The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999)

A friend and fellow poet borrowed this volume from the library. It turned out that "outlaw" means hard on the eyes, the ears, and any puritanical sympathies laying about in my own mother heart ("Just Say NO to Family Values" John Giorno). Poems about condoms, AIDS, and drugs...about the deafening silence leaving us lonely in the clattering, babbling city scapes. I fluttered through pages of poetry at random today knowing I don't have time to contemplate 685 from cover to cover and I found that most did not want to be contemplated or picked apart. These poetic snapshots are like the stamps on the letters of modern history - colorful and functional. They seal the story of this one blink-of-an-eye moment without pretending to be timeless. Yet, some of them are:

Love is the silence out of which woman speaks - Stuart Z. Perkoff

My heart is graffiti on the side of a subway train, a shadow on the wall made by a child. - Maura O'Connor

all the levers and lubricants needed to pry a last bit of suffocating soul from grey bondage - Dominique Lowell

We know the ego is the true maker of history, and if it isn't, it should be no concern of yours - Larry Rivers & Frank O'Hara

To live as I have done is surely absurd - Jack Micheline

Some people guard their lives like a eunich guards the harem door - A.D. Winans

And so it is, that even the outlaws trying not to be timeless, attempting only to capture a moment, condensed into so many words, speak and I feel - assaulted, betrayed, bemused, intrigued - why not open my own mouth? Why won't you open yours?