As Seen On Surgery

Announcing the arrival of The John Cotter/Shafer Hall Poetry Making Machine!

The JCSHPMM is a website featurning online, real-time, live-streaming poems assembled right before your very eyes.

Our rules for assembly will be posted in the "comments" field, so you will always know where we are, and when the end is near.

John and I would like to invite and to encourage you to use the comments field to request subjects and to submit challenging new forms of your own devious devisings.

Hall Pepper Collab (Doughnut Death #2)

Another Very Difficult Commute

sprinkles,
chocolate frosted death
and custard
spills like ropes of
intestines
over the snow

shivering
in the powdered
sugar dust:
a pastry chef

and where
is the consequence
of what we have done,
if not there,
under the overpass,
being dunked in my coffee

JaPoWriMo #8: Poems By Request #5?: K. Pepper

Doughnuts Are Dangerous On This Dangerous Morning

Good morning! Or should I say:
Dangerous morning? When murderous
men breeze through your Attorneys-
At-Law morning, even the doughnuts
seem dangerous. As soon
as we finish these doughnuts, we'll
get right down to the killing, although
in some ways, the doughnuts and
the killing are the same, that's
how dangerous is the morning
when you associate with
liminal types like us. Orange juice:
killing. Doughnuts: killing. Taking
a shower: killing. Look at these doughnuts:
every last one of them is dead.

Maureen's and Shafer's #15 Villanelle:

It's Time to Awaken

Wake up, little friend, it is time
To get a move on, time to awaken.
When you get vertical you'll feel fine-

Tuned and perpendicular, like a Georgia pine
With green needles all alive and shaking
Wake up, little friend. High time

Is time spent with your head in the sky
Over an Earth you've completely forsaken
So get vertical, little one, get fine.

Let pure sun filter into your sublime
Skin. It'll stop your heart from achin'.
So wake up, little friend. There's no time--

It's a fight to wake up, and that's fine.
You deserve gardens, not everything breaking.
Get vertical, get fit, get aligned

With stars and with planets. Their tremulous shine
Will help you make whatever you're makin'.
So wake up little friend, it's time.
When you get vertical, you'll feel fine.

The Luckiest Wreck Around

I am the luckiest wreck around, 'cause I know Ada Limon!

JaPoWriMo (Guest Starring: Kari and Jeffrey, Dad and Patsy) #7

Soviet Spies Never Sleep

When sleep comes I dream
of the post-apocalyptic kinky
Mad Max afterlife: we will
all roll down to Mountain
Pasture; the air compressors there
are made of trains.

January is National Poetry Month! (Many thanks to sleeping Kari)

Enthnobotany

half an eternity later on this primitive planet
we make food by eating; our food defines
ourselves, we are what we choose
to eat

later I will make oatmeal,
for now I am nothing

My Nana Turned 47 Today!

First Frequency at the Face

Dear Fishes, Shrimps, and other aquatic life,

Fin it over to the Face for the first Frequency!

FREQUENCY READING SERIES
Featuring Laura Glenum, Kirsten Kaschock, Danielle Pafunda, and
Sabrina Orah Mark
Saturday, January 21st at 2PM
at the Four-Faced Liar
165 West 4th St. (212) 366-0608
A,C,E,F, or V to West 4th
FREE

This will be the FIRST reading of the 2006 season and will feature:

Lara Glenum, author of Hounds of No (Action Books)
Kirsten Kaschock, author of Unfathoms (Slope Editions)
Danielle Pafunda, author of Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press)
Sabrina Orah Mark, author of The Babies (Saturnalia)

Many Thanks,

Shafer Hall

My Grandfather Was Stoked About The Rose Bowl:

Photo by Uncle Geoff

Poem For That Guy In The Bottom Of The TR Photo (JaPoWriMo #5)

Fear Shared Is Friendship

Late Sunday night my eyes
were drowsily browsing
All in the Family's 27th Movement,
and my brain was filing through
the astounding number of Stapletons
spread across the history of Vaudeville.

That's when I saw you, a performer
in your own right, staring
out of Teddy's armpit like a headache.

I have had a few headaches of my own
lately, and I wasn't looking for new ones.
Particularly on MY website:
it's meant for a depository of headaches,
not for a new-headache engine.

But some headaches cure themselves,
just like some mysteries unravel
into oblivion, and with eeks and shivers
from Shanna and Maureen, Old Evil-
Eye sighed into a new category.
File Under: Laughter.

Here in the Jean Stapleton Afterword,
comfort is the currency. I'll quiet
down quickly now.

I am deeply afraid of the guy in the lower right quarter of the below picture of TR. I didn't even notice him until this morning. At first I thought he was the result of a very creative hack job on my Photobucket account, but investigation revealed that he has likely been there the whole time. He has a very devious look in his eyes. And the way his hat lines up perfectly with the posture of TR's shoulders...scares me.

Colonel Roosevelt's Last Words

Please Put Out That Light, James

Hours after the Derby children ceased
to rambulate in the mansion in Oyster Bay,
James, the quiet negro, quiet for a quiet
house of sleep, put out the light
over Theodore and his bed.

After he had dictated letter
one hundred and fifty thousand,
after he had thoroughly protected
the shaking trees,
once Kettle Hill
had been exceedingly stormed.

TR was a tiger of a man, a carnivore.
If one needed anything
for the Feast of St. Rocco,
one merely presented oneself to him.

Another Sexy Publication

If it pleases you, please purchase the Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, featuring a great number of (literally) sexy poems by a great number of sexy poets, including Shanna Compton, Maureen Thorson, and Shafer "I'll Show You Mine" Hall.

Click on the icon on the right for instructions on how to score it.

The Below-Referenced Jolly Jack

JaPoWriMo #3!

Hush, Puppy

Quiet, child, your
seafood's on the way.

Wide San Antonio
in my restaurant youth:
Sea Island's
shrimp skewers
parallel nothing
in my memory.

Behind Jolly Jack
my family drank beer.
Hush, little dog,
your seafood is near.

JaPoWriMo #2!

The Catsup on the Cake

The icing drips very slowly on down
the side of the little building
made of baked batter
you call your cake.

Those things that move
without seeming to move:
the thickening liquid of glass,
the confusion building
in my leafblower head.

Choosy-y Adventury

If it pleases you, go to Laurel Snyder's Jewishy-Irishy and follow directions to her new book, a choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse!

Back to NY 2006 Poem #1 (January is National Poetry Month!)

Call Me If You Get Scared

If you get scared, honey,
give me a call, and I'll send over
powerful mind signals
made out of undiscovered matter
so tiny as to pierce/deflate
any of the dirigibles of Fear
that float the night.

John Cotter/Shafer Hall Haiku From Memory Project Number...4?

This one was really easy to remember because we just wrote it:


what the heat fades up
in is the top of my house
where you live, warm one


please stay tuned for a new blow-by-blow John Cotter/Shafer Hall Collaboration Blog!