would kurt cobain have despised steve halle? if he was as anti-establishment as halle says in his afterword/apologia he would not have. "the establishment" despises & (zero)tolerates. to oppose the supposed establishment would mean you had to do away with such things. a not too wild guess is that mistah cobain would have found mistah halle's cessation covers (just out from funtime press) amusing & possibly amazing. the book consists of 27 untitled eight-line poems that started as mishearings of nirvana lyrics

crook on the inside means suicide
crops on the downside, pesticide
boy on the cribside, infanticide
favor eyes over eyesight in homicide

she asked me to untie her,
chase away the lice,
the worthy few isn't me
heaven sees

we have a fine potential noir story here. i'm sure you see it too. that's one thing about these poems. they reach & dance off in lots of directions. no matter they are all formally alike. or maybe they can just because they are so formally alike. in the second stanza of the first poem we go across the big water

thistles off
Darfur wreck
ordinance of
supernova fits

will the mention of darfur change the rather brutal reality there? not likely. at least not quickly. but it may serve as a reminder. which will often have to be good enough. it seems to me there's too much convenient oblivion running rampant the last 30 or so years. & even a small poke in the side like the darfur line gives me some hope that maybe other, even more forgotten wars & occupations may be remembered. & maybe some pressure will be applied on the aggressors to end them. morocco/western sahara anyone? since the mid-seventies. & the grand classic, the israeli genocidal politics against the palestinians. cessation covers is the second book from funtime press. the first one was the book that gave the press its name, funtime by adam fieled & andrew lundwall. with two such titles to its young name it makes me curious what they'll come up with next. one good thing would be a blog where they could post cover images, maybe a sample poem or two & some ordering info, as, for example, price. none of my business though. so. is this great poetry? is it even good poetry? maybe, although those questions are undoubtedly irrelevant. it's often beautiful ("the sun/capsizes Los Angeles"), it's political ("these mink coats/paid off well") & it's silly ("wild horse unglued/a treatise on shoes"). & it makes me want to write songs

a couple of days ago i received my authors copy (singular) of some hay. this is probably the smallest book i'll ever publish & even more probably the only handwritten-on-demand. & yet there's room for some really cool hay(na)ku drawings by eileen alongside the 24 poems. i'll throw in a poem here just to tempt you

spring
the trap
clap the board

the house behind
the cold
spring

also in the package were two of eileen's own books, the huge i take thee, english, for my beloved & the secret lives of punctuations, vol. 1. i will swimming deep inside them for quite a while, methinks, before i can say anything more coherent about them than READ. & when will vol.2 appear?

in other literary news, the funtime collaboration has gained new momentum

on now to the more absurd. the swedish national football (or soccer, if you prefer) team is going to play a game aginst costa rica in san josé. they made a touchdown in houston to change flights. all the players passed airport security, except behrang safari, who (granted, was born in teheran) has lived in sweden since age 2 & has a swedish passport & was in the company of his employer. he was taken aside & mocked, threatened & interrogated for three hours. which caused him to miss the flight to costa rica. if the u.s government fear & hate people with iranian names that much, why didn't they just surround him & march him off to his connecting flight & make sure he got on it so they were rid of him?
some of the swedes were no better though. three of the players got on a flight to san jose, california. when asked why their reply was that the airport staff spoke such bad english that they couldn't understand what was said. yihaa

in my ears, nomeansno