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8 Pack Monday Night Poetry

Drop In Session of Choice

Caravan Subscribers who want a discount? Email me at paul.corman-roberts@caravanwriterscollective.com or acpablo67@gmail.com

TATTOO ME

a cow
a patch of reedgrass on a sand dune 
a five gallon container of unpasteurized milk
the lamp from a lighthouse
several railroad ties
a burl coffee table loaded with drug paraphernalia
empty album sleeves of Rumors and Hotel California
the town drunk driving a tractor
a wall of fog pushing in like an avalanche
a slab of driftwood in the particulate orange light of a setting sun
the roar of surf covering a southern jetty
the cry of the red tailed hawk
the lowing of the herd in the distance
the stuffiness of the haybarn
the thinly diluted manure around a milkbarn
a sandbar beach covered in shells and broken beer bottles
an elevated cabin in the mouth of the Eel River
a piece of cheese
a patch of reedgrass on a sand dune
a cow
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(WITHOUT BORDERS!)

Caravan Writers Collective

Jun 01, 2026

HAPPY MONDAY EVERYONE!

Our Summer schedule continues to come together, and we’re excited to announce Paul Corman-Roberts’ new offering MONDAY NIGHT POETRY (Without Borders.) This will be an 8 week session running from June 15th (two weeks from tonight) through August 10th on Monday nights, starting at 5 Eastern/8 Pacific and running for ninety minutes each session so we don’t get too burned out on the evening of the 7th best day of the week.

Per usual, Paul will be bringing poetic forms from around the world for us to study and read closely, and then begin the process of building a 16 PAGE PORTFOLIO of rule breaking poems over the course of this summer.

8 sessions ($225):

OR Pay for a drop in session or sessions of your choice, for only $30 (normally $40) per session:

Drop In Session ($40)

Night begins And I can tell when the whole cycle is about to kick back in because of my third eye rupturing like a psychic aneurism which sends gobs of steaming blood and pus streaming down the center of my face and all I want to do is try and close it with a thick mixture of Bisquick ® batter I would smear in thick heaping layers across my forehead complete with butter and syrup, sure my super heated blood would cook it into the finest hemoglobin flapjacks the west side has ever seen but in my desperation I have snorted the last of the Bisquick ®i n hopes of achieving a cheap starch high and of course I cannot purchase more Bisquick ® from the local supermarket, not just because I’ve been banned for leaving puddles of blood and pus on their fancy shiny floors but I cannot even afford to purchase anything from the Bisquick ®dealer for the simple reason that I left all my money with the kind hearted surrogate worker down by the warehouse gardens who couldn’t even be bothered to give finish the hand job she started when she saw my ruptured third eye and said that it would be too painful for her to bring me to orgasm because it was all just so goddamn poetically beautiful and she wasn’t even going to charge me full price but for the simple reason she told me she wished she hadn’t hemorrhaged the video camera that had been surgically implanted behind her eyeballs so she could always remember the texture and layering of the brown, red, black and yellow scabs trailing down the center of my face, but not wishing to offend I left her a big tip after that and stumbled down the waterfront in the dark unable to see where I was going till I smacked headfirst into a wooden stop sign that had been vandalized and left hanging off an abandoned warehouse gate which in turn opened up the wound over my third eye all over again and there I am trying to pick myself back up off the ground when I sense a car pulling up next to me and bright lights washing over the whole pathetic spectacle that is my brokenness and a gravelly, blues singer voice croaks out “hey you datin’ baby?” and I squint into the direction of the light and voice and tell them only if they have Bisquick ® on hand.

I have never been able to justify spending $100 just to get a hard on when they already cum so cheap. No one ever entered a strip club looking to be saved but seeking the dark transcendent “Yes.” It’s so easy to say at the wad exchange.

My ”date”: the guy whose great idea this night out was in the first place, I had been brushing my teeth, on my way to bed when El Generalissimo calls up, has my roommate bring me the phone, promises to pay for everything all night long. I already know it sounds too good to be true, but like a horror movie whose plot choices I can’t control, the words “okay Azzari, I’ll be right over” fall into the receiver like an act of utter madness.

Red Flag #1: he can’t get us into the Palomino (why hadn’t I guessed he’d already been 86’d.) So he covers my entry fee and first drink at Crazy Horse II.

Red Flag #2 at the CH 2? He fucking disappears on me.

Hustlers on the pool table work me for a pitcher, holding me responsible for the bet made by my prodigal Guatemalan prince-ling hiding out in the DJ’s booth near the dressing rooms, bragging about how he’s a DJ at the college station.

A couple of low key dancers talk to me and I attempt to put on my best “please invest in my:

HipnessCoolnessTogethernessSexinessCredibilityDesirabilitySustainabilityFertilityBuyitbuyitbuyit.”

But I can’t. So they don’t. Not the bouncers. Not the pool table hustlers. Not the well dressed men in the booths. Not the dancers. Not for a minute.

I dress for the part that got cut from this script. People like me always wind up patsies for the depraved future foreign service martyrs or their alternate suicides.

The walk home is six miles. When it’s over the sun will be rising. There will be dried blood in my nose. I will have to go to work in three hours. And still this will taste better then still waiting for the promise to come true.

Back when I was on the payroll at the Clean Conscience factory, and I could drop in randomly on a weekend evening after flaneuring around the East Bay and pick up a three hour shift, pick up a few dollars on commission to get me through because I could talk that talk that would get a loyal KPFA subscriber or a married businessman to reach for their wallet and I’d get through to the next day with a little scratch for the corner liquor store groceries and a dimebag lost somewhere in multi-pocketed hippie shorts.

Back when BART ran until 2:30 in the morning and if that didn’t pan out you could haggle for some basement space and a few blankets at the Food Not Bombs house on Aileen Street because you had just helped put together the bulk foods for an upcoming road trip you weren’t even going on.

Back when a couple of hot hands at the blackjack table and one smart short at the sports book meant an evening of pissing pocket change down the keno toilet but the margies were free all night long and a dimebag of blow found its way into your pocket and the cocktail waitress was willing to go share it with you as her shift ended at sunrise and you both climbed into that yellow cab, that fresh frosty margie still in your hand with the whole day of sweat beneath the baleful, ninety three degree eye of Sunrise manor ahead of you.

Back when silver spoon students on scholarship would literally come up to the desk during business hours and simply ask, “anything you need?”

Back when nobody cared about the twenty four strains of Alderpoint Blueberry drying out on bailing twine in the bedroom of the third roommate who never seemed to get their mail except for all the strange hippies and sometimes even strange hippie girls who would show up at the front door at odd hours asking to visit with the third roommate.

Back when I had no driver’s licence and the local union president looked me in the eye and said “I don’t think I heard your answer to the question so you’ll give me a call when you get back from Guerneville right?” as she handed me the keys to her car and then handed me the chief steward who I was most definitely supposed to leave in a backwoods compound with the word INPATIENT at the end of a long, winding driveway beneath redwood shade.

Marmaduke wears an Allied Security uniform this morning. He lets me out of solitary because everyone is supposed to watch professional tackle football. I’m crushed to find my artwork has been completely removed from the wall behind my bunk but then realize that the bleach stains still maintain the outlines I established & so my chakras leap upon realizing the symbols have taken & are now permanently etched into the internal compartments of my fellow patients. Important legitimate work on important, legitimate enlightenment has begun, like when I was in the school year book.

My bunkmate Felix is pleased by my representative art as well; he’s been thoughtful enough to urinate in my bedding, just finishing up as I return & with a hearty laugh he asks, “Guess who had to clean up your fucking ass goblins? You’re lucky there’s football on today or else I would have kicked your ass too.” I realize with unrestrained joy that I have made my first convert & that a valuable ally has been gained in the coming jihad.

I didn’t realize it was possible to obtain as much as twelve unadulterated hours of NFL programming in a single day. It’s a good thing though because the NFL is definitely hip to the radio wave segmentation manifesto. Their programming is exclusively for all of us here in Bay #6. We can’t be bothered with that goddamn college football programming which everyone knows is a market controlled exclusively by the Scientologists.

On Monday, Felix, Rodney & Tom Scott all introduce me to the three-story closet, a secret place inside Bay #6 that the army doctors don’t know about. We build a small campfire out of the garbage we are supposed to throw away but always keep a little bit stashed so we can have something to do in the closet. Someone has managed to bring in a cigarette which we all share it around the sweet, noxious campfire fumes. Some of the other patients say we’re crazy for coming in here, that the doctors know that we come to this secret little place to make plans against them through the enacting of subversive communal rituals, & that it is just a big Venus Flytrap waiting to snap shut upon our little resistance & dissolve us into a permeable bile like foodstuff, but I can’t resist the fact that my new church not only has its own symbols but also the traditional & necessarily Romantic control office place where full-fledged jihads are allowed to blossom. We need to make use of all of the resources we have. I see objects barely revealed in the light of the campfire against the walls. I ask Rodney what these objects are & he tells me they are cleaning supplies. More bleach can only mean more symbols etched in the infinite of the eternal exposure. I can hardly wait to come back tomorrow.

The four-year old’s eyes bore into me worse than anything my parents cast upon me.

“Plllleeeeaaazzzze???”

And then a drop-dead eye roll. And why not? I can’t blame her, this has been bordering on charade for some time, and she knows some sort of ridiculous deadline has passed.

But damn, where did she get that eye roll from? Exquisite.

“Okay,” I relent more to my own relief than hers. How bad could it be? The police tape came down two days ago, and it’s been a full week since the assassination.

She was expecting to go and play on the twisty slide that day before the street was blocked off by squad cars just after lunch, and we didn’t quite lie to her when we said the city need to do some “special repair work” down at the park so it was closed.

Special.

“Repair.” As if.

There were witnesses. Maintenance men on their lunch break saw one kid draw point blank on the back of another kid sitting on the bench, only the park fence between them.

Before she even goes through the gates, she is at a full sprint, pent up and stir crazy to reach the fortress of tunnels, slides, fire poles and climbing poles, and utterly oblivious to the memorial that has blossomed obscuring the sign that announces “Nicol Park” financed by HUD. Utterly oblivious to the dark spattered stains on the asphalt her little sneakers trample over that were a part of living matter just a week ago.

We play hide and seek, hit the swings, and she runs pell-mell all over the play structure pretending she’s Dora and I roleplay as the Blueberry Bear. For the next seventy five minutes I can see people from the neighborhood taking long looks at us from the street. Are we the first to venture into this park since the incident? Are we being disrespectful by coming here? How long was I supposed to keep my kid from coming to her favorite park?

It bothers me that I don’t know how to feel. Who am I supposed to ask about the etiquette on when a hit goes down at the corner playground park? Somebody had to come back and breathe life back into it at some point.

Eventually Hannah notices the gathering of flowers at the far end of the park. She asks and I don’t lie.

“Somebody died in the park and the people in the neighborhood want to remember and honor them.”

Over time, she will ask more uncomfortable questions, and I will have to answer them as truthfully as I can, but for now she remains quiet. She thoughtfully goes over and picks a daisy out of the overgrown grass of the park and puts it on one of the memorial bouquets.

One night later I’m stumbling home drunk from the bar after midnight and the entire memorial is a brilliant candescence of dozens of candles lighting up the flowers freshly placed there that day. I can’t help the tears.

SOMEWHERE ON EAST EARTH

			Whas’ goin’ on over heah on this side?
                                           - Cletus, the Slack Jawed Yokel

we never go looking for the sun
it always comes for us
we don’t go on vacation
vacation comes all over us

being crucified to concrete
is no different than being a bagel…

…your time to cook
will come ‘round
as sure as the spin
on a magnetized axis.

The crucifiers you ask?
Always the same.

Decorative hats.
Practical armor.
An insignia.
A rank.

PHONY
POSEUR
SELL OUT
COWARD
SYCOPHANT
LEACH

All these anti-empowering labels I cloak tight around a strangled self-esteem on a blindingly bright and freezing cold Saturday morning standing on upper Broadway. Standing away from the shuttle stop where inexplicably there is this enormous grouping of pretty hipster spinsters that seem to be glaring at me standing aloof outside the Prius dealership.

It’s just so fucking bright and the corona of our planet’s local star is creating that weird particulate light wash that kills my eyes which in turn hurts my head that sucked in too much mixed alcohol and superficial ass kissing again last night and all I want is to find a sliver of shade to keep the sun out of my eyes. And the consequence of this lazy squalor of the spirit are the keys to an anti-social, self-deprecating hell becoming all mine, complete with the drawing of blood from the insides’ of my cheeks due to the grinding of my neurotic teeth. This is it I swear, I’ma keep to the straight and narrow after this morning’s fresh hell.

And then in a flash of an instant, my flight instinct kicks in with a rush and a start, but I’m not fast enough to process or react to this sudden violation of my space boundaries right in front of me: the vehicle screeches his passenger window to a perfect halt less than a foot in front of my barely able to see and surely bloodshot eyes.

The driver is me in 15 years or my father ten years ago. Either way, I’m looking into the eyes of a man every bit as familiar as myself with the boundary between resin and wood at the bottom of a marijuana pipe.

“You called for a cab?”

No.

“You’re not goin’ to West O?”

No.

Furrowed perplexion fills in his brow as if this was a possibility he hadn’t considered.

“You got another cab comin?”

No, I’m waiting for my wife.

Finally he gets it, a flash in his eyes and then throws back his head and breaks out one of those real, genuine, belly laughs I wish I could have even once a week.

“Oh shit, you got a wife? That’s a shit lot better than having a cab!” And then he hits the gas and he’s gone.

Not fifteen seconds later my wife pulls up and I have the déjà vu of remembering that cab drivers really should be in charge of this world.

And suddenly it’s not so bad being a hack. And I’ve got my ride. And the sun is out of my eyes. And I look around to see if I can still see the yellow cab or the pretty hipster spinsters are still around, and unable to see either, I begin to wonder if the last five minutes were even real. What was that I had sworn to do earlier? Is that what’s in front of me?

REGISTER HERE!

(art by Tala Lilie)

Love In The Time of Late Stage Capitalism


Netflix and Chill is today’s modern colloquialism for getting it on, the horizontal bop, doing the deed, bumping uglies, making the beast with two backs and other visceral descriptions of physical intimacy that make it known what they are referring to, and there is nothing about the words “Netflix” or “chill”...either separate or together…that suggest that’s what they are about. Late stage capitalism is all about false advertising.

What is a dating app but a fancy shell we build around ourselves, a curation of resonant qualities we arrange in such a way that we attract interest but there is no way in hell anyone is getting inside to this heart of mine, but hey, we out here ain’t we?

Netflix and Swill means there may or may not be engaging in the act of physical intimacy, but there is for sure going to be the imbibing of chemically altering and mind altering substances which may or may not enhance or enable said physical intimacy.

What is a workplace romance but the easily outsourced need to complete the emotional crater eating away at our insides, because where the hell else are we supposed to find the slave…I mean “salve” we need to go on during late stage capitalism?

Noflix and Swill…no engaging in the act of physical intimacy which is compensated for by the extra imbibing of chemically altering and mind expanding substances, which appear to do nothing to dissuade the male from wanting to somehow get back to Netflix and Chill.

The men are broken. They might even be totalled. The closest we ever got to teaching them empathy was teaching them manners, and we gave up on that fifty some odd years ago. Now they have neither empathy or manners or jobs or anything meaningful to do with their lives. Some figure out how to get back on the rails. But mostly the rails have been taken out of service.

Noflix and Chill…no drink, no drugs and ALL SEX ALL THE TIME.  Is that the answer? Does that sound like where we want to go with all this?  Be most careful for what you wish.

We must learn to adjust our mating profiles to understand well over half (at the very least) of our most desired demographic is neurodivergent if not outright broken by a world for which the infliction of trauma is the default for every conflict nobody knows how to resolve otherwise.

All the above is overrated.  What is underrated?
Friendship
Trust
Faith
Patience
Listening
Holding space
Partnership

But…ya know…

…dudes, bros, entitlement
all the reasons we can’t have nice things
but still have a chance to find love
in the age of late stage capitalism.