Alan Catlin


from Memories

		749-

Fordlandia. Brave New World
A Ford Prefect. A Hitchhiker’s
Guide. To the Universe. The Ford
Peccadillo. An experimental car
that runs on human waste. Fact
or fiction. “Who wants a car that
smells like cancer?” Mused Mrs. 
Henry Ford. Not an Edsel



		752-

Euphemistical Titular Inflation Resonance
			For Everyday Living: Help Wanted

Sandwich artist or deli counter worker.

Lobby ambassador. Director of first
impressions or receptionist.

Chief personal communication evangelist
or publicist. 

Image consultant. Assistant content
provider. Dialogue coach. Or screenwriter.


 
		754-

“Were people this dumb before television?” 
White Noise
“Everything we need that is not food or
love is right here on the tabloid rack.”
More White Noise
“So instead of going into homicidal rage,
I read to the blind.” Babette Gladney
“The future belongs to the crowds.”
Mao II



		755-

“God is dead, Marx is dead and
I don’t feel so good either.”
French sentiment of the 80’s as 
Expressed in The Years. Annie Ernaux

Sartre and de Beauvoir refused to
to appear on television (and no one cared.)
Ernaux

“The whatever generation.”
 


757-

Anais Nin’s little birds.   She slept with 
her analyst (Otto Rank). Her lovers (Henry
Miller, Django Reinhart). And her father.
Contemporaneously. More or less. According
to her (unexpurgated) diaries. A brag or
a perversion. Slept with everyone except
her husband (Hugo). Apparently. Was he the
voyeuristic eye in the stories. The Spy in
the House of Love. 



		759-

Spy of the First Person
Spy Catcher
(The) Catcher Was a Spy
I Spy
(Fenimore Cooper’s) Spy
(Joseph Conrad’s) Spy
The Spy Who Loved Me
	(the book Not the movie)
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold)
	(the book And the movie)
The Spy and the Traitor
Spy Game
Hawaiian Spy
Spy me to the Moon

 

764-

Patti Smith Sequence June-July

Around the world in 1,000 pictures.
The curved palm of San Juan.
Kurosawa’s water wheels where wasabi
grows; dreams.
Jorge Luis Borges’ desk.
His infinite expansive (expanding) universe.
A wax figure’s dream; perpetual cups of coffee 
on the table.
London, Florence, Hiroshima.
The garden where Virginia Wool’s ashes
are buried; a of her bust cloaked by ivy.
Woolf’s dreaming bed.
Jim Carroll’s.
O’Keeffe’s.
Patti Smith’s in Rockaway.
Our dreams are a second life. 
Nerval.
Joseph Cornell.
Desk talisman post cards.
Sam Shepard’s pocket knife.
Bolano’s chair.
Abraham Lincoln’s death mask 
As door stop.
With black jar.
P.S.’s desk in winter light.
Sam Shepard reading Beckett.
Patti masked as Bob Dylan.
Gem Spa with Robert.
Stacking end tables; dreaming Brancusi.
Still Life with Finnegans Wake.
Peace pagoda San Francisco in fog.
Freedom Tower with cloud.
Kavan’s I Am Lazarus.
St. Michael’s & All Angels Churchyard:
East Sussex, an unquiet grave.
 

Alan Catlin has three new full-length collections slated for 2023: How Will the Heart Endure (Kelsay Books), Listening to the Midnight Sonata (Impspired) and Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged (Roadside Press). He is the poetry and reviews editor of misfitmagazine.net.

 
 

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