Brian Lampkin lives in Tarboro, North Carolina, but has Buffalo, New York embedded deeply in his language. He is currently in the graduate Creative Writing program at East Carolina University and is an Editorial Assistant with The North Carolina Literary Review. He is the former owner of Rust Belt Books in Buffalo, where he helped found The Real Dream Cabaret, among other street theater performances and media pranks.He currently writes “The Nature of Tarboro” column for The Daily Southerner and just returned from the “Re-Visiting Black Mountain College” conference in Asheville, NC, where he presented with David Landrey on “Robert Creeley’s Buffalo.”
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Tongue
thought it a language when it wasn’t
anything more than movement
of mouth, an utterance.
felt it no less all through
the moment it caught in throat
and moved on into world.
no word would have captured what memory keeps
of you stopped in guttural sense. how
does I taste to you? like nothing
you could describe, say in any tongue
that’s not been lost. I won’t hear
more than sound, waves
of human feeling reaching back
into black space at root
of all we know.
Christopher Hedges
Christopher Hedges says
I should fear the future. Poet
David Landrey does and he’s my friend
in Buffalo where it’s been 10 degrees below zero.
If it’s true, Christopher Hedges, that “the idiots
who rule America” have forgotten the common
good then come watch Milk with me, try
not to cry at all the common, decent good. Walk
out of Premiere Theatre with the stranger and hold her
hand because she’s crying too.
I don’t believe in Bernanke or Geithner
either as I walk in the old Red Row of Rocky Mount
where white people refuse to go
to find the absence of Monk’s house and further find
the felons who never did make mark for Obama
and have lost nothing in this crash.
The Christians in Via Cappuccino are all so nice
in their end-of-days exuberance. John makes
espresso and sees what you see Christopher.
He welcomes it in the way Weathermen welcomed
revolution without regard for those not in
on the times.
Still I want home to walk into, Stacey and Hayley,
Natalie and Clara in mid-laugh and leaping. What care
I can give I’ll give and I won’t
ignore the News and Observer in 72 point:
47,000. I don’t doubt it’s just the beginning, Christopher,
but my job’s in the home I still have.
And yes, yes in the world, David. Let Wachovia,
Citigroup and Bank of America fall
into our arms. Let the crocuses of class war
blossom into orange velvet spring. Even if
Christopher Hedges.