Rooftop Poetry Club - Geoffrey Gatza

Geoffrey Gatza

Bio:
Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and Publisher of BlazeVOX [books] and the author of five books of poetry; Not So Fast Robespierre (Menendez Publishing) will be released in 2008. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY (1993) and Daemen College, Amherst, NY (2002), and served as a U.S. Marine in the first gulf war. He lives in Kenmore, NY with his girlfriend and two cats.

Reviews, Articles & Interviews:
Review of Black Diamond Golden Boy Takes Bull By Horns
Review of BlazeVOX and Publishing
Interview on MiPOesias Magazine
Review of I Wear a Figleaf Over My Penis
Article: Crazy Buffalo Poet Has A Lot Cooking

Poems:

The Treachery of Poems
Or, How to dress your friends in Magritte

I comb my hair in long sweeps in front of the winged mirror.
I cannot stop unfastening myself. I keep brushing, brushing.

I made my way to the diggings. We bought an estate and lived
A prosperous life with miners, we wouldn’t work the in mine.

I weave the stands of hair that comb out of my brush into yarns.
I weave baskets from this hair and give them as gift to my friends.

It was only once in a feat of remarkable lethargy, he would pile
Bundles and bundles of manuscripts, none of which to be burned.

I comb through these manuscripts and weave them into woven baskets
woven works of rusting yarns brushing, brushing baskets in the mirror.

A black-eyed shadow of their former self, there is nothing else out there,
He stood calm in the gun room and gazed lightly upon his cable sweater.

The Ebony Cane with an Amish Flaw

Three mortal hours

1. ‘my pendanticism is still like the green hat’

And when you mentioned your notebook,
which I heard ‘the nook,’ and was dismissingly
amused thought you were referencing Blake

I desperately don't want _______ ear.
It is the most wonderful time of the year, and really

_______ a Yule Log and Col. Plum Pudding
Gingerbread and Frog Morton were in town

She salts the world he creates. But, it’s so hard to compliment
him on his pie, its funny watch how his face twists and scowls
treasures to bring the viewer from excitement to tears
in the same way a roller coaster can luster leather

had me in a twizzle until ten minutes after

It’s all a rolling present! Let me know when you are free
Parallel, in ways a roller coaster can be free.

Pretty please with a cherry on top my thoughts jumped to, dude
they are like baseball cards, I wanted this too but feel odd asking
I took real care of your friend, and maybe you thought otherwise.

Every time it was my turn to shake his hand someone else
important to him and his life came up to him – so it
was odd to burst in on that for me to say, I’m nobody.

2. ‘We named the dog Indiana’

they make capacity for compassion
a real twizzler of a reality

like when folks look on my fedora
then I go on to explain how his has a wide

ribbon band and his brim points down and
mine is a country walker with a leather band
with a curled back brim.

This must be what they felt like
Duh. I had not thought
Of the excitement of a roller coaster

He brought over a box of Nat Sherman’s
cigarettes and I told him of our adventure

Even with the jokes
No one else gets this – so thank you.
__________________, no?

We have become that great evening of song!
I keep thinking of the last piece before
the intermission where the full force of

the voice arrangements opened up and slowly died away.
Stunning use of voice as well. Not the power chorus
there was a real pacing which explains that bottle of Joy.

It stuck me as a real-life Warhol.

Something in the way I think you may see the world in the title
of it too. Me, set in Blake’s Joy and Woe – and you and your
comforting pragmatisms, a non-ultra Joy seemed like
the perfect thing to pull from the grocery bag and
gift to you. No one else gets this so thank you
for your gracious acceptance of it.

I think that heaven can wait for another day,
You wore blue and the German’s wore gray.