2012 is all about MUSIC FOR PORN by Rob Halpern

Poetry does seek, and courage is what it seeks both day and night. Rob Halpern’s MUSIC FOR PORN (Nightboat Books, 2012) is a book of poems I have been waiting for for years.

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"yr role in something boundless makes me impotent, a blank the
war keeps repeating, a bad infinity gone sublime. you come from
the land of ur, forgotten zone of oil and steel. these things extend
the body, my operations of regulatory power. kissing barn wood,
rubbing rock, yr clover grows over everything. it all fades out
beyond the true, my one unwritten sentence, this forest of dying
birds. would that you were only meat"
--(from page 17)

If there is anywhere presently where the machinations of how we are carefully FED the most brutal possible acts of our species it is with faggots and war. The delicate palate of the American Left for inclusivity, albeit through assimilation, cannot negotiate taking a stand against war if it means disallowing faggots their God-given right to kill Arabs with pride. Apparently nothing can calm a nervous populace like a politically correct militia. Halpern does not write overtly about any of these things I say, it’s the historical timing of the publication I note.

The ACUTE timing of Halpern’s book with gay genocide (silent genocide) in American-occupied Iraq, a genocide American homosexual soldiers (closeted or not) helped create, perpetuate, ignore, and fester. Halpern’s book has 9 sections, 9 the indestructible number, each section a departure from the previous section’s form, but never from the unyielding examinations a poet worth their salt will make. Rob Halpern has found his strength in the susceptibility to harm. To linger over the wound is to imagine any hole as an invitation.

"My body keeps channeling so many contradictory feelings around
the figure of a soldier intensity of shame as his body becomes the
object of my violence and my lust. I want to kill him for blocking
my dream of a demilitarized future, and I want to be fucked by
him because the repressive sublimation of his body has become
unbearable, the way the realization that I, too, stand in the way of
that other future has become unbearable."
--(from page 47)

There is a way to read these poems without stopping, let them wash you in the nightmare. The timing of the song will enter and pulse inside no matter how conscious we are of the speed of our reading. What’s also true is that no matter where we read this we will read it again because the pain of this poetry will (without fail) reunite us with a design for the reformation of a hooligan elite. I am completely devoted to proclaiming the gravity of needing these poems!!