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Off the Books

I want to cry over books written in public washrooms, the wreckage on our shoulders . . . My desk bent, its hands up, finally going down under the blows. Wave after wave breaking off into fragments of unpublished verse and crumpled paper flowers. Do you want facts or action? Rigor, glamor, wild ass sass. “I attended school no longer than the law requires, matriculating to a life in rooming houses.”

The Atlantic Avenue and Maspeth/Cooper Park NYC Men’s Shelters Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle has been published in Aufgabe*, Bald Ego Bellevue Psychiatric, B3C (detox: where the murderer Jack Abbott bunked, author of In the Belly of the Beast), Bailey Seton Hospital (For the insane. Now abandoned.), Bellevue Psychiatric, The Bowery and Water Street Missions Boog City*, The Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cahiers de Purple, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Coagula, Dead Roads, EOAGH, Explosive!, Exquisite Corpse, Fascicle, Fence (4 issues) and Fence: The First 9 Years, Gigantic Sequins Graymore (detox: originally a transients residence for seasonal farm hands built during the Great Depression) Greetings Hazeldon Hotel Amerika, Kilometer Zero, Kulture Vulture LAS (Outpatient) 14th St NYC La Petite Zine, Logopoeia.da.ru, Lit, Little Horse, Lungfull!*, MiPoesias, New York Nights, Now Culture, Nthposition, Oblongo 13 Hell’s Gate Circle: its recreational facilities and pool tables attached to the Wards Island prison for the criminally insane. We sold Christmas trees for food . . . (Incidentally, here Steven Soderbergh filmed Side Effects) One Edit Paine Whitney Psychiatric (Violent Ward) The Paris Times, Poetry Blue Book, Pom 2, Purple, Purple Journal, Red Heroine The Salvation Army SHAMPOOPOETRY Smithers (twice) Sonaweb, Stone Soup, Trampoline, Upstairs at Duroc, and Verse.Trinity House (Halfway house: 13 months. He left finally clean after a 10-year-long heroin withdrawal, spent living homeless outside on the sidewalks of New York City)

Considered to be an underachiever, they didn’t have anything I wanted. Yet I showed signs of promise left overlooked. I stole car keys by patting down jackets hung in the faculty coat room, then went for a drive . . . At that time, I thought his six poems in my anthology of Romantic poetry were the only poems Shelley ever wrote. Because my mother died, I was permitted to graduate despite flunking everything but the Iliad. How life decisions are made. I recall it to this day. Infuriated at my sass suffused with sullen intractability, my Guidance Counselor threw up his hands. “You can’t sit under a tree and write poetry all your life!” “Watch me,” I replied. Instead, by some measured an overachiever, I am not a product of my environment or the outcome of tragic error. If you are young, have no money, and crave adventure, looking for trouble means action: cheap, plenty, fast. I accomplished the goals I set for my day. In my teens, I always wanted to run away to Paris. I’ve gone fifty times. I always wanted to shoot junk, which requires its own ardor and rigor. I always wanted to get locked up in Bellevue . . .

Ick-a-Body, a radio play written in collaboration with his (Cruickshank is their mother’s maiden name) twin brother Jay Hagenbuckle, was broadcast and is archived at Cape Noir in Princetown on Cape Cod. https://womr.org/podcast/ick-a-body/. He is the author of one poetry chapbook, Nuit Maudit (2006) and the editor of the poetry journal Dear Bear. He received Special Thanks for his work on the film Finding Forrester, directed by Gus Van Sant. Other film credits include To Die For and Tremors, that giant rubber desert sand worm flick starring Kevin Bacon. He appears in Our City Dreams, profiles of the artists Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, Ghada Amer, and Swoon, directed by Ciara Clemente.

Long blood heart’s love thanks to the Peter S.Reed Foundation, Giovanna Franciosa, Seton & Kiki Smith.

*Alias: Crow Jane