Penny Arcade

Hoarfrost

—for Marianne

There’s heart break
I heard the crack
Amazing
I am amazed
that there are still places in my heart that can break

Nothing has changed much
Since I was 13
I still approach love
Like a famished animal
In a burnt out landscape

Love is a lottery
Sometimes I play
Sometimes I don't

There are small tears
Swells
At the corner of my eyes
I want what others have
and I cannot have it
I cannot

I have gone from Aphrodite to Artemis
From the ocean swell to a barren rocky place
Still here   there is also beauty

Invisible like electric fence
a perimeter lies around my heart
unpassable
one would need the password
but like every other password
I have forgotten it

These are old feelings
The source forgotten
How furtively I still search for love
Like a man with a Geiger counter
I pan for possibility
guessing where I might find it
I think
It must be here – there
Somewhere.

Bodhissattva

—for John Giorno

I reside in your heart

Your mind the waiting room

I never made it to be your friend

There was only the animal connectedness

Something like family

Something like relation

But I never became you in the real sense

Of people in love

Who pass thru their own skin

To reach the other.

We are poets

We are the stars at night

We twinkle in proximity but never

On top of each other

We are the sun and the moon

Like Francis and sister Clare

You are a lunatic

A hermit

On top of Mt Li Foy

In the forest it is always dark

The canopy of trees

The wolves come out at dawn

Penny Arcade, aka Susana Ventura, is a poet, essayist, spoken word, video & theatre maker who creates long form, text-based performance, a form of experimental theatre that investigates the boundaries between traditional theatre and performance art based on her poetic practice. Her focus on the creation of community as the goal of performance and her use of performance as a transformative act mark her as a true original in international theatre. Since 1999 she has co-helmed The Lower East Side Biography Project: Stemming The Tide of Cultural Amnesia with her 30 year collaborator Steve Zehentner.

She’s contributed to new art forms every decade since 1968 – experimental theatre and film with The Playhouse of The Ridiculous and as an Andy Warhol Superstar in the 1960’s, conceptual art in the 1970’s, performance art and spoken word in the 1980’s. In 1990 she spearheaded the international neo burlesque movement with  her anti-censorship show Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! a blend of erotic dance and humanist politics. She's the author of 16 full length works, hundreds of performances pieces, lectures, interviews all available on https://www.patreon.com/PennyArcade by donation. A partial collection of her scripts and ephemera was published by in hardcover by Semiotext in 2010 Bad Reputation. www.pennyarcade.tv