31.12.05

Tarbouche

Another year walks away,

another one starts to pass on by.


Before you know it


they are all gone.


30.12.05



HAPPYNEWYEARNEBRASKAhappynewyearnebraskaHAPPYnewYEARnebraskahappyhappyhappynebraskayearhappynewnebraska

28.12.05

The Nightclubs and Restaurant Reviews,
The Vacation Destinations,
Without the Word:
MECCA

The road to Mecca is dry
the mountains near Taif
angular, unforgiving.
Baboons scurry in front
of the car, begging for handouts -
most of them maimed in some way
hit by cars. In Oz, they could fly.

A dozen kilometers or so
from our destination we pass
under a giant concrete book
in awe of human ingenuity.
Hardened pages spread
over two gray lanes.


I wonder: Can I go here?
The signs warn of dangers
outside the Emerald City.
The wizard has concocted
and created a disturbing motto:
Infidels, those of us who don't believe
a highway sign might
sentence one to Hell for all eternity,
turn back at once
.
Dorothy, go home.

I've got the green document
it says I can do this,
I won't be arrested.
I'm wearing these white sheets,
yet somehow I don't believe.
I doubt that Mecca knows my name.

Inside the rocky town
most people never see,
a Pizza Hut stands catercorner
to the prize. Over there,
a Five Star Hotel under construction.
The castle doors are all the same,
angels guarding every single direction.
We leave our plastic shoes
near the most conspicuous looking one and go in,
barefoot and murmuring in a thousand voices.

Seven times around the Kaaba,
we circle drenched in the sweat
of others, the crimes we all bear.
The malodorous throng contracts on one corner
hands reaching for a meteorite.

I the imposter
have stained my white clothes
with Arid Extra Dry,
I've got Hanes Her Way under these limpid sheets.

We run for water
we run like Hajar,
the Generous Stone.
We run seeking water,
decanted into plastic containers, from her well.

Zam Zam! Our shoes disappear,
picked up by a stranger.

Mecca for the unbelievers
this is where you go
to find yourself,
stone the devil himself
and why not?

Signs are only signs.

An Explanation of the word: Niggeritis

Some words cannot be spoken,
written, referred to, carried out,
plagiarized or otherwise utilized.
Simply put, we must discriminate.

I've got niggeritis.

Realizing this,
I appointed myself to the Nigger Watch.
A declaration was made,
I am the muslim Nigger,
I am watching you like you watch me,
watching you at the fountainheads
of language.

Please explain this niggeritis.

No problem I say, Constance wouldn't mind.
Constance with her big white teeth
and her big White name.
She and I have an understanding
about that sort of thing.

Niggeritis is a feeling.

"You've got what?"
I said that just as we stepped
gingerly over those concrete barriers
in a parking lot, those that slam
into car bumpers.

Niggeritis.

It was two o'clock, lunchtime.
It was hot. We'd been working hard,
well, hardly working in the ICU,
in our pure and white uniforms.
Some days are like that in a hospital.

Constance, where's your niggeritis when it's needed?

I felt so very white, so white
next to this African Canadian
with niggeritis,
so very ignorant from a colorless
redneck town. Where's the red?

Niggeritis comes from Africa.

She opened her big wide mouth,
the one that got her into trouble
most of the time, that one
with big white teeth and explained:

Niggeritis is nigger laziness.

Can I have it?
I'd like some of that.
In the end though,
I found out I can't have niggeritis
unless I am a nigger.

So I declared,
in light of being an Islamofascist
in some people's eyes,
in their carelessly chosen rhetoric,
to be a new kind of nigger.
So now I can say nigger,
as much as I want.
People generally don't like it,
but you know,
we niggers don't care.

26.12.05


THE LONGER FARTHER

The poem that got him into heaven
had apologies, to Whitman I think.
It spoke of a desert watering hole
all God's creatures, crying
the same way, a manzanita bush.
He must have eye watered while he wrote it
laughed when it was published in the local rag.
He must have laughed. Not loved either
but published finally. His life story
on the front page, with apologies:
Lili Marlene, the frozen toes of Aleutia,
the family part of mining.
Part one concludes.

II

Here is the day he was discharged
honorably from eight years of his life,
a wallet sized picture of a road grader in microfiche.

III

This is the time he leapt
like the elk over the Impala at Tonto,
my body waiting below in the gully for transport
between my sister's big breasts under
a Catholic style shirt front, she held me in c-spine.
Those were good times: a father saving a daughter,
a sister to lean on, a hospital to go to.

IV

Back over there he kept the nuts and bolts.
Jar lids screwed to the bottoms of cupboards,
nailed the latch back into place on the back door
broken from the banging.
He fixed the washer with his specs
perched low on his nose,
his eyes peeking over them and shining.

V

Right there above his long celtic brow
was a hole too small to hold a bullet
but it was a bull's eye and in his casket
I noticed it still as large as ever.
The snapshot of his dead body is in the album.

VI

She came for a spell to sit at the dinner table
tell stories with certain embellishments.
His mother had an ax to grind:
grandpa's mistress out in the valley,
some other children named the Driggers, distant cousins.
How mean grandma got over that.
How she hit with a crutch.
It is strange how long one can remember, how details
hidden come to the forefront in Riyadh,
long distance sisterhood and her swollen ankles
aching from the flight. It matters because I never knew.

VII

"Just a piece of metal, a broken one now
but you are okay, you are okay." Driving isn't
always easy on Laundry Hill but you are okay.
The new brougham wholly dented fender to rear.
It was all a daughter ever wanted to hear,
caught me a little off guard. Mom advised:

You've got to tell your father, not me.
It'll be good for the both of you.

I think it was our only conversation
because he saved up the rest of his talk
for that poem, to get him into heaven,
the only time he ever mentioned the word God, in there.
A certain kind of self confidence you get from fighting in a war.

VIII

We were in the lumber yard,
I was holding a grape Nehi,
Red was adding up the total,
two by fours and four by fours.
We tooled around town like that for a couple years
when he was sober, preparing to die.
Just a pause he was taking between drinks,
about five years of dry wall and fixing the electric,
balancing on ladders, picking stucco out of my eye.
He'd take a hit of oxygen between corners.
Sometimes I held a hammer or a jar of nails
taken from the washroom. Someone changed my name
to Lolita, showed me Last Tango in Paris,
a funny kind of thing to do to a kid.
My father decided to drink himself to death
instead of shoot the bastard
and he did. May 23 to May 23
but they got it backwards at the printers:

b.1983 - d.1913

I've got it here in his mother's jewelry box,
absolute proof. I look at it sometimes
and think about the wars and sexual exploitation.

IX
His poem is somewhere else,
yellowed;
out of date;
with apologies.
Yet I keep writing it longer, farther.


*Sorry no time to correct the band of pink on the edge of the old photo...or no will to. Some things just don't matter to Pig Pen.
Ode to Seven

"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
-William Wordsworth, We Are Seven


"If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles."
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass



THE SEANCE

If Elvis was here
he could do it
but we lost him
in the back seat
of a bluebird.
Me and Sarah
sobered up like
Katherine in the closet
when we asked Lori's dead dad to knock,
we all sobered up,
kicked our way out-
saw locked windows and doors
all around, pleasant grass outside
not the fake kind
but real, stable grass,
Country Squire in the carport,
the avocado Frigidaire
opened and closed
bilaterally,
 as was the style.

SQUIRREL DUENDE

St. Pat's let out at three
no one moved until
Sister Josepha left with her
cross-kissing Judas stories
hanging around her ankles
like worn out socks on a poor kid,
no one dared.
A squirrel huddled behind 15 miles an hour,
tried to give me rabies
in trade for my cuddle,
his eye a brown globe
the color of a monk.
I denied this in the confession.

MARY'S OD

Mary, Mary quite contrary
how did your urgent need grow?
Knick Knack Paddy Whack
your old man rolled home.
Here we go round the Mulberry Bush,
so he beat the shit out of her.
She died in her own vomit
several years later,
her bracelet landing
on heaven in the hopskotch.

BURN


We tried to burn the town down
a stampede put it out
as an afterthought
right near the big circle
that drains into several
asphalt tributaries

Wood Canyon, Spring Canyon
Perley Street-

We should have known
by the water marks
on the library walls
the flood couldn't take
it down neither,
a hundred some years before.

It just kept on melting.

MEDITATION

Old Man Ham
had a Hills Bros can,
his wife was really lean.
She kept a Baptist house
no smoke inside, her pies never burned.
He stood and puffed
out by the garden gate,
heard the cottonwoods say:


wow amen.

US

All our fights looked the same
mom's skirts blowed up
as she fell down
her soft perfect bottom
as clean as a whistle.
Old man Ham a trusty witness

as we pushed him out the door,
his false teeth clicked
in the roof of his mouth.
Inside their place next door, Grace
popped her gum incessantly near
something they called an "ottoman".
Sometimes we felt a little poor.

AFTER HE DIED

At night one night
running past the ankle high
black gully windows,
wicked little transoms
under houses built on flash floods,
up past the garden gate,
his chair under that pear tree,
almost empty,
the air was very, very clear.
Through our newest
old door I kept running -
and on the last breath I summoned
his soul from the cotton we kicked
off our shoes in spring.
When I told mom this,
she called for a Nitro.


This is how I remember it.

GRACE HAM'S ADDENDUM

On a muggy afternoon
in late summer three quarters
of the way from Tucson
Grace Ham's daughter
took a turn for the worse on I-10.
Mom turned into puddles
all around the house.
It was wetter than the day
our spaniel Maxi got rigor mortis on the front porch.
Those are the old stories now. All of them that will be revealed here for now. I can only do so much you know...there are laws. One of the reasons I cannot publish is because the laws lack complete specificity until they are utterly known and then...oh then Goethe and Gogol go to their respective positions regarding matters of art.

The new stories though are always okay to relate because to relate them in ignorance is ALWAYS allowed. Always. Determination regarding their validity and response can be delayed for a certain amount of time required for the decision to be revealed. But they can be revealed.

Yesterday I heard the wind of the grave for the first time. Do you have any idea what that sounds like? Oh...you hear it all the time and don't know it. Everyone does but they've neglected defining it often enough to make it into an everyday occurrence.

It sounded like the wind. That is all. Ordinary enough eh? But when you hear it you remember Bill Porter talking about that psalm that goes: through the valley of death I will fear no evil...and you hear what he was hearing. He was remembering the war and all it had done to him and he only heard it later and felt no one would understand what it was he heard as he slashed pages out of the bible to send them to Vietnam and my brother (not his son...his step son whom he supposedly never accepted). Ah. You hear the wind and it sounds differently all of a sudden and you know inside that seashells will also offer up the sound and some other things too.It is a lesson to start listening better to the sounds. You really have to hear the earth in her groaning. You've got to see the lights as being stored energy mostly from dead bodies.You see the MOON as what it is...for the first time maybe...a stored source of solar energy which is something you don't know what but it is something widely studied. Particle physicists and the like do alot of work in that field. They don't know much about it except measurements on instruments and call that truth. They do and they make alot of sense sometimes but they usually neglect to tell you what they are really after.

They are after God you know. They just don't like to say it out loud or to themselves or even to God. They think their work is enough justification because it leads to a more "sustainable" universe. How funny. As if the universe needed them to be sustainable. That is really funny.

13.12.05

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. - Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence

I was discussing with Samson Shillitoe regarding the existence of God and whatnots. As usual the conversation took a turn for the worse because Samson is Anti Bush and I am not. Read on:


But I am going to tell you...as a poet there is just nothing that compares to the series of signs you receive when in this state (on the verge of life changes). It is a bittersweet reunion with spirituality as always but don't knock it until you've tried it.

Not that brand(Christianity)...no of course not. Ridiculous and actually..I pity those that are left with the half truths of the Bible...it is a damn shame really. But in the end as long as they meander along with that and try to be faithful to what they believe in and do 'good works' then they still get a shot at the final show. Fence sitters and arrogants as well...special clauses JUST for them (or you as the case may be and no offense intended).

That brand though lost me when Jesus (Isa, (saw)) asked himself about himself on the cross not to mention the part where the devil tempted him with Las Vegas AND Amsterdam....can't tempt God you know. They lost me about right there or maybe it was at my mother's funeral...the priest walked by scenting us with his magical smells and I heard the ringy bells (alter boys, special effects) and said, "What on earth is going on here?" Could have been then.

So...to make a short story even longer and funnier....December 11 is a day that will go down in history for my son Ali. He shaved. Finally. I was so tired of the mixmatched facial hair and his dad filled with all those superstitious myths about shaving and what it might do to a boy (CHIA PET MENTALITY)...

But that isn't all that happened...no sirree. He also went to church yesterday for the first time...and worse yet...we had to sing in German (a charity function at the retarded school in Tyre) and even WORSE STILL...(I cannot believe I've contaminated my son in this way...) Worse still...the preacher was awoman. I'm nearly collapsed by now in the candlelit hall. I'm there and some guy behind me trying to indicate which song it is that they are on and I tell him I don't speak German and he keeps pointing to the hymn book...so I say, "Anyway I am a muslim." The usual reflection on HIS face...huh?

But this isn't really the whole story. My son passed so many landmarks yesterday we all agreed to put a special bookmark on December 11th...decided it was a REALLY BIG DAY for our family because....something FAR WORSE had happened in the morning...I should have stayed in bed you know.

On our way to Tyre I gassed up at a station-slash-liquor store.I needed something to drink. Banana milk specifically and Sarah ordered one for herself and Ali ordered a beverage...called FREEZE...and he wanted the green kind.So I go grab my two bananas and my green one and get in the car. Around the time we are halfway between Sidon and Beirut (on our way to church and shaving (in the evening)) my son declares from the back seat, "It's a BUZZ!"

Dear God in heaven. I almost went over the edge into the great big sea. You see...FREEZE is non alcoholic and BUZZ is the cousiin...same company and same bottle size/shape/beverage colors. I only grabbed a 'green one' in haste and ended up getting the poor sod loaded on vodka.Oh dear...by the time we reached Tyre he was asking for Chinese Food. Yes I said....that always happens.

10.12.05


A letter of interest arrived from one Lanny Muss. It has only been a few days since his friend doogs interest renewed in my condition...doogs an older fellow with the world inside of himself and one who never lets the smallest thing bother him...aside from a comment about "literary artifice" which was made with the most humble respect for the glory of ages gone by and styles of performance in gentlemanly circles towards women, 'in my condition'. Ah...it is so good to hear from a friend of a decade....a whole decade. Here we are wondering why we bother at all to write to one another...knowing that it really is the most gentle solace one can ever know...a kind and friendly letter with all the necessary obscurities that are enacted to sit in a parlor with one another and chat awhile. It was only to preserve the poem which we arrived at...as we always arrive at some nonsense or another that I relate to you my reply to my gentlemanly friend, Lanny Muss, old doogs friendly butler:

Dear Lan,

In this our series of chaotic missions
perserverence, detection, destruction
marriages and wars, streams of conflict
seemingly all around

women arrive in dreams offering zakat
unrecognizable except to a simple few.

She wants to understand betrayal,
the unseen, the protected law of the universe
in all of its blinding capacity
although it is wrong and impossible.
She tries anyway. Leaves everything else alone:
socks, ashtrays and friendly letters,
platonic unifications of her very own soul
which is so valuable anymore to her
and no one else. No one else bothers
about another man's soul any more,
his own wife's or her dog's soul -
the same to him as they are to her
but in a different way. In such a different way.

All I can say is I know Lanny. I'm much better acquainted with the quietish doogs and have long missed him. It is good though to hear pippa once again and wonder where that must lead a person...because dreams and these things always do lead to a something...never bitter and certainly only mildly scorned and infrequently.I wish doogs could sit a while on the Corniche and tell me once again I'll be alright because I'm truly not sure about alright. Alright is a creation that fends off the not so good, the absolutely intolerable and the ever present hypocrisy...my own and everyone else's....all too painful to encounter as much as I do....all too painful and leaving the rottenest sores..sores of the mind that never heals..only remembers what it is told.I am so glad to hear from you once again. I need something to help me from losing my mind once and for all time.LJ(Layla and Lilac send their regards and Lilac sends her photo as well. My God she was a beautiful maiden...where on earth did she go?

4.12.05

Link to the general debate regarding big mouth non participants in the political process. In memory of the famous Wolf O'Meara, compatriot of the oppressed and the sexy.

http://www.bisbeemarquee.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=913
openwingedcopy



The Lebanese Magician

3.12.05

http://al-islam.org/LWM/mutahari.htm


The Ascent of the Sherpa

He was common, ordinary so to speak
nothing special about him,
the usual clothing worn by Sherpa
warm, useful.

Not thin coated.

Engaged as he was in public debate
he found it difficult to make a decision,
whether to lead or to follow.
It came down, in the end,
to the need for enough diesel fuel for winter
to pour into a certain kind of heater
that escapes description universally.

Twelve Nepalese were killed in Baghdad today,
someone whispers to me. Not that it matters.

So he put together some things,
bread, cheese, Sherpa Foods,
the usual fare. And set out to rendezvous
with the ten or so moralistically staunch
climbers engaging him, moralistic in that they
insisted on the unusual. Very moral.

We should say ethical but that is just not physical enough.

They met and he collected the agreed upon
Sherpa coin. No one knows what it looks like.
It might be Chinese or in this case, Ben Franklin-like
because of the universality of Empirialistic trade,
so it goes in the impoverished world.
Doesn't matter to us or to the Sherpa who Ascends.

He turned to the leader of the group
who had learned Sherpa Language easily enough,
certain tough families of words useful
to climbing, torch, fire, food, oxygen,
death, liquor, book, socks, cold, die-ing (being a
progressive form of the former), pain,
mother, father, and of course, candy...
he said, "I'll have to stay ahead of you all,
I'm uncomfortable in the company of others."

The leader was puzzled but agreed to this stipulation
all the same. It must be some sort of standard
in Nepal he thought, some sort of requirement.
"How will we follow then?"

"I'll leave my footprints in the snow of course."

"Oh," the leader said, chastened at his own stupidity.

The trek began the next morning which happens pretty
early up there, finishes pretty late,
with the Sherpa starting off at night,
slipping out as fast as he could go,
like an angel in the moon's glow,
one mustn't dally on a short night.

The moralistically inclined group set out,
pleased to see the tracks well defined,
deep and the weather pleasant, the mountaintop
in view, achievable. Very optimistic,
if you will. Occasionally they caught sight
of the Sherpa, his head bobbing up and down
in the distance, disappearing behind rocks,
reappearing. The tracks were still quite good.

The second day was much the same only the Sherpa
was no longer in sight, the tracks slightly obscured
by the light snows. Some of the tracks looked
a bit altered, a yeti paw here or a goat hoof there,
but that was expected. No one bristled yet.
The climber at the end of the rope disappeared
yet no one noticed, each of them caught
in their own meanings, their own cold.

By the third day however, the bristling
was looking more like a forest fire,
the cold was like a burning heat,
the sun was no longer just the sun
but an actual star, the sky was no longer
so far away, the shells of gas,
the rings of Jupiter, all of them
somehow related.

The tracks had completely disappeared
and were replaced by paw prints:
first a snow leopard, some kind of bird,
a Wolf and finally, a palimpsest.

The party began noticing, one after the other,
the disappearances of the others until the final
moralistic climber was left to himself
and felt the Sherpa beside him, pulling him strenuously,
dragging him, whipping him with a leather strap,
the Sherpa's nails digging into the frozen flesh of the last one.

He'd been there all along and had dismissed the members
one at a time, disguised as a snow leopard, a yeti, a Wolf
until he decided which one he could keep company with.

"Here we are." he said, peaceful and not very excited,
he'd been to the spot how many times now,
"How do you like it?"

"Die-ing," he replaced the form deliberately.
The Sherpa deliberately replied, "Death."

1.12.05

dog


The Secret Eye of the Apocalypse

Could someone please
in all honesty explain
why Bonaparte was exiled,
why he was the first Anti Christ
and what was going on over there
at the time? Could it be...but no.
No way.He was a liberator or sought
to be one, he did travel to North Africa,
liked it well enough impressed
by the solidarity of slavery there,
but really, was it worth a trip to Elba?
I don't know but the Piltdown man must
have some clue, his Cherry Red Cranium,
his darling Oranguatan chin, he simply must
have at least one idea in that empty head of his.

I know I don't.

Don't know much at all 'cept what I's told.
I's told that history is a fact. Mystery is a clue.
Illuminated Enlightenment, I's told that too
and now they's tellin' me things are not the same,
tellin' me things are secretly oriented to the top
of some damn geometrical principle full of scorcerers bones.
I'd say I's told wrong. I's been fooled.