Catch a glimpse of poets in their natural habitat. Notice the blooming of the egos and the complex rhyme schemes. Don't miss it as this only happens near the beginning of spring.
http://p072.ezboard.com/ftheforbiddenstoryfrm7.showMessageRange?topicID=2369.topic&start=1&stop=20
Sixty Ways To Leave Your Swami
We used to go into hiding
because of the chiding
Jews, Germans and Irish
and some say too, the Amish and Bri'ish.
If this is the way of the saints
it might be best to buy paints
and make the good ones green
and the bad ones red
like Ken Wilbur does for cash
at Scam-bala press
with the Indian Ogden Nash
Deepak Chopra
who teaches how to meditate
and calculates his profits
and the profits of others
who aren't necessarily green
nor actually red
but something closer to Dick Smothers.
www.smothersbrothers.com/...ntact1.htm
27.2.06
Well in general I don't do alot of blogging, you know the type, blogging. Talking about myself and my life plus links to theseareafewofmyfavoritethings. Oh, I did this and then we ate that before going here to see JoJo at open mike where we found ourselves seated at the same table with (insert famous poet/critic here) who was complaining about the spumoni. No...I generally don't do that. But recently, because of a slight disruption in the balance of Kerbala, I decided to show people exactly what kind of poet I really am. I'm someone who knows what a sunburn is. I used to research things like DU because I had a bunch of messed up kids from Hafr al Batn as patients (three noses, no arms and fused eye sockets, stuff like that), not to mention my pal Steve who received the gift that keeps giving, testicular cancer, after his stint rewriting BASIC and COBALT for a DEFENSE CONTRACTOR in the Gulf, before the great crash r/t the fictional Y2K snafu. Well. I used to do that and could tell people all sorts of stuff like that, I've a memory like an elephant except for the last location of my bifocals. So I'm hip on sunburns and MiG 20s and dynamite at RPGs and Los Alamos. Computers disappearing lately? Forest fire burned it down most likely. Happens all the time! President's brothers have Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin's brother over to dinner ALL the time, I'm telling you and yes, William Cooper probably DID have a photo of the Kennedy do hickey that was to-die-for, and he did, approximately three weeks after 9/11. I'm a conspiracy theorist par none. So once in a while I plan to reveal a word or two to teach the up and coming MILITANT poets like Tost and K Silem a thing or two about dealing with politics in their work. My advice, don't. Unless you plan to spend at least three years reading really boring stuff about Central Asia. Just talk about your fame and chapbooks. Everyone likes that and leave the bombs and wars to those who know a bit and have IQs approaching the event horizon.
My thoughts on Flarfists: Watch out. Your days are numbered if you keep bullshitting your way through theater class.
http://www.vialls.com/myahudi/sunburn.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7147.htm
I've long watched the progress of this projectile and kind of hope it isn't buried in my back yard somewhere near Kafra. We've rid ourselves of most of the Israeli landmines (which they refused to provide maps for) but a sunburn can look an awful lot like a water tank or sheesh, like one of those old hunks of junk we borrowed from the Israeli occupation a few years back. Tanks all over the place which are used for centerpieces in public parks down there.
The Sunburn can deliver a 200-kiloton nuclear payload, or: a 750-pound conventional warhead, within a range of 100 miles, more than twice the range of the Exocet. The Sunburn combines a Mach 2.1 speed (two times the speed of sound) with a flight pattern that hugs the deck and includes “violent end maneuvers” * to elude enemy defenses. The missile was specifically designed to defeat the US Aegis radar defense system. Should a US Navy Phalanx point defense somehow manage to detect an incoming Sunburn missile, the system has only seconds to calculate a fire solution –– not enough time to take out the intruding missile. The US Phalanx defense employs a six-barreled gun that fires 3,000 depleted-uranium rounds a minute, but the gun must have precise coordinates to destroy an intruder “just in time.”
What I constantly question is this idea that the US wants to END the Syrian Occupation but the group that ended the Israeli Occupation is considered a Terrorist Organization, the group known as Hezbollah. I really wish someone could help me figure that one out. It is all that ever stood between me and Bush love. And now, he allowed the rift to widen at Kerbala. Whoever nuked that mosque is in a heap o trouble my friends. A heap o trouble.
"The arming for war has been matched by threats. Israeli officials have declared repeatedly that they will not allow the Mullahs to develop nuclear power, not even reactors to generate electricity for peaceful use. Their threats are particularly worrisome, because Israel has a long history of pre-emptive war. "
I mean come on Tost, did you know that the Israeli's stole the Golan Heights AFTER the Syrians had agreed to a cease-fire in the Six Day War which was started by Israel, a pre-emptive war which of course, was won. We live in the days of pre-emptive battles, scary. And we also live in the age of hackneyed political ranting in poetry. Where's the beef?
Or you get that fellow Christopher George who is supposedly a historian who writes photo captions (huh?) . One of his last masterpieces compared Israelis taunting Palestinians, calling them "Samarai" (bleck, oriental poetasting) and the Iranians standing in the foreground of two smoke stacks as perpetrators of the WTC disaster. Did he understand that those guys were the Sunnis that hit the WTC? Reminds me of the time a wedding hall in Israel collapsed and I went to work the next day and a nurse from New Zealand told me all about how a Palestinian with a nail bomb disfigured about a squillion people in Israel, damn terrorists.
And how about that photo of two IDF soldiers smiling over the carcass, their last kill saying cheese? Forget Abu Gharaib...that was nada compared to that shot of the kid who was being shielded by his father and murdered in cold blood. Israel promptly bull dozed the murder scene and blamed the unnecessary civilian murders on Palestinian gunmen. Happens all the time, we are used to it.
You think, poet, get a job already.
*That means it can do a loop-d-loop at the target destination and some say, it can also do push-ups on command.
My thoughts on Flarfists: Watch out. Your days are numbered if you keep bullshitting your way through theater class.
http://www.vialls.com/myahudi/sunburn.html
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7147.htm
I've long watched the progress of this projectile and kind of hope it isn't buried in my back yard somewhere near Kafra. We've rid ourselves of most of the Israeli landmines (which they refused to provide maps for) but a sunburn can look an awful lot like a water tank or sheesh, like one of those old hunks of junk we borrowed from the Israeli occupation a few years back. Tanks all over the place which are used for centerpieces in public parks down there.
The Sunburn can deliver a 200-kiloton nuclear payload, or: a 750-pound conventional warhead, within a range of 100 miles, more than twice the range of the Exocet. The Sunburn combines a Mach 2.1 speed (two times the speed of sound) with a flight pattern that hugs the deck and includes “violent end maneuvers” * to elude enemy defenses. The missile was specifically designed to defeat the US Aegis radar defense system. Should a US Navy Phalanx point defense somehow manage to detect an incoming Sunburn missile, the system has only seconds to calculate a fire solution –– not enough time to take out the intruding missile. The US Phalanx defense employs a six-barreled gun that fires 3,000 depleted-uranium rounds a minute, but the gun must have precise coordinates to destroy an intruder “just in time.”
What I constantly question is this idea that the US wants to END the Syrian Occupation but the group that ended the Israeli Occupation is considered a Terrorist Organization, the group known as Hezbollah. I really wish someone could help me figure that one out. It is all that ever stood between me and Bush love. And now, he allowed the rift to widen at Kerbala. Whoever nuked that mosque is in a heap o trouble my friends. A heap o trouble.
"The arming for war has been matched by threats. Israeli officials have declared repeatedly that they will not allow the Mullahs to develop nuclear power, not even reactors to generate electricity for peaceful use. Their threats are particularly worrisome, because Israel has a long history of pre-emptive war. "
I mean come on Tost, did you know that the Israeli's stole the Golan Heights AFTER the Syrians had agreed to a cease-fire in the Six Day War which was started by Israel, a pre-emptive war which of course, was won. We live in the days of pre-emptive battles, scary. And we also live in the age of hackneyed political ranting in poetry. Where's the beef?
Or you get that fellow Christopher George who is supposedly a historian who writes photo captions (huh?) . One of his last masterpieces compared Israelis taunting Palestinians, calling them "Samarai" (bleck, oriental poetasting) and the Iranians standing in the foreground of two smoke stacks as perpetrators of the WTC disaster. Did he understand that those guys were the Sunnis that hit the WTC? Reminds me of the time a wedding hall in Israel collapsed and I went to work the next day and a nurse from New Zealand told me all about how a Palestinian with a nail bomb disfigured about a squillion people in Israel, damn terrorists.
And how about that photo of two IDF soldiers smiling over the carcass, their last kill saying cheese? Forget Abu Gharaib...that was nada compared to that shot of the kid who was being shielded by his father and murdered in cold blood. Israel promptly bull dozed the murder scene and blamed the unnecessary civilian murders on Palestinian gunmen. Happens all the time, we are used to it.
You think, poet, get a job already.
*That means it can do a loop-d-loop at the target destination and some say, it can also do push-ups on command.
A very very BIG thank you to Ellis Heckman of the Bisbee Marquee for choosing two very long poems that only "our people" understand. Or maybe not! They've been born if only into a small community of left wing radical ex miner poets. If only there. He was allowed to take whatever he wanted and it knocked my socks off that he'd choose something very difficult to translate into Esperanto. And that he would say such kind things about me. That is always good and I'd like to return the favor here:
You are a smart nice guy. Keep up the good work. We love you over here if only we are a band of one.
http://www.bisbeemarquee.com/
You are a smart nice guy. Keep up the good work. We love you over here if only we are a band of one.
http://www.bisbeemarquee.com/
Traditionally yours,
Me
21.2.06
The Flood
How is it one waits
in the womb sublime
for birth, a mere
forty weeks time,
and so long to die?
Is it really so?
Or is it that the earth
waits with me and you
for either one, of the two
through falls and springs,
past temples and kings,
the atoms and strings.
Such strong forces
and weak forces,
the catastrophes of horses,
treaties and divorces?
These upswept mountains
and overswept seas,
we slept also through these.
The sands that were rocks,
eggs became flocks
and the dust in the clocks,
among these, our sweetest talks
and our boldest lies
take measure of those kinds of cries.
The poet earns a living
from such conscientious giving,
as if to say
we were waiting just for that
one to come,
the last poem,
the final diagram.
Or, the steady beat of the oldest drum.
What happens at the door
between its opening and closing,
a particular history
full of dystrophy,
that thing called decadence,
a bit of tungsten evidence,
rising shining and parting,
forever moments starting.
Without a past or prediction
or any map in this local jurisdiction.
How can anyone go on!
Who decides which blip
charts this lonesome trip
called life, this one,
this only one and you're gone?
A shadow never stays long,
its death never wrong
nor its life very strong,
the short, the long,
the phantom song.
At noon, under the feet,
or near night and so fleet.
Poor wise old shadow,
mark this grave, this body.
You are a wise old shadow,
a terrible reflection
escaping detection
changing direction,
a slight thin projection.
Do you see me too?
Can you write a memory,
weather a storm?
Will you wake up
when I do not?
Or are you just a dream
of a thing designed
a breath of time?
Were you an afterthought?
Which apparition do you look like?
Could you be just the sketch?
An anomaly of light?
A shadow only proves
one thing as it moves,
I am here and tremendously small,
as thin as a ghost
full of vapoury boasts,
the arrogant din
of land-locked men
made of red-brown clay
who are born and die
day to day.
Our shadows explain in words
as they force us to exhume
joy and doom,
the perpetual flux,
skies filled with ducks
and freeways with trucks,
does and bucks,
all of the crux
of an abacas,
the tractatus mathematicus.
The Bull of Heaven dies too.
His shadow leaves.
His parable lives on.
The children in Ceylon
want pencils to draw
everything they saw.
They know as well as us.
How is it one waits
in the womb sublime
for birth, a mere
forty weeks time,
and so long to die?
Is it really so?
Or is it that the earth
waits with me and you
for either one, of the two
through falls and springs,
past temples and kings,
the atoms and strings.
Such strong forces
and weak forces,
the catastrophes of horses,
treaties and divorces?
These upswept mountains
and overswept seas,
we slept also through these.
The sands that were rocks,
eggs became flocks
and the dust in the clocks,
among these, our sweetest talks
and our boldest lies
take measure of those kinds of cries.
The poet earns a living
from such conscientious giving,
as if to say
we were waiting just for that
one to come,
the last poem,
the final diagram.
Or, the steady beat of the oldest drum.
What happens at the door
between its opening and closing,
a particular history
full of dystrophy,
that thing called decadence,
a bit of tungsten evidence,
rising shining and parting,
forever moments starting.
Without a past or prediction
or any map in this local jurisdiction.
How can anyone go on!
Who decides which blip
charts this lonesome trip
called life, this one,
this only one and you're gone?
A shadow never stays long,
its death never wrong
nor its life very strong,
the short, the long,
the phantom song.
At noon, under the feet,
or near night and so fleet.
Poor wise old shadow,
mark this grave, this body.
You are a wise old shadow,
a terrible reflection
escaping detection
changing direction,
a slight thin projection.
Do you see me too?
Can you write a memory,
weather a storm?
Will you wake up
when I do not?
Or are you just a dream
of a thing designed
a breath of time?
Were you an afterthought?
Which apparition do you look like?
Could you be just the sketch?
An anomaly of light?
A shadow only proves
one thing as it moves,
I am here and tremendously small,
as thin as a ghost
full of vapoury boasts,
the arrogant din
of land-locked men
made of red-brown clay
who are born and die
day to day.
Our shadows explain in words
as they force us to exhume
joy and doom,
the perpetual flux,
skies filled with ducks
and freeways with trucks,
does and bucks,
all of the crux
of an abacas,
the tractatus mathematicus.
The Bull of Heaven dies too.
His shadow leaves.
His parable lives on.
The children in Ceylon
want pencils to draw
everything they saw.
They know as well as us.
The Catastrophes of Horses
I used to draw horses and thought
the worst thing that could ever happen
was one of them might fall down
while chasing down a tribe of Indians,
guns blazing, arrows flying.
No one taught me about the rest, the bad parts.
"They're just movies." They did
tell me that when I'd start to crying.
I used to draw horses and thought
the worst thing that could ever happen
was one of them might fall down
while chasing down a tribe of Indians,
guns blazing, arrows flying.
No one taught me about the rest, the bad parts.
"They're just movies." They did
tell me that when I'd start to crying.
20.2.06
Hall of Fame, Jack Gilbert
You want to invite this fella to dinner.
http://www.poems.com/briefgil.htm
A Brief for the Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Jack Gilbert
You want to invite this fella to dinner.
http://www.poems.com/briefgil.htm
A Brief for the Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Jack Gilbert
Schadenfreude in the City
Where did this problem start,
this stuff about wondering where
a siren goes in the dark
or during the rain, the curtains
pulled aside and you want to see
mainstreet, hope to see a fire
or the headlight of someone's car
dangling like an eye out
of its socket, all hay-wires.
Here, it is night and a plane
ascends, banks then disappears.
A siren peals through the almost silent
predawn cold and continues on.
Then another. It is always
the second one that gets you going.
Where did this problem start,
this stuff about wondering where
a siren goes in the dark
or during the rain, the curtains
pulled aside and you want to see
mainstreet, hope to see a fire
or the headlight of someone's car
dangling like an eye out
of its socket, all hay-wires.
Here, it is night and a plane
ascends, banks then disappears.
A siren peals through the almost silent
predawn cold and continues on.
Then another. It is always
the second one that gets you going.
18.2.06
Nude Descending
Godiva of the farmlands
of the peach,
Godiva of the Gift Shop
of the thrill seeker,
Godiva of parched lips
of crippled hips,
Godiva of sitting Shiva
of hands folded,
Godiva of perpetual collision
of happy turmoil,
Godiva of pathologie
of eternal blackouts,
Godiva of waste
of long dead people,
Godiva of Whow-wee
of fox, bat and wolf,
Godiva of bangle bracelets
of shortness in breath,
Godiva of sons' sleeping
of the silence before dawn,
Godiva of musical chairs
of poorly tended zoos,
Godiva of the Apache
of Globe and San Carlos,
Godiva of handmade paper
of full ashtrays,
Godiva of the coin-fed horse
of El Rancho and sawdust,
Godiva of the Grapes of Wrath
of invasions and launchers,
Godiva of typhoid
of summers in tuberculosis,
Godiva of seasonal illness
of cold and wet, hot and dry,
Godiva of foreign hospitals
of fascist gendarmes...
Godiva, Godiva, Godiva
That's all I ever hear.
How The Ants Got Famous
They stood on their hind legs
congratulating themselves. How
they did, the ants, become famous.
Lifting six times their weight:
grains of sugar, wheat capsules
and so many types of resins
called capitulations. Even
in the love generations, men
were heartier than their women,
chosen very well, as it is always
the case, for their breeding:
Connecticut to New Hampshire,
Wilshire to Orange
and Pinal to Greenlee county.
The march of these creatures
was not very long to us
but to them, it was
a very long and hoary deal.
Tree trunks to consider, alimony,
panhandling and no hole to crawl into.
It was a very long way to Mecca.
They stood on their hind legs
congratulating themselves. How
they did, the ants, become famous.
Lifting six times their weight:
grains of sugar, wheat capsules
and so many types of resins
called capitulations. Even
in the love generations, men
were heartier than their women,
chosen very well, as it is always
the case, for their breeding:
Connecticut to New Hampshire,
Wilshire to Orange
and Pinal to Greenlee county.
The march of these creatures
was not very long to us
but to them, it was
a very long and hoary deal.
Tree trunks to consider, alimony,
panhandling and no hole to crawl into.
It was a very long way to Mecca.
Have A Coke And A Smile
For three days I've sat wondering about three days
if this is how it is, finally realizing
after all these years of three days
the contempt I must have for something inside
but I can't find it. I look and look
for it outside the parameters of those three
days that come in pairs and triplets sometimes,
wonder about the babbling brooks and sea line.
Is that where it is at? I just don't know.
Winter is the best time for the activity of wondering.
No where to go and no one wants to go with you there.
The streets are slick with the slime of summer
for the first few and they come clean after that
but you don't want to attack them in the usual way.
If I do it is with the commraderie of pilots,
navigation systems of the Byzantines as water
indicates the need for an aqueduct or two
all the while listening to a song about a corner
in Winslow Arizona where we were, not so long ago.
The surges there of geology all around, flowing
just flowing in rivers of rock and the Ice Age.
Painting there and Indians selling silver bracelets,
the poor of the plateau, the divested of the main.
In the ouzai they sell inflatable Santas in December
in the squatter shops and bathing suits in summer
as if taking a bath were a common thing and Christmas
is for them too. There is a resentment and appreciation
for this kind of thing floating in our rivers
as the rains clean the city up a bit, I wonder
where it all goes and how the future rock will present itself.
I once saw a tree with a coke bottle firmly throttled
in the fingers of the root, have a Coke and a smile!
as I proceeded to the slaughter of a goat, that area
with putrefying fats the dog gets off on.
Have a coke and a smile the tree said to me.
We've not moved very far out of the sludge.
On occasion I'll walk down to the Gulf Mart
just to give the folks on the way a kick, they'll try
to talk to me but I'll be thinking more about
the sewer mud and the black color of sewer mud.
I'll resent that but not their well wishing,
and the fish market near the Gulf full of special kinds
of fish no one knows about. Not orange roughy but yes,
some salmon and occasionally, a lobster tail.
More like Hoki, less like snapper. That is what I'll do
if boredom becomes depression and that becomes something else,
something like ice in the spleen and you imagine the liver
quite large by now from the anesthesias. If that isn't enough
there will be more at the origin to think about,
the knick knack mosque in the arcadia quite lovely
and the Syrian in the doorway downstairs
his serious labor for the day concluded and his feast
on the floor near his mat. I'll ask him if the cockroaches
are dead yet but he thinks I mean the temporary condition
and I'm talking permanence. Are they still crawling
out of our own personal aqueduct Murad? He nods but asks
about the light switches in the conducive common way
an employee asks about anything pertaining to my quality
of life as opposed to his, as if I didn't know.
As if I didn't know what composes all of the days of ours,
the togetherness of this building and that one over there.
As if I didn't laugh when they played It's Raining Again
yesterday as I ploughed the freeway on a juggernaut
faster than anyone else, a measure of superiority.
Three days and more to come. More inside jokes and cokes.
More of the watery graves in which we are all sinking.
For three days I've sat wondering about three days
if this is how it is, finally realizing
after all these years of three days
the contempt I must have for something inside
but I can't find it. I look and look
for it outside the parameters of those three
days that come in pairs and triplets sometimes,
wonder about the babbling brooks and sea line.
Is that where it is at? I just don't know.
Winter is the best time for the activity of wondering.
No where to go and no one wants to go with you there.
The streets are slick with the slime of summer
for the first few and they come clean after that
but you don't want to attack them in the usual way.
If I do it is with the commraderie of pilots,
navigation systems of the Byzantines as water
indicates the need for an aqueduct or two
all the while listening to a song about a corner
in Winslow Arizona where we were, not so long ago.
The surges there of geology all around, flowing
just flowing in rivers of rock and the Ice Age.
Painting there and Indians selling silver bracelets,
the poor of the plateau, the divested of the main.
In the ouzai they sell inflatable Santas in December
in the squatter shops and bathing suits in summer
as if taking a bath were a common thing and Christmas
is for them too. There is a resentment and appreciation
for this kind of thing floating in our rivers
as the rains clean the city up a bit, I wonder
where it all goes and how the future rock will present itself.
I once saw a tree with a coke bottle firmly throttled
in the fingers of the root, have a Coke and a smile!
as I proceeded to the slaughter of a goat, that area
with putrefying fats the dog gets off on.
Have a coke and a smile the tree said to me.
We've not moved very far out of the sludge.
On occasion I'll walk down to the Gulf Mart
just to give the folks on the way a kick, they'll try
to talk to me but I'll be thinking more about
the sewer mud and the black color of sewer mud.
I'll resent that but not their well wishing,
and the fish market near the Gulf full of special kinds
of fish no one knows about. Not orange roughy but yes,
some salmon and occasionally, a lobster tail.
More like Hoki, less like snapper. That is what I'll do
if boredom becomes depression and that becomes something else,
something like ice in the spleen and you imagine the liver
quite large by now from the anesthesias. If that isn't enough
there will be more at the origin to think about,
the knick knack mosque in the arcadia quite lovely
and the Syrian in the doorway downstairs
his serious labor for the day concluded and his feast
on the floor near his mat. I'll ask him if the cockroaches
are dead yet but he thinks I mean the temporary condition
and I'm talking permanence. Are they still crawling
out of our own personal aqueduct Murad? He nods but asks
about the light switches in the conducive common way
an employee asks about anything pertaining to my quality
of life as opposed to his, as if I didn't know.
As if I didn't know what composes all of the days of ours,
the togetherness of this building and that one over there.
As if I didn't laugh when they played It's Raining Again
yesterday as I ploughed the freeway on a juggernaut
faster than anyone else, a measure of superiority.
Three days and more to come. More inside jokes and cokes.
More of the watery graves in which we are all sinking.
Notes on Byzantium from Barbara Guest's
MYSTERIOUSLY DEFINING THE MYSTERIOUS: BYZANTINE PROPOSALS OF POETRY
http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/print_archive/alerts1086.html
( excerpts from a talk given by Barbara Guest at St. Marks Poetry Project, NYC, June 1986)
We once took a ship from Beirut and sailed along the coast of Turkey which I shall here call Byzantium, as once Constantinople was its center, as once Constantinople was a center of art, learning, poetry, and under the great Constantine held the barbarian at the gates and saved a civilized world, that of the Venetians, to whom we are so much closer with its own relics of religion and art. We think of St. Marks in Venice with its Byzantine domes, as one thinks of the perpetual filming of Venice which brings us the Byzantine optics of wealth and plague as we watched in Death in Venice. The Byzantine in Venice is slowly dying and it is a major death, yet this demise shows itself in fragments, just as the poet slowly dies in his or her poem making sure there are fragments remaining of the empire which created the poem, the empire of the poet's soul.
The ship on which I sailed was on its way to Greece, but first it came into the harbor of Turkish Mersan. In order to enter the harbor we dropped anchor near a Russian freighter, and there were all the signs of excitement on our ship of nearness to a stranger, possibly a barbarian, not the lowly Mersan, but the permanent stranger, Russia, who dominated our imagination.
We were curious about this port, so we left ship and entered the dingy, sandy town with its scarce trees, like a suburban oasis. But no sooner were we inside the gates than we entered a bazaar. It was an open bazaar--an exciting image--unlike the closed, narrow, sky-covered and awning-covered bazaars of Morocco and Damascus. A supposed simple place where country people had brought their stuffs, as they did in Jude the Obscure, the object of these country folk here was a small town of Mersan with
[line missing in original]
world with decorated cafe umbrellas, but little else.
It was curiosity that had brought us there and the boredom of a confining ship. Our curiosity was rewarded, for suddenly we were in an open square of pilgrims' wares. Before our eyes were laid golden, silken stuffs of such serious and sophisticated spinning and weaving only to be viewed in the expensive shops of the West. There they lay as if mute rags, palatial silks. Yet to these folk they were the ordinary treasures of a modest life. The poet in us heard singing birds, saw gardens of pruned oranges and ornamental peacocks, heard water fall. The merchants were even guileless in their bargaining, as were we in our astonishment. We bought some of the silk and took it back to our ship and we sailed on with a memory of simple grandeur, as unlikely a mixture as could be found anywhere except in poetry. The silk was turned into curtains and thus began to lead a tamed, domestic existence, its history asleep in our house, much as a poem enters into an anthology.
This experience Keats has shared in one of his early poems, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," which I shall call Byzantine. And we can define Byzantine as that which is convoluted, difficult to track down, complicated. Underneath its apparent surface there is the presence of 'something else.' You can think of this 'something else' as a woman behind a veil. Or you can think of it as architectural complexity disguised as mathematics, as the dome of a Byzantine church. I can appeal to your Byzantine thought with words such as corridors, plots, disguise, whispers, atmospheric treaties with civilization expressed in the abstract. Underlying this rather sinister, and almost indelicate movie-plot, under this disguise is the word I would like to discuss, a word that is as necessary to poetry as the oasis to the traveller, "mystery."
I would like to borrow from Mallarmé, an enduring phrase, an introduction to mystery, "Not the thing, but its effect." This "effect" is what I have been leading to with my curtains from Mersan. The "thing" is the poetic process which gives off without notice an effect which is the poem. Each, the process and the effect, go on about in disguise, they must be uncovered, found out; Chapman's Homer must be opened by the poet.
In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility. In the cloak of Byzantine colors the poet spins a secret life. The poem is the unburdening of the ghosts which have come to haunt, after the trip to the labyrinth. These are ghosts, not words, they are the effulgencies of the mystery that surrounds and decorates the poet like a halo rescued from life. And it is the poet's halo that we must see within the poem, not the full dress of rhyme or structure, or vers libre. Not the artifice of landscape or the hotels of verse. Shelley liked to think of spirits hid in clouds, and Byzantine poets imagined genies escaping from bottles, and Blake drew angels. Marianne Moore said that what must be present in poetry is "an impassioned interest in life's creative secret." "Awe" and "Secret" are brought to us by that Spirit "hid in a cloud."
In My Emily Dickinson (I am fond of that "My"), Susan Howe has quoted Dickinson as confessing about reading a poet (who might have been Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a poet who sought mightily in her work for that "awe," who although passionate was singularly unimpassioned, and whose work is flawed by the heaviness of her search for mystery): "Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have--A something overtakes the Mind--" There speaks the true critic, and for my purposes I note that Dickinson took a very Byzantine turn, to reach the poem's kiosk. "A something overtakes the mind."
The Byzantine aspect is a preference for abrupt connections with the remote in order to establish a concrete interior or coastal connection. It longs for a poetry of regions, not regionalism, for a poetry that can embark on ships and find its way to a settlement where a commodity such as silk is respected, and with an ability to exchange its contour for a curtain without losing an identity imposed by the bartering of one idea for another. There is nothing mandarin in this search for the instinct, or "inner sound," which withholds itself from the promises of merchants and permits a common marketplace to examine its value.
The inner sound of the poet protects the poet. Delacroix wrote that painters of marine-life do not represent the sea satisfactorily. "They want to show too much science, make portraits of waves, as landscapists make portraits of trees." His argument was that these seascapes do not concern themselves with the effect on the imagination, as they are absorbed by the details which "turn the mind away." Why? Because this mind filled with details, this poet whose sole urgency is his subject matter neglects the immensity of the depth to be rendered by Art. The depth is the mystery.
Silk which has made sacrifices to art by concealing its leopard beauty recognizes its value. The silk understands the merchant desire to display everything, and with a Byzantine preference for the hidden noise of fabric lowers its eyes, gazing into the mysterious deep.
MYSTERIOUSLY DEFINING THE MYSTERIOUS: BYZANTINE PROPOSALS OF POETRY
http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/print_archive/alerts1086.html
( excerpts from a talk given by Barbara Guest at St. Marks Poetry Project, NYC, June 1986)
We once took a ship from Beirut and sailed along the coast of Turkey which I shall here call Byzantium, as once Constantinople was its center, as once Constantinople was a center of art, learning, poetry, and under the great Constantine held the barbarian at the gates and saved a civilized world, that of the Venetians, to whom we are so much closer with its own relics of religion and art. We think of St. Marks in Venice with its Byzantine domes, as one thinks of the perpetual filming of Venice which brings us the Byzantine optics of wealth and plague as we watched in Death in Venice. The Byzantine in Venice is slowly dying and it is a major death, yet this demise shows itself in fragments, just as the poet slowly dies in his or her poem making sure there are fragments remaining of the empire which created the poem, the empire of the poet's soul.
The ship on which I sailed was on its way to Greece, but first it came into the harbor of Turkish Mersan. In order to enter the harbor we dropped anchor near a Russian freighter, and there were all the signs of excitement on our ship of nearness to a stranger, possibly a barbarian, not the lowly Mersan, but the permanent stranger, Russia, who dominated our imagination.
We were curious about this port, so we left ship and entered the dingy, sandy town with its scarce trees, like a suburban oasis. But no sooner were we inside the gates than we entered a bazaar. It was an open bazaar--an exciting image--unlike the closed, narrow, sky-covered and awning-covered bazaars of Morocco and Damascus. A supposed simple place where country people had brought their stuffs, as they did in Jude the Obscure, the object of these country folk here was a small town of Mersan with
[line missing in original]
world with decorated cafe umbrellas, but little else.
It was curiosity that had brought us there and the boredom of a confining ship. Our curiosity was rewarded, for suddenly we were in an open square of pilgrims' wares. Before our eyes were laid golden, silken stuffs of such serious and sophisticated spinning and weaving only to be viewed in the expensive shops of the West. There they lay as if mute rags, palatial silks. Yet to these folk they were the ordinary treasures of a modest life. The poet in us heard singing birds, saw gardens of pruned oranges and ornamental peacocks, heard water fall. The merchants were even guileless in their bargaining, as were we in our astonishment. We bought some of the silk and took it back to our ship and we sailed on with a memory of simple grandeur, as unlikely a mixture as could be found anywhere except in poetry. The silk was turned into curtains and thus began to lead a tamed, domestic existence, its history asleep in our house, much as a poem enters into an anthology.
This experience Keats has shared in one of his early poems, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," which I shall call Byzantine. And we can define Byzantine as that which is convoluted, difficult to track down, complicated. Underneath its apparent surface there is the presence of 'something else.' You can think of this 'something else' as a woman behind a veil. Or you can think of it as architectural complexity disguised as mathematics, as the dome of a Byzantine church. I can appeal to your Byzantine thought with words such as corridors, plots, disguise, whispers, atmospheric treaties with civilization expressed in the abstract. Underlying this rather sinister, and almost indelicate movie-plot, under this disguise is the word I would like to discuss, a word that is as necessary to poetry as the oasis to the traveller, "mystery."
I would like to borrow from Mallarmé, an enduring phrase, an introduction to mystery, "Not the thing, but its effect." This "effect" is what I have been leading to with my curtains from Mersan. The "thing" is the poetic process which gives off without notice an effect which is the poem. Each, the process and the effect, go on about in disguise, they must be uncovered, found out; Chapman's Homer must be opened by the poet.
In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility. In the cloak of Byzantine colors the poet spins a secret life. The poem is the unburdening of the ghosts which have come to haunt, after the trip to the labyrinth. These are ghosts, not words, they are the effulgencies of the mystery that surrounds and decorates the poet like a halo rescued from life. And it is the poet's halo that we must see within the poem, not the full dress of rhyme or structure, or vers libre. Not the artifice of landscape or the hotels of verse. Shelley liked to think of spirits hid in clouds, and Byzantine poets imagined genies escaping from bottles, and Blake drew angels. Marianne Moore said that what must be present in poetry is "an impassioned interest in life's creative secret." "Awe" and "Secret" are brought to us by that Spirit "hid in a cloud."
In My Emily Dickinson (I am fond of that "My"), Susan Howe has quoted Dickinson as confessing about reading a poet (who might have been Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a poet who sought mightily in her work for that "awe," who although passionate was singularly unimpassioned, and whose work is flawed by the heaviness of her search for mystery): "Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have--A something overtakes the Mind--" There speaks the true critic, and for my purposes I note that Dickinson took a very Byzantine turn, to reach the poem's kiosk. "A something overtakes the mind."
The Byzantine aspect is a preference for abrupt connections with the remote in order to establish a concrete interior or coastal connection. It longs for a poetry of regions, not regionalism, for a poetry that can embark on ships and find its way to a settlement where a commodity such as silk is respected, and with an ability to exchange its contour for a curtain without losing an identity imposed by the bartering of one idea for another. There is nothing mandarin in this search for the instinct, or "inner sound," which withholds itself from the promises of merchants and permits a common marketplace to examine its value.
The inner sound of the poet protects the poet. Delacroix wrote that painters of marine-life do not represent the sea satisfactorily. "They want to show too much science, make portraits of waves, as landscapists make portraits of trees." His argument was that these seascapes do not concern themselves with the effect on the imagination, as they are absorbed by the details which "turn the mind away." Why? Because this mind filled with details, this poet whose sole urgency is his subject matter neglects the immensity of the depth to be rendered by Art. The depth is the mystery.
Silk which has made sacrifices to art by concealing its leopard beauty recognizes its value. The silk understands the merchant desire to display everything, and with a Byzantine preference for the hidden noise of fabric lowers its eyes, gazing into the mysterious deep.
17.2.06
In the Ides of March
Descended from the long line of Tombstone prophets,
the Doc Holidays sic Veras of the Dragoons,
yet separated by one lonesome day, seventeen years
in advance adjusted for the noons and the copper blasts,
we were born you and I in the alleyways.
Early on you called through the mouth of St. John without his hands
via new Byzantium to annoint the death of Marilyn, JFK
a few months later, that familiar iconography of happenstance.
To lose a few of the trails in the rain part of consequence.
Who finds the wooly mammoths out in the desert covered
in the long shadow of their probable Ice Ages
separates them fork-wise from the progeny of Appaloosa
through to the Pinto, a bean colored rag pony
of the Injuns we used to catch like butterflies; the US gov
gives them grants to buy Remmingtons but not the ones
Pegar used to paint down over the flash floods
where we were all born one after the other in Doc's hands.
The horses' feet buried in the flame-like grasses of a hundred
Hopi Mesas. All of the divorces final and worthy
of great canyons of excommunication. The articles of faith
too vast to approach even the expontential. A real long way.
There'll be some splainin' to do.
"I remember my ancient dream,
in which a woman tells me,
"Your house only burns inside, it's
still standing..." Some consolation,"
Alice Notley, some consolation.
Descended from the long line of Tombstone prophets,
the Doc Holidays sic Veras of the Dragoons,
yet separated by one lonesome day, seventeen years
in advance adjusted for the noons and the copper blasts,
we were born you and I in the alleyways.
Early on you called through the mouth of St. John without his hands
via new Byzantium to annoint the death of Marilyn, JFK
a few months later, that familiar iconography of happenstance.
To lose a few of the trails in the rain part of consequence.
Who finds the wooly mammoths out in the desert covered
in the long shadow of their probable Ice Ages
separates them fork-wise from the progeny of Appaloosa
through to the Pinto, a bean colored rag pony
of the Injuns we used to catch like butterflies; the US gov
gives them grants to buy Remmingtons but not the ones
Pegar used to paint down over the flash floods
where we were all born one after the other in Doc's hands.
The horses' feet buried in the flame-like grasses of a hundred
Hopi Mesas. All of the divorces final and worthy
of great canyons of excommunication. The articles of faith
too vast to approach even the expontential. A real long way.
There'll be some splainin' to do.
"I remember my ancient dream,
in which a woman tells me,
"Your house only burns inside, it's
still standing..." Some consolation,"
Alice Notley, some consolation.
Labelling the pages as if they are a personal outline of filth.
At first, standing naked and brushed, reflected in the outlaw
tub which turned my pale skin into a tempting middle aged struggle
of coded names numbered in sevens, beginning and ending
with the same letters O to O and M to M.
The Tropics, Henry, have changed
and Paris is no more than a gesture
taken before a hard right into the police states, and for good.
In those washes the bedouin camped and walked towards finding
me and all the others wishing they had their passports and visas
in order. Hoping for the pope to come in and make it all final.
At last, standing naked and brushed, feet buried
in the flame-like grasses of a hundred Hopi Mesas, one left turn after
the Phoenicia, a valentine ends a seven lettered cycle,
taken before a hard right into the police states, and for good.
In those washes the bedouin camped and walked towards finding
me and all the others wishing they had their passports and visas
in order. Hoping for the pope to come in and make it all final.
At last, standing naked and brushed, feet buried
in the flame-like grasses of a hundred Hopi Mesas, one left turn after
the Phoenicia, a valentine ends a seven lettered cycle,
the fields all go fallow.
Everyone in this particular city stomping
Everyone in this particular city stomping
towards one aftermath after another aftermath,
after another mammoth sound from the pvc
after another mammoth sound from the pvc
aquaducts just shy of the Roman, plus,
the sound of their digging. The future fossil record unable
to record anything at all and it seems, the five thousand miles
to sic Vera in the Dragoons is a meaningless equation of the siesmic.
I remember my ancient dream, the fire pattern, the wooly mammoths. I remember this too, a double reactive incindiary device,
twenty eight dominoes to a pack, falling in two directions.
Old Wallace's Smoke Shop, a tropical shirt
borrowed and in the mirror my reflection caught on tape
a burning flowering rose towards the journey seven letters, seven
fallow, seven aftermaths, seven saints
the sound of their digging. The future fossil record unable
to record anything at all and it seems, the five thousand miles
to sic Vera in the Dragoons is a meaningless equation of the siesmic.
I remember my ancient dream, the fire pattern, the wooly mammoths. I remember this too, a double reactive incindiary device,
twenty eight dominoes to a pack, falling in two directions.
Old Wallace's Smoke Shop, a tropical shirt
borrowed and in the mirror my reflection caught on tape
a burning flowering rose towards the journey seven letters, seven
fallow, seven aftermaths, seven saints
and all the seven popes of the seventh centuries
gone mad, gone straight to mad puffy hells
gone mad, gone straight to mad puffy hells
with the fury of the OK Corral.
Telemachus reads while the women are still at the river,
Telemachus reads while the women are still at the river,
pounding dry the linens.
Home is where the heart is, it's still standing and the others
buried at the rest stops, flagging each other down.
Home is where the heart is, it's still standing and the others
buried at the rest stops, flagging each other down.
Beveled Glass and Annas
Oh beveled glass and the five minutes!
But Mike we haven't met! Oh the beveled glass!
The tarnished view is taken.
Enter thus with tendrils floating
perilously close to cigar smoking,
cigars cigars cigars and
tendrils, the gender gap,
we walk on stilts and preen
for what? A wedding, perilously
close to a Photo Op?
Just another one, just another one
fireworks behind a ten-tier plastic
prop, cut with a saber.
The witch-like bride makes peace
with her prop and her background
two villages, two people united
and the ten tier'd prop weakens
before the chaotic drumming
the hired dancers, (all bedouin of course),
we are duplicating a culture here Mike
but we haven't met...
how could we in five minutes?
Our table is occupied by a rondolet
girl, rondolet
but bitter, replacing his ex
Ukrainian who hopped back
into the Ukraine with two tots -
another prop I suppose,
but the two of them
rise automatically to the Debka,
rise like a storm in response to the barometer
of a lackluster union, no smiles or thank yous
just a Ukrainian wife gone missing and a rondolet
Arab girl replaces her now.
Mike,
we aren't Vronsky and we aren't Anna
but we've come in tendrils
to speak of beveled glass!
The father of the bride smiles
at all his props and this must
be costing him a half million
but no mind Mike, there's more where that came from!
Five minutes are a lazy eight infinity you know...
a half million let's say:
fifty tables on this side,
fifty on that, sixty percent businessmen friends,
more than two thousand dead shrimp easy,
a ten tier'd prop and fat slices at every table:
MARZIPAN
and cake studded with a grainy hazelnut,
let's say he's smiling at his props eh?
Let's say he could be a Vronsky
when I dance more than anyone could have guessed
when I do a belly dance from hell,
all red hair tendrils and the thumbs up
from a guy we knew (not you Mike)
in Riyadh who sold nuts, he's looking satanic
when I shake my bangled wrists, fooling them all,
I've got him chained but you know what Mike?
I've not met you and won't divest you of the hope
that Anna did choose more than just the props
when she arched inside the bosom
of the Monot scene after a Sunni Wedding..
after achieving another Pontius thumbs up
after surviving all that! Becomes one of them
and arches inside the belly of a whale
down on Monot near Martyr's square,
the kind of place where people burn up
because they can't get out of the flames,
it's just so small compared
to the Grand Ballroom at the Phoenicia
where across the street in a year
a car will explode into all eternity for us,
so small in the belly of that whale with manifestoes,
and so many Annas.
In Monot, the underground bars sound happy from the street,
no one bothers to remember where all the glass came from.
No one wants to see the melted Russians in the auditorium.
Oh beveled glass and the five minutes!
But Mike we haven't met! Oh the beveled glass!
The tarnished view is taken.
Enter thus with tendrils floating
perilously close to cigar smoking,
cigars cigars cigars and
tendrils, the gender gap,
we walk on stilts and preen
for what? A wedding, perilously
close to a Photo Op?
Just another one, just another one
fireworks behind a ten-tier plastic
prop, cut with a saber.
The witch-like bride makes peace
with her prop and her background
two villages, two people united
and the ten tier'd prop weakens
before the chaotic drumming
the hired dancers, (all bedouin of course),
we are duplicating a culture here Mike
but we haven't met...
how could we in five minutes?
Our table is occupied by a rondolet
girl, rondolet
but bitter, replacing his ex
Ukrainian who hopped back
into the Ukraine with two tots -
another prop I suppose,
but the two of them
rise automatically to the Debka,
rise like a storm in response to the barometer
of a lackluster union, no smiles or thank yous
just a Ukrainian wife gone missing and a rondolet
Arab girl replaces her now.
Mike,
we aren't Vronsky and we aren't Anna
but we've come in tendrils
to speak of beveled glass!
The father of the bride smiles
at all his props and this must
be costing him a half million
but no mind Mike, there's more where that came from!
Five minutes are a lazy eight infinity you know...
a half million let's say:
fifty tables on this side,
fifty on that, sixty percent businessmen friends,
more than two thousand dead shrimp easy,
a ten tier'd prop and fat slices at every table:
MARZIPAN
and cake studded with a grainy hazelnut,
let's say he's smiling at his props eh?
Let's say he could be a Vronsky
when I dance more than anyone could have guessed
when I do a belly dance from hell,
all red hair tendrils and the thumbs up
from a guy we knew (not you Mike)
in Riyadh who sold nuts, he's looking satanic
when I shake my bangled wrists, fooling them all,
I've got him chained but you know what Mike?
I've not met you and won't divest you of the hope
that Anna did choose more than just the props
when she arched inside the bosom
of the Monot scene after a Sunni Wedding..
after achieving another Pontius thumbs up
after surviving all that! Becomes one of them
and arches inside the belly of a whale
down on Monot near Martyr's square,
the kind of place where people burn up
because they can't get out of the flames,
it's just so small compared
to the Grand Ballroom at the Phoenicia
where across the street in a year
a car will explode into all eternity for us,
so small in the belly of that whale with manifestoes,
and so many Annas.
In Monot, the underground bars sound happy from the street,
no one bothers to remember where all the glass came from.
No one wants to see the melted Russians in the auditorium.
16.2.06
Guernica
(From, The Anthology of the Eye)
Guernica visited me last,..
no I'm awake just now from Guernica
my poems stolen by a man that looked
like Billy Bob Thorton in a baseball cap,
he'd taken all the best ones, folded them
just like I folded up the newspaper article
and crushed it in with that one slide,
an out of work actor and his pooch
him wearing a fur coat leaning on the open hatch
of his country squire at the flea market,
interviewed by a reporter looking for a human interest
story. I realized, the two of us had become famous...
To begin with I wished it upon myself before sleeping,
wanted to go back to Bisbee for a while
but apparently, Guernica wouldn't have it that way
and sent a male lion to chase me and the dog
out the back trail, somewhere up near Higgins Hill,
I can almost remember the place, the lion though
was friendly and where he sent me, it was not.
I waved to my brother as we left..
We ran over the ledge and someone I know was a spouse
pushed a broken down van the other way,
it almost fell into the ravine we (me and the dog)
(From, The Anthology of the Eye)
Guernica visited me last,..
no I'm awake just now from Guernica
my poems stolen by a man that looked
like Billy Bob Thorton in a baseball cap,
he'd taken all the best ones, folded them
just like I folded up the newspaper article
and crushed it in with that one slide,
an out of work actor and his pooch
him wearing a fur coat leaning on the open hatch
of his country squire at the flea market,
interviewed by a reporter looking for a human interest
story. I realized, the two of us had become famous...
To begin with I wished it upon myself before sleeping,
wanted to go back to Bisbee for a while
but apparently, Guernica wouldn't have it that way
and sent a male lion to chase me and the dog
out the back trail, somewhere up near Higgins Hill,
I can almost remember the place, the lion though
was friendly and where he sent me, it was not.
I waved to my brother as we left..
We ran over the ledge and someone I know was a spouse
pushed a broken down van the other way,
it almost fell into the ravine we (me and the dog)
were trying so hard to avoid.
We made it to the house we seemed to own but rented
for my in-laws but they weren't home, I was checking out
everything while they were away, amazed at the antiques,
a fountain bedroom set in mint condition,
a porcelain bowl, tipped on its side
boiled on the stove, some remnants of bread and water inside.
I turned it off and then saw my father-in-law sitting there
watching me and I scolded him for leaving it on.
Then they started coming...entire tribes of people
with my mother in law carrying a person on a litter,
the person she had been tending in the hospital
while she was away..so many people, I'd never seen before
and all their kids...one group was even black!
I called them niggers when they tried to steal my purse
from the bedroom so they hid it and I didn't even know my
camera was inside. I went back out to look some more through
Billy Bob's collection of goods, mine included
and found out that he was teaching a young kid to paint,
mostly oil pastels but all equally amazing,
one of them barely visible, just a smudge at the top
of the page, like an eye...and then, Guernica,
the fantastic black and white bull charging from the corner,
his head only and a brilliant chiaoscuro rainbow (if that is possible),
flowing out from his nose,
We made it to the house we seemed to own but rented
for my in-laws but they weren't home, I was checking out
everything while they were away, amazed at the antiques,
a fountain bedroom set in mint condition,
a porcelain bowl, tipped on its side
boiled on the stove, some remnants of bread and water inside.
I turned it off and then saw my father-in-law sitting there
watching me and I scolded him for leaving it on.
Then they started coming...entire tribes of people
with my mother in law carrying a person on a litter,
the person she had been tending in the hospital
while she was away..so many people, I'd never seen before
and all their kids...one group was even black!
I called them niggers when they tried to steal my purse
from the bedroom so they hid it and I didn't even know my
camera was inside. I went back out to look some more through
Billy Bob's collection of goods, mine included
and found out that he was teaching a young kid to paint,
mostly oil pastels but all equally amazing,
one of them barely visible, just a smudge at the top
of the page, like an eye...and then, Guernica,
the fantastic black and white bull charging from the corner,
his head only and a brilliant chiaoscuro rainbow (if that is possible),
flowing out from his nose,
I forgave Billy Bob then, for his indiscretions.
I went outside into the cramped alleyways,
I went outside into the cramped alleyways,
a bulldozer almost took my life
but a small dog ran a diversion and saved me,
but a small dog ran a diversion and saved me,
a stranger started skipping around me
chanting and threatening me so bad I went back into the house.
I told the family inside, the hundreds and dozens of them,
they seemed to multiply into that much,
chanting and threatening me so bad I went back into the house.
I told the family inside, the hundreds and dozens of them,
they seemed to multiply into that much,
I lectured them in perfect arabic
about how this shouldn't happen,
about how this shouldn't happen,
they'd have to leave, there were simply
too many of them. They just looked at me like I was crazy.
Then I remembered my purse and my money.
too many of them. They just looked at me like I was crazy.
Then I remembered my purse and my money.
I found it with a little girl
who had taken my Nikon apart, spit black mucous inside like
a grasshopper and bent the internal parts of the shutter,
I wanted to kill her but just started pinching her really hard
and then held her so I wouldn't finish her off.
Finally, finally....finally and thank God, I woke up....
I'm wondering if my husband's grandmother is going to die soon.
It seems to be the case, she looked fairly gray this weekend.
who had taken my Nikon apart, spit black mucous inside like
a grasshopper and bent the internal parts of the shutter,
I wanted to kill her but just started pinching her really hard
and then held her so I wouldn't finish her off.
Finally, finally....finally and thank God, I woke up....
I'm wondering if my husband's grandmother is going to die soon.
It seems to be the case, she looked fairly gray this weekend.
14.2.06
Lebanese Sonnet
(Rafik Hariri, martyred February 14, 2005)
It is that time of mourning when
darkness is as it is and the stars still spin,
the roads of the world are trials of night
and the wine dark sea reflects a pale light.
Trapped between the layers of water and sky
is the relentless dawn song as it travels by,
nothing but time making its noise -
not dog's bark nor the neighborhood boys.
Since then it has been a complete year
when the builder reached the blue dome
in the first heaven an eternity to roam,
and hears only dark waves fall against dark pier.
We miss his big brows and pudgy lips, thick hair
but mostly we miss his financial flair.
In every time zone
a soldier patrols the perimeter of the site
in a certain kind of loneliness.
He persists but I do not.
A prayerful moth, rather large,
finds sanctuary on top of the blinds
but we do not.
Momentary gladness fills the room,
grace ends with a smile.
Your presence fills nothing but the void
as a car loading explosives at dawn
shuts prophecy down for the day.
It is grown here and exported, how?
Radishes grow into melons.
Dogs scattered in various poses
at the road side, mangled and all
quite dead. How can this be?
Who is painting the roads red?
A minaret climbs through the arcadia door,
it is almost beautiful, a knick knack.
The men in clusters near the bottom
count several angles, another balances
high on the scaffold with bare chest.
A slaughter in the dust one year ago
and next year my decorations will
sing everything is loved once before
building a reputation, wherever that is.
Beirut Assassin Leaves Mark
The cocks were storm-crowing that morning
after a real long spell of total
environmental darkness. Two broughams sped by.
(In the land of the prophets
the angels talk out-loud,
people pretend not to notice.
Here it is the status quo.)
All the clocks whirred with quick sighs.
At sunset the clouds were full of the dust.
On the sand hundreds of lovers were kissing
out in the open. Everyone was buying
flowers and the coffee carts were brimming
with hot fluids and stale remedies to the skies.
Then everything just stopped. Windows fell
apart and people ran home, started looking.
Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out.
I felt around for my watch to note the time.
School was letting out and I compared JFK,
that unholy day to this one. Must have been similar.
Shapely forms felt their way toward the horizons
and the same herd of goats crossed my path twice.
No more luck, no more money, no more beadsmen.
The predictions are always keen to usurp everyone
and the last unlucky man born will tremble
near a pitcher of water and a set of lost keys.
This benediction quieted all the kinfolk
and the rich slept closer to their quarters
but it does take some time, perhaps forever.
The poor remain indifferent.
One man was found two weeks later in the rubble,
pointing in one direction, holding his cell.
No one called out the dogs because it is said
the canines ate the corpses in Sabra and Shatilla.
I wonder.. to whom was he speaking,
where was he pointing?
Tarbouche
Another year walks away,
another one starts
to pass on by.
Before you know it
they are all gone.
(Rafik Hariri, martyred February 14, 2005)
It is that time of mourning when
darkness is as it is and the stars still spin,
the roads of the world are trials of night
and the wine dark sea reflects a pale light.
Trapped between the layers of water and sky
is the relentless dawn song as it travels by,
nothing but time making its noise -
not dog's bark nor the neighborhood boys.
Since then it has been a complete year
when the builder reached the blue dome
in the first heaven an eternity to roam,
and hears only dark waves fall against dark pier.
We miss his big brows and pudgy lips, thick hair
but mostly we miss his financial flair.
In every time zone
a soldier patrols the perimeter of the site
in a certain kind of loneliness.
He persists but I do not.
A prayerful moth, rather large,
finds sanctuary on top of the blinds
but we do not.
Momentary gladness fills the room,
grace ends with a smile.
Your presence fills nothing but the void
as a car loading explosives at dawn
shuts prophecy down for the day.
It is grown here and exported, how?
Radishes grow into melons.
Dogs scattered in various poses
at the road side, mangled and all
quite dead. How can this be?
Who is painting the roads red?
A minaret climbs through the arcadia door,
it is almost beautiful, a knick knack.
The men in clusters near the bottom
count several angles, another balances
high on the scaffold with bare chest.
A slaughter in the dust one year ago
and next year my decorations will
sing everything is loved once before
building a reputation, wherever that is.
Beirut Assassin Leaves Mark
The cocks were storm-crowing that morning
after a real long spell of total
environmental darkness. Two broughams sped by.
(In the land of the prophets
the angels talk out-loud,
people pretend not to notice.
Here it is the status quo.)
All the clocks whirred with quick sighs.
At sunset the clouds were full of the dust.
On the sand hundreds of lovers were kissing
out in the open. Everyone was buying
flowers and the coffee carts were brimming
with hot fluids and stale remedies to the skies.
Then everything just stopped. Windows fell
apart and people ran home, started looking.
Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out.
I felt around for my watch to note the time.
School was letting out and I compared JFK,
that unholy day to this one. Must have been similar.
Shapely forms felt their way toward the horizons
and the same herd of goats crossed my path twice.
No more luck, no more money, no more beadsmen.
The predictions are always keen to usurp everyone
and the last unlucky man born will tremble
near a pitcher of water and a set of lost keys.
This benediction quieted all the kinfolk
and the rich slept closer to their quarters
but it does take some time, perhaps forever.
The poor remain indifferent.
One man was found two weeks later in the rubble,
pointing in one direction, holding his cell.
No one called out the dogs because it is said
the canines ate the corpses in Sabra and Shatilla.
I wonder.. to whom was he speaking,
where was he pointing?
Tarbouche
Another year walks away,
another one starts
to pass on by.
Before you know it
they are all gone.
12.2.06
The San Pedro River, Cottonwoods
At the rivers edge
Originally uploaded by radiann.
Photo by Radiann Porter.
Wow, Amen.
Ode to Seven
"But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!"
William Wordsworth, We Are Seven
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 confessions.
Mary Estrada'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
Pearly 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 Folger's can,
his wife was really lean
she kept a tidy house
no smoke inside, her pies never burned.
He stood and puffed
out by the garden gate,
watched the cottonwoods
say: wow amen.
Us
All our fights looked the same,
mom's skirts blowed up
as she fell down
her soft perfect ass
as clean as a whistle.
Old man Ham nearly fell over
when we pushed him out the door,
his false teeth clicked
in the roof of his mouth.
Inside his house 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 clear.
Through our newest
hollow door I kept running
on and on the last breath
I summoned his soul
from the under the cotton we kicked
off our shoes in Autumn.
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.
10.2.06
My Name Is John Doe
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2003winter/deerhead.shtml
"One might also argue that 6) a poem is an expression of a community of poets. Deer Head Nation is a state-of-the-art collection of a kind of writing that's sometimes called "flarf." (The term was originally supposed to designate uses of language that would be inappropriate in poetry, but now it seems to be primarily associated with poems based on internet searches.) Some of Mohammad's colleagues in flarf writing (Drew Gardner, Gary Sullivan, Katie Degentesh, Jordan Davis) make cameo appearances in the charming, witty, and only mildly offensive poem "Puritan": "there's a bunch of people in Drew's pants / and not forgetting Gary's pants / police also noticed a bulge in Katie's pants / . . . we are in 'Jordan's Pants' / oh great--/ let's go find Michael Jordan's pants." (I'm using the term "offensive" in, if possible, an objective sense, although anyone who claims to be offended by this book is probably being disingenuous. What did you expect from a poem called "Puritan" in a book called Deer Head Nation? Which is just to say that 7) a poem is also part of a community--a collection of poems, or a sequence such as "Deer Head Suite"-- and should be judged mainly for its behavior within its peer group.) "
The problem with American DUDES named Mohammad, K. Silem:
http://limetree.ksilem.com/archives/000436.html
"Poetry, however, has not always had its special relation to crisis theorized in the same way in all historical periods and by all practitioners and readers. Adorno’s famous statement that lyric poetry could not continue to be written after Auschwitz, whether it is taken literally or rhetorically, has a particular force because Auschwitz and similar modern atrocities took on a particular force in public consciousness that hadn’t been possible before the innovations in the technology of genocide that brought it about (and the innovations in the technology of popular media that brought it to the world’s attention). Asking whether poetry is “enough” in an era of global terror and global capital does not necessarily solicit a yes/no answer. "
Then this great tit for tat argument (the kind poets are known for) erupts between someone using words like "Christological" and Kasey defending himself thusly:
"Yes, you have a right to your skepticism--but when your skepticism becomes as predictably reductive and offhandedly dismissive as it has, automatically labeling anyone who mentions poetics and politics in the same breath as tainted with false piety and cynical careerism, others have a right to balk at it."
Now. I'll tell you what. America, Fuck Yeah! (from the movie, Team America*). I'll tell you what. You CANNOT ask why K. Silem Mohammad uses the name "Kasey" instead of what his name is, might be or is suggested via a long association with "guys named Mohammad, Mohamed, or simply 'Moe' as is the usual conjunction associated with this John Doe. You cannot do that. It is UNSCRUPULOUS. You can however comment on the unscrupulousness of "accusing someone of being, FAME HUNGRY" and in possession of one of the most controversial names: Kasey (most notably in my experience is the conjunctive form of three names, Osama, Kassem and Asem. Perhaps more.) You cannot mix, apples and oranges. Nor can you criticize an ego-ist. This is not allowed. You cannot even ask him why he won't post a link to poets FOR war on his site in which he is quoted as stating war is a perpetual thing.
Better luck next time, with the next war or, generation of wars as the case may be.
This, in the week of the Cartoon Controversy and Brittany Spears photographed while escaping Papparazzi with her newborn son on her lap.
Justifiable hardship? I think so.
The benefit however of this has been getting myself excused from that tedious Lucipo list. For that I say, Al'ham'du'lilah. Allah Kareem.
*Team America from the creators of "South Park" explores the notion of an actor playing the part of a terrorist in a scheme hatched by the "intelligence" apparatus of the United States of America. One of their other notable contributions to the world of animation was a brief, brilliant sketch within the confines of Micheal Moore's, Bowling For Columbine which depicted Americans as violent puritans disembarking from the Mayflower. It is worth noting that the creators of the Columbine animation had a falling out with Micheal Moore and subsequently, blew him up in the movie, Team America. In my opinion, the movie Team America is a must see because the puppet porno is probably the funniest thing I have ever witnessed in my entire life except for the time when I saw King Fahed ushered into the ER wrapped in a pink blanket.
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2003winter/deerhead.shtml
"One might also argue that 6) a poem is an expression of a community of poets. Deer Head Nation is a state-of-the-art collection of a kind of writing that's sometimes called "flarf." (The term was originally supposed to designate uses of language that would be inappropriate in poetry, but now it seems to be primarily associated with poems based on internet searches.) Some of Mohammad's colleagues in flarf writing (Drew Gardner, Gary Sullivan, Katie Degentesh, Jordan Davis) make cameo appearances in the charming, witty, and only mildly offensive poem "Puritan": "there's a bunch of people in Drew's pants / and not forgetting Gary's pants / police also noticed a bulge in Katie's pants / . . . we are in 'Jordan's Pants' / oh great--/ let's go find Michael Jordan's pants." (I'm using the term "offensive" in, if possible, an objective sense, although anyone who claims to be offended by this book is probably being disingenuous. What did you expect from a poem called "Puritan" in a book called Deer Head Nation? Which is just to say that 7) a poem is also part of a community--a collection of poems, or a sequence such as "Deer Head Suite"-- and should be judged mainly for its behavior within its peer group.) "
The problem with American DUDES named Mohammad, K. Silem:
http://limetree.ksilem.com/archives/000436.html
"Poetry, however, has not always had its special relation to crisis theorized in the same way in all historical periods and by all practitioners and readers. Adorno’s famous statement that lyric poetry could not continue to be written after Auschwitz, whether it is taken literally or rhetorically, has a particular force because Auschwitz and similar modern atrocities took on a particular force in public consciousness that hadn’t been possible before the innovations in the technology of genocide that brought it about (and the innovations in the technology of popular media that brought it to the world’s attention). Asking whether poetry is “enough” in an era of global terror and global capital does not necessarily solicit a yes/no answer. "
Then this great tit for tat argument (the kind poets are known for) erupts between someone using words like "Christological" and Kasey defending himself thusly:
"Yes, you have a right to your skepticism--but when your skepticism becomes as predictably reductive and offhandedly dismissive as it has, automatically labeling anyone who mentions poetics and politics in the same breath as tainted with false piety and cynical careerism, others have a right to balk at it."
Now. I'll tell you what. America, Fuck Yeah! (from the movie, Team America*). I'll tell you what. You CANNOT ask why K. Silem Mohammad uses the name "Kasey" instead of what his name is, might be or is suggested via a long association with "guys named Mohammad, Mohamed, or simply 'Moe' as is the usual conjunction associated with this John Doe. You cannot do that. It is UNSCRUPULOUS. You can however comment on the unscrupulousness of "accusing someone of being, FAME HUNGRY" and in possession of one of the most controversial names: Kasey (most notably in my experience is the conjunctive form of three names, Osama, Kassem and Asem. Perhaps more.) You cannot mix, apples and oranges. Nor can you criticize an ego-ist. This is not allowed. You cannot even ask him why he won't post a link to poets FOR war on his site in which he is quoted as stating war is a perpetual thing.
Better luck next time, with the next war or, generation of wars as the case may be.
This, in the week of the Cartoon Controversy and Brittany Spears photographed while escaping Papparazzi with her newborn son on her lap.
Justifiable hardship? I think so.
The benefit however of this has been getting myself excused from that tedious Lucipo list. For that I say, Al'ham'du'lilah. Allah Kareem.
*Team America from the creators of "South Park" explores the notion of an actor playing the part of a terrorist in a scheme hatched by the "intelligence" apparatus of the United States of America. One of their other notable contributions to the world of animation was a brief, brilliant sketch within the confines of Micheal Moore's, Bowling For Columbine which depicted Americans as violent puritans disembarking from the Mayflower. It is worth noting that the creators of the Columbine animation had a falling out with Micheal Moore and subsequently, blew him up in the movie, Team America. In my opinion, the movie Team America is a must see because the puppet porno is probably the funniest thing I have ever witnessed in my entire life except for the time when I saw King Fahed ushered into the ER wrapped in a pink blanket.
In The Field Of Edens
Hidden variables
may exist or maynot pretend
to exist in our observations:
the anthropologist in the field
is part of the entropy of the field.
It is said that the mirror likes
itself and repeats the like
of itself, self aware.
It is self aware and this awareness
is part of the thing
of God. This thing of God,
this abstract thing, a word
in constant repetition:
implicate, explicate
delicate, very.
You're telling me!
Choice:
what to study.
Random:
non-selection.
Result:
what is seen.
Very. The people fall
through the open slits
surprised, in Byzantium,
absolutely.
Without the autostrat
they'd fall, elsewhere,
less manageable but still
chaotic, measurable via.
Either way, they know
where they are by the trees
that grow there, the lindens.
They manage that whatever
it may be.
This tar-macadam, those
initial conditions
becoming more
like first cases, always
the first case disclosing
a sample, only.
Hidden variables
may exist or maynot pretend
to exist in our observations:
the anthropologist in the field
is part of the entropy of the field.
It is said that the mirror likes
itself and repeats the like
of itself, self aware.
It is self aware and this awareness
is part of the thing
of God. This thing of God,
this abstract thing, a word
in constant repetition:
implicate, explicate
delicate, very.
You're telling me!
Choice:
what to study.
Random:
non-selection.
Result:
what is seen.
Very. The people fall
through the open slits
surprised, in Byzantium,
absolutely.
Without the autostrat
they'd fall, elsewhere,
less manageable but still
chaotic, measurable via.
Either way, they know
where they are by the trees
that grow there, the lindens.
They manage that whatever
it may be.
This tar-macadam, those
initial conditions
becoming more
like first cases, always
the first case disclosing
a sample, only.
9.2.06
For, The Tricksters
http://www.geocities.com/coqrico/apachedance.html
Expatria
(for Sunanda Kundra and Rajeev)
Late into the night
this Hindu and I
wonder about our past lives
and present, this book of Ruth.
Born into Central Africa
near Idi Amin and raised
by Malibu and wolves,
we resist the violations
of borders and treaties.
How did I end up here
on this veranda
with a tantric lawyer
basking under one Arabian moon?
Perhaps we dreamt
of Morocco and elephants
in the long hours of adolescence,
in the misplaced destinies given us.
I picked civil wars and extended families,
yes picked, and she chose a Brahmin.
We braided our hair in silence,
cornmaidens near the San Carlos river
running the miles before the sun,
pollen drenched and weeping, like Injuns do.
(The Arabian moon hangs
differently in this hemisphere,
it truly does and
there are hidden chakras.)
The Brahmin is an old soul
and chooses to proxy a sisterhood
to me on a Tuesday. I stick
a grain of rice on my head like this:
forehead in a plate of Egyptian pearl.
He is bound with rakis,
my soul's older brother. A pagan
string on my wrist is a friendship
bracelet I am not supposed to cut.
What coordinates determined
what is happening now
between this horizon and
our moon? How can I tell this story?
What good fortune
to discover the faithful
here, amongst the damned.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/Indian/Mosquito.html
Paris And The Will Of God
We must seek to explain
Paris Hilton as the expressed
Will of God, as revealed
in the particular lazy-assed ways
of the gentry, pink sundresses
and gentle lap dogs.
Divinity and the rush of the Master
out da gate divined
that a girl must symbolize,
no, must generate a Conceptual Framework:
The Rules, so that anyone can play
the un-unique game of petty etiquette
and jobless, screwy inanity.
We must submit to this Will of God.
The camera adores her, so do we.
She's all cute and curious,
nothing contemptible about her.
Save for a moment of laviscious horror
like those of the Courts of Yore,
en flagrant dilicto,
pussycat-pussycat where have you been?
"I've been to London to visit the King/Queen,
or both, frightened a mouse from under their
chair. I'm rich you know.
Very, very rich.
My dog gets lost and I consult a telepathic
for $what an hour I don't know
tells me to put up signs all over Wilshire,
they get sold on Ebay, imagine my distress!
Should have sold them myself."
This is the Will of God. Repeat,
this is the Will of God. It is divine
and divinely created, it is the unveiling
of history itself, the remnants of whatever
it was that gave the damn muthafuckas the right
to Lord over us like that!
This is the Will of God,
from the Jay Leno set
inside an apartment far, far away
where a mosquito fails to collapse
in my hand because of it's fragility.
That too, is the Will of God.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/Indian/SpiritLand.html
Ode to the Two Pointers
Hanging up there between our clothes line
and theirs, a hand could borrow sugar
from our open windows, that close,
a two-pointer draped from his haunches, eyes all froze.
We came home running to see what was shot,
heard it all the way down by Old Man Riley's garage,
a two pointer, not a doe. Everyone heard it.
It was big news, big game and there he was,
hanging over the squash and winter iris
looking out like that, just looking.
A pressure cooker steamed inside
the kitchen window, it tooted and hissed
while he hung there waiting to be butchered.
Takes a long time to cut up a deer like that,
and longer still, to bag one.
Times were pretty lean, the winters pretty cold.
God is as an animal, our fortress.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/Indian/OriginAnimals.html
http://www.geocities.com/coqrico/apachedance.html
Expatria
(for Sunanda Kundra and Rajeev)
Late into the night
this Hindu and I
wonder about our past lives
and present, this book of Ruth.
Born into Central Africa
near Idi Amin and raised
by Malibu and wolves,
we resist the violations
of borders and treaties.
How did I end up here
on this veranda
with a tantric lawyer
basking under one Arabian moon?
Perhaps we dreamt
of Morocco and elephants
in the long hours of adolescence,
in the misplaced destinies given us.
I picked civil wars and extended families,
yes picked, and she chose a Brahmin.
We braided our hair in silence,
cornmaidens near the San Carlos river
running the miles before the sun,
pollen drenched and weeping, like Injuns do.
(The Arabian moon hangs
differently in this hemisphere,
it truly does and
there are hidden chakras.)
The Brahmin is an old soul
and chooses to proxy a sisterhood
to me on a Tuesday. I stick
a grain of rice on my head like this:
forehead in a plate of Egyptian pearl.
He is bound with rakis,
my soul's older brother. A pagan
string on my wrist is a friendship
bracelet I am not supposed to cut.
What coordinates determined
what is happening now
between this horizon and
our moon? How can I tell this story?
What good fortune
to discover the faithful
here, amongst the damned.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/Indian/Mosquito.html
Paris And The Will Of God
We must seek to explain
Paris Hilton as the expressed
Will of God, as revealed
in the particular lazy-assed ways
of the gentry, pink sundresses
and gentle lap dogs.
Divinity and the rush of the Master
out da gate divined
that a girl must symbolize,
no, must generate a Conceptual Framework:
The Rules, so that anyone can play
the un-unique game of petty etiquette
and jobless, screwy inanity.
We must submit to this Will of God.
The camera adores her, so do we.
She's all cute and curious,
nothing contemptible about her.
Save for a moment of laviscious horror
like those of the Courts of Yore,
en flagrant dilicto,
pussycat-pussycat where have you been?
"I've been to London to visit the King/Queen,
or both, frightened a mouse from under their
chair. I'm rich you know.
Very, very rich.
My dog gets lost and I consult a telepathic
for $what an hour I don't know
tells me to put up signs all over Wilshire,
they get sold on Ebay, imagine my distress!
Should have sold them myself."
This is the Will of God. Repeat,
this is the Will of God. It is divine
and divinely created, it is the unveiling
of history itself, the remnants of whatever
it was that gave the damn muthafuckas the right
to Lord over us like that!
This is the Will of God,
from the Jay Leno set
inside an apartment far, far away
where a mosquito fails to collapse
in my hand because of it's fragility.
That too, is the Will of God.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/Indian/SpiritLand.html
Ode to the Two Pointers
Hanging up there between our clothes line
and theirs, a hand could borrow sugar
from our open windows, that close,
a two-pointer draped from his haunches, eyes all froze.
We came home running to see what was shot,
heard it all the way down by Old Man Riley's garage,
a two pointer, not a doe. Everyone heard it.
It was big news, big game and there he was,
hanging over the squash and winter iris
looking out like that, just looking.
A pressure cooker steamed inside
the kitchen window, it tooted and hissed
while he hung there waiting to be butchered.
Takes a long time to cut up a deer like that,
and longer still, to bag one.
Times were pretty lean, the winters pretty cold.
God is as an animal, our fortress.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/Indian/OriginAnimals.html
8.2.06
In The Locality Of Whimpers
The static of those times was deafening,
transcripts and telegrams bogging
down all the lines, apothecaries
and epistlaries grew quite rich.
They all began to tell their stories,
everyone of them, quite dismal
because of the chatter and negations. We all
hoped for more but came up with so much
less. So many forgotten aftermaths,
so many more to make, we felt quite sad.
Our whimpers grew to infamous
proportions, exponential even,
until we wept with a single growl,
"Enough is enough. We want more."
Lost as strangers in the strangeness
of going home to find the huts burned
to their very interior ashes, those
ashes in the sky or the breath
of our friend Iblis. He was tremendously
hard to find except in the fine print
of lawyers' contracts. He wasn't
what you would call, a good listener.
Iblis produced ashes like whispers,
his spooky action at a distance
and stood to gain more than a few
borrowed souls and heartbroken women,
a real deadbeat dad rounding up his vixen.
That is what they say about him anyway.
She said to him early on, "Come and get me,
if you can. I hide quite near the tan area
called the gray matter. It isn't easy to find
but try anyway. I've got nerves of steel."
7.2.06
The Twisting Sleeps
Edna stated once as she sat
in the semicircular booth
at Sambo's drinking a cup of tea:
you don't want to dream anymore.
She meant, when you are old or wise
or like me, you get to that point.
After the hounds of Ha'wab they sent
a small envoy and then a second, how
many more would come into the fray,
how many more loose ends to tie up?
There are no reasons for these recurrent
troubles, recurrent themes. There
is no reason to be forced into para-
trooping fresh out of the boot camp
of dreams where the mess is
full of ice cream machines bowling alleys
and - Las Vegas lighting.
There is no reason for the envoy
to be buying trinkets to take home
(standing there as they did once before)
and certainly no reason the bus
accelerated like an F-15 but mostly,
there was no reason for the envoy
to pay a second visit at the end
to remind the dreamer there would be
no helmut nor any special lace-ups
for one of the jumpers. Sri Lanka
or wherever we would be landing
is certainly a jungle of the worst type
and we drove by the best forests on our way,
green and dry, beds of needles, familiar.
One last look before you head off.
It is the woman from Liberia who keeps
everything from descending. It is her lost
son and the memory of her slavery
which saves. Blink, wake up, get out.
Avoid the fall by missing the jump.
Edna stated once as she sat
in the semicircular booth
at Sambo's drinking a cup of tea:
you don't want to dream anymore.
She meant, when you are old or wise
or like me, you get to that point.
After the hounds of Ha'wab they sent
a small envoy and then a second, how
many more would come into the fray,
how many more loose ends to tie up?
There are no reasons for these recurrent
troubles, recurrent themes. There
is no reason to be forced into para-
trooping fresh out of the boot camp
of dreams where the mess is
full of ice cream machines bowling alleys
and - Las Vegas lighting.
There is no reason for the envoy
to be buying trinkets to take home
(standing there as they did once before)
and certainly no reason the bus
accelerated like an F-15 but mostly,
there was no reason for the envoy
to pay a second visit at the end
to remind the dreamer there would be
no helmut nor any special lace-ups
for one of the jumpers. Sri Lanka
or wherever we would be landing
is certainly a jungle of the worst type
and we drove by the best forests on our way,
green and dry, beds of needles, familiar.
One last look before you head off.
It is the woman from Liberia who keeps
everything from descending. It is her lost
son and the memory of her slavery
which saves. Blink, wake up, get out.
Avoid the fall by missing the jump.
3.2.06
Anti Noamism here:
http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html#1
...just a dumb guy like me thinking too hard. Or maybe not.
http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html#1
...just a dumb guy like me thinking too hard. Or maybe not.
2.2.06
Syrian lighter
.
The Erotic Life
Should have written it down
instead of wreaking havoc
yet the other self says keep trying.
Once Haj 'brahim drank the ashes
of his cigarette from his tea,
said it was good for us.
Sultana came through the door
looking pale once again,
thoroughly his wife.
Oftentimes I saw them out front
peeling tobacco leaves one by one,
a group of sisters smiling.
One time the mule got loose
and I led him home by the rope,
fed him apples in the afternoon.
Their children sat out on the roof
watched us through the window,
told the village how foreigners make love.
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