31.7.09

Between Black Skies

almost forever,
there it is it is
over forests, all forests
over deserts, all deserts
this one now
as it shines
and this shines also
as the lightning gets
all over us
showers pure protons
over us
it is over that too

out there, always
just out there
turning round
vanishing
returning
vanishing
never too soon
nor late
nor the lightning.

From here the sky
is blue gray white black
sometimes green or silver
from here
it appears
to be there
but it is not
just a sky anymore
as it used to be
not just blue
and not cupped
not one day the same
yet we think it is
as we believe
in all things
we just do
this consequence
that ommission,
makes sense only
in one instance.

25.7.09

When I wrote the following, little did I know that I was prophesizing. Little did I know that in a few years I'd be living this poem. Three years ago I was somewhere between Ramstein Air Force Base and New Jersey. I was on a cargo plane. The chains on the floor were cold and I watched an airman inflate his travel mattress and snuggle in for the night. I never felt so alone.

The poem was originally just a few jagged lines, mixmatched sentences and beautiful in my eyes but not within the grasp of the reader. The following is what I make of it now.





Morning Has Broken

In the opening frames
the actress addresses

the entire Syrian army
privately with a speech
holding a stick
and then retreating
after being hit
by one of them
with an ammo belt.
As she walks away
she strikes the stick
against a pole
and parts of it fly
high into the air.
It's just another day
in the suburbs of Beirut.
She comes from a lower
middle class working family
in the southern United States.

She is filmed as she wanders
through the third floor
of the abandoned building
where the Syrians

shave and bathe,
make catcalls at her
from the window sills
as she walks to the dekhena.
Dogs drift in and out
of the building
and lose their skin
from the mange.
She tries to save them
but they all eventually die.

In the previews, Julia Roberts
walks into the rooms
of an unoccupied building

in the Levant, near the sea
where the Syrian troops
launch their evil plots
from hand-me-down fox holes.
It cuts to a montage
of tracer bullets and
embassy dialogue:
important people
whisper important things
to other important people,
there is more than enough
of the requisite drama,
katuyshas, Mercedes
and hidden faces.

On one of the rubble strewn
balconies, there are wine bottles
and a flak jacket
and pictures of half dressed
women from magazines
with hand drawn breasts,
nipples in red ink.

Some of them
are pasted onto the wall,
most likely with ejaculate.
The harmless literature
of soldiers is everywhere.

Other rooms have sundry items,
clumps of old flat bread

still in the bag where sometimes
a bird is found trapped
and is freed if they're lucky enough
to be found as they flutter
and fight the inevitable.
There are boots hardened

by sun and rain,
and cigarette butts,
and the putrefying entrails of sheep

from an impromtptu feast the soldiers
enjoyed several days before,
there's empty corned beef cans or tuna.

In the quiet scenes of Act II
Julia Roberts finds certitude
in the Creator and Sustainer
of the entire universe,
just in time. The book

is written and closed,
the script mysteriously disappears.
The timeline is abridged later
when the captives are traded
by the opponents,
victory belongs to one
side not the other.
Syria moves their forces
into the Bekka Valley
several weeks before
the first bridge
is taken out by the IDF
although this is said to be
the pretext for the war,
it is a lie.

The audience applauds
at certain times,
the moments of liberation,
ticker tape parades,
where not a single corpse is used.

Not a single child is wasted,
not one of them can steal
a scene anymore,
their eyes caked
with the mud of C'anaa.
Death to the Great Satan
they said, it was their only crime.
Dancing in the streets on September 11th,
who cares about some much deserved
Shadenfraude. Shadenfraude
is not a punishable offense.

Finally,

Julia rises
into the air
suspended by thin

flesh-colored bungee cords.
American soldiers advance
dressed as dancers in full regalia

lifting her
vigorously,
outrageously erotic-
from the refuse of her occupation.

It is a monumental scene,
the crowning glory, years in the making.

As she moves across the sands
of the beach a black soldier
leans over to help her
onto the amphibious
he is thinking Normandy
and Julia looks into his South
Carolina good intentions
and screams at him

this is a war crime you're involved in

but there is a woman
succumbing to hysteria
on the ramp. They all have
to move on, they all
have somewhere to go.
The USS Trenton has pirates
in the hold, docks in the port
of an allied nation, the lines
are quite long.
The sea undulates and is a terrible green
as it fills with the oil
that pours in from
the fuel depot of a civilian hub.
Julia asks one of the sailors
if this is normal
and he shakes his head
after looking at it again,
no ma'am. It's not.

As the credits roll:


The hold of the Cargo jet

opens and the airman
gather everyone for one
last photo. This is clearly
an intelligence maneuver.
The faces will be studied
and the bird takes it's last breath
and she releases it,
she saves only one.

Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix
boarding now,
the more or less catatonic

actress drags
her few things behind her
through Newark International.
Yusef Islam strums
a tune but she cannot see him.

















22.7.09

Pervert Movie


The Changeling starring Angelina Jolie. Great movie, great times for perverts. A christian evangelist radio preacher saves the day in real life back in the twenties. A mental institution, a hanging, axes....Jolie looks fabulous as a flapper cum roller skating phone operator. Shucks.....and clucks and whacks.

Left me feeling really exhausted but somehow very satisfied and afraid. Really afraid of perverts.

Those were good times...a hospital to go to and a sister to lean on. But no more....nowdays the preachers are the pervs and perps.

What gives?

19.7.09

God and the Recession



In times of record-high foreclosures and Treasury Department scrambling to shore up loan-refinancing initiatives, the Prosperity Gospel can sound as if it comes from preachers who live under rocks, not in mansions: "God wants to give you your own house," big-cheese pitchman Joel Osteen announced in 2007's Your Best Life Now, which he penned in an economic Indian summer of a bull market and excited homebuyers. " 'How could that ever happen to me?' you ask. 'I don't make enough money.' Perhaps not, but our God is well able."

Osteen is everywhere these days. You see his coiffed pate smiling on Good Morning America, at the new Yankee Stadium for its first nonbaseball event, on the cover of Texas Monthly's ideas issue—all in one week. Yet he artfully disappears for housing-crisis questions like "Why, if God wants to reward the faithful with material possessions, are so many believers in foreclosure?"


"The Lord is my banker; my credit is good." Charles Fillmore, Unity Preacher




The reason for FLARF is to be found here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/toc.html#6290

I've made a cursory attempt at reading this smut but to no avail. It isn't worth reading. There's Charles Simic...yes...THE Charles Simic rattling on about some lady that isn't going to live long enough to throw out the paper plates after she serves some water melon. There's Hoagland (no, not that Hoagland) trying to make everyone feel guilty. Some up and coming poet writes the last line:

An ounce for the gorgeous man in the gutter,
the beggar-poet cries, and some crab legs with clarified butter!


There's a housewife poem and a poem about four hour priapism. I mean, couldn't he have interjected that priapism just for kicks? My Lord.

There is a poem about the wonderful capybara...one of my all-time favorite zoo beasts but all the same, it is nothing more than a gimmick employed to make comparisons about "life". Good old "life". I just love "life"...such a wonderful premise for a poem, "life".



Therefore, FLARF exists because the language of poetry has become dismal. The idea is threatened with non existence and the, ahem, identity crisis of poets isn't at all an identity crisis.....these poets seem to think they are doing just fine!

They aren't. This is truly miserable poetry and it is found in, ahem, a notable magazine. Jordan Davis got it right when he issues this:


PICTURES OF BUGS BUNNY DRESSED LIKE A THUG


What drove me to draw this picture
Of Bugs Bunny dressed like a thug?


Plural. Pictures. Not once did I sketch
The buff tattooed torso of Thug Bugs


But many times, over several days.
He looks mean, doesn’t he? When O when


Will this election be over
So I can blow off life again


Without inadvertently producing objects
Of great and mysterious-to-me beauty.




One only hopes his tongue was thoroughly lodged in his cheek when he did.

18.7.09

5:55 GMT + 3, for Me and Haneen

Doesn't everyone want to say something
just everyday, special? Every day is
so great or not so. Maybe it wasn't nice
the way the man looked at me today
while I bought a plug for the generator.
Maybe it isn't cool to be American.
Maybe I should have said I was Russian.
Maybe I should have hugged him.
I don't know. His eyes were somehow
not to my liking. I guess he could say the same.
Maybe that isn't what could be said though.
How about all the money that I spent,
hundred thou after hundred thou after hundred thou
every lira to a foreigner who couldn't understand
me and vice versa until I banged my head
and said, Damn it! Just damn it all.

Little Haneen laughed. She is only two
and knows the feeling.
Not quite sure but it was raining, still is.
April is cold this year and very wet.
It is 5:55 GMT + 3 or so.
I'm sure to the east there's a hell hole
and to the west there's a bunch of girl scouts and boy scouts.
Maybe up north there is some snow.
Down south, some kind of tribal antics.
Here it is, 5:55 and I've got to go now.
Hope the car starts. Hope is all there is.

10.7.09


In The Mines Of Mexico They Weep

Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos . . . . the elder encourages the younger and shows him how . . . they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars and sweeps through the ceaseless rings and shall never be quiet again. - Walt Whitman, in the preface to Leaves of Grass.

In a twilight pilgrimmage
via these frost cracked streets
close to the Campbell shaft
full of our fathers breath and breathing,
we unfold our own cloth on the Fourth of July,
one crease at a time on the crags
near the ballpark in Warren, down from
the Loma Linda and the old mine-boss housing.
Flashlights dangle from the hands
of children. The night catches us deeply
unaware, but they don't think like that,
they are that,
think more about the starting time,
and the firemen on top of the dumps
who signal the end by waving lanterns,
how they crave that sort of thing
up there on those mountains of slag
thinking, as ours do, of the breath
of canaries and candles deep in those old holes.

A persistent and unheard whimper
fills space on this weary-
happy picnic in July or maybe
it only fills the weariness with something else.
I clasp a child tight in my arms,
a finger closes the tender wound,
hush hush, our waiting begins, we settle down.
Our Fourth of July is in sweet tortuous ruins
thrown in a trash bin of appetites lost.
We've run from one excitement to another

races, parades, contests, reunions
thankful for a gentle sun, there was no burning
and there will be few scars if any.
The miles between this and that
contract like stars in heaven where
light reaches us much too late
and we as well, get there accordingly.

This is the anniversary of all
that's happened here
for each body on this ragged old quilt,
each poor soul and dumbstruck
face tipped up toward the sky.
The silence between one person and the next
is only the truth where commentary has failed.
I look around me one last time
before the sun takes all the light away -
count the faces I own, erase what's left,
a small town thing to do on an occasion like this.

The darkness is complete and the fireworks begin.
My daughter tells me, during one of the beautiful
interims which goes like this:


ooh, aah, wonderful! then another interim and another,


one day the sun will die


as copper sulphur spark comets flower dark,
my father scatters in the sky,

Oh! Mufasa, talk to me!




2.7.09

I'm not yelling. I'm telling the truth in a loud voice.

In case of revolution
please break the glass

when we were young
false alarms were punishable by death


Chorus:

They thought I was a Marine Barracks.
They thought I was a tire burning.

they knew it was him
the ink was all over his hand

but no one called out the dogs because it is said
the canines ate the corpses in Sabra and Shatilla

that summer one house burned
each week until they were gone.

The bitterness of translation
is the joy of understanding,
and vice versa.

Budapest Bhudda pest.