30.7.10

This is just so so cool.

The Answer Wasn't No But If

This is my jar of pennies,
where yours is, is it messy?
Is it reckless and noisy
like this one?
What a yellow flower
is tomato and we see
salad, the water
in the gourds is stored
but would apatosaurus
mind to be this apple
overnight belonging
to the sun?
If these things be true
our mouth flourishes
and the lesions reply
justice afterall is law.
To wake up on a morning
and realize the roll-over
was real, the hospital
full of bandage was
the hope of other people,
as if change
monitored equals survival.
I signed the last letter
because and forfeited
success, don't you
want some yellow birds
that don't belong here too?



Hilarious antics at the neighbor blog house, disabled posts, angry protests and Kent Johnson/Ron Silliman in charge of channelling the living.

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Joseph%20Massey




28.7.10

The Death of Photopoe Z

Magnesium Potassium
Calcium and Sodium
thou art great
messengers and message
without which
the body experiences
it's own lightning
twitches and warns
this is the coming
fret and ash
as still as he stood
in photo his heart
stood still and static,
still static and still, still.
Olson, as far as the eye can see, the New East is the Old West and vice-versa

...shamans who've learned to talk
brightly about tomorrow
from yesterday in India,
before the sun's closed its
occidental eye at dawn in Rivendell. -From Obleo's Lament



http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/2010/07/back-to-geography-poemtalk-34.html

The shorter the poem, the longer the conversation about it. Seems to me anyway.

So much does depend upon the wheel barrel but so much depends on the wheel as well, the screw and the wedge. You see? The six simple machines of poetry are variables and likely, there are way more than six.

Knowledge, Accidence, Bias, Memory, Inspiration, Time. There's six and they are crucial to the development of any poem be it long or short, stylized or accidentalized.

Knowledge (and truth) comes to us from a variety of places and one could argue, is asociated with all of the other tools of poetry in some way or another. Each of them depends upon the expertise (historical/foundational knowledge) of the poet and their exposure to a variety of pressures be they personal or universal in nature or as well, influence from other poets who also have a certain level of expertise. Some poets, particularly the immature poet, seek to eliminate the influence of all 'old' knowledge by avoidance (I did this at one time) as if knowledge were some type of contaminant to the very nature of poetry itself and in particular, their 'special gift' as individual poets. Some mistake the Make It New poetry fatwa for the idea that there actually is something new to be relayed to the starving readers out there. Luckily, this stance doesn't survive very long out there because poetry is a dog eat dog world you know and there's only so much other poets who have worked hard to obtain a little chunk of knowledge for themselves will or can tolerate. Poets who are necessarily the gatekeepers of poetry inevitably have hyper-sensitive bull-shit meters, but do they also then, have knowledge? Could it be that there's a black hole of intensity just waiting to be filled and it is based on what has been avoided (in history) rather than what has been included? I think so and the New Age of poetry isn't so much "new" as it is "better informed".

Accidence will make or break a poem. A poet not in control of that is one less poet.

Bias will generate more bang for the buck than most poets realize. Bias can betray the poet and the poet should be, if anything at all, aware of their own if not also completely aware of the bias of the reader be it a whole population of similars or a single individual interested in poetry and specifically, that particular poetry produced by that particular poet (the schools of poetry are great machines for the production of such types). The modern salesmanship of poets and the pobiz coerces and has coerced its own readership into a hole that is discussed ad nauseum by those that care about 'what happens to it'. The paternalistic notion that "we" as poets know what's good for a person is evident in anything even remotely attached to a 'school'. Schools of poetry are innately biased toward the paternal notion (and you can ask feminist poets what they think about that!). Furthermore, when a bias is no longer necessary or has been found to be a faulty one (Republican right wing for example), it dies an important if unsightly death. It seems to be blind to its own shortcomings and in a fit of dying passion begins producing a miserable amount of hot air which is known as Cheyne-Stoking.

Memory is dependent on both knowledge and bias. It is present in a poem whether a poet wants it there or not. The idea that confessionalist work (the largest body of memory based poetry) is somehow the anti-thesis of modern or somehow easier to write is ludicrous and ignores the fact that what is present in a poem is often times much more important than what isn't and that would be alot of stuff including that which is excluded on purpose by the poet writing a great confessional/narrative piece as well as that which is not known by the poet (the future, to name the most important of that which is left out of all poems) which has an inevitable impact on the work over time.

Inspiration isn't something that can be willed into existence and if it could be so, it wouldn't be 'inspiration' or that which unwillingly/unwittingly rises to the top and leaves the pack behind it panting. The most ellusive of the simple machines of poetry. At the heart of a good poem is the angel-dust of revelation both in a mythological sense and an actual historical sense. One could argue that inspiration is a function of knowledge, memory and bias however, if it were the case, we'd have a lot more good work and a lot less junk. The volume would remain the same perhaps but the quality would ultimately be better. It isn't any wonder to me why so many people fail nowdays to see the value of 'modern poetry'. Much of it is generated by the soul-free machinery of the times which includes the machinery of the publishing process itself.

Time. Where would we be without a time, an application of the poem (read: work) in society. The reason some poems feel timeless depends to a high degree on universality or "the human condition" over time. The human condition over time does not change. The circumstances however do and the application of universal themes in context matters more to academics than it does to the general population. The general population is interested much more in their own context and for the most part they have little idea that Mr. Olson was pushing back history with his arms and defining an era in Time as one of change, willfulness and contempt for the ages while simulataneously embracing "the Ages" by mentioning them in the first place, bringing them to the attention of the less well-informed.

So yes. A lot does depend on the wheel barrow. Plus all of the things that the wheel barrow/barrel contends to carry on, forward or around. In the case of this wheelbarrow, the poem is greater than the poet and when that happens, it's a bingo.

The Red Wheelbarrow
-William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.




With the white chickens/beside the rain glazed wheel barrow/so much depends upon a red.

Could so much have depended on a rooster? Or a green John Deer?


Probably not.



Max

Is he not all that is missing too?
That's alot.

27.7.10

Pleasurable Complexity
by Thilias Moss

-every indicator says
poetry is inevitable


Monsoon-Lotto

The jazz of the ottery all
is pinning with lightning
in the sky outside. Azz
of ottery all is pinning,
that's right third followed
by the fourth, fifth and sixth
otto 41, 33, 23, 12, 44 and 11
and the azz of ottery is pinning
some one out there is getting
hit and someone is getting it.
Quid falls gently as quails,
treads sweetly over the sails,
the green near blinds the eye
drags grass right out of the sky.

22.7.10

SURPRISING POEM
John Gunboat Pauker

I looked, and looked again. There were no people.
The people had disappeared. The people were gone.
But the things they had created were still there,
A suit of clothes and a gown walked arm in arm
With a dog at the end of a leash. The dog was there

And snarling. In the street, vehicular traffic
Flowed as usual but without drivers or riders.
Inside buildings, doors opened and closed.
Cigarettes smoked, telephones rang, receivers
Slammed as usual, and on television

Something of all this showed, but without people.
--The fifth of scotch went on diminishing.
Electric razors razed and revolvers fired
As Usual. The things went through their paces
And seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely.

I longed to look in a mirror but did not dare.



BROTHERLY POEM

All men are brothers
Like Cain and Abel.



"This couplet constitutes John Pauker’s entire “Brotherly Poem,” and encapsulates both his idealism and his bitter realism. He helped more poets and writers around the world than anyone else alive in his time. Some were American, and free to write as they wished and to travel on international cultural exchanges. Others lived under threat of imprisonment in their own lands. Many were young and little-known, others older and revered, often neglected and persecuted by their country’s establishment."

21.7.10

I wear my cap backwards
so I don't burn my neck.
I wear my cap forwards
'cause I don't like Glen Beck.
I eat at the D-FAC
makes me poop alot
that's because it's Minot
and the food's never hot.
These combat boots
hurt more than shoes,
I read Vonnegut
then Doctor Suess,
I work in the office
in green camoflauge,
my girl didn't want
the matching corsage.
Call me a kid
but to tell the truth
I refuse to grow
out of my youth
but the boots still hurt
and the food makes me poop,
I wear my hat backwards
and Glen Beck's still
an asshole.




-Airman Sowid, Minot AFB, North Dakota

18.7.10

Make it New!

if I spoke gibberish to you
would you then listen
even at last to me?
-Darla Whitehead, Book of Evaluations

If you could see that has been seen by those of you who have died, you would be puzzled and troubled. Then you would have listened and obeyed; but what they have seen is yet curtained off from you. Shortly, the curtain would be thrown off. You have been shown, provided you see and you have been made to listen provided you listen, and you have been guided if you accept guidance. I spoke unto you with truth. You have been called aloud by (instructive) examples and warned through items full of warnings. After the heavenly messengers (angels), only man can convey message from Allah. (So what I am conveying is from Allah). - Ali ibn Abi Taleb, Commander of the Faithful

Knowing which of the nafs to pay attention to, that's the thing.The one that blames, the one that loves too little or too much, the one that writes poetry or reads it to oneself or to the others. The one who sits inside a room with other nafs, converses and betrays the self, the honest nafs cannot get along except with other nafs of the same discipline because they are all true to the unique Allah and the instructions of same. This is the teaching. It is the learning and from that the nafs of the poet monitors each strange thing, with or without knowledge, with or without specific strengths and weaknesses and uses the language, the language genie to perform the necessary not obligatory acts of poetry. It is the deceptive activity of the heart and the hearts of others that teaches ignorance by ringing all the right bells and whistles without risking the hard task of truly teaching through poetry what there is to know in the proper language that only the nafs can truly understand and we physical selves master without knowing the import upon the disingenuous nature of our souls, that group of related things. We instruct our own selves: deception, apathy, remorse....we encourage desire and her cousins jealousy and greed.....but that we as poets teach others both unremarkable or absolutely poisonous lesson is to be made a matter of because, in modern poetry....there is an utter lack of proof that what is being taught is actually being known, at first, by the teachers of wit and wisdom (ruination and salvation, lack and presence, agreement and disengagement)....known more commonly as poets.

You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.' -W.H. Auden


How honest and true that is but written with only a superficial knowledge of the spheres, the archetypes and most importantly, the trusts that bond certain types of nafs together.

Archetypes upon which the new foundation of modern poetry are built (imagery) are only stable as processes within the writing of a new mythology that pleases certain groups to a much greater or much lesser degree. Make it New! is the dictate and within the fabric of that simple statement made by the Godfather of a great number of younger poets, Ezra Pound, is a profound truth and lesson. What does that dictate intend? To the impossible, unimaginable or simply, the unknowable commerce between souls? They should perhaps instead refer to themselves as Pentacostals for it is true that they speak in tongues impossible for most of us to decipher unless we practice the art of the 'close reading' when in fact most of them are entirely uninvolved in the act of 'close writing'.

That there is something old, something predated that requires a new disguise? Why yes, of course. And imagery as well as Objectivist mannerisms are suggested as the most fitting alteration in the garment of poetry...or languagism in which poets learn to converse not with other people but with other nafs. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes wrong but it is never really clear to me when they mean to.

And I guess poetry ought to at least mean to. It ought to take its share of the responsibility involved in disseminating both popular and unpopular ideations. The ubiquitous languagist school makes it new alright but keeps it the same by suggesting there is a wrong and right way to do things, record things. That there is a party to which everyone else belongs and they are somehow exempt from the rules of trade and barter in which the only currency might be a clippy tongue or savage intelligence able to distill prose into a hitherto uncharted and nonsensical poetic mind drill...well. There are several schools of thought that prove that poetry can be generated from overheard conversations all the way to computer search engines. It is not however proof that what is said within that context of accidentalism is either understood or apprehended by the party to whom poetry is actually addressed (when it is done well) and that would be the nafs.

Getting it half right (they were wrong i.e. the SoQ) is not the same as getting it right themselves and the nafs bicker incessantly not only within the individual but with the nafs of others. The untrained nafs who is not the captain of the ship but just one of the slaves who stole onboard as one of the crew with a variety of functions both good and bad, in need of a leader and a ship.

17.7.10

AMERICA DECLARES COVERT WAR
ON IRAN, FAST TRACK
DIPLOMACY IN PROGRESS

US support for Jandallah, Al Qaeda, Israel. The blueprint and fingerprint of US support for the Taliban repeats itself and if Seymour said so, it's true.

Iran vows revenge upon the United States and from where I stand, they mean business and it will come when the US leasts expects it and without warning whatsoever.











16.7.10

Blaser's Heaven

-and human survival, which, with its adjectival ironies,
proposes a social inheritance
Robin Blaser from As If By Chance

the survival of words
the next day of
rain through the night
nothing has been
diminished
lots of rubbish natural
or not is rotting,
truly morning certainly
and the gray sky drifts home
like a dock loader like
one job after another.
There is something
right about the result
it cannot be argued.
How big is the secret
between these rivers,
should not each word
in this be an entire thing,
a dreadfully long metaphor
in which every interlocuter
is pressed and finished
with a final answer?
I am not an ant nor am I
courageous enough to admit
to a certain revulsion
over such important claims
wisdom peace at last neverending, etc.
Hard nutrition this and to keep
everything round the point
the universe is blank
without us, hidden
in the dark-dust pocket
don't you know.
Everything and inside
of that is empty nothing
where words try to begin
and notice the backs
of their heads who listen
the way they scratch
and nod inside those skulls,
to sit still when in fact
it isn't even close
to what they are doing
which is die-ing.
All push pins and dreamers
of scatological redemption
plus phase after phase
of chew boast and record.
Damaged pop-up classics
like Poky Little Puppy
cannot find their
way into poor pox* or Greece.
They don't even know
about the watching
let alone the focus
of the watch in which
are presented
a multitude of chances
in Detroit, in Timbuktu,
outside of that tailor's
shop in weary Sidon.
Not again, not that
yet again, the hierarchies
of angels again?
Oh purple plusses
and gold stars,
old beards and glazed eyes,
sonorous damn voices,
please not that yet again.
Love, mention our archetype,
at least one little surprise
in that most indefinite word.
Friendship, nothing like old
men saying such things
in their own dugout,
a classroom full of turnips,
self witness and transfer
for an old wrinkler who hopes
for quiet dominions
in which the kings
have his face,
his hands and say
the same pungeant things
to the waiting podunks,
better them than no one
and repeat after me.
There'd be poplars and Spicer
and some of that glow,
a tireless legion of adulation,
almost his angels.
Whose fault could it be
and if so, might it be yours?
The hole got filled already
and you're in it despite
the curious loss of imagination
and yes, in that you uttered
a final truth, a blessed amen:

"What changes are not the things but their limits."

*first usage

http://jacketmagazine.com/22/blaser-quar.html


Blaser laments ‘the unrecognized disaster of a
world devoured into human form, rather than a world disclosed in which we are images of an action, visibilities of an action, an action which otherwise is invisible, larger, older, and other than ourselves.’




And to whom is he speaking and of what one wonders? The substitute called Mother Nature/Father Time, the indelible admixture of the Creation with the Creator via the Created, i.e. through language? Some of us recognize something but I highly doubt that without a certain amount of scholarship like ours that Mr. Blaser would be the one to judge the veracity of such and such a claim. As he insists on the existence of language in which wisdom, beauty, etc etc are manifested prior to even their own existence and then to provide a convoluted parameter for such convoluted exagerated "wisdom' (as such interlocuters usually do) thus, it is a miracle then that language exists at all and without it, I suppose, there is a vacuum of action, intention, result even. Really now. It is part of the interlocuter's job of course to make sad things seem peppy, to make dumb things speak but at the very least they should try to make them speak in logical terms that provide at least a little more than a bit of something from that which is being dismissed as horse pucky. And if so then how is it that the word sperm does not contain the majesty of creation? Would not just a bitter drop do? All these outpourings seem necessary in the work of poets who spew and outrage, criticize and 'humor' us all with a teardrop at the end of a perfunctory and quite complex obligatory lunch time foray into the blisteringly hot alcoves of this so called 'hell' that they prefer to life. How contradictory....even if in our culture it is inappropriate to attack dead men unless of course they are prophets.

You cannot get away with such references without at least a little bit of accountability in my perhaps not-so-humble opinion. As well, neither poetry or philosophy should or can be considered, a shortcut to religious knowledge. Yet in the modern context, both are considered and given greater attention and the answers arrived at ...well of course. They are not satisfactory. That they are not even satisfactory to those poets and philosophers ought to be enough, ought to be a sign but tragically, they are allowed to flourish and even encouraged. The only group that they find themselves outside of is another group of outsiders and so on, so forth in myriad formation. What on earth convinces the reader better than the widespread fame of such entities that indeed they are not truly inside by virtue of their outsidedness nor are they inside by virtue of ours, or by gum, our (actual knowledgables) bloody ignorance.

"For it is not God, but man, who is dead, Blaser argues (suggesting this was Nietzsche’s conclusion also)."

And what means this 'dead'? As in the vacuousness of a variety of mistaken identities within another variety of mistaken premises? Here's the hot tip newsflash...the mystery isn't so mysterious and the logic is not so logical if in fact the non mysterious mystery is fabricated in form and function with a blasphemous and even higher form of mythos that is placed intact, in situ in this "public space" and in that, the argument the public must pose is against it's own fable and ironically, armed with its own fable. No wonder there is chaos rather than redemption (and isn't that what is being redeemed in the poetry of the late Mr. Blaser...'the public' in which 'joe public' resides)?




in unmapped America, the Puritans had a ferocioustime with omniscience, which
proposed predestina-tion of human nature, one by one—now, when you get down to
brass facts, who in this community should be allowed to receive the body and
blood of Christ?—the answer: the successful—speaking inthe voice of—the
coherence of—capitalism—Robin Blaser, Great Companion: Dante Alighiere


I don't think the author of the jacket article understands enough about Nietzsche in order to know what Blaser understands about Nietzsche...not that Nietzsche understood much himself to begin with...other than he understood that the reflection of a reflection is bad enough let alone the stonification of such ideals and analogs into a curious pantheon of fatal humanistic trends that don't really trend up or down...they merely tread alot of historical water.


in 1963, an Italian reporter named Luigi Pasquini met
Pound in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini:
'When I reach him he is standing in the sacristy
of the church, a tiny room that formerly housed its
relics. Above the door is Piero della Francesca's fresco
depicting Sigismondo Malatesta as he kneels before
his patron saint. Pound is standing beneath it, sur-
rounded by people.
'I approach him slowly, nervously, until I am
directly before him, face to face. I look him in the
eye, and inquire: "Ezra Pound?"
'He does not respond. He stares at me, silent, and
his mouth hints at a smile.
'I insist, and repeat his name. He gazes at me, arch-
ing his eyebrows for a moment, but says nothing.
'I fear I must be mistaken and address my glance to
the woman beside him. She peers up at him, then
nods, reassuring me that it is him.
'I offer him my hand, and he takes it in his own, I
do not tell him my name, but I make clear that I know
his books. . . . He understands, it seems. He gives a
sign of assent, but continues to remain silent.
'Our hands are still clasping each other. "This is
the hand of the great American poet," I offer. ("La
mano del grande poeta americano!")
'And at last his voice emerges, his first words,
uttered in a tranquil Italian accent without a trace
of an Anglo-American inflection: "I am not great."
("Non grande.")
'Swiftly I reply: "—you are among the greatest."
("Grandissimo.")
'But the conversation falters, and I grow uncertain.
Through friends I had heard that he was living in
Rapallo, but a stray remark from Miss Rudge indicates
they have just come from Venice. I try to take up the
topic: "Where are you living now: in Rapallo? Or in
Merano with your daughter, or in Venice?"
'He will not reply. He looks at me again, with a
mocking gaze.
'I persist: "Rapallo, Merano? Venice, Rome?"
'Nothing. He is still silent, his gaze fixed on me,
like someone playing a guessing game.
'I press on: "So where are you living now?" I con-
tinue, "Where?"
'At last he lowers his head, slowly, and put his
mouth to my ear so that no one can hear us. His
voice is a whisper, rasping: "I live in hell." 'This leaves me
bewildered. Here we are in church,
in a sacristy in fact (even if it is the sacristy of a pa-
ganizing temple)—in a place, in short, as far as pos-
sible from Erebus or the underworld of Lucifer. And
yet he says we're in hell. I fail to understand and
want to pursue it: "Which hell do you mean? The
hellish tourism? The inferno of the war, here in
Rimini? the hell of Rome? Of Italy? Of the world?"
'He is silent again. At last he moves his hands: he
places them before his stomach, and slowly lifting
them to the level of his heart, as the traces of light in
his pupils become like glowing coals, he whispers a
suffocated scream. "Here is hell. Here."' -Blaser in Great Companion





And hey, Dante was the prototypical Anti Islamicist don't you know!

Ah well, he was on the right track (desirous of knowledge) but you know what they say, the highway to heaven is just paved wall to wall and side to side with the best intentions afterall. The role of the outsider in this, the role of the one who was thrown out of the ring so to speak, is in Nietzsche's own contruct, a necessary evil. Through such necessary evils it is that truth can be translated and deduced throughout time by examining the effect instead of the cause.

And perhaps there is redemption in at least some of that
.






http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/16/camel-milk-riegler-dairy_n_648663.html

The benefits of Camel Milk and the outrageous price of same.

15.7.10







Christopher Hitchens and Throat Cancer, oddly enough.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-wilhelm/in-praise-of-christopher_b_643797.html


The Ascent of the Sherpa

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

Not thin coated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tracks had completely disappeared
and were replaced by paw prints:
first a snow leopard, some kind of bird,
a wolf or yeti and finally, a time-worn palimpsest.

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

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

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

"Die-ing," he replaced the form deliberately.
The Sherpa deliberately replied, "Death
."
The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
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12.7.10

Back of the Bus

















11.7.10


BLACKO WACO
The United States of Purgatory






Twenty years ago this Friday*, city police dropped a bomb on this block and let it burn. Five children and six adults, members of a small radical collective called MOVE, died; 61 homes in a middle-class neighborhood were destroyed. As the nation watched, Philadelphia became the city that bombed its own people.


*May 11, 2005
What can you do? Write to Eric Holder here by signing the petition:


What the US and Israel have been planning all along, 'bama or no'bama.

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-iranian-threat-by-noam-chomsky

7.7.10

Astounding

Today the world
talked about death,
the clots and bleeds
from A to Zed
it said to me,
worry.
But not about your own
and the devil
dragged me away
to his personal cell
to try again,
as dramatic as ever.
Poetry Rules of Engagement:
Poetry Ought to be FUN




T-Bird at the Gila River


"Advice: learn poems so that you don't have to
write them or rather, they write themselves.
Strategies are useless testimonials."
- The Book of Warnings, D. Whitehead

This pretty life is death's comma
and we are between, constructing
the darkest layer in the top soils
over which the eagle flies
with the owl, as same as the bug.

Once I stood on a reservation
for our tribes and thought.
The wild wisdoms entered
like drugs with the cackle
of gypsies and caw of old birds
into the earth's big recorder.

When suddenly! Like that!
The newest grand canyon opened
her secret vaults to receive
the sound and reek of vomit from the throat
of a drunkard who turned in and then sped away.
Ah, the stories the rocks will tell!

**************

...or sexy albeit not too much muchness of that:

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.