Land of the Lost School of Poetry, Painting and Performance

Real quick before I have to go study for my basic life support class...how we nurses look forward to those! Ee gads! Fifteen to two, fifteen to one, five to one, pump and check or no, don't check anymore thank the Lord just keep counting and pray. Pray for what I don't exactly know because when it's your day, it's your day.

I was remembering last Halloween (which is once again, just around the corner how those corners keep turning up faster as time goes by in one's life). The whole town was dressed up, I imagine, as what they actually are or at least, want to be. I decided to just go the way I would like to go, in hijab. We heard whispers around us "She's from the gulf region," and true, it isn't much of a disguise. My husband went as himself.

As we entered the Gulch, we saw that an ex tempore reading was taking place in the old Latent Image. Ye olde gallery where I once spent my teenage years cavorting with demon touched souls and various mishaps of humanity. Half book store, half photo gallery and certainly, the name of if carries a whole lot of weight for me.
It was where Lois Porter traipsed in one day, her face the color of a gravestone and longer than the day she caught me burglarizing houses when I was seven. The crystal ball and Japanese flag.

We went in and took a couple of chairs. Betsy Breault (Easterday) was there looking wonderfully turn of the century and as ephemeral as always. August there too and we get along now that she lives up at the old art deco hotel on the hill in Warren that I never knew was there, no one does, lucky girl. It's real Hotel California.

We heard about a half dozen poets read but nothing much really. The usual suspects if you will in a town that has perhaps the highest per capita number of forgotten poets in the United States. They hold their readings here and there at irregular intervals, trying to get something going but nothing ever does. I get invited to read and never go although I always agree to but never show up. They did stop inviting me but I have little doubt, they all know that I am there when I am. There've only been three readings I've performed at in three years including one on the radio that was a tremendous amount of fun. That night, following the on air reading, I took pom poms to the Central School auditorium and read the Bisbee fight song poem, literally sang the darn thing, gave it everything and brought one woman to tears. Hard act to follow and I don't even try...can't muster that kind of energy anymore, not really.

On Halloween night though, this guy got up there and a great silence ensued. Some were meandering about and having some chips and salsa from the snack table over by the old brick at the Latent Image.

The poet took advantage of the silence and it was all quite dramatic...Betsy in her ancient hat and me in my head scarves and tremendous amounts of kohl.

Then, he started yelping like a run-over puppy. And he kept doing that..the whole poem just a bunch of yelping and whooping.

My husband and I almost exploded. We are on the same page anymore and have been places, talked it all over and now agree that most of it is bullshit. Most of poetry is just bullshit. And then, there's the rest.

How we laughed and then went home leaving all the merry makers to their merry making. We'd had way too much fun already.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

Feminism and the Strategy of the Real ahem. You know yer in trouble when you keep trying to fake something but end up sounding pretty much like yourself but don't realize it and others do.

The notion of "high" end art aka the Baroque coupled with the newest new phase of hyper feminism aka Gurlesque and here's my signed copy of Diane Arbus already. I keep it in the drawer with Uncle Ray.

There is nothing new under the sun you know but there is such a thing as experience when it meets the new.
It says, hold on a minute!

I'm breaking through
I'm bending spoons
I'm keeping flowers in full bloom
I'm looking for answers from the great beyond -REM, The Great Beyond

http://seeiteverywhere.blogspot.com/

Here we go. This is the blog of drafts produced by K. Lorrain Graham. Finally, I see poetry, some fine lines and interpretations. The "disjunction" if you will, is all over the place and borders on the overwhelming. You see, take any intelligent young woman and tell her to talk and this is what you might get. The sense of "everygirl/ubergirl" is written on the subway walls ala the Song of Silence and there are lines amongst the detritus that the poet herself must love and I do too:

It's important to not believe in a lamp burning for you or anyone in a window somewhere.

...for instance and this special knowledge:

Can not seeing you be our date?

Unfortunately, there is still a sense that the poet is still just trying on clothes:

I said "I'm going to dress up
like Elvis soon," and everyone
laughed kindly.

...or doodling in her personal diary:

Our relationship was about how to be
like frites and pureed potatoes. Enharmonic,
"like British food," she said.

But there is really something to say about a poet with a sense of humor:

I am the father of Kung Fu. I can't believe it. The conditions are ideal.

That line just blasts out of there but all the same, it is an old joke by now...Kung Fu....is this dream or masterpiece? Not sure really but finally, I have found the bare reality of K. Lorraine Graham as she masquerades as this thing or that thing and this hope of all intelligent young women to be high maintenance and appreciated for it at the same time. Afterall, not many young and beautiful women know what Mastic is:

I ask if they have any mastic. Mastic, she says, is an Arabic thing. I say yes, I know, I want to use it in pudding, and you have a sign that says "Yes! We have MASTIC!"

.....Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today! Couldn't resist that one but here's the deal. Mastic when chewed is delightful but turns rock hard in about a half hour. Spit it out before you hit the wall, my best advice.

K. Lorraine Graham reading a nice love letter to an ex. Not sure about how this ought to matter to others as in readers or listeners because it is average, expected stuff from the jilted or amicably jilted folks in the world. I guess you might imagine that it covers the conversations that still roam in the head of a person who used to identify with another person with whom they were "in love" or at least, attracted to. The giggling parts...well. Okay. We can forgive that but at the same time we can say, put on the big girl pants now. There's Buddha in there and Je-Lo, basically I guess...a feminist travelogue and I have to wonder, What would Rachel Corrie say if she could say it? Would it sound like this? There's conflict about work (yet again) in there and I'm faced once again with how distrurbing it must be to be a young woman now, or a young person for that matter. But as a mature adult, I know that already, everyone does but that doesn't make it fodder for a whole poem let alone a career. There is way too much self in this and not what I'd call "the personal" and to call it a prose poem is a bit of a stretch. I'd call it a piece of a memoir albeit, parts of the memoir that are best left in the artist's head who, because of their expertise in the field of writing (whatever that is) knows that things have to be interesting to the reader and their own thoughts have to be disguised using the generally accepted tools of place, time and character. These things are actually quite mundane and I imagine the audience to be hoping here for something, anything at all. Throw me a bone they are saying. Why are you going on like this? "When you were about six or seven," starts a line and boy, am I sick of other people's childhoods when in fact mine was so grand. Ahem. Don't we all feel that way but this isn't to say that Ms. Graham has any understanding of the Universal except to say that it isn't common to find a girl who speaks Chinese but why doesn't she use some here? I would. I most definitely would but then again, that would put Ms. Graham in the ranks of Ezra and that is presumptuous isn't it? Throw me at least a Haiku here. "There's really nothing else to say," goes the poet.....okay. Then end it already. I hear your audience whispering and fidgeting in their seats and I don't hear the spontaneous Wow that is heard in the midst of truly wonderful readings. I'm checking the progress bar now and see that you still have at least four minutes more of monologue i.e. letter to the long lost lover that by now we have all forgotten about but truly know why this relationship ended. This is childish stuff and not the kind that we find charming even though we love kids and know poets who help children and themselves to healthy portions of that juvenalia wish I was there and look at what they see kind of beauty. Naive. Childish. Two different things entirely you know. And finally....we get to something hopefully worth the projected seven minutes it will take to finish off (and there must be a timer on somewhere). Oh no! She explains herself before starting! No. Never. Please don't do that. It's a California poem and we get some deep philosophical meanderings....from See It Everywhere.....and we're talking Tofu burgers now or perfume that smells like Tofu because it must be California and no laughs...not a single witty thing is tossed in there. Ay Caramba. Ay Caramba is a word that means I give up, the rest of the seven minutes can go on without me.

The Gypsy Tells Him All About It

looks deep into his eyes
across the short table
his palm outstretched
the candle flickers
to establish the cadence
as is the usual,

she will leave soon
there will be ten others
until she settles on just one.

Your lukewarm praise
the way you missed
everything is in there
but I cannot tell you how
I know this, cannot reveal
the secrets of my art.

As you look back
won't you wonder
about the questions
re-investigate the solutions?

Don't worry, she will check
in on you once in a while
to know if you are dead
because we all go on living
regardless of the temperature.

I used to think
I would like it here,
would get out more
but found the indoors
pleasing to me,
brought rocks and seeds
into the house, admired
the sand from all the shoes
that entered and left,
and told fortunes.

Coming Attraction: Finally, a poem maybe worth investing my time in.

http://www.scn.org/realpoetik/graham-lorraine022002.htm

The first poem here "from" Work Poems is titled Always For. I'm not sure why it is called Always For to be honest and don't get the connection to the poem itself which appears to be a monologue given by a working girl in the think tank/strategic defense contractor industry where Jane's is on every coffee table in every office. Now, I do have some experience in that field since I have a daughter "in the field" so to speak and I'd tell you more but I'd have to kill you (so she tells me as she whips her ever changing computer password keychain around and blots her lipstick on her way out the door to her Toyota Scion). The poem flirts with body image situations that co-mingle with your typical cubicle conundrums that women and men face in any industry let alone the defense contractor, missile defense systems, ChemAli arrangements types of deals and yes...we have an execution in there that shows up in the middle and right at the end. Death I suppose, real or imagined but in my opinion, those behind desks have little idea how to describe the life of either the executee or the executioner. It tends to fall on it's self righteous face over and over again and wherever it is encountered in "Poetry".

And excuse me, but I liked the Bourne Identity...the first one anyway. Nevermind that my shrapnel collection is somewhere else and all my toe rings had to be melted in order to make bullets.

The second selection is called Stash and once again, I'm a bit perplexed as to what that has to do with the last line: push up office squat no spaghetti straps here other than to say that the internal monologues of beaureacrats bore me because I am one. It does highlight however the waste involved in such work and I have to agree...it is best to get out of that sewage when in fact you might confuse your sexuality with your ability to hold down a nine to five. Time to change you know.

The third and thankfully, the shortest piece is titled My Proposal and finally there's a title that has some connection to the poem itself which borrows from religious texts tangentially and indicates that the poet doesn't like men to push her around. Okay. Like, okay.

Shrink is the last poem on this particular page and is at least, somewhat cogent. It moves from the same ideology and that is, this poet hates to work doing certain types of things one might construe as "establishment" like. This is entirely expected but I am at least grateful that for once, the poet believes that the reader might like to know what is going on inside that "pretty little head of hers" and I don't say that with tongue in cheek or apologies. A female poet that makes such a point of telling us about their epic hamstrings must realize that her epic hamstrings will be fodder for the critic. My best advice...either accept the fact that you are what you are and that is beautiful (and Ms. Graham is very much so) or leave it out of your work entirely. I'd pick the second and always have...for the most part. Once I got wise to the fact that it is a gimmick that contradicts the message you indeed hoped for if you are writing the types of poems you are now "known for". Feminist, etc. blah blah is best left unsaid if you know what I mean as is a certain female tendency to behave in narcissistic ways when asked to promote their work by donning the nearest push up bra and matching panties.

And don't bore the mature audience with this I don't have a message message which is one of the most curious of curious curiosities of modern poetry. Ah no, not me. I was just this radio receiver and helping everyone to hear what was going on. We can hear. But can we write? That is the question.

Overall, I am once again tres disappointed but think that I'll keep looking and order Terminal Humming "just in case" I've missed something.

Did you ever feel like you were on a wild goose chase? I do. You see, I thought I had a whole poem in my hands and then I found parts of it elsewhere with messages that read: if you want to read the rest, you'll have to buy something.

http://areasneaks.com/index.php?id=11

And then what?

Billy Mays is dead. Let's channel him and see what the pitch might sound like eh?

More available work from K. Lorraine Graham here including this

Once again, we have a poem or portion of a poem "from" In a Supralunar World. Okay. Darla Whitehead who has written many poems with various citations like "From the Warnings" and likewise other disingenous and wholly fictional books, some not yet published like "From the Land of the Infidels"......although Darla (whom I've known for many, many years) would say that the title of a piece isn't the same as it's fictional citation. They function in two wholly different ways and do so in order to encourage the reader to think a little beyond the title of the poem and the poem itself. To think about the context of the poem and the poet (dual identity poet).

In this case, all I am thinking about is ....well...nothing. Supralunar and I see, Supraulnar instead and then I'm not quite sure what I am talking about. But that's okay because neither does the poem.

The last line appears and may or may not be the last line, my guess is as good as anyone's:

It is good to be a poet on the way to the office of the censor,
where one can read all periodicals

I'm afraid this one too get's a C minus at best. But not to forget that this is effort free, value free, free free poetry that escapes the poetry radar as long as it insinuates line breaks and argh! that awful crutch poets often use "early" in their careers, the Part I, Part II, Part III technique of stringing together widely disparate thoughts that are merely connected because the poet commands the reader to connect them:



I

More & more now no one

speaks----but
I say “no one speaks.”
This style is a style, not something
imagined

this style says something she said:
“I like your style”
then said something
----

“Those plucky girls upset the roman emperor.”

“Plucky girls.”


That is the first er...stanza if you will. "This style is a style, not something imagined" No...it is imagined and if it isn't, it is borrowed. It isn't innovative nor witty nor even linguistically inviting to me. The surprises are dull if you can call them surprises like the naked girl in the forest and the many references to girl body parts in the poem Supraulnar, Supralunar. If this is an inside joke, it is mediocre anatomy at best. The desperate plea to be recognized as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (the secret life of the explanation mark comes to mind) is obvious:

The nouns shall woo you They shall be wooed

I am most definitely not woo'd but feeling a bit wooden all the same. That letters, syllables, phrases or gosh, punctuation marks function on their own, justify their existence in a poem is a bit incredible to me in a field in which one famous poet declared that he sometimes spent an entire afternoon changing the word "and" for "the" and agonizing over it like the loved ones of a brain dead patient in an ICU. Anyone who thinks otherwise about poetry doesn't understand poetry, SoQ or not. Poetry IS about the words, letters, gaps, dashes and long white spaces that somehow through an evil trickery of the poet, take shape in alarming or expected ways. It has been about that ever since the typewriter and abundance of paper products allowed it to be about that. In the days of Stone Tablets, such luxuries no doubt came to mind but were simply not "do-able".

There's a story I'm thinking of now....about a young adulterous in a muslim country who is followed by her husband's brothers....the story unfolds but I'll not say how because...that IS the story.

You see? The cinema...movies like 21 Grams have not only changed the way we view a story but the way we think about the disjointed matters of everyday life, the "we" being Joe Plumber. A muslim would tell you....the signs. They make great stories and poems but even the disjointed is connected in the "spooky" world of the unseen where this poet somehow hopes to will herself to be engaged in.

Every chaos is a new type of order but this poetry of K Lorraine Graham (thus far looked at) is just chaos.




On Cole Avenue

I keep worrying about setting
my own back yard on fire,
keep thinking about the psycho
somatic differential involved
when an ash turns the new sweater
into holes.

These are true stories
about a girl in the back yard
about the back yard itself
about the particles seen
in the afternoon sun
where the sweater turns
in-to the holes.

K. Lorraine Graham

"I realized that a writer was something one could be."

Not to be mean spirited about this but it isn't fair to review a book based on a few haphazardly reviewed samples provided by the "usual suspects" aka Ron Silliman, K Silem Mohamed...to name a few and touted by the "usual suspects" and that would be the "young writers" associations of America who play blog master. The young writers movement is as old as the hills on your granny's chest you know. It is sometimes referred to as the "avante guarde" and is oftentimes responsible for great changes in the way we view art, poetry and even life.

I aim to do an in depth analysis of one of these young writers in light of the fact that she is one of the hundreds if not thousands of "young" people today who wish to call themselves poets. Do they wish to assume the responsibility of such a role? I highly doubt it. All the same, they deserve a fair shake. And they also have to be looked at as we look at any "profession" in which there seems to be a relative shortage and then there's this flood of applicants for the job Poet Laureate, Breadloaf prizes and whatnots that certainly cannot feed a family of five but most likely will make it possible for a person to legitimately seek public assistance while waiting for their professorship to arrive. We are just bound to get a few applicants who really don't have the credentials (actual writing skills) but are willing to do the paperwork (writing reviews, hobnobbing with the boss and the bosses wife). So we let them have the job because afterall, it's just poetry...not brain surgery.

I plan on buying Terminal Humming at the soonest possible opportunity but in the meantime, I have embarked on an internet search for previously published work by K. Lorraine Graham.

Let's start with the name, that initial and the notion of M. or L. Susie Smith mentality and we'll move on to photos of the poet. If we can do it to Palin, then it is only fair to treat poets the same way. We'll look at some interviews and try to construct an argument for or against this type of willy nilly self/other promotionalism that goes on in the "young writers" association that to me, seems to want something for nothing. Too often, young poets want what they cannot have and rely heavily on sensationalism...flarfists are a notable example. Comedy and schtick are their tools, philosophy and truth are their enemies or at least, they do not want to lend any credibility to the notion of philosophy and/or truth. They tend to just want to "get away with it" and that would be something new!

http://www.mipoesias.com/Poetry/graham_lorraine_k.html

Here is a poem from See it Everywhere...or maybe that's the title..who knows! from See It Everywhere. Now, first I'd like to say I have a tremendous amount of respect for Didi Menendez and MiPOesias magazine. A very slick shindig it is. In this case however, I have to wonder what it is I am looking at and/or reading:

The poem begins with a one on one with a French boy who likes basketball. It morphs into...er...a paranormal investigation of some type and one of highly suspect linguistic device by using the er...I'd like to say "unexpected" but it's probably more apt to say "unacceptable" word SPOOKY.

Get out there and say, "I'm spooky." Then you place a photo at the top of the page MiPO style (slick, GQ quality)of the poet that looks like it was taken in a recording studio and ends with this glaringly awful few lines:

"Q: How do you find a treasure?
A: I ask someone
Q: What do you know of ghosts?
A: They are complicated and sometimes spooky, as are people who are serpents.
Q: Really?
A: Worms, flying things, and ants are also complicated.
Q: What do they think about?
A: Myrobalans and terminalia seeds. They think of them and they come to us.
Q: Oh."


Come on now. Is this poetry or I don't know what. It's awful. Simply awful and so awful I might even be led to believe that the poet wanted it to be awful but even then, the irony is lost when the poet spells I-R-O-N-Y out in every sentence for the reader. That's missing the point of irony.

Here's another poem once again, from See It Everywhere:

http://www.flim.com/spareroom/mark-wallace-k-lorraine-graham.html

The UN. Now there's a great topic for a poem and mine was called The UN Sounds Blue. It was published somewhere back "in the day" when my writing skills were most likely at their peak but only Allah remembers where that publication is. I certainly don't.

In Ms. Graham's piece, it opens with this:

swooning—not going to the UN but
never believed anything could be saved still
love seems a good idea: “God willing
you will find a wife” g-d willing in English

OK....well....a bit of the found in there maybe but WHY? Why? Tell me why please. And it ends with the most definitely not fine last line:

what can I do / why go home? in my body are biles—yours, too
track by the track and fences self in everyone


Am I reading a poem or Jay Walking with Leno near the UN headquarters in New York? Hard to tell really...hard to tell. All I know is that the poet cites something about complicated telephone polls. Okay.

Apolitical, dumb, throw in a piece of in'sha'allah memorabilia...and if there's one thing that irks a muslim poet like myself is the borrowing that goes on in non muslim poet's poetry. They ought to be more careful and that g-d part...well...okay. Oy. As she ends in the first piece about the French boyfriend and paranormal skit...Oy.

It isn't tantalizing. Nor lyrical. Nor mentally dazzling except to say that if this is what a "young" writer thinks is good poetry...we are all in for a long and boring decade of miserable, self involved claptrap.

There's a catch though...Ms. Graham also practices what used to be called painting or drawing and calls it "Visual" poetry. Yawn. Someone really needs to tell the young writer's association that poetry cannot sequester other art forms in an attempt to cover for their own lack of ingenuity in their chosen field of "poetry". Because that is what that is.

She draws pretty good. Reminds me vaguely...very vaguely..of one of my favorite artists, Basquiat, Jean-Michel who took the everyday graffiti of life and made wonderful paintings out of scribbles and scrawls. He didn't call it poetry now...did he? And in this case, a spade is a rose by any other name.

There is a sense in the YWA of seeking legitimacy. This is done through 1)choosing a school to which one belongs 2)taking poems to their utmost extremes and even driving in a lane which is not yours to drive in (visual poetry) 3) and then demanding that people take you seriously as a poet. Not in the sense that one throws a temper tantrum every time some careless critic mistakes work of genuine value because the critic is a moron but that also happens too i.e. poet is misunderstood, the poet goes and pouts about it to other YWA members or the members of the Avante Guarde as a whole which is composed of a variety of poet types and subtypes. "I have a book and therefore, I am a poet," and who in the hell does this critic think they are bashing my work up with a sledge hammer!

I still remember the day that I decided to call myself a poet. It wasn't like I hadn't been writing poetry for many years already because I had. I was in the elevator of my building and said to myself...why not call yourself a poet now? I guess I felt that I actually had enough skills by that time to indulge myself the honor of calling myself a poet. The YWA however...is much more audacious in this situation. They fall into a group of poets and voila, I am a poet. I dress like a poet, act like a poet and before you know it, people are calling me a poet.

It doesn't work that way. A poet is special...really special. Yes, they do invent themselves but not out of thin air. In her own words, this poet admits that standards can not or should not or will not apply:

"If someone, anyone, calls it poetry, then it’s poetry. After that we can argue about whether or not it’s interesting or fun or effective or risky…"

Well..that leaves the poor critic in a bit of a conundrum then doesn't it?

The good thing about the internet however is that we can formulate an interview with a poet without the poet even being there by pulling in various comment (found objects) streams and analysing them for indications of poetic prowess, poetics (as in the study of/practice of), and instances where the poet has self disclosed when probably they ought to have remained quiet so that their upcoming book might actually get a fair shake outside of their own self indulgent poetry talk that all poets in the beginning of their "careers" do in the bathroom mirror. Ms. Graham discussing Terminal Humming:

"1) I wanted to write about how much employment and bureaucracy suck and 2) I wanted to write about how women and men interact. 3) I also wanted to really question my own emotional investment in these two cultural institutions--employment and romance--and I wanted to do it in a way that was as honest as possible. Finally, 4) I felt that none of the social and professional discourses I knew were sufficient enough to do this. I knew I'd need to play with everything, with words, sound, images, space, source, syntax, etc."

Careful. This might read:

1. I needed a job and don't like to work 2. I want to write about the only things that do interact in human language i.e. girls and boys 3. I honestly want to combine romance and employment as a poet rather than steal for a living 4. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up and like to use more than just scissors and glue when I actually find out what that (a job) is.

Ms. Graham goes on to describe how she writes poems:

"Making the poem is a process of finding the boundaries of those concerns and edging them in different ways to see what happens."

Nothing like a blindfolded dart thrower you know. Experts might engage in that and call it automatic writing. Novices however that engage in that are just foolish.

"All of that sounds very heady. Oh well. I agree with Yvonne Rainer that "the mind is a muscle." Here's a list of some of my feminist icons: Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Colette, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Yvonne Rainer, Sophie Calle, Yoko Ono, Kathy Acker... "

I'm so glad that Yvonne Rainer believes that the mind is a muscle. Actually, the mind isn't a muscle. Not even close. The mind is a series of complex neural circuits and it functions as a receiver for input from other body parts. The mind is encased in the skull and actually has no literal connection to the world. It is a dark, silent, taste-free, odor free environment that when it is operated on, doesn't require anesthesia because it can't even feel itself and if it did, it would need another brain to interpret the signal. That's what the brain is.

Ms. Graham's blog is here...and apparently wasn't much used until Terminal Humming came along.

http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2009/05/mind-is-muscle-by-k-lorraine-graham.html

There's another angry young woman
signing a proclamation, another
type of order bent on chaos
organizes itself into a Breck Girl
because things are what they are
underneath it all, under the illusion
of the titles popping up
like crop circles.

The tiresome act of living
coupled with living itself
combined with the truth that
is
out
there
invisible to the naked eye
available to a select few
who have been informed

this isn't for everybody,
don't try too hard lest
you break your neck trying.

Yet one more tupperwarewastebasket of soiledpantyliners discovered by archeologists

K Silem Mohamed prefaces the tired old-fashioned essay which seconds as a book of poems thusly:

"The poems in Terminal Humming often take the form of an unregulated swirl of voices, as though from different sectors of some public space filled with furtive private dramas ... kind of like a humming terminal. Pronouns shift from singular to plural with breakneck suddenness, so that the speaker seems to be continually teleporting outside of her own embodied situation and observing its multiplication into disparate scenarios. This description makes it sound as if it could come off as a certain type of tired postmodernist "interrogation of the self," but it's much livelier than that. The emphasis is less on states of awareness than on unique actions and constellations of events--a continually shifting mise en scene for an unspecified production. From "An Attempt to Unleash Inner Badness Ends Thus" "

...and we are treated to an excerpt of boring feminist "post modernist" if you will claptrap.

Are you serious Mr. Mohamed? Are you really serious? Has this stuff gone to your head and have you actually read Howl? Or Whitman? Or let's be fair and say El Bishop?

This isn't good poetry and it isn't even good feminism if such a thing actually exists as something that is separate from its root cause, which, if addressed, annhilates it's own reason to exist. This is generational and evolutional commercialism complete with product placement that astounds anyone who has ever read a fantabulous book known as the Liar's Club in which dippity-do plays a cameo role....





One of my problems with quasi feminism and the quasi feminist generation that we know exists today is that it is a parody of the actual product known as feminism and even more importantly, PERSONAL feminism that is not only land locked but uninformed and exploitative of the process. This generation of poets, particularly the Girlesque (not Nada of course cuz she is way smarter than all of that and way older)...is that they don't know the history of the National Geographic that El wrote of so eloquently as she attended to one of those old days types of dentist office visits that your aunt might take you to. And marvel at the boobies...it was extraordinary!

They've no clue and worse, they've no solution because they do not understand the root causes of human error and specifically, male error. Male error is everywhere NOW and throughout time, as we examine and exhume the remains of previous generations who were more pro woman and less pro woman...we might be surprised to find out that we live in one of the most male dominated and male messed up eras of time.

Just talking about it isn't enough in my estimation and this book so obviously does more of the same. Blah blah blah and here I am. Jello is as Jello does you know!

But you know...maybe that's her point. And maybe she doesn't know it as the poet. Who knows and who can tell from the excerpts I have thus far read.

It appears to be another tiresome and in that, genuine feminist manifesto and gosh...those just aren't that rare nor is this writing indicative of anything particularly new or worth the five bucks it would cost me to find out.

http://aerialedge.com/TerminalHumming.htm


Or you can spend your time and money wisely and at the same time, investigate the problem of feminism by purchasing this:

"The Liars' Club" deserves its wide audience. Karr is a shrewd, plucky and deeply observant storyteller, and she expertly spins out the details of her family's life in small-town Texas in the 1950s. Her mother was a kind of "Bohemian Scarlett O'Hara" whose wild streak (and seven marriages) shocked Karr's neighbors; a devoted parent, she would also be subject to destructive rages and psychotic episodes. Her father was a brawling oil worker, a generally taciturn man who came most fully alive when he told stories, spinning out whoppers with a group of men called "The Liars' Club." Karr's greatest achievement, though, is her ability to climb inside her own 8-year-old cranium. She evokes the landscape of a preadolescent mind with such exactitude -- fights, fears, petty jealousies -- that "The Liars' Club" stands as one of the best books ever written about growing up female (or growing up, period) in America. "

http://www.salon.com/may97/karr970521.html

I suggest the latter and then, if you like...read this boring little treatise for comparison's sake alone.

San Pantaleone Sees Anne Sexton On The Corniche In Beirut

Becoming a parody of oneself is not so bad when you figure everything is a bit fetish, the tickling tease of the ego." - Dr. Soandso, 1990, Commencement address, Bryn Mawr: "The history of stereographic photos revealing ladies' bloomers and the moral controversies of our time."

Oh that divine itch!

The fuel of the fire, man
-the fractional distillation
-the rising to the top
-the sparkling rumination.

Oh that jet fuel!
How it makes us fly!

A system of clockwork,
spins its spine,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
ferris wheel and gypsy
in our hokey hoboken
on the boardwalk
lit up in the dark,
the sea is waiting
to see under her skirt
her frantic nipples
and her eyes so alert!

Our Hurly Gurly of Lunatic Park.


According the the National Organization for Women (NOW), here are some statistics about violence against women in the mostly arreligious vis a vis Christian Free World aka The West aka USA, which is of course a Non Muslim country and in a state of Jahaliya (ignorance):

In 2005, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner.1 That's an average of three women every day. Of all the women murdered in the U.S., about one-third were killed by an intimate partner.2

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes crimes that were not reported to the police, 232,960 women in the U.S. were raped or sexually assaulted in 2006. That's more than 600 women every day.6 Other estimates, such as those generated by the FBI, are much lower because they rely on data from law enforcement agencies. A significant number of crimes are never even reported for reasons that include the victim's feeling that nothing can/will be done and the personal nature of the incident.7

Young women, low-income women and some minorities are disproportionately victims of domestic violence and rape. Women ages 20-24 are at greatest risk of nonfatal domestic violence8, and women age 24 and under suffer from the highest rates of rape.9 The Justice Department estimates that one in five women will experience rape or attempted rape during their college years, and that less than five percent of these rapes will be reported.10 Income is also a factor: the poorer the household, the higher the rate of domestic violence -- with women in the lowest income category experiencing more than six times the rate of nonfatal intimate partner violence as compared to women in the highest income category.11 When we consider race, we see that African-American women face higher rates of domestic violence than white women, and American-Indian women are victimized at a rate more than double that of women of other races.12

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that the cost of domestic violence in 2003 was more than over $8.3 billion. This cost includes medical care, mental health services, and lost productivity. 14

Smoke and Flood

Look around there near the place
where I smoke and smoke,
just keep smoking and people
walk right up
and say you have to just quit
this dirty habit and I
just look out and think
about their habitual ignorance
that woman who killed her kids
and nieces and two other people
and hey, there's this really green
grasshopper sitting on the ashtray
which is filled with nicotine
tainted rain.
He has one very long antennae
I mean it is really long
like a hair and just noticing
how the bubbles appear in the puddles
in the grass from heaven
mineral charms casually dropping
by and a dragonfly
catches me by surprise
and then my boss calls me on my cell
are you still here?
Sure. She comes out to join me
such an honor, beautiful woman
cranky blonde not a blonde moment
in her and she says that was just
brilliant that thing I wrote
this morning about anolingus
and anorectal gonococcol esoterically
speaking and think
I'm a writer you know,
I write. All the time
but she wouldn't want to hear that
wouldn't understand
but it was indeed brilliant
full of words
so full of things
that don't touch me at all
clinical data is all it is
just stuff not like
that one that got canned
by the UN, he's a Dakik
his wife says life
has been so miserable
with the Dakiks
end of times and all
in the morning they believe
and by nightfall
they're heathens
but no
my boss wouldn't understand
about the time that it takes
to get from Sodom to Gomorrah
or the rationale
behind the missing bone
in the back
that got us upright
or the lie
of the transfiguration, no
and a few hours later on 80
I start yelling into
the cell to my sister,

It's Lordsburg!
You wouldn't believe it
it's just great, just wonderful
just like the rain that hit us
forty years ago and the cars all
lined up on either side of the flooded
road, stopped, not going anywhere
it was getting dark
Dad opened the door and walked up to the edge
rolled up his pants
we were all eyeballs and knuckles
at the dashboard
thinking,
will he make it, will he?

He got in there up to his ankles
and before you knew it
everyone filed right on through,
right on by
and the night took hold.
Should I say, this is true
about everyone I know?

Ward I Ken Budge, Ward I Boyd Nicholl, Ward III Bennie Scott, Mayor W.J. "Jack" Porter,
Ward III Anna Cline, Ward II Luche Giacomino, Ward II Ray Rodgers


Hard to believe that I am part of Bisbee Royalty. Go figure. My dad would be rolling in his grave if indeed he hadn't been cremated. Funny thing though, Jack usually never tolerates a photo. Like me. We just don't like them much. Old Bennie Scott...I've been hearing that name since I was knee high to a gracehoper and I have no idea why. Boyd up there....ah we used to pal around the photo circuit and artsy fartsy loop. Luche, heh...my bee hived girls soft ball coach...she'd be out there with that wonderful do and telling us to kick some ass. And she still is an asskicker par none. I don't know the others at all and it's probably just as well...they don't know me either.

Jack & Fish

Everything happened suddenly, Jack surprised.
Jack? Jack surprised. Jack handsome.
Jack in the front seat, Jack driving.
Jack like father, Jack like Grandfather.
Jack like all Jacks. Jack of all trades
and Jack of all exiles. Jack of the St. Louis Arches.
Jack of hippy hiking across the land of Jacks.
Jack of Sailor Suits. Jack of smiles.
Jack. Just Jack that day and John, somewhere else.
Some other altar smoking cigarettes perhaps
in the tent. How did she catch that? Jack said.
No one knew. As big as her arm. As long as her pony.
Her two ponies, Apaloosa and Pinto. Those
ones they all dream of at certain times.
Come here little fishes. She said come here
little fishes, big ones too. I'll get rid of you!
Or, I'll let you go, or you will get away.
But for now, I'll catch and pull you in.
Jack pulled it in. Jack sliced the trout and guts
with his Jack Knife. Jack, just jack all over.

R.E.M. - Sweetness Follows lyrics

Muslim Versus Non Muslim: 1 to 0, bottom of the seventh inning:

Jewish Scriptwriter and Pro Israel Zionist from New York City and long time poster to one of the message boards I have frequented for....oh...about fifteen years now (between kickouts...the most important kickout being the one in which folks didn't know that the message board was owned and operated by a member of the Rothschild family)....posts this:

Muslim woman to be flogged in Malaysia over beerBy JULIA ZAPPEIKUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- An Islamic court in Malaysia has sentenceda Muslim woman to be flogged with a rattan cane for having a beer ina nightclub, a court official said Tuesday.It is rare for a woman in Malaysia to be sentenced to caning -- apunishment usually reserved for men in various crimes ranging fromrape to bribery. It is generally done by specially trained officialsat prisons.Part-time model Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno was sentenced Monday tosix lashes and a fine of 5,000 ringgit ($1,400) for consumingalcohol, said a Shariah High Court official who declined to beidentified because he was not authorized to make public
statements. More:

<http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2009/07/20/D99IM9MO0_as_malaysia_caning_for_beer/index.html>

In other news, a NON MUSLIM woman in North America kills her own children, herself, and her own three nieces and still yet, two other people in a head on collision after getting stoned and drunk and hopping into her mini van:

A mother drank vodka and smoked marijuana while taking a vanload of children home from a weekend camping trip that ended in disaster when she went the wrong way on a highway and crashed into an SUV, killing eight people, police said Tuesday.Diane Schuler, who died along with her 2-year-old daughter and three nieces in her red minivan, had more than 10 drinks of alcohol in her system and a high level of the main ingredient in marijuana, authorities said. A broken 1.75-liter bottle of Absolut vodka was found in her wrecked minivan, police said.The revelations from the 36-year-old Long Island woman's autopsy helped explain how the woman her family called "an accomplished working mother who always put her children before any other priorities" wound up driving the wrong way for nearly two miles on a suburban parkway before slamming into the SUV.

Oh, and she also had six more units of undigested vodka in her stomach at the moment she died...what a way to go...a flogging might have saved her and her family from this much larger DISGRACE. Man...it could have been me that day in Khaldeh...

http://intervention911.blogspot.com/2009/08/drunk-driving-tragedy.html

Notes about now

Waiting patiently for Ogden in the mail, just received The AlKoran by Geo. Sale 1891 edition which was a church copy donated by one Mrs. Poore and El Bishop in Life! (ah Fred Tarr for the Life!) and Adonis Understanding Arabic Poetics ought to be coming along soon plus oh gosh...think it is actually something by that nutty professor Ashbery. Or is it bury? The AlKoran cost me thirty bucks and if you ask me, that was a real steal and the rest?

All of them no more than two bucks apiece and hardbacks.

Says alot doesn't it?

Plus I have a big fat book of Supplications coming in from the orient on the midnight express in about two days. It will smell like the bookstores in the Levant which typically smell like turkish and dust. I won't be getting any seeds for Loofah sponge squashes but oh well! They probably wouldn't grow here anyway as my father in law always told me they had to grow near sewage waters. Drat.

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, photo by Sarah Melanie Lopez

Atelectasis

between winter &
watermelon
a
chequering bottom
pool, swimming
to dream
in castlists
no name
shocks and fevers
hostage dramas.

looking down just like a Pieta then
up
for planes
for birds
for kites
or stars,
airs.
tempt me.

still hurts
to breathe
wondering
wondering
why why why

the corpse
of djinn,
the old families
inside lizards,
which day it was
he got in.

away ago
through an eye
plucked
gutted
a spiritual cousin
name of splinter
stopped
in the meat
of orbits,
lodged

a piece of bramble.
you tiny things.
you tiny societies.
you tiny tin-toothed.
buzzard keepers.
curs. bunch of curs.
no magic
nor curses left.
pockets dry.
amulets useless.
natural causes
might amaze you.
There might
be a stumbling.
a deflation.

What is Zionism? This question has always haunted me. Truly haunted me that supposedly intelligent and educated people in this country have literally no idea what Zionism is, how it is defined or where it actually happens. Even though it is in the news every single day.


Find more videos like this on Palestinian Mothers

The Uncertain Law of Certainty

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. -Degas


In the miscellaneous list
of the dark, the colors
although mute
must all still be there.
The dark sides of the planet
wait to shower us
with primrose and satin,
with faces

all the color of clay,
how so?

Colonies of crimson
permute the agony
of decay into rust
and true white
in the back alley of
treachery and art.

He sketched girls
on brown paper bags
to accentuate the curly
ambiguity of their hair
with exact strokes.

This is the mysterious
dark side of the earth
over the morning
as birds quicken
midst the leaves
and float into one
particular sillhouette.

The independent prostrate
shadow kneels steady
near the prostrate and content
moon, shallow on the surface
deep in reflection, distant
lonely cousin of the sun,
the sun created as a proof for it all.
Beware, observare.

A helicopter descends at dawn
on the hospital up the street
and changes all their lives,
out of thin air a dusky bird
hits the glass
she commits adultery
the stories ex post facto
all make sense now,
her hesitation on Friday
before, her head tilted
to the left.
We met him years ago
now he lives here.
Snake, skunk, wolf
on the way down,
wolf, skunk, snake
on the return.
This broken heart
keeps breaking.

http://bookforum.com/booklist/4091

Flarf is a box of choclates you know.

Oh man....David Meltzer....from the rockpile site that Micheal Rothenberg sent me but I was just too busy to check the emails lately....haha. Great jazz, great readings, wonderful Meltzer from the days of yore...those two. David and Micheal...Buddy Flick Poet Lives for sure. I so have a soft spot for Poet Buddy types of things.

http://www.meltzerville.com/1958/1958.htm That's where you'll find the awesome readings.

The actual Meltzerville site is here:

http://www.meltzerville.com/index.htm

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Free Courtney Bisbee

http://www.justice4courtney.com/

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!

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.