Carmen is a Cat

23.3.25

Delusion

Talking to my children this morning, the children that have seen three invasions, three escapes, three traumas.....well none of that can compare to this in Gaza. No but when it comes to tasting that bitter boneless cake we know exactly about the texture and flavor. Even Israel knows it well and have it as a creed: Never Again.

The one thing I hear often on the few newscasts that I pay attention to, so accustomed I've become to this ongoing problem that appears to descend from the battles of brutal Assyrian kings...I notice when they ask, "who is going to rule Gaza after this is over?"

I don't bother answering because afterall, it's a script and a TV screen. I have spent way too much time shouting at those actors who go home to their lakeside properties in windy cities with mass transit, arriving home to martinis and fettucine. Who are they to ask questions when it is the case that they work in front of butcher shops for the butcher selling knives? Why are they even asking? Do they expect a response or are they scheduled to give one?

It is no secret, I have the answer. Are they trying to pry it out of me? They know I know the answer, they stare at me all day feigning ignorance.

Memory. Memory is going to rule Gaza. It always has.

The Killing Shields

I listened to a phone call of an IOF soldier (assuming it is real) speaking in Arabic to warn a Palestinian family to get out as IOF is preparing to destroy their building. He begged the Palestinians to leave their building because there were children. The man simply said, "Kill us then" ..to that effect. I assume the bombing was carried out although it could have been faked but if it was faked, there's an enormous backfire in the logic. I'll elucidate.

I cannot begin to imagine (no, wait I can) being so dead inside, so exhausted, so impoverished that death even for my children is an acceptable choice. To just say, "I give up. I give up for them. I just give the hell up."

Because some people, usually people who have never been victimized to that extent, have bought into the human shield argument think that "surrounding yourselves with children as human shields" is proof that a victimizer should continue the insane act of torture and of murder. Victimizers who have never been subjected to emotional, physical, financial torture and abuse are able to say:

they deserve it....even the babies, toddlers, old women, teenage girls and boys, grandmothers, grandfathers, amputees, people in wheelchairs and I assure you, there are way more of them now than anything else

But wait. The decision to CONTINUE BOMBING EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE CHILDREN.... to not stop is the definition of premeditation

What about that? Is that not part of the question?

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The Heart of Darkness

Sometimes I want to write, "What's on your mind Meg" as if farcebook wants a real answer to the intricacies of an intellect. Mine or someone else's. The devil is in the details you know and certainly farcebook has little actual interest in "What's on your mind" and a voracious appetite for who you connect with.

I've an inkling, which is merely the tiny spawn of a squid (circa 1400 C. E.) that my connections on farcebook make little sense. Nor should they matter a whole lot to a Super Power like farcebook that blindly uses our freedom of speech to manufacture consent to everything from State Terrorism to human trafficking to gambling.

Atelectasis is an old poem and no doubt it can be understood by anyone who can read it. Atelectasis on the other hand might require at minimum a brief description of the word coined relatively recently (early 1800s). Atelectasis is a condition in which your lungs behave like a wetted and deflated balloon and fail to operate as designed. Our lungs generate a hell of a lot more than just breath. The lungs generate everything from whispers to screams:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

Just before the war, the infamous war of '06, I'd had a slight 'accident' of the vehicular variety resulting in some atelectasis and further on down the road, a courtesy ride on a boat called the USS Trenton. It led to this and that and the other thing because life is like that however, there are strands of 'it' this thing which we call life but really, it should be called something else alot less bland. Life is interesting more than the word itself and for me as a poet (which I am embarrassed to say such a thing), poems are like miniature versions of novels, great big episodes with chapters and pages but written in my own personal code. Once in a while I provide an illustration. I'd say Atelectasis is an illustration.

The poem Atelectasis is full on angry, hostile, desperate and mean. It is downright mean. Which I can be. I suppose we all can but in some people I find it difficult to imagine that they are ever mean. That is, until I find them on farcebook exhibiting their mean core, their alter ego that they either wish would go away or wish they could summon to defend themself when mired in human conflicts. On farcebook it is almost as if some are exorcising the devils within them, airing out their grievances as if that was how it is done. Reminds me of one Sister Josepha of the St. Patrick's Church convent.

Sister Josepha told us a story once. I was sitting in the first seat of the row and had to pee really bad as she launched into her horrorifying tyrade against the devil. Back then, we couldn't just go to the bathroom as a child does now. Oh no no no. You had to wait.

Sister Josepha related a story about her brother, a Jesuit priest of some sort. The Catholic Church used to have entire families of priests and nuns, dynasties of divinity so to speak. Her brother worked saving souls in some remote place in the jungle. He was summoned to give last rites to a man of particularly diabolical character. She told the tale in graphic detail and we looked with eyes wide open, ready to tip over in our seats as he took his entourage up a winding jungle road, dense and humid, into the home of said diabolical non-believer who was wasting away in some hut or another, of terminal cancer. Sister Josepha glared at us as she spoke of the odors emanating from the hut, odors that were virutually intolerable, disgusting, repulsive and beyond our barely emerging and so precious, intellectual imaginations (sixth graders). I imagined it must have been like the smell of fried cow liver which I hate and watching my mother savor it haunts me to this day.

As her brother lifted the crucifix to his lips and instructed him to kiss the cross she described a scene right out of The Exorcist (I hope we all are familiar with that episode in time). The man stuck his tongue out to wantonly lick the darn thing and it became fused with the metal, so much so that it had to be cut off after he died. Let me repeat: after he died. By that time of course I was ready to wet my pants and perhaps I even did. It is the stanza in the poem Ode to Seven:

St. Pat's let out at three

no one moved until

Sister Josepha left with her

cross-kissing Judas stories

hanging around her ankles

like worn out socks on a poor kid,

no one dared.

She was mean and luckily, farcebook had not been invented yet. At this point one asks, "I wonder what happened to her?" No profile pic, not a shred of evidence that she ever existed perhaps except to a few of us who remember her absolutely terrifying role in our lives traipsing back and forth through rain and shine to sit there and be terrorized by a nun. I assure you, she existed and is remembered. I digressed. Not even sure how I got this far down that road and through a jungle and into that hut.

"Mistah Kurtz—he dead"

Atelectasis

between winter &

watermelon

chequering bottom

pool, swimming

to dream

in castlists

no name

shocks and fevers

hostage dramas.

looking down just like a Pieta then

for planes

for birds

for kites

or stars,

airs.

tempt me.

still hurts

to breathe

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.

A trilogy of sorts:

Drone and Birdsong

-7.13.2024

Around the table

In Scranton tonight.

Here the fog rolls in

To ripen figs

I love you more

Each day

Says the king

Whispering sweetly

As the drone

Flits and shivers

between birdsongs.

I'm Sorry I Love You Said The King

-2019

The fog's already burned off.

He declares it is to ripen the figs.

I'd rather not say. Causality.

Miles and miles of tossed and torn plastics,

miles and miles of one after another.

Pharmacies next to butchers,

beauty shops alongside old tires.

Laborers, Syrian refugees.

There's just no plan, all so random

as if time has finally taken over and won.

Here in the wake at the back of the boat,

cancer is killing everyone.

One at a time by the dozens.

The post-coital run-off is in the gutter,

part animal and some of it fog,

the color of gray in hell.

The same ice cream truck interrupts the maghreb every day.

You can hear change falling

from

their

pockets

as they rise from the rugs-

the sky stops there,

holds down the putrid steam below

.....as night turns figs into fall.

What About Mars?

-before 2006

No more problems says the package

the cure came in, no more

warning labels and the price tag

no longer legible. It began

with flashy children and fast cars

then people started talking

about the leftover stuff

after the move out,

wondered what would happen

to the crystal ball and Japanese flag.

Where to put Mars now?

Whose house next?

Dear Whoever You Are,

Once again, I fell to sleep, eventually.

The amount of pain I felt was beyond

my tolerance for accepting it as 'just pain'

and rather, I believed it to be mental illness.

Things will never end will they?

But the part of you that is they

knew this, know this.

I wonder who is the teacher?

Is it you or the devil? In the morning

I wake to realization, that kind of nausea

which everyone knows.

It will be there for some hours.

It is a pattern we learn to live with,

not an old friend but a regular visitor.

A mailman or garbage collector.

The sadness arrives in the heart

inches up through the esophagus

to return to the stomach and ends up in the hands.

where it circles back into the heart and runs

the circuit until it is divested of the pertinent

electrons responsible for the distribution of grief.

Grief? The losses endured. The loss

of things no longer even there

to remember let alone to grieve.

Ancestors. They are there but no longer have names

we are two generations away from being strangers

in the diaspora of the dead.

Dear whoever you are, my question is this:

have you felt your skin on inside-out yet?

Liberation and Higgs-Boson

Liberation

“The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.” Cantos, LXXXI

My heart is broken

for the olives fallen

for the uncollected

displaced by now

bruised and rotten.

My heart is broken

for the wood

not burnt

to warm the weevils

that must have come.

There is a weight pushing

me down into the couch

I stand up and sit down

over and over all day

which stretches into

night, incredibly short

night. Cry baby cry

for all the next

Christmases and Birthdays

for all the women

you supposedly save

by warning them,

killing their husbands

and their sons.

The Higgs Boson

This is no ordinary fatique,

looking through the posts

about Fenton glass, microwave cookware

and sheets through a storm.

Through boxes and happy birthdays

to find footage of his funeral,

I am on a mission in space

hoping for a timestamp.

About the same time

they were carrying your father

from the house to the cemetary

you scalded yourself with a cup of boiling coffee.

I'd been warning you of such a mess

for a long time but you insist

on refusing condolences,

treasuring your sweet secret another day.

As you open the cash drawer

over and over tomorrow and the next

day and the next, please

think of the pain on your knee.

Think of the time laspe world

in which we live, in which

fathers and sons try their best

to run the experiment backwards.

I think a new widow reminds me

of a bride, I think your father

scolded you at a distance

last night as you screamed out.

Life is this super collider

and as they lifted his coffin

a bit too quickly, the atoms

and molecules rearranged your DNA.

Next to Ginsberg

-For Paul Johnson executed by US backed Al Qaeda operatives in Riyadh

I sat next to Ginsberg in the Sacred Heart,

saw King Fahed being ushered into the ER

wrapped in a pink blanket to disguise him,

he pee'd on my friend in the ICU.

Jack Nicholson ordered coffee from me once

at the Little America Truckstop in Flag,

a pack of cigarettes rolled up

in the sleeve of his black t-shirt

(then he started marrying waitresses).

I lived next door to a man that was

beheaded for building Apaches.

My husband ran into Gene Hackman at the Taj Majal

and Elvira let him encircle her for a picture

down in Atlanta at a convention.

Someone I know told me Goldie Hawn was a real bitch

in a five star hotel and Kurt was as handsome

as he was in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes

(which I mistakenly called, The Computer War Tennis Shoes)

and Steve Pearl told me the Dalai Lama would visit

the city park and I hoped to be able to pet him.

Somewhere in the Middle

There are words which tether

skin to silence, motors

code to scale in glow mode

from moment to monumental.

The three choices are

war, more war and surrender.

At eye-level robots

replicate below,

the above,

in galaxies, more galaxies

drag in

the dead horse

for a beating.

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Meg Swaid

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The Curious Case of F. Knight of Dead Peter Row as reported to one Lanny Muss, a dear old correspondent to the Miss regarding the nature of birthdays. As always in third person, somewhere between omniscient and limited, as was the style of her letters to dear old Lan:

Alas, a few minutes to herself, a grown-up MIss relates to you Mr. Muss, the story. One delinquent cat has taken her motherly perch on the shelf above and between the framed Valentine from 1927 and a photo of her eldest wearing a most daunting party dress, her mouth puckered up to blow perfect round bubbles into the air of that room on a birthday in an old miner's shack in the canyon belonging to the Miss's brother.

It occurred to her that Mr. L. Muss had been one of those old coots on the iron bench as she came to understand over time and after much communication that he was an experienced time traveler, so succinctly did he gather the truth of the details and portents once he had been reminded. If it wasn't for Lan's singular focus on Mr. F. Knight, the Fuller Brush salesman, seated dead center, five men to his right and four to his left, she wouldn't have grown so uneasy about Mr. Muss' fantastic ability to describe the situation seen in that odd old picture the Miss had presented to him the day before in her letter. Context can amount to long parables indeed. Clearly though, Mr. Muss required her to fill in the gaps for him out of curiosity and over the intervening years, she'd grown used to these odd bits and pieces showing up from time to time between the two of them. Mr. Muss and the Miss observed the etiquette handed down through centuries of correspondents but it was the case that occasionally one or the other had to add an additional piece to the ever growing puzzle of their connection, the one they agreed existed although neither knew why.

The Miss continued writing:

Mr. F. Knight was no stranger to her childhood, as he arrived punctually on the first Tuesday of every month to solicit her mother just after pay-day. He'd display his marvelous assortment of Fuller brushes...cleaning tools, grooming wares and fancy racks on which to hang coat brushes and shoehorns. Her mother had chosen a brush rack that held each instrument with horse head handles made of the best black polymer manufactured to date in 1969. No, F. Knight was not a stranger, he was a familiar.

Mr. F. Knight was an odd fellow who wore a golf cap, often mistaken for a beret when he turned it to one side or the other. His hair was thin and smooth and always clean. On his face was a perpetual knowing smile and he spoke with an intense familiarity that frightened the poor Miss and sent her out through the back door every first Tuesday to wait out his visit, to the landing with wisteria on the right, irises to the left and three drooping clotheslines above. She'd sit with her elbows propped on her pestle-shaped freckled knees for what seemed like an eternity until she heard the front gate close behind the salesman as he left. Often, she suspected he knew where she hid and was filled with terror lest he make a quick dash around through the neighbor's yard, up the wood planks that separated the two miner's shacks by no more than two feet and grasp her by the elbow and lead her off to wherever it was that he might. Yes! His face was the face of the Pied Piper and certainly, his smile derived itself from consuming the flesh of fragrant young girls and boys.

Years and years later, the Miss was wandering around the park after dark where the old men gathered in the mornings, as she was used to doing past evening-time so that she could question the trees and listen to the sounds of barking dogs after the people of the town had grown tired of picking up their mail and gossiping and shopping and trailing along slowly in a procession of cars up and down the one winding road through the old town....it was then that she could hear the details of the conversation, the conversations that few can hear.

The Miss continued:

It must have been April or August, one of those two most likely times of the year when extra-ordinary things occur and all at once she found herself face to face with Mr. F. Knight. The Miss had seen him about town now and then, smiling at her from small and great distances as he had reliquished his salesmen's tactics long ago. He had retired from the door-to-door business and kept to himself collecting monumental stacks of the dailies in his dingy little place up Subway. His only outings were to the iron benches at the park a half block away where he waited day after day, hoping to catch sight of something that interested him. Certainly he visited a barber shop too as all the men on the row did now and then. Kept himself clean and shaved.

All the years had not aged him in the least and his eyes still shone with that quality which she interpreted differently now that she was all grown up and had been tutored by the barks and breezes.

"When is your birthday?" he spoke without making any use of the perfunctory salutations which a stranger needs to make use of out of common courtesy. He knew, she knew...this was the moment of the delivery that had been prefaced for quite a long time, as described in her letter to Mr. Lanny Muss.

He stood over her, a streetlight created a halo round his head and darkened his face and without notice he gently lowered himself onto the wide shallow stairs in the center of the park and sat exactly two stairs up from the nearly mature Miss. Mr. F. Knight pursed his lips, rolled his eyes down and to the left, and raised one finger to his chin. "A nine. You are a nine. This means something very good indeed!" His face suddenly emanated a most brilliant light as he stated this curious fact and the Miss felt somewhat relieved that his satisfaction was so easy to administer. All it took was the giving of a birth date and the concealment of her fear of dark intentions, unworldly things proved to be nothing but girlish imagination.

"I'm an Adventist you know.." he went on without her asking, "..and a numerologist. Your number is quite high." He said a few things about God and dissappeared as quickly as he had shown up, leaving the Miss alone. The Miss never saw him again, his death was unnoticed save by a few and she was not privy to further news of him either good or bad.

Perhaps one day the Miss will relate the story of the Adventists who reached the 9th level in August 2001. Someone told her it might be important for you to know Mr. Muss.

Signed (just): Miss.

23.3.25

Liberation and Higgs-Boson

Meg Swaid

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