Ode Called Where
(For those this week who have gone there)

Where do the birds go to die?
There should be great stacks,
whole pyramids of bird corpses, and others
pyramids of different kinds corresponding
to the likeness of all of them, the animals
all the sea of things that breathe,
there they are somewhere and somewhere.....
They go there to sleep in that eternity,
a statue place where monuments cover
the avenue in shade and formula, the girl
with a hoop runs towards that point
following the shadows she has learned
by touch, the man with a tall hat tipped slightly,
avoids his journey by standing like that, an arc
made of bird feathers on the cloth of bird skin
where they've all gone to simply be, flattened
into the thought that light is transparent
as much as the flight of where they go.
Watch how they go there all the time, watch
through the trees,
the descent,
the vanishing.


**Michele Canty of the US writes of a young moderator of "Shia Chat" who suddenly collapsed from heart attack at age ?21. Here in Beirut, a woman only two years older than myself died suddenly (the same day) after arriving to the ER at the American University of Beirut complaining of a "stomach ache". She is survived by one son and her husband. And this is for anyone else, on any given day of any given month that goes there. This poem is based on my favorite painting (and everyone else's) by Giorgio DeChirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street.

Death is the only democracy.

May they all rest in perpetual peace and freedom.

Yusuf Ali: O ye of Faith! Say not (to the Apostle) words of ambiguous import, but words of respect; and hearken (to him): To those without Faith is a grievous punishment.

Zohurul Hoque: O you who believe! do not say Ra'i-na, rather say: Unzur-na, and listen. And for the Unbelievers there is a painful punishment.

T. J. Irving: You who believe, do not say: "Herd us,"; and say [instead]: "Watch over us," and [then] "Listen!" Disbelievers will have painful torment

T.U. Hilali-M. Khan: O you who believe! Say not (to the Messenger Peace be upon him ) Râ'ina [] but say Unzurna (Do make us understand) and hear. And for the disbelievers there is a painful torment. (See Verse 4:46)

M. Pickthall: O ye who believe, say not (unto the Prophet): "Listen to us" but say "Look upon us," and be ye listeners. For disbelievers is a painful doom.

M.H. Shakir: O you who believe! do not say Raina and say Unzurna and listen, and for the unbelievers there is a painful chastisement.

http://www.qurantoday.com/BaqSec13.htm

My bad. The word is Unzurna. Heard that?


.....butting my cigarette out on the ground, my heel grinding into it as I casually glide away to FEED MY DOG. Vicious.

Iranian Yankee in Byzantium, a modern fable.

It was a fine day for an excursion. Me on my own and able to take the fine trains that always run on time in Istanbul. We were there for a C=O=N=V=E=N=T=I=O=N of business minded individuals, the New World Order types and all. I wasn’t invited to those thank the Locomotive of the Lord (another poet's words, not mine), thank that! No, I, like all ‘business wives’ was allowed to hook up with one of the other poor sods left behind in hotel rooms, or, I could take some sort of flower arranging lessons in the hotel mezzazine with the older European crowd that usually claim to have lived in Zanzibar. So I decided to Hoboken it down into Istanbul proper. I’d been there before to Istanbul, to all the gala rug shows and tea parties about ten years before when we had that awful crash near the Hittite Hideouts.

What I wanted to do was trot on down to that Topkapi Palace. Ah. One could stay in there for days and not get enough of it. Wonderbar. I took a notebook (so unlike me to do that sort of thing) and make some sketches to remind me of the visuals (like that horse in a painting which had a human face, spooky man!).

Of course, that secret policia fellow was on my trail and met me as I disembarked from the Oriental Express which is filled with more and more hijaby clad women than you can shake a stick at. They can’t attend public universities dressed like that you know so instead they ride trains to the textile factories there. There are RULES if you know what I mean and make sure if you ever go there, DO NOT MENTION KAMAL ATATURK’S RESEMBLANCE TO COUNT DRACULA. If you do, the thugs will follow you all over creation and to kingdom come. And don’t have a car accident or they’ll take you to their secret prisons to cry over the fact that the portrait of KAMAL ATATURK on the wall looks just like COUNT DRACULA. Armenians my butt. They’re all over the place here buddy, Byzantium which is a wide area encompassing some of the best real estate between the Sahara and the Gobi. They usually speak five to seven languages and some of them even live in France! Imagine the horror of that diaspora! But that is what they call, “off topic”.

So anyways, I took my time and meandered through all the tools of ancient warfare, the kitchen utensils of the ancients, the special clocks and family albums until at last I sat down outside the HAREM to make up my mind whether or not I wanted to pay the extra ten bucks it costs to go in and see how the real burqa clad crowd suffered…such exotic excesses there if you know what I mean. Diamond encrusted couches and pillow cases made of something a bit nicer than percale.

This kid was sitting out on the bench near me and I struck up a conversation with him. You know, kids will generally say the darnedest things and I usually prey on them like potato blight. Little spuds. So I asked him where he was from and he started to look really scared all of a sudden. I thought to myself, Aha, I guess the secret policia got hold of you too. He just wouldn’t spill the beans. I was about to get out my rubber hoses and smack him around a little (legal in some policia states nowdays, even if yer a kid) when all of a sudden his family showed up and eyed me real mean like. Like, What are you doin’ to my kid here?

Nice people but terribly nervous. When they told me they were from New York via Iran I said, Oh yeah. I would be too, nervous that is. Yer probably nervous ALL THE DAMN TIME.

So I went on and on as I usually do about how our Hezbollah was doing such a fine job of liberating our people down in the boondocks. You know how it is. Loud mouthed naïve that I tend to be.

They just looked at me and shook their heads. The dad looked me SQUARE in the eye and said, “We’re Jewish.”

Damn if that didn’t make me feel like an ass. But after we got that out of the way, we had a good time for five or ten minutes swapping tales of the Orient. It was a good day all in all. And then I took the train home. What a nice ride.

The Tavern, sometime in the early '80s.

One of these days I'll have to search for the pic of Ginsberg in profile, the gothic stained glass window behind and him in profile. It's a classic but I'm typically lazy. Don't even know how to use blogger you know? I think that old dude's name was "Nacho".

Don Schaeffer

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Schaeffer%20poems.htm


"..And the earth is still
a mass of worms. "

For five minutes of Don go here:

http://thejeunessedoree.libsyn.com/

Don, the hardest working guy in pobiz.

Rough Music and Violating The Norms

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Mar2006/barsamian0306.html

Well yes. I'll say so.

Post deleted due to length. Oh, and defamation. I wouldn't want to defamate other people's characters.

The Twisting Sleeps

Edna stated once as she sat
in the semicircular booth
at Sambo's drinking a cup of tea:
you don't want to dream anymore.
She meant, when you are old or wise
or like me, you get to that point.

After the hounds of Ha'wab they sent
a small envoy and then a second, how
many more would come into the fray,
how many more loose ends to tie up?
There are no reasons for these recurrent
troubles, recurrent themes. There
is no reason to be forced into para-
trooping fresh out of the boot camp
of dreams where the mess is full
of ice cream machines bowling alleys
and Las Vegas lighting.
There is no reason for the envoy
to buy trinkets to take home
(standing there as they did once before)
and certainly no reason the bus
felt like an F-15 but mostly,
there was no reason for the envoy
to pay a second visit at the end
to remind the dreamer there would be
no helmut nor any special lace-ups
for one of the jumpers. Sri Lanka
or wherever we would be landing
is certainly a jungle of the worst type
and we drove by the best forests on our way,
green and dry, beds of needles, familiar.
One last look before you head off.
It is the woman from Ghana who saves
everything from falling. It is her lost
son and the memory of her slavery
which saves you. Blink, wake up,
get out, avoid the fall by missing the jump.

A snapshot of me fleeing the erudite commentary of a vague experimental numbnuts who, like George Carlin once remarked, "teaches your kids the wrong words for things."

Good old Bill Porter, Abu Jack

You know, our father was a Monotheist.

He only said the word God once.

Ode to the Fight

We invented kickboxing, the ethical kind
where if you came home bloodier than the other guy
you weren't treated as well as the Athenians.
You took off your glasses and handed them over
to a brother or a best friend (if they weren't
your opponent), then the lions leapt
out of their cage and hair scattered
in the air while the crowd
was already thumb upping, not in your direction.
I'm reminded that if I were born a boy
they would have named me Daniel.
Sometimes, I wish it had been the case
but usually, I won anyway.
Ephesus a far away shore, the Bosphorus Blue.

Bound to Happen

I thought I was just pretending
all along, saying well, that's
bound to happen and it does and I say
well, that's bound to happen.
We all know that when we leave
the room, the room disappears.
We've known it since we were born
and sometimes we talk about it
with strangers knowing full well
that once they leave
all secrets follow
into the ether or the dark,
same thing and who can tell
time as it passes
when you are asleep,
the clocks looking you over?
It is a strange statistic
and one I am fond of until
it comes to the war zones. concentration camps.

My Drink With BJ


http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/206373

http://stinkylink.blogspot.com/

The stinkiest link in town.

What Silliman Sees

Lou's Nirvana

http://parts-lilac.blogspot.com/

From Sister Cities:

"They thought I was a tire burning.
They thought I was a Marine barracks."

Highly recommended listening, podcast central:

The Diamond At The End Of Time.

Don't miss it. Or the rest but don't miss the Diamond. EXOTIC mofo Shakespearian rant schemes combined ala Carerra. Damn Fine. Got the mojo blues? Haybaby, you no haybaby. You no more than a darling of the damn white man. Don't fear. Help is on the way. Palabra Cadabra. Es muy bien, es muy muy bien.

Poet rescue knows no gender or racial bias. Poet rescue, dial:




thejeunessedoree.libsyn.com/

Recordings solicited.

Muqawama Central. Colonialism. Lectures about same. Yawn is right. Time is short. It doesn't wait for your talent to show up but it does bypass you when your talent moves into the past. Poems are pictures to me. They must have balance. They must have some implications. They must have some depth of field consciously selected for its contradictions. They must have composition that makes some sort of sense. They must appeal to the dumbest person in the dumbest ways and to the intellect of the dumbest persons in the smartest ways. Furthermore they should scare the crap out of a paranoid person smart or dumb or of middling intelligence.

This dime-store effort isn't much and the back story of it is....the cop down in the "round-about" hahaha just like the traffic circle in Lowell, Bisbee which had its old name unceremoniously dumped to favor the more exotic European look: roundabout. In Riyadh we called them "death circles". But back to the game. I drove a bit further down to take that shot of a blind Palestinian monk's banner which is juxtaposed near a Coke sign and that of our very own Nabih Berri, another warlord of great renown (Coke is Imperialism they used to say around here but now they drink it, no more black marketeers like Fred Tarr the trucker of the ancients). I stood down from my mighty Range Rover (white as is usually the case with stallions) and whaddya suppose happened next? A nice French Colonial Attired officer walked towards me to get my phone number and a bit of INFO. Info like that guy who was getting INFO from me on the hill in Aramoun one day and pulled his Shia Rock out of his pocket to prove he was a Shia Info Taker (like yea right, all us Shia's carry our Sutra in our pockets nowdays, a kind of ID or something, not!). I, a bit miffed, started fumbling with my latches and locks to get back into my stallion, my Trojan Horse (at least he thought so) and whaddya think happens next? Another person of whatever designation, pokes his head through the blinder space (passenger side window) of my mount to give me a piece of his mind and get his INFO. Scared isn't the word for it. I wasn't even that scared when I went to the Police Station in Turkey and cried over Kamal Ataturk's strange resemblance to Count Dracula and drank such lovely Apple Tea....I was indeed scared. Thank god for automatic locks and latches. Shut down. Drive on. And watch that black Mercedes follow in the Rear View Mirror for a while. Stopping all the while to take poems in a camera at the various rest stops where the youngins are commemorated. He finally left, my companion. He finally gave up the chase when he knew it was impossible to go unnoticed. Somewhere around C'ana, the place of the mighty massacre of '96 (Grapes of Wrath, Israeli Massacre at UN depot Southern Lebanon). Why are people so confused about all of this? Because they don't think. They simply don't think. They ASSUME. And that is what good poets make use of. Assumptions. And time doesn't wait for you to make a decision, come to a conclusion.

Artistic decisions are usually best made at a fast pace with little use for the intellect and more use for the eyes. The eyes tell it like it is and the heart guides a person to a fondness for certain beauties, certain masterpieces of society. Not a control of the Language which is never fully understood, never fully utilized and certainly, never fully invited.

It just come on in.

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.

http://www.blogger.com/publish-comment.do?blogID=24698014&postID=114325294773855278&r=ok

UDA

Beggar at the Gates
Originally uploaded by radiann.

This Mexican man is waiting to attempt to enter the US for the third time through some of the most dangerous desert in Southern Arizona. When I asked if I could take his photo he got up and walked to the wall behind him and stood for an ID type photo because that is what he thinks the Americans do. It is how his photo was taken by the border patrol who caught him and took him a hundred miles or more away from the location of his previous attempts. He lost all his possessions the first time that happened, including the photos of his wife and children for whom he makes this sacrifice. He is compelled to do this because NAFTA has made the economics of farming unprofitable for his employer and there is no work for him in his home. His wife and family are starving and they have bet everything they have on this attempt to get him into the US so he can do work no citizen will do -harvesting tomatoes and melons in California.