EPISTLE WHIPPED

This site has moved!

2007-02-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

Cuz I don't like Blogger anymore, I've moved my blog to wordpress. Too many restrictions here, and too much googlegod. Hasta.

If you want to follow this blog to wordpress go here: I hope you will join me...

Not dead, just different.

what we refuse is this

2007-02-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Most _______ _______ evidence for the ______ of the kitchenware postulate comes from the _____ of _______ verse. Not this verse nor this sunset will not do. This livingroom's a witness too. Question of doors or killers or examinations performed by strangers in a family tongue. What happens here? Chairs and tables weekend. Forces over vices times regret. A major component of "cold" is its function of apathy, and when telling; here we are again. Fascia y Fascia. So and because of I design. I have stripped my soul's coincidence to a blank verse's bone. Where? Did someone ask me. They asked me, and I had no answer. Are you? But there I was right there, and in the way. In the way a guesswork saplings up to the lowest cloud. In the way an elbow can be a knot of root -- when down here is reached for. And in a way, hiding from the soil of promise like I had a stake in it. Buried to the armpits in dirt road, country road, fibers gruesome in the ground toward the core. We are not patriotic anymore. Face down, nose shoved to ground, the clouds appear to laugh, fluffed up with gaudy greed. The city's birds don't land, but pass and song bright names of things unknown. Careful kid, replies the breeze. Get back inside. And in the corridor of this chasm cross your heart. spectral mirrors tag along--the orphan faces of all opposites--where no remorse is imminently clear. Life have we here, and we're the hex on it, and we're the brick and tentpole, and everywhere we are mistaken. So sadly mistaken for ourselves until we are.

a february so viola and blue gem

2007-02-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

The sun has come out, like a spring, and so there is a mood of bounce in the air. Or something, what would GGMarquez say? I just finished his new book Memories of My Melancholy Whores; “In my ninetieth year, I decided to give myself the gift of a night of love with a young virgin.” A good book to read on one's birthday. Mine just passed a few days ago, and so I am a year older. I am listening to the Fruit Bats and in the noisy background, through my wide open office door which floods with warm afternoon light and sucks in the crisp February air, the cryptic sound of some worldbeat hippy gig playing across the street at The Hut. It's some gem show deal, lots of bands, all day and night, flutes and bongos, me and the sun, and the fruit bats. I went for a walk on the Avenue. When I returned to Casa I realized that the three writers who have cars and are staying here at Casa, all rented red cars. All three are parked out front in a shiny red row. They match the sign and the paint of the window frames, it all looks as if it were planned. In a half hour a man who would like to decorate the front wall that faces the street with a mosaic tile construction will come to talk with me about it. He's going to donate it. What a life I live. Is everyone walking down the street living it too? This same life? I can't see how. I haven't written a new word in weeks...but here they are. Like a viola in my head, the strum of a gem, cacti eye, the gradation and...here comes Eduardo.

Waiting under a college night moon

2007-02-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

everything is romantic except you moon. even the oppressive music
of drunken college minded cries from over my roof
where i know you also shine, like you are now
down down and through the crowding
clouds, pathetic silver
clouds, and your light bounces
off the pool, touching what is blank
in this early morning dark.
i like that my cigarette smoke sees
you, and i see you the same
though tired to my core
i stay to wait, your famous
light a dull note filtered out
by all that is now.
Why do I feel sorry for you?
When I can do no more
damage to fate than you?

a yellow umbrella? Jan. ninetee(n)th: take one

2007-01-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

formula of a kind of prayer: iv

In choosing marriageable, harmonious _________, let us, bearing in mind the graphicable Laws of Rememberances, use ________ we can remember. _______ with vibration, avoiding the extremes of the obvious. Devil be damned. Our history is versatile, and a soft corroborator to our common good. ________ has advanced to the place of devolution where souls are desirous of _______. The rest will be decided by the co-workers; each harboring a characteristic of a church in his funny bone; each ______here to fore and demanding as all food. Such as much are at the height of attainment, saith _______. For there is no longer a Law of __________, and the National Philanthropic ministry has invention to thank for further going on their name. _______! We _______ the general store outcome, and embrace our brittle braid. We unbias our bosom of evangelism, hefty _____anti-science: we are as one as we are cloven. We regard _______, whose secretary-ship is as hungry as the brute’s technique is borrowed. _____ is a failure of lecture and medicine without regard. We accept how careful to the candle is its light. Just so. So _______; our present day caprice _____ to possess whatever pall in earnestness, corresponds with the deeps like a diary. _______ plus one and five is the number of adjustment to be made. We realize too much. A frank delimiting to score the heart by ultimatum. To be tenderer still, the separating singles ______ the completed ______, for a fortune. Let us then, vary the signatures, so the physical is judged by the intuitive. O atmosphere, please as _______well, and mental vaudvillary, also develop well your automations with ______. Arrange our flowers for progeny in future’s jar, on future’s hill. ______, O rebels, against destiny arrive, O rebels arrive on time. Like droplets moving down the outer pane (not of their own _______ ). Obedience to gravity; will you take after us, after us?

Weather or not there is terror...

2007-01-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

Has it been colder than normal here in Tucson? A good sum of my plants have been killed by the several nights of freeze. I could not cover them all. The rest of the world complains it's too warm. I live to live outside, and am already tired of the inside.

If you've mostly been reading about the globe's warmest December on record, or the fact New York City had its first December without snow since the 1890's, the visual media is now catching up in a hurry. As a logical way to tell the story, Stern offers a 15 page photo gallery juxtaposing scenes in specific places this January as compared to last. Some photos from Munich. - bagnewsnotes.com.

The New York Times has this interesting article about Greenland too...

I just finished reading a book called The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, so these things are on my mind. These things, and human nature. The sky, the trees, bodies of water, the road connecting the shorelines. How cold it could be, may be, if. The book reminded me of the truth of what terrible creatures we are when reduced to ourselves without equipment, food and shelter and other life. Without our trappings. Without our reasons to live. It even sounds flat to the ear of the man who can not imagine it. Terrible creatures. Terrifying. It is true, as I was duly warned, that this book was deeply depressing. But I still recommend it. It doesn't have much to do with global warming though.

Here's a good review I found online.

Rilke's "The Panther", and Embarrassment

2007-01-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

The other night Koosman (oops, Koosmann) recited this Rilke poem to me in German. After she had me good and mesmerized, we sat quiet a moment, and then she translated it for me. Tears swelled, and I let them. (I know this poem of course, but had I heard it before?) I paste it here, to connect to another topic on my mind lately, later in this post.

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

* * *

I read it and read it over. Still it gives me an urge to weep. I don't of course. I am too busy to weep. To weep is embarrassing.

Another poet friend of mine, Arpine, said to me the other day over coffee..."It is embarrassing to wait for Godot." I laughed outloud, but it wasn't exactly because it was funny. We had gone to see the Rogue Theatre's production of Jean Genet's The Maids a few nights before, and were still processing our enjoyment of it--how painful it was. How we loved the painfulness, and how silly, ultimately, we felt we were. We sometimes get so excited we look at each other and want to cry through our stiff smiles. Somehow, this led to a conversation about how difficult it was to articulate to another such sensitive type feelings of heartbrokeness. How we were kind of waiting for Godot together when we met to play our poet roles together. On our "poetry dates".

We were discussing presence. Presence with friends, with each other, and being lucid and available. To do so often necessarily leads to embarrassment. To be in public with another. To be public with them. You can not remain private and truly be with another. You can, however, pace in a cage in broad daylight in great crowds of others (I came to think of this after Koosmann recited the poem above to me later.) Arpine also said, "There is an embarrassment that we need to feel in order to connect." This resonated with me, and still does. This led to us talking about the ways in which we buffer ourselves from that embarrassment, like drinking, or taking drugs, or distracting ourselves in other ways. I touched the wall and told her, I know this is here. But I also know it is dimensional in ways the sober eye is often too lazy to see. I like seeing the other ways in which this wall is here, I said. She asked me, why? Why do you want to see it any other way than the way it is? I want to feel the pain of it, she said. She meant, the way it is, most obviously a wall, most accessibly, most physically and visibly--is painful.

Another poet I know, but haven't asked permission to reveal (so I won't lest I embarrass him) talked about that "feeling" phenomenon months ago. He wrote: "The answer is not in language, it is in numbers: do you feel? If yes, then, in all communities, rise up and say: I feel. If you do not feel, if you feel nothing, then lay your apathy down for those that feel. This is not the time for standing aside (I know and feel this)."

The idea of embarrassment is a truly remarkable one. To be embarrassed is an act of love, albeit backwardly so. It is, really, because of love that we bother in the first place to feel it. Shame is another, but not the same, and still fear and regret, and there are others.

My gaze is stuck on child's naked ankle as her parents hug goodbye above her; how do I know they did not look each other in the eye?

Someone said, it is all a just a chase for wind. My friend Arpine says so agreeably, "Yes, but where did the wind come from?"

Recently, I have not felt like writing much. It is cold in the desert and I can't move as fluidly as I would if it were warmer. If I can't move in the world, I am sitting still too long. While sitting still, I lose substantial quantities of proprioception (a lovely new word I learned from another poet friend at another poetry date over coffee a couple days ago -from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception). It means, as she explained it, if you hold a spoon in your hand long enough, you will feel it as if it is an extension of your hand, and know without looking where it is in space. This desk then, by now is like an extra belly, and this window I sit by--another eye.

Instead I am reading books and browsing dictionaries, and visiting indoors with friends. Working, of course, and there is a lot of work to do. This is my 39th year of life, and I seem too tired for my age. I am too young to be this tired. It's embarrassing. All these things are related, and I feel them, but I don't know what they are...

Let them eat soup

2007-01-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

Sopa de Lima de Ami (Lime Soup of mine)

For four soup eaters use this much stuff:

At least 1 good full cup of freshly squeezed lime juice—more is better than less—it usually takes at least one dozen limes. You can try and buy the pre-squeezed stuff but ...just don't, cuz you'll miss it, and it's important.

14 medium firm/soft ROMA tomatoes (chopped in small cubes) Any tomato, ok, but the Roma best for it’s meatiness (as opposed to mushiness).

1 sweet yellow onion or less to taste (chopped smallish)

2 FRESH Serano chilies (chopped as tiny as possible) or less, or more. More chili more hot.

3 cloves of garlic or two small pre-chopped spoonfuls

1 Large Can (about eight cups) of Chicken Broth (can be replaced with veggie broth for veggies)

1 tsp. Cumin (to taste, maybe more, maybe less, depends).

4 generous pinches of Mexican Oregeno (crush in palms as you add it to pot)

2 small pinches of nutmeg (to taste)

1 wheel of coteja (pronounced co-tay-ha) for crumbling into soup when served (can be substituted with feta or goat cheese, any white crumbly salty cheese but blue)

1 large bag of BLUE cornchips (best) or RED (also good) White cornchips, or all three for a festive soup.

Do it like this:

First, prep-work: Chop all the choppables up and get them ready, put it into separate bowls and have it ready to add to the pot. The limes will take the longest, and the soup itself cooks pretty quickly so make sure you have them mostly squeezed before you start actually cooking the soup. When squeezed, set it aside, in the fridge is good.

Now: Take some extra virgin olive oil and drizzle a goodly amount into a deep soup pot (big enough to hold ALL the stuff that’s coming) heating up to a medium heat, throw in the garlic, onion, spices and chopped Serrano chilies. Before you add the tomatoes, which come next, make sure your whole kitchen smells like the chilies and the spices and the onions have softened and turned almost transparent. If you put your face in the pot, your eyes should sting.

Next: Throw in the chopped tomatoes and stir the onion, garlic, chilies and spices into the tomatoes. Cover and let the tomatoes reduce and soften juicily—not long—about 7 minutes max; when the tomatoes have softened a little and released much of their juices, pour in the chicken (or veggie) broth. You’ll pour in about 5 to 8 cups…depending on how wet or chunky you’d like your soup. Stir, cover and let sit on low heat for about 10 minutes. Taste it when you open the pot. Need more nutmeg? More oregano? More cumin? Add it now and stir. Let sit a bit. Now you add the lime juice.

Lastly: Stir the lime juice in, just a little, don’t mix it too much. Then turn off the heat and let it sit for about 5 minutes before serving. When serving, ladle desired portion into bowl, crumble a good sized palmful of Coteja cheese in the middle and top with a handful of corn tortilla chips. Ready to eat!!

Buena Mangia!!

Ninja Answers to Non Ninja Questions: Hyaaahhg!!

2007-01-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not kidding. Be killed, or be entertained...laugh here now....
and here
and here
and if you are still here: here

Do you have an interesting question for the ninja? Here are some by M Koosman and Andy B:

How do ninjas prefer to kill zombies?
When ninjas kill other ninjas, do they use white out?
Do ninjas feel embarrassment when they get leafy greens stuck in their teeth?
What noise annoys a noisy ninja?
Andl lastly: Ok, there's a hippopotamus and an alligator, a mongoose, a hyena, and a ferret and a butterfly (against a ninja?) who would win?

My question: How does a Ninja entertain itself while waiting for Godot?
Or? How does a Ninja deal with blood stains?
Or? Is there any sacred place a ninja is restricted from killing?

I'm it again. It all comes back, doesn't it.

2007-01-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

Morgan Lucas Schuldt has tagged me to list five little-known things about myself. Hmmmm. I thought when I read that. I used to hate being it, but, I thought, it shouldn't be so bad as a "grown-up"...And then these five things occurred to me:

1. Between the ages of 7 and 10 I sincerely considered the idea that I was God, and that everyone around me knew this, but no-one was allowed to reveal that they knew anything. Not to me or to each other. I was sure that EVERYTHING that happened was set up, staged, and nothing would ever deviate from the plan. And clearly, there was a plan. I was the only one who didn't know the rules of the game, or the details of the plans-but somehow, I had made the rules and the plan back before my memory was erased. It was complicated.
2. I have an extra rib and my last lumbar vertebrae is fused to my sacrum.
3. For a brief period I was obsessed with Def Leppard? Especially "Pour Some Sugar on Meeee" and Pyromania. So I ripped my clothes with a kitchen steak knife and waxed (actually VO5'd) up my hair and danced with a tennis racket in front of the mirror screaming it at myself as it blasted in the background (on my tape player that was one of those earlier renditions of what we later called a walkman). I swallowed two "Christmas Trees" during this event. That same night, I went babysitting at a tiny motel in town, dressed like this. The "parents" left a bevy of canned beer on a bed of ice in the tub. I drank it and watched the tv loud. Was there a kid there? I don't remember. I was...15?
4. I received the gift of tongues when I was 12. I lost it again, when I was uhhh 12. Years later I would discover the gift of fingers and thumbs and hold my tongue. The gift of tongue (singular) was a gift I learned to give, and I was a quick learner.
5. One year a friend of mine and I decided to take a crazy train trip the day after Christmas from Nogales to Tepic Mexico. The train was full of people and we were separated by the conductor. The windows were open on the train, it was snowing outside, and we were put in the seats next to the stinking bathroom. The seats were simply wood with a thin layer of leatherlike material covering the wood. We were bundled up as if we were going out to build a snowman. She got assigned to the seat behind me with the friendly American traveler that shared his cigarettes, and I got the seat (aisle side), next to the young smooth faced girl with a perpetual smile and crisp wide eyes whose entire extended family (I'm guessing) filled at least six rows of seats in front of us. The ride was an overnighter, and so you slept sitting up, if you could sleep. My girl leaned up against the window with her nice Mexican blanket and slept like a babe. I sat up bolt straight in my puffy down jacket and hallucinated the entire night. I did not want to slip off and lean, even slightly, against my sweet little seat mate because her entire family had been trying to hook me up with her all that first day, thinking I was a boy. I did not tell them I was not a boy. I don't even know if I tried. All day they turned their heads around a smiled at me, gesturing and giggling, winking and nodding at me, and were clearly trying to encourage me to warm up to their young, single, available (?) niece, cousin, daughter, grandaughter (?), I didn't speak very fluent Spanish. It was hell on earth. I guess you could say I lied and suffered for it. I had long since come to understand that I was clearly NOT God.

And now I am charged to "tag" five others...so I choose: M.S.Rerick, Sommrbrowning, TC Tolbert, Rodney Phillips, and Morgan, for five more things.

I am sad, um, who's sane?

2007-01-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

Sunday, December 31, 2006
blog entry by "Riverbend" at Baghdad Burning site here:

"A Lynching...

It's official. Maliki and his people are psychopaths. This really is a new low. It's outrageous- an execution during Eid. Muslims all over the world (with the exception of Iran) are outraged. Eid is a time of peace, of putting aside quarrels and anger- at least for the duration of Eid.

This does not bode well for the coming year. No one imagined the madmen would actually do it during a religious holiday. It is religiously unacceptable and before, it was constitutionally illegal. We thought we'd at least get a few days of peace and some time to enjoy the Eid holiday, which coincides with the New Year this year. We've spent the first two days of a holy holiday watching bits and pieces of a sordid lynching.

America the savior… After nearly four years and Bush's biggest achievement in Iraq has been a lynching. Bravo Americans.

Maliki has made the mistake of his life. His signature and unhidden glee at the whole execution, especially on the first day of Eid Al Adha (the Eid where millions of Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca), will only do more to damage his already tattered reputation. He's like a vulture in a suit (or a balding weasel). It's almost embarrassing. I kept expecting Muwafaq Al Rubaii to run over and wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth as he signed for the execution. Are these the people who represent the New Iraq? We're in so much more trouble than I ever thought.

And no- not the celebrations BBC are claiming. With the exception of a few areas, the streets are empty.

Now we come to CNN. Shame on you CNN journalists- you're getting lazy. The least you can do is get the last words correct when you write a story about an execution. Your articles are read the world over and will go down in history as references. You people are the biggest news network in the world- the least you can do is spend some money on a decent translator. Saddam's last words were NOT "Muqtada Al Sadr" as Munir Haddad claimed, according to the article below. If anyone had seen at least part of the video they showed on TV, you'd know that.

"A witness, Iraqi Judge Munir Haddad, said that one of the executioners told Hussein that the former dictator had destroyed Iraq, which sparked an argument that was joined by several government officials in the room.

As a noose was tightened around Hussein's neck, one of the executioners yelled "long live Muqtada al-Sadr," Haddad said, referring to the powerful anti-American Shiite religious leader.

Hussein, a Sunni, uttered one last phrase before he died, saying "Muqtada al-Sadr" in a mocking tone, according to Haddad's account."

From the video that was leaked, it was not an executioner who yelled "long live Muqtada al-Sadr". See, this is another low the Maliki government sunk to- they had some hecklers conveniently standing by during the execution. Maliki claimed they were "some witnesses from the trial", but they were, very obviously, hecklers. The moment the noose was around Saddam's neck, they began chanting, in unison, "God's prayers be on Mohamed and on Mohamed's family…" Something else I didn't quite catch (but it was very coordinated), and then "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada!" One of them called out to Saddam, "Go to hell…" (in Arabic). Saddam looked down disdainfully and answered "Heya hay il marjala…?" which is basically saying, "Is this your manhood…?".

Someone half-heartedly called out to the hecklers, "I beg you, I beg you- the man is being executed!" They were slightly quieter and then Saddam stood and said, "Ashadu an la ilaha ila Allah, wa ashhadu ana Mohammedun rasool Allah…" Which means, "I witness there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is His messenger." These are the words a Muslim (Sunnis and Shia alike) should say on their deathbed. He repeated this one more time, very clearly, but before he could finish it, he was lynched.

So, no, CNN, his last words were not "Muqtada Al Sadr" in a mocking tone- just thought someone should clear that up. (Really people, six of you contributed to that article!)

Then again, one could argue that it was a judge who gave them that false information. A judge on the Iraqi appeals court- one of the judges who ratified the execution order. Everyone knows Iraqi judges under American tutelage never lie- that explains CNN's confusion.

Muwafaq Al Rubai was said he was "weak and frightened". Apparently, Rubai saw a different lynching because according to the video they leaked, he didn't look frightened at all. His voice didn't shake and he refused to put on the black hood. He looked resigned to his fate, and during the heckling he looked as defiant as ever. (It's quite a contrast to Muhsin Abdul Hameed's public hysterics last year when the Americans raided his home.)

It's one thing to have militias participating in killings. This is allegedly the democracy the Americans flaunt. Is this how bloodthirsty and frightening we've become? Is this what Iraq stands for now? Executions? I'm sure the rest of the Arab countries will be impressed.

One of the most advanced countries in the world did not help to reconstruct Iraq, they didn't even help produce a decent constitution. They did, however, contribute nicely to a kangaroo court and a lynching. A lynching shall go down in history as America's biggest accomplishment in Iraq. So who's next? Who hangs for the hundreds of thousands who've died as a direct result of this war and occupation? Bush? Blair? Maliki? Jaffari? Allawi? Chalabi?

2006 has definitely been representative of Maliki and his government- killings like never before and a lynching to end it properly. Death and destruction everywhere. I'm so tired of all of this…"

Beo laetus innovo mustus annus

2007-01-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

Hope all are well this new day, and looking back or forward, have something to believe in which gives your living heft and meaning. Gravity and gravitas. I found this website today and have read some of it for awhile during my coffee/recovery time.

Once more into the breach...

The World Question Center

Beo: beo -are [to bless , enrich, make happy]
Laetus: laetus -a -um [fat , rich, fertile; glad, joyful, happy]
Innovo: innovo -are [to make new , renew].
Mustus: mustus -a -um [young , new, fresh];
Annus: annus -i m. [a circuit of the sun , year]; poet., [time of year, season]

Sinking sand, took my hand, raised me up...

2006-12-31T11:51:00.000-07:00

If you weren't there last night, you did miss something. Here comes Kristen and my sister Theresa, who hasn't been out alone without her son since he was born (two years) and I, waddling into the theater, tired, wary, and feeling a bit awkward. I moreso than anyone. I felt old. Too old to be going out to a concert of a band I used to worship in High School. The crowd was mixed. I noticed there were a lot of too old people there. We bought beers and made our way into the thin crowds meandering around the mainfloor of the theater. The opening act was already on when we entered the house. I can't remember their name(s), but their sound made me feel even more wary...

The opening duo's set was a drag compared to what was to come, and it seemed to go on forever. Normally I don't mind the folksy folks singing and strummin loveydovey mush, in fact I rather like it. But last night I sat on the floor of the rialto holding my beer between my knees and trying hard not to fall asleep. We waited a long time. Went out for a cigarette, bought another beer, wielded our way back to the front of the crowds, and waited some more. In retrospect, it was good they had such a mellow opening act, because I had no idea how the old femmes were about to make me move. The floor filled up, people began to fit tighter and tighter and started to whistle and scream and chant. As we all waited for the Femmes to finally come out on stage the energy just kept building until people were almost at the point of surrender. It wasn't going to happen, or was it? I think people started to doubt. Finally, at 9:15 the lights go down and here come the femmes, running onto the stage and grabbing up their instruments. I stood up and did not stop moving my body, hard, for the next two hours.

I would say that it was one of the top five concerts I've ever been to. I haven't enjoyed the live music experience, unless its classical symphony, or at a bar in the background, or a hippie-type banjoing his heart out on the Avenue at 1 a.m., in a long time. Grateful Dead 88 (or 87 I can't remember) in Phoenix --first LSD and hippie parkinglot madness--; Dozens of Major Lingo shows in the late 80's in Jerome, Flagstaff and in the old armory in Prescott; Bruce Springsteen in 84? Born in the U.S.A. tour in Phoenix; Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels tour Phoenix and Moby Dick show in L.A.; Meat Puppets 86 Phoenix.

The three best songs they played last night were Jesus Walkin' on the Water, which was so evengelical church in the Ozarks I almost cried--Gano on the violin and Brian Ritchie (sorry but he can be arrogant if he wants to)--Gone Daddy Gone (Brian Ritchie on that xylophone was amaaaazing), and Gimmee the Car--where they totally played their hearts out and just jammed for a long time. Of course they played Add it Up and Kiss Off and Blister in the Sun too, but those were just the crowd pleasers (appeasers). I was amazed they played so hard so clear and so energetically, for such old guys. I mean, they aren't really old, but they are older than me. I started listening to them when I was 16, which is two years after they started being a band at all.

From the VF site: "The Grandfathers of Folk-Punk. Rock's dadaist improvisors. Calcified fossils of teen angst. American roots minimalists. The sonic personification of anxiety. Blues cubists. Spokesmen for misfits. These are just a few of the phrases that come to mind upon thinking of the Femmes." Yeah, kiss off into the air, I DID buy a t-shirt.

I remembered all the reasons I loved this band to begin with. That they understand "American" music is no understatement. Jazz/Gospel/Rock/Garage/Blues/Bluegrass--it's all there. It's an orgy of there. I love that Gano still sounded as Ganoesque as he does on their first album, and that the drummer Victor DeLorenzo (who looks like an old geek who just came from a computer lab somewhere) stands the whole time and bounces like a...well...a 14 year old geek, pounding the shit out of those little drums of his, not necessarily as artfully as the rest of the bunch. They didn't seem old, slow or finished. Which I was fearful of before we went. Yes, it was a good hard set, and everyone in the crowd was loud and loving it.

That was a great Christmas present Kristen, thank you much.

Hambone soup day, before the Violent Femmes

2006-12-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

I'm making hambonebean soup today in our lovely donated crockpot, and later, sinus infection and all, K and I will walk over to the Rialto to wall-eye with the Violent Femmes. They must be older than I am, so I hope they are in the mood to play. Last night we went to a intertribal pow wow at the race tracks with M & A. We all participated in a round dance and my thighs burned afterward. I'd say we only went around in the round two or three times, but it was a big circle and a slow repetitive pace. Thin crowd cuz we got there so late, but good to get out into the air and visit the tribal members being ceremonious. We ate some of the largest frybreads I've ever had, and drank hot cocoa after. It was good though, to get out, especially because it seems like a pretty depressing year end. I am a little depressed and have a lot of work to do...so I think I'll stop this now. I hope everyone's last week of the year...last few days now...goes without harm.

My brain is at least 10% on vacation.

2006-12-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

I found this bit of socalled information on a random site while roaming and smoking for pleasure.:

10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

Now, I have to admit, I really like this fact, numbered 4 of 99 of a list of "interesting science facts" I found on some random site I stumbled on while roaming the internets and smoking for pleasure. Especially its grammatical ambiguity. And. Wouldn't it be cool if it were true? I like to take it literally, and then just for kicks, figuratively...and then...share it with you.

Because my mind isn't back from candycane land yet...

You know what it feels like?

2006-12-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

That's what it feels like.

I stole this christmas card. Happy Hallowdays

2006-12-24T16:38:00.000-07:00

I can't contain myself.

2006-12-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

Here's your hip hop Christmas baybee...
p.s. thanks for the link Kristen!

Role Play Adaptability and Hmmm Aphasia

2006-12-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

If you want to know what I think about being an activist, I don't feel flexible. But the catastrophic inducibility of some subversive information's affect is benign. It's common sense, or at least, it appears to be common sense. Remember cytoplasm? Remember trans fatty acids? We shouldn't treat science so badly after all, should we? I am a hungry from the microcosm. I want to hang out with a miniature proteins. Dude. I want to know, which molecules in the body are neo-conservative, or secret members of the federal reserve system which is also an invisible cancer. As far as I know, there is nothing federal about the nervous system. I am not calling that cancer forward, mind you, no, I just would like to identify it. The following is from the internets:

"Relating to the general government or union of the states; based upon, or created pursuant to, the laws of the Constitution of the United States.

The United States has traditionally been named a federal government in most political and judicial writings. The term federal has not been prescribed by any definite authority but is used to express a broad opinion concerning the nature of the form of government.

A recent tendency has been to use the term national in place of federal to denote the government of the Union. Neither settles any question regarding the nature of authority of the government.

The term federal is generally considered to be more appropriate if the government is to be viewed as a union of the states. National is used to reflect the view that individual state governments and the Union as a whole are two distinct and separate systems, each of which is established directly by the population for local and national purposes, respectively.

In a more general sense, federal is ordinarily used to refer to a league or compact between two or more states to become joined under one central government."

None of this is really important, or it gives me pause. There are a hundred differing observations, possible interpretations, and non-sequential hypotheses that go as ignored as bad habits. Bad bad habits, like breathing in poison for comfort. Some cancers are also romancers, or, they start out so. In the light of their dark we are constitutive mutants. We are a bunch of people I don't know well and wonder about. We are not my family but act like it. We are macrocosmically systemified to not feel that we are. So what? So so what, indeed.

Is it a problem if I choose not to believe in bacteria? If I turn a blind eye to glaucoma? If you cut me do I not? What do you call the distance between an open wound and a cypher? As in his eyes were like two cyphers, and he never touched a single dollar bill in his life. If you cut him he bled coinage. If you saw him he was wearing columns for suspenders and a skyscraper for a hat. If you begged from him he gave you suggestions disguised as fortunes. He said "spend your life _______." You held the fortune you could not translate and spent a life guessing. Will he go down in history? You mean down when you say down: He loves me, he loves me not...etc.

Our fresh wounds will always stupefy our sense of distances, and they so strangely seem to keep fresh for long periods. The action of metabolic repressors is found to be regulated by (passive voice) divisible systems similar to those regulating the action of inducers. I mean fear. Or are not found at all, if not, in which case, the role play arises at a locus far removed from the powers controlling the powers themselves. Fat chance, I know; but the manner of activity can merely be guessed, so what small wrong one already practices (active voice) is the best evidence of any locus at all. It follows that this reaction is more specific than no reaction, but perhaps more or less catalyzing. "I like it!"

To clarify, hmmm. Let's say the source (question of voice) is the negative vehicle from which all rides home are too dangerous to take. A negative result would not necessarily prove that the code of conduct is not universal; a safe ride home may only imply that it is. What kinds of specificity do you enjoy? How specific do you need your messenger to be in order to accept the invitation to be Him's passenger? I fail to see the logic. In other words; I too, dislike it.

O look, walls. O look, more walls. A direct approach in this instance is impractical, and our goal is to supply the center with a good view. Just not quite as corporate as, say for instance, a glass ceiling might. No, not that back aching give-a-hand bullshit Back in the cell, if I remember correctly, I could see all the way to the uniquely eternal. Conveyances of a restitution of a of one of the (other voice). I realize there is no schematic simpleton enough to leave heaven out. Least not the truly scholarly ones.

Alternatively, our approach may support the basis for continuous suffering, and that's not the goal at all. I don't worry about functions, so much as the goal of the body. So, in order to put the apparatus of correction to good use; we accept that death may be true (possible voice) and then we simply continue with our bridge building religion. We are more than structures of replication aren't we? No, not really. As far as love is concerned. Nearly all the secrets here are as synthetic as dreams. Isn't that lovely? God I think so.

listening list

2006-12-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

Here's what I'm listening to these days:
Pete Yorn's Nightcrawlers & other Pete Yorn

Annuals: Be He Me

Ben Kweller's Ben Kweller album & On My Way

Caribou's Milk of Human Kindness (love the Pelican Narrows track)

Califone: Roots and Crowns & Heron King Blues

Notwist: Neon Golden

And, some classical mix, when I don't want to think so hard.

I take it back

2006-12-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro Kazuo (author of The Remains of the Day) isn't that good. In fact, now that I've finished it, even though I'm relieved it's over, I'm sorry I didn't stop reading it earlier. A great great story lie somewhere under the vapour, but I couldn't find it. I hate seeing all that potential go to waste. The story mainly follows the lives of three kids, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, starting from their early years at an exclusive school called Hailsham where they studied nothing but art and poetry and music and theatre and literature. In England, of course. There they studied art, played sports and lived together in prep-school styled dormitories. No mention of parents, ever. The teachers were called Guardians, and the kids never went to the outside world of Hailsham, instead the outside world came to them. After they "graduated" Hailsham, they went to The Cottages, which were like dorms without college. Cabins in the country where other graduates of other similar schools lived and lounged about. All they did was hang out there at the Cottages for years, until they were ready for "carer training", when they would learn about the next phase of their lives. That being, to care for donors. Donors, never referred to as anything else, were clones grown specifically to serve their "possibles" (sic), the folks they were cloned from. Unknowingly, though they get clues all the time and progressively throughout the story, Kathy Ruth and Tommy will become donors when they are called. After two three or sometimes four donations, the donors are said to "complete"--or die. Though neither the word death or die are used in the book. I thought there would be something far more interesting in a story like that--something profound--but it turns out to be silly, predictable, and tiresome. All this is taking place in what seems like the 60's or 70's or 80's I don't know, and there is never mention of such detail that might clarify the time period. Sigh...I don't even have the energy to say how disappointed I am now. Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake was much more satisfying. What now?

Let X = X

2006-12-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

When I can squeeze some thinking in, I have been thinking in. Thinking about lineation much, and why not? I am tired of it, and also frustrated by it, and also I still admire those who bother or can but. But I just can't do the math. Years ago, Liam Rector the director of Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont, said of my work, "I think there is no way for Ann but through." He wrote this in one of the last evaluations he wrote for me in our semester. It was as if he had, at that point, come to a place of acceptance (not acquiescence, but it almost felt so) of my designs on words. I had heard him repeat the phrase "thru-line" to me at least one hundred times during our mentor/mentee months. He suspected I had none. I knew that I did, but did not want to fall into the trap of trying to prove it except through the work, in the poems.

Mr. Rector was actually referring to the pushiness of my poems, and how they were kind of relentlessly forward, and not necessarily meditative or containing a status (or he may refer to it as the poem's "first world,") but producing static for him instead. They didn't begin or end, but continued with themselves. He didn't say that exactly, but he might have, he was trying to check me on my intentionality and on how present I was with the movement. I was obsessed with lineation then, and the math of it. (Geometry, Trig, and all invisible work underneath)...and tied this all the inevitable relationship with architecture and theory of. The connections form a messy web and catch too many bugs. What I really wanted was to just GO. The line was a distraction, a pretense, a radio part. It was a problem.

Now I say I can't do the math because that is the connection I am making to the act of lineating. It's mathematical, and should be correct and correcting. I have abondoned the line for now, to dwell with the words. What the radio is, makes, it's x's and o's. Here is an interesting article I recently read that made me hot (uhuh), and so I thought I'd share.

The Problem Is.

2006-12-04T11:58:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, you discover a blog that knows itself. Here is a strange place where poetry loves math + poetry - love = hmmm.

I can't think either...(go figure)

2006-12-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

The truth is. I am a little turned off. The season's activities are pervasive, the very colors flash and repel the good eye blind. I hold my words above the page afraid they will land wrong. My pen amounts to itself, and shakes. I worry the sky. People keep calling for help. This and the door threatens to receive unwanted knocks. Knocks once wanted, but I can't concentrate now. And how will the servants do on their exams? Of course I have many other things to concern myself with, but I think of them. As I have so little time to study for my own. I am too distracted by appointments and obligation. And how will the money travel, from angry hand to greedy fist and back? And how will the landfills get much needed rest? Rotting rendering churn under the sun; the heavy smell; best evidence of us. O Holiday, you are a guilty time, charged and dangerous. Our crime, which is also our nature? We don't need forensics, and yet mirrors, as honest as they might practically be, only look honest. The same songs. The same songs. The same songs. Ring like loose change in a breast pocket. One more year.

These I summarily recommend...

2006-11-27T12:22:00.000-07:00

Please, believe me, you must see this documentary. I can not even explain how hauntingly worth it it will be: Gray Gardens "Little Edie" Beale .

Gray Gardens is one of THE most amazing documentaries I've ever seen. Reality TV; eat this.

Next, for a thriller of a most unusual (while still a little familiar) sort, you may like to rent Hard Candy. Then, you'll have to come up with your own opinion about it. I personally thought it was pretty damned good, even when it was bad. The thing is, if you don't have to know everything to be satisfied, in fact the very fact is satisfying, you'll love it. If you like things spelled out for you, forget it. It's the kind of film you can't say much about unless you want to ruin the plot (and there is one), so I won't say much about it. The reviews are split down the middle...but they don't stop coming in...and that's saying something. I err on the "two thumbs up" side.

For those I don't want to think or be thrilled nights, rent A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. The box would scare you off if you saw it in the vid store, but you know what they say about covers. You think, akk, and then, ummm, no. You wouldn't think an 80s movie would be so beautifully weird, but I thought it was way weird. I mean creepy and enjoyable because of its incredibly uncomfortable a little over half real and the rest of the way unreal idiosyncrasies. Weird in that highway accident public wreck kind of way. River Pheonix, sex, smokes, drinks, cars, dad, future, what? SO weird. Not the Breakfast Club. How is it I never saw it in the 80's? Well, I don't think it was every in the theater, or I wasn't. Good with gin and tonics after midnight.

Homo nympho tograph

2006-11-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

I have fallen
a good ways, and
now I know
how much
a good weighs.

meditation on my thankings for

2006-11-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

Kristen: our friendship and how we float. Together, the same and different. For that matter, love. Family: I have chosen, who've chosen me, and then these whom I was given to by birth. Some friends, who I say are also family. Few friends. Good friends. Strangers who smile or wave or nod, like friends. I am surrounded on every side by the challenges love brings; all of it blesses me and molds me for more. Pain and mourning. Struggles and failures. And mildew, because it works in invisible ways. Gravity, and dreams. Sleep, and sometimes noises in my head. This house and this place I live and work in. The terrors of distance. Desks. Chairs. Pencils. Books. Language. Color. The sun in Tucson and how the sun in Tucson is. The element of surprise. Poetry. Rain. Questions and answers. Questions more than answers; answers end up, feeling somewhat arbitrary when turning back to look at their corresponding question. The beauty of the question. Ecclesiastes. Hammers. Birds that build. Erasmus. The temperature of sickness. Blood. Electricity. French. French in unexpected places. Unexpected places. A woman's body. Every crooked strata. How fingers and hands go with others' bodies. Touch; and feeling. Orgasms. Eagles. Good endings. For being able to realize, just at this moment, that this moment is too short, and there isn't enough page or internet or computer or space for an accumulation of binary symbols to list what I am really thankful for, and that ultimately, this is the challenge. In art. Also. Art.

How to Workshop Poetry, Ahhh...now That's Helpful!

2006-11-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

This helpful link sent in by our lovely friend Julianna. She isn't even a poet! So generous. I know all my blog readers will appreciate this. Enjoy!

Creepy Link of the Day

2006-11-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

Ok. I don't know. You have to check this out. Explore the whole site before you give up on what may at first seem relatively innocuous, and click yourself back to fantasy land where we are all blissfully numb with mundanity of the present. This site is called Human Upgrades. And so is the company, and so...I, I don't know. Right now, I'm a little nauseous, and yet, is it real? Let me know what you think.

Good Fiction Alert (the fiction, but perhaps not the alert)

2006-11-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

I am reading a book by Kazuo Ishiguro right now, called, Never Let Me Go. This is the perfect book to follow after Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Both books read in the realm of science fiction, but not, at the same time. I love how really well they go together! Love love love. There is a subtle blending, and yet they are so not the same story. Can I say that? Like that? I mean, really, they are more in the mind and mood of 1984ish sci-fi. The Future beware tales. But in Ishiguro's book, something else is happening besides, because he's using the future and the beware to explore, not the future, or to say beware, but to peek into the dark soul of man (between the lines). I am already sad it will be over before I know it, and then what will I read to keep this lovely discomfort up?

This calls up a question for me. What are my favorite books? What do they have in common? And why am I do stubbornly picky when it comes to fiction? For the most part, I mostly loathe much of contemporary fiction (that I've attempted to read). I can't make it through most of them, and if I do, I am dissatisfied. I hardly liked The Hour, or The Alchemist, or ...or I can't even remember the names of the other myriad of mediocre books I've read...Shipping News, ummmm...what? So why do I like the books I've read that I liked?

Oryx and Crake was weird, but I read the whole thing, and that's saying something in my case. Ishiguro is so subtle, not banging away at my head, but my heart thumps along happily as I read. I loved Empire of the Sun, Birdy, Lord of the Flies, Housekeeping, Alice Walkers first two books in The Color Purple series--The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar (great title!), Handmaid's Tale, Song of Solomon, Invisible Man, Adams Breed, Huck Finn, here I begin going farther backward...

To Cervantes and Erasmus and Pope and Rabelais and whoa! I don't have an answer. All I know is, I can't do entertainment reading. Reading to fill time and space. Reading to go away. TV is for that. Anyway...why am I writing this? I have nothing more intelligent to offer on the subject...will anyone send me more good fiction to read? Please?

Count: One Comment

2006-11-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

How far away is that trees?
How far away is the breath i just exhaled?
How far away did you reach?
Distance, you bastard, show yourself!

the sacred, and the mundane: a critique of toilet paper sculptures: Part One

2006-11-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

For a change, I am going to attempt to write a review, sort of, (in the spirit of, but not style of, Maxwell's experiencings of) of Jessica Drenk's new show at the Conrad Wilde Gallery on 4th Avenue.

Last Saturday night K and I were walking downtown to meet some friends at the Red Room, and passed the gallery where her new show is up. Jessica was one of the local artists that displayed her work at Casa Libre this summer, and generously donated one of her book sculptures to our silent auction. She is extremely talented, and her work is always unique and has an organically magnetic energy to it. The piece she donated this summer was from an earlier series in which the principle medium was books, and has been widely embraced.

In this new show, all the work is made of toilet paper. An artist friend joked the next day; "they should have called the show shit happens," though, he has neither seen the work nor can my verbal description of it be counted on for an accurate picture of it. He isn't to blame for his impulse to MAKE a joke of it though; in fact, that very impulse is why I ultimately think, however and because of how disconcerting the medium, the work is very, if somewhat ironically so, successful.

In this new show, all the work is made of toilet paper. Before I say too much, here are a couple photos from the exhibition:

"Nucleus Universe"

"Yellow Cells"

I'll give you a hint. Ultimately, I really dig this new work--although my appreciation is much more ideologically driven than it is (necessarily) a visual appreciation. This appreciation comes in contrast to my appreciation of the book or porcelain sculptures— which I think are both ideologically and visually beautiful. Whatever the case, I have been thinking of it ever since, and was compelled, for the first time ever I think, to sit down and hash out my inspired thoughts on a living (visual) artist's art. This is a good thing! In the annoying tradition of disclaimers though, I should clarify that I am going to be using the process of writing to explore my own internal polemic about the work, and in no way claim to be an expert art critic. However meaningful that is; it all starts like this:

As we began walking to the Red Room we passed the illuminated gallery (closed) and were happy (and somewhat stunned) to see the new exhibit hanging. We stopped and nosed up to the gallery window to check out Jessica's stuff. While we stood there for a long while looking at it and processing our visceral responses to it, random other folks would stop to look and voice their responses as well. We stood aside and let others step up to the window in our places. In silent observation, we eaves-dropped, not choosing to get into a debate with strangers by the window of the gallery. In general (apart from my own personal response to it) these passers-by seemed to be confused or put off by what they saw in the window. Instead of the complete gushing awe her other sculptures have inspired, these new toilet paper constructions seemed to inspire (at least in the immediate way) a more defensive reaction from onlookers.

I am, of course, talking about random people strolling down the Avenue on a Saturday night, most likely headed for the nearest bar and the cheapest mixed drink--and NOT, as might be more useful here, seasoned art aficionados. But they were at least the kind of people who do stop at the gallery window to look, think, and respond to what is there. So I think it's ok to take my notes from that moment and insert them in my "experiencing" of Jessica's new stuff, because even K, who seemed to want to agree with these folks' opinions, seemed to be, at least initially (and this is important) a little off put by the pieces.

But most people, art lovers or not, who I've spoken to before (because I do think her book sculptures and earlier work attracted a great deal of interest and brought legitimacy to her work) who were familiar with or came in contact with her Tabula Rasa and Reading Our Remains (book sculptures) series were full of nothing but praise and excitement. I think I may have read a review, perhaps one, that whined about the treatment or abuse of the book (as sacred object). But most everyone, art lover or not, was satisfied and believed the objects were beautiful, and was genuinely inspired by their surprisingly familiar presence. (Maybe it wasn't a review I read, but some fussy whiny writer or other...whatever the case; I disagreed.)

I mention people's reactions to her earlier work, the books - which all resembled stone or logs or driftwood or wasp's nests or some other floral or geological substance occurring in nature; the porcelain sculptures of everyday objects that happily and whimsically resembled sea choral or jellyfish tissue or an underwater dream of a placenta—because, in conjunction or in relation to those earlier series, this is her first project that I feel has the most built in or inherent tension by virtue of the medium: toilet paper. I mean to say; her choice material may very well conflict (more than the artist is aware? I’m not sure.) with her intention—evidenced in the earlier series—to mimic nature with everyday human objects. The earlier work speaks of Jessica's love of nature, and has a feminine (as in graceful, romantic, fluid and reverent, naked and simple, and, dare I say, even nurturing) quality to it; we might assume that this new work wants the same outcome as the earlier work. So, here is my conundrum.

The titles of the pieces above are “Nucleus Universe” and “Yellow Cells”. According to the artist’s own website, they come from a series entitled “Cellular Composites.” How does that make me feel? From a distance, from the street and peering hard through a glaring window, I did not see cells under a microscope as the titles now lead me to believe I am meant to see. What if they were called something else? What if the pieces were called Singed Toilet Paper and Yellowing Toilet Paper? Or? This Place is a Shit Hole, or, What White Absorbs In This Box, or, Completely Hammered? Can I see passed the toilet paper? Of course I can, and I strive to. But at the same time I don’t want to. I don’t want to forget the medium because I am familiar with the artist’s work, and it seems to me that the voices in her work have so far been delivered as much by the medium as by what she’s done with it. So, in this case, it leads me to wonder if the artist truly intends the substantive irony the medium brings to the affect of the work. I also don't seem pressed by the artist to ignore, or see passed the medium (the toilet paper) because it is so...well...toiletpaper like still. It isn't carved or waxed or disguised as much as it could have been...if the artist wanted to...

I consider these two pieces, below, which are also made of toilet paper (and wax) [earlier pieces from 2003 / 2004 series called "Pre-Historization"]:

Frankly, I only realize these objects are made of toilet paper and wax because the little card tells me that's what they are made of. I don't even think of toilet paper--not once. I don't think of toilet paper much, even after I know they are made of toilet paper. I think more of wax paper, and wax and paper, and geologically unique stones or cross sections of stone. I think of nature. The nature of objects manipulated, and chemistry, and how paper is a very very ordinary material that can be made to perform extraordinary feats. That is, in the hands of the extraordinary artist.

A certain poet who is staying here, who I'll not name to protect her privacy, and I just walked down to the gallery to look at the work again. As we were approaching the gallery I said, "Do you see it now?"

"No," she said. We approached closer, "Now?" We were now in front of the windows which provide a wide clear view of the entire wall where Jessica's sculptures hang, "How about now?" I asked the poet.

"No," said she, "I don't see any toilet paper." Then I pointed to the pieces which she had been looking at a moment before. She said, "What? I thought that was wood!"

We walked inside and chatted with the, the...what do you call em? Gallery person. Perhaps not the owner, but she presented like a manager or an assistant curator or something. We proceeded to have our own mini art critique session. The three of us very different women, but still, all familiar with art. The Gallery girl said three of the pieces of Jessica's show were already sold. The first thing she said to us, as she observed us from her receded position in the deep end of the gallery, "it's toilet paper."

Tomorrow, I'll go a little deeper into my thoughts on this, as soon as I find my copy of Tom Wolfe's book, The Painted Word, which unfortunately I only just now realize I think I lent to someone I haven't spoken to in months...sigh. An artist, no less. Well. Until next...

the half of it

2006-10-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

as catch can

2006-10-31T09:51:00.000-07:00

New title for my unpublished manuscript?

2006-10-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

what war

hey, i kinda like that.

Dear Art, I Am Having Trouble Going...

2006-10-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

Hey, don't worry, the following isn't a poem, isn't trying to BE a poem, or wouldn't know a poem if it crawled from its bowels growling, "I will arise and go nowwwww." So sit back and relax. Smoke em if you got em.

I called the police on the police last night. I was so so tired, and about to shut my whole being off when...one of those effing harrassing HELLicopters came down over the house and started circling the block (of which we are apparently in the center). They circled for over a half an hour until after 1 a.m. I went outside in my pajamas all squinty eyed and mad as haides. They beamed their light on me flipping them off. I think it flustered them because they circled more tightly around the property and beamed the light at me (hard!) and all over the pool area again and again, almost in a frantic kind of way. So I went inside and called the police. It didn't matter of course. The lady who talked down to me was too calm about it. Said some felon was running around my neighborhood with a gun or something. Armed, I think she said, or dangerous, or both. I said, “That may BE, but do they have to shine their lights in my yard!” (like, “c’mon maaaaan”). I couldn't sleep for hours after, so I read the rest of my uncomfortable and bizarre novel by Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, yes, it's been months). It wasn’t satisfying. First whole book of fiction I’ve actually finsihed in a long time. What now? Back to the Dr. Bronners bottle.

Today I am struggling to get through student essay evaluations, while trying to keep my guests happy. We have a full house at Casa and I'm helping everyone off and on with random needs. Folks want to chat, stand in the sun and chat, drop names and titles of books and more names and chat, and there are the telephone calls. Nonstop. There's no room for uninterrupted concentration. I want to tell all the kids, you are fine. Don’t let them ef you up with details. Read a lot. What do you want? What will you do with your dreams? What do you care about? Know what you care about. Care about something, someone, some place! And I want to burn all my books of poetry.

I saw the movie Art School Confidential. I have been waiting for months for this movie to come out on DVD so I could get it in the mail from Netflix. I can’t tell you whether it sucked or rocked. I’m still on the fence about it. I mean, John Malkovich as a failed artist cum art teacher working in an urban legend of a deteriorating art institute in the middle of a ghetto where a serial strangler is on the loose? C’mon, it works. It was wonderful too see art portrayed as its all so vague and stupefying self. I know I wanted to be made fun of. I wanted everyone to be made fun of, but harder than they did it. Not to say the movie doesn’t make fun of art. It’s not the kind of fun making though that makes you double over in laughter-pain, but more like fidget in your chair and worry about your entire life—has it all been an effing waste?

What do you write when you realize you aren't a writer? After years and years and years of loving it and doing it and loving the moment you do it? No matter how hard you love language, how deeply, how interested you are in it...if you are not good at it, you should quit. Who can keep up with all the intellectual mumbo jumbo frustrating the digital miles between minds?

Art is so crazily tempting and gorgeous and arguable. Art on the page, canvas, chickenwire, whatever! I say to myself, You. You should do something else. What if you don't have something to say? Something to add? Something earth shatteringly good? What are you doing but cluttering the landscape with nonsense? That's how I feel right now. Increasingly as the days drag on. This is clutter. These words are clutter. How long have I felt this way? Since the 1600’s? (I can’t seem to stop though!)All these years and I still can't quit you.

I keep trying to get out of it, and it keeps coming back. The hunger, the ego, the pursuably disparate matrix. The pursuit is something isn’t it? For what? I keep trying toward it, and yet I fall back here. Every day I get closer though. I buy an online subscription to a streaming video game website. I play games. I blow off friends. I don’t go out, but I don’t go in either. I smoke two entire cigarettes before I move from my chair toward the kitchen to refresh my coffee, get sidetracked in the house and start doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, the bathroom, reorganizing the CD’s in the TV cabinet. I read the news for two hours, and then go in the house and watch it on the TV. I hate TV. I hate myself for watching it. I get up and check the mail. Maybe a rejection slip. Good, I tell myself, this helps. Hopefully, I’ll stop making empty threats soon, and will actually jump off that ledge into a total mundanity of insanity. In that loveless place where pulling weeds becomes a holy act—listening to the neighbor drone on about his dead chickens—
yelling at kids tagging your wall and pissing on your trash cans—calling the cops on the cops because, damnitt, you are just not going to take it anymore!

Tolstoy said: “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”

What? Tolstoy is dead too, lest I forget.

The funniest thing I read today was an article in Harpers (in my reading sanctuary, known to some as "the shitter" [people are so creative, i love them])--anyway, some guy actually delivered a paper on how to determine the number of prayer times and how to find the correct direction to pray (toward Mecca) from space. An excerpt: "As trips to space become commonplace, human civilization will no longer be tied to the surface of the earth. But Muslims, wherever they are, whether on earth or in space--are bound by duty to perform the obligations of worship." It goes on to speak in psuedo-mathematical and semi-technical terms about how, even though you are approximately some millions of miles away from earth, you don't have to increase the number of times you pray. 5 will suffice. Allah's creation is ordered. "A user-friendly portable Muslims in Space calculator could determine the direction of [The Rock] [in space]." What an excellent art installation THAT would be!! A SUPER-USER FRIENDLY PORTABLE MUSLIM PRAYER DIRECTION FROM SPACE CALCULATOR!

Art is an effing accident. And by that I do mean, act of god.

Turkish Turkeys and the Nobel Prize

2006-10-24T00:17:00.000-07:00

This Turk won, but...

The Great Turkmenbashi wouldn't turkmenostan(d) him in his country...even though he loves books building much...

Because I love both architecture and books, I love how these two stories go together and don't...

Goodnight mad world.

Which one?

2006-10-19T10:33:00.000-07:00

1. Diary of a Diorama
2. Oh Diary/Diorama
3. O Diary/Ah Diorama
4. O Diary Ah Diorama
5. Diary ah Diorama
6. Diorama of a Jingo
7. Other [tell me]

Break for sponsor identification

2006-10-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

This "project" is going to get away from me if I don't stop and spend some quality time with it. The "diary" project that is. And I think I've come to peace with what it wants to be, which isn't entirely what it has manifested itself to be up to this point. So I am sincerely going to take a moment and work on it. With it, that is, as it is a collaboration with myself and it. It occurs to me that the last piece is much too long and cumbersome. Already I have chopped half of it wistfully away. Now I am going back into the thing which is cumulous, and reprimanding (oops, I mean repairing) the whole lot. We will see what happens eh? Tonight K and I are free for the first time in awhile to be home and alone without guests. So heavenly.

In the meantime, while I am away in editing mode, there are a good number of things which I will post that have nothing or something to do with the “project” (but I don’t like that word much), any of import I hope. So I’m off.
Cheers.

animal-wise: words to just enough by

2006-10-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

"I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea." ~ Bram Stoker, Dracula

"A word to the wise is enough.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes

Dear Diary [as Diary wildnight]

At midnight I wrote an entry on horseback. But this morning I am afraid to look at it. Who returns with the numbers of such radical sequences? How soon after ecstasy so terribly aimed? I already adore their universe.

In it, the stars seemed to gesticulate the entire time. And yet they were completely likable. I don’t remember how much their distinguishment weighed, but their finer points kept pace with my simple speed. Otherwise, I pretended much too hard in situ: saddled as I was to thronging air.

These are the artifacts, I might have said, and here I may function without certainty.

Yet among the lightning hooves printing names to the mud; what is found but gone. My own going maps a chain of manes; screened and trailing. Still, the efforts of a single breath and the current barriers bother me to ask; what may suddenly become of this glorified ardency? Will it beckon a mysticism or drop like a weapon of a jaw?

Today I cull the sky’s cloth for picture telling and hope the piling of these tethered selections will catalyze a furtive reaction. An oversized fire shirt or a too small heating hat. That would be wonder full enough. Even a duplicate of enough would suffice.

Against the imperceptible all I can see are bare branches: a rough sketch of now.

But this morning your ghost reveals an advantage. Evidenced in letters writ to me by accomplices wrung from banishment—I found—(I have found), late Tudor to Jacobian in tone: the sprawling rooms. You can’t imagine my technical surprise.

There has been a tender keenness to each night’s favoring of each.

This terrestrial point of view must degenerate, or else speak indelicately. So arcades of lost wings disappear in a mosaic of isometric decoration. A trembling (enough) begins just there; a tiny bit mean.

I surmise: Death is about. Everyone’s smiles. Death is about. Desire careens. Death is about, and life.

What a character is an aspect of this character. This is how I found my love for birds killed by housecats is crucial to my decorating sense.

A somewhat flirty clue, I wondered if I should separate out for a later entry, but alas, how summer of love; I decided.

And you, you will always agree politely because. You will always because. Your way to answer me is perpendicularly given to your interest in my code of questions. I don’t need to look into fruit red wounds to know I have atomic proof. No further than this, or maybe a little because.

But I may reply to your lampooning guesswork by playing you back. Handwrite our comical alphabet in different cursives on used paper bags. I'll say I like the brown ones; they go with your nose. And straight away, our practice alphabets will be telepathed in a chest below the floor, to illustrate the foundation of our mutual fantasy.

I do this in spite of the bulk of your unrepentant dye. Nothing goes in the bags. Nothing fits after the ink dries. Down they go.

This kind of thing threatens to get sacred, but try not to balk. I am particularizing my spiritual investments with your trust. Mostly, but then this dream isn't dire.

Inwardly I stash keys as any locks hold, to keep unwanted visitors in superior suspense. Next, in case of certain errant suspicions, I will bet you at charades. Pantomime for you: rust, optic, rotation, bridge, and sinking ship. The verses are more filled with air than we are. I assure you these are a front.

As with any test of our friendship in this game; you must guess all my facts act correct, and they may very well be. Some tension is palpable, but you look simply noble in your borrow riddled slacks.

I also like to watch as I take up arrears. I know what I owe the view.

Despite my distancing, I think the separation between us is dependable. If not now, with luck forthcoming. Though this whole matter is much less frugal than my forgery of it amounts; in hindsight I spend the time of our life.

You are a brilliant paramour for me ever; so unlucky in my trade. I am happier post-nightmare of it to serve you. Look forward, then. Tonight I’ll ring the house with blind corners, around which I’ll hide all the possibilities I can.

Until the current scheme advances; yours.

I can't help this one. And: Here's why other stuff...

2006-10-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

While you are out there "having fun" reading Pound, you might take a break and look at this trio of bizarre videos, related only because the world is insane--and so for me it is beautiful and fair--in the order I post them here. Gotta watch em in order, k? Personally, they make me happy in an embarassed kind of way. (The first one appears here to contextualize the other two).

1
2
3

p.s. I am not writing my dear diary series here anymore. I decided it needs to gestate in private. Not that it didn't feel like a private thing (so quiet as it was around here then), but, well. You know. Also, I am busy, bitter, and bedazzled. Also, I am looking for poetry in the ovbious, and not here. And I'm going in for a kind of personal kill. Might take me awhile to disappear...who knows? Like my new representational photo? For now, it's the best representation I could scrounge up. In the end, I am about sending my sincere love to who needs it most. Please do not curb your appetites for any literary tea else. In the meantime...

Taking a break...

2006-10-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

Going quiet for awhile. Matterless. Have fun here.

And a Ratio of Worrisome Machinations: Voicables

2006-10-06T17:38:00.000-07:00

“The Machinery, madam, is a term invented by the critics, to signify that part which the deities, angels, or demons, are made to act in the poem.” A. Pope ~ Alexander Pope wrote this in a letter to Mrs. Arabella Fermer in regard to certain potential confusions which might arise for her in The Rape of the Lock: An Heroi-Comical Poem, dedicated to her.

Dear { },

I have unauthorized news!

The state is on fire and the technical manuals have fled their offices. I am writing you now because all other coffee break channels are jammed, and I am burning from the seizure.

Because of the current rate at which emergency isn’t getting due credit, I have determined to raise a new machine at the speed of a very old foundation, and you [Dear { }] are at the center of the shunk shunking redundancy that will inform its auxiliary sound. I trust you will bode as well as a glass cog in a barrel of luminous facets here. You will split prettily on this new/old foundation: like a long thin crack in hard logic. I look forward to how your swiftness will report.

My empty platitudes aren’t the ones meant to influence you. I have many requests; the facets of which are measured in angstroms, and may draw exception to my range (in empirical radius). I so have to warn you that some local obstacles have become their own race. Never the less side winding in the sidelines; we will see, we will. Allow me to flyer this warning around town, and flag the characteristics of your cracking reach in return. [You will find my invitation to a celebration in a later letter.]

For now in this dark hour I must consider your potential contribution to colonial import. Post marked, of course. Unequivocally, the languages will come to gossip over this. But, you are, after all, a careful shape that grows in correct proportion to the space you inhabit. So I don’t worry the residue in the jar, or of size. Let it settle and stay behind. Let it talk back and forth to itself when the table’s bumped. It is important to be sensitive to our respiratory function, the wings of our tertiary structure [there is always the three of us in every room] and the singularity of useless liquid – under attack by the lowering of whatever lid.

I feel sorry for the rest in an air that has not befriended your gaze. You can be an elaborately cruel apparatus! For some reason, when I think of you in an automobile; I imagine animal tongues will soon begin falling like hail; wildly wordless heirs of the war cry licking a long dead sky. Too much slack lacking much needed practical levity. Soon the land is cumbrously littered with disembodied lingua. I sure hope I don’t cringe posthumously from this aftermath. Most death isn’t much of a death.

I have slipped on my tidy application. Forgive me? You seem thinner the more I write you.

All eyes want to buy you groceries. Want to buy you food and clothes and put you in a wooden bed in a room made of wood. Want to weave rings of medicinal herb to string to trees. Want to heal your view from the technical ladder. Our hands are not as tied as our ambition is you know; so much is possible. Instead of a volley with our dream crushed voices wishing to spew: reductio ad absurdum; all this could happen. By hand! Up north, vast fields are already in private communication, and in the places where the water is clean clear through; a terrific impressionism supposes its way to the bottom of the sea. What else could it do? We haven’t skippered its boat shapes to cut in…

I swear I never set out meaning to demonize your beneficial obviation; so how does it always come to this? Maybe it’s the distant syntheses of your terms. You are so deliberate, fundamental, and yet nothing and barren et all. Time doesn’t understand.

You must speak with your carrier pigeons! They keep dying face first in our windows! No matter how many dirty marks we leave to lessen their speed toward them. Monday through Thursday are weapon building days, and we have no time to gather dead feathers and messages from outside these buildings. We can’t afford grounds keepers, and the weather is always too hot. We are not concerned with the techniques of civilization in these planes, so tell your pigeons your anonymity is useless.

In closing; I do plan to name a fairytale city after you: Nevermind. This week I will build a strange weapon of hypotheses. My two edged little weapon thinks of you so much it cuts a forehead for you. That will be its exact goal. No longer a friend of whalebone or whalebone a friend to me, and at the accelerating pace of all systems; I will never have time to use it.

Now: how to get you through your day…

All I have to give today...

2006-10-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

One sick puppy after another.

A note not part of project note

2006-10-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

My dears,

I have had a bit of Mao Tsetung today, and brights of Pope and darks of Milton. Sick of everything today there is today, I left this lusty land of lists for early on. Take a moment; I’ll let you to your snickers. There. Who would skip back and forth like this is only hurried. Or is hurried and has little much of else to spare. With all the what there is to why this is how I who. Some ungenerous fop left a woodchuck cider in my fridge, and after one sip I’m too offended to drink. So I call Kristen before she comes home, “Are you bringing beer? I sincerely hope so dear.” While I await her bicycling arrival home from work, I offer these:

Read Milton’s smaller works: bite sized to fit in your bonnet. Sonnet XI: (a sonnet).

A book of writ of late call’d Tetrachordon;
And wov’n close, both matter, form and stile;
the subject new: it walk’d the Town a while,
Numbering good intellects; now seldom por’d on.
Cries the stall-reader, bless us! What a word on
A title page is this ! and some in file
Stand spelling fals, while one might walk to Mile-
End Green. Why is it harder Sirs then Gordon,
Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp?
Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek
that would have made Quintillian stare and gasp.
Thy age, like ours, O Soul of Sir John Cheek,
Hated not Learning wors then Toad or Asp;
When thou taught’st Cambridge, and King Edward Greek. (1673)

Read this excerpt of a poem by J.C. Squire called The Birds: Early 20th Century. I have rudely cut it crudely from the text for your pleasure:

As I this year, looked down and saw the same
Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft
With grey-green spots on them, while right and left
A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying,
Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying,
Circling and crying, over and over and over,
Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover.
And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted,
Pipe-necked and stationary and silhouetted,
Cormorants stood in a wise, black, equal row
Above the nests and long blue eggs we know.

O delicate chain over all ages stretched,
O dumb tradition from what for darkness fetched:
Each little architect with its one design
Perpetual, fixed and right in stuff and line,
Each little ministrant who knows one thing,
One learned rite to celebrate the spring.
Whatever alters else on sea or shore,
These are unchanging: man must still explore.

(end)

Ohh. I sigh. The suns set for its going down now…goodnite.

A good time for an intermission...

2006-10-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

Time to take a brief break. Such density needs air to breathe. Evaluating essays now, for Gorman, and the kids words are all the breath I need. Eraser rubbings make my area a little filthy, mixed with cigarette ash. A fourth cup of coffee is on me, and these important things are due today. Time management's on my back.

Full of guests here. Full of guests and essays, and interns on the way. This desert weather is almost romantic, and so I mention it. Fall is so thinly expressed here, and not necessarily in weather terms. Biorhythms, and brainwaves. Thoughts begin to ground themselves, as leaf re-matters. Gravity asks for recombination. I look forward to a reading of my charts by the Australian. Someday via mail. Letters of guesses to retrofit me.

Obviously to you or not, I have been immersed in an accidental problem/project this passed week. Something coming of it, or something going on, or something. I am enjoying myself really. Observably, the thing to fold is troublingly dense. Difficult to crease, bend, present. (Like a ceremonial gift, of a flag to the survived by), but this one is more sentient, like a serial scent. I have always loved the diary. Or for you who loathe the term diary, the journal, written record of days, the life log. Even this socalled breath from it, dense dense dense. I guess so, therefore I am. No more wedding notes, and no more sermons from the church of the bored. The blog is a blog is a blog. Don't you like how blog echoes blah?

Sigh, yawn. Back to work. I miss everyone.

Diary operating manual(ly) online: sketch two

2006-09-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

“This mixture of apparently disparate materials—scandal and spiritualism, current events and eternal recurrences—is not promising on the face of it.” ~ Gary Wills

Retrace.
Or retrograde? Doesn’t matter. A) You were getting climactic in your years, and B) no-one could tell.
1. Again, to stipulate how the myths were punctuated: open wider, take risks, be wise; generally, all aware of the triumph of lies. It is a tedious theory we practice. This may not be as true as the way we practice tedium, theoretically.
2. The letters came after the war we thought was the one for us. Our memory of it was so familialy confabulated, we had to buy the serial stories of guns so we could stick to them, and count on strangers as if they were kin: justice cuts in line. Follow the woodwind section to opine. For a moment, as brief as any’s awe, we assume a lesson is learned for us we will not have to learn en masse, and so we escape narrowly, the consequences of individuality. Hence, the Dear Diary/episodic corroborations/ occur naturally in situ. Everywhere that said truth went the lambs were sure to follow.
3. Histrionic is history. The future is all epilogue.
4. The new something is not a product of erasure so much as a product of how much you used to love to go camping. Remember this when attempting to describe the perfect method of roasting a marshmallow in the format of the new something. Remember the implements, the fire, the duration, and the sticky absurd morsel you once prized.
5. Instead of o captain my captain, o madame my madman.
6. “I’ll see you later.” coupled with, “Not if I see you first.” is a humorous problem. Humorous problems will not be ignored in the future. The goal will be to forget your middle name, and remember them only at greetings.
7. About pungent toil: It is a good, albeit out of fashion, habit to form with regard to living in any house shaped like a diary.
8. Again, when stipulating how the myths were punctuated: the house itself, is not suspect.
9. Divining rods and thresholds are useful instruments for interpreting possible messages revealed when the falling sky lands in your psyche more than once in the same second. The page has no roof. I will build the relations, and keep them everywhere. These relations are not statistically important, but count on us for reentry into the diary. If anything moves, I would love that.
10. Consider also: syntax equals form? Oh yes; sounds have bilabial and labiodental attitudes; and even express as personal information, as “I walk to Safeway,” comes into play, there is always a denoting and connoting toward safe ways.
11. Repeat and change. Never again look the pages in the eye and say, “you are better without God.”

Architectone Moderato

2006-09-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

Dear [replacement] Diary,

I would like to make a slew of curious statements quickly; pray bear with these efforting helices; and bring your density and gradients along with their eyes.

I still don't know your name but consider a sacred annealment tangible. In the city I stride alongside solution's haunting. Yours is a thirst only this denatured drink offers itself to. So, I inhabit this radio of clime, careful of the static gaps.

The fragmenting of this theme [Dear Diary] into its own motives may soon suffer momentum’s pitch, but will you help me commend creation for knowing its architecture: For putting up angles of calculated surprise, and importing us in edificial quatities of sleep. Each testimony, is both regional and virtual. So you are not a love letter, but I love the elemental functionality of our zigzagging model. Together we object to X-ray. Thankfully, we were born without mechanical regulation of our registers. Both ours. I am pressed inward, also I am impressed, to stand like a nerve statue and bevel away at my nature. Under this very frontispiece hung here: we may hang over in a primal dance. I know I should not embellish what gypsy I am not, as if I could. Sorry, but I know how charming little tunes divine. Can you come out here in a year?

In response to your metonymic letters, my voice is a challenging antique. An item that may auctioneer for less than a buck or more. It gathers itself by way of introduction, and bouquets like a fist. Stops here. Segments of my motives lead to new impetuous dissentions, and segments fantasize: the pink bowls in your body full of patriotic milk; the life of your hot tongue leaning tired against its teeth. Sum of button and which to push: How I am beleivably ignored. The more timid locations in the imagination struggle to harmonize two things (sweet and graceful). Higher Organisms? Say hello. And then? Precisely midway between the heart and the head: a category is born. Brand new. I am told things afterward, that don't help much. But the succesful synthesis of vital inspirations ensures the number of (two) are afforded a correct placing on the messenger template. Category (answer) or no (receipt).

The allegory for which has not been written?

Is art working too hard? Send him home, and his luggage.

It occurs that in art worked too hard it is said we inhabit hell. In diligence we might avoid ourselves and miss hell. Hell lives in lazy art to which it is impossible to fasten your attention. Please, please. Can we avoid false virtuosity and embrace a purposeless brilliance? Regardless of more general things (genetics and stereos); our temple is more than a vogue movement. Less than: a primitive horn made of the noise itself. O, I almost forgot our neighbors of the hay; tell them battled antiques dream in droves. Caricatures of rust and want; but I miss them too often.

What is brand new; as is when; and where; and how. But who is brand new? You wrote: Announce your lyric little Put; step to the front-of-the-beat. And: Which aspect of music composes in you vertically? Sway, sway…you sway. The mountain speaks in your favor. I am confident in the new category’s music, and promise to come round.

Do you remember Jacob of Leigé of the fourteenth century? He thought music had become “lascivious beyond measure.” When I think of him I see sheets of arabesques catching fire in a pauper’s house. I think of our old school. The dirt floors. Yes I am referring to the remote past. Sweet modes, good mode, thank you (same as now.) It injects me with a subtle warfare and helps maintain my mood of well-being.

In your absence I am affected by physical achievement, tonics of simile, some method I am creating under wraps. I hope I am capable of determining your uniqueness among the fray. Otherwise I live in a nightmare attempting to resemble your murder. Mind, I am watching after you, and you mustn’t but you will fret, even though I dwell here willingly. My post is set on the point you have marked with your fraction. Have you born witness to the scale of these walls? Lately. With my temperature pitched by fever, reflection proves a mandatory exercise. The walls are fairly built, and measure themselves: note by note. I sway to God on my mother. Come, come.

Without you I will feel crass and obvious. Too obvious. I would rather surmise a doctrine of affections, and mirror what is vivid. Much rather. Sincerely, struggling. Nothing to panic about, I just know.

p.s. I have enclosed a reasonable religion I have no room for in my workspace. Hide it from me. I trust you will tell no-one you know.

Diary operating manual(ly) online: sketch one

2006-09-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

1. Death or Ceremony of: carriage of reasons; methods of getting at: remembrances.
2. At the moment when blank was added, the end would be expected to contain emptiness in various states of completion. Some measurement of time later each of the blanks would be finished emptying and cast off into the void. If the blanks were assembled in ordinary sequences, they should be labeled at their breaking points. And meaningful ones will be (difficult). Thus the blanks which were most nearly complete at the moment when nothing was added should have received the least label, and those which had only just started growing will receive the most. Among any triptych set of blanks, which will now be isolated from an assembled mourning set, cast off by less affable blanks; the blanks situated near the beginning point of the assembly should be in agreement with any expectation. Ignore the rate of reaction which is all extra, but measure all corresponding rememberments. Lastly replace blanks with souls. Realizing should, upon assertion, possible.
3. If a harp enters the picture this in an opportunity to extend work in oratorio style. Harp on particular death’s service. Stabilize individual instruments for the coming plucking.
4. Remember the pages were consisting of arms, legs, foreheads, anterior torsos and thumbs when amassing emotion. Lie broken spine down as lovingly. Lay rheumatic hands on the cover to coax carefully (one speaks to the other). Leftover quills go in the mouth.
5. What is dead is neither belonging to what was nor indicating, in any way, a past inhabitation or summary of any mineral composition. Not merely and/or not a target. Regard a defect in every mourners’ eye. Regard style of art. Regard subject and subject’s strength. Somewhere in here is a vast improvement. What is a thunderfish? What is that sound of thunder? A testament presents moments featuring everyone.
6. Send in the bones. Send them book rate. Send court[ ]ships slanting. Shipments of. Pack light. Take care not to overwhelm weight of actual bird.
7. Note sketch patterns may divide (attention of) the following. (Put what in ink!) Denote further later.
8. Automobiles: immensity, eternity, infinity [must get somewhere] (why is laughter such an unattractive semblance of letters?) Still, one sees the dropping of a jaw there.
9. Arrivals, conditions, disciplines, what ports of authority [set? by whom?], supposed aftermaths. In the case of suits, tie them off. Carbon is a simple being. Loveless light.
10. If you believe in God, that he or she may detest even numbers may have occurred to you.
11. Names can demote the cataclysmal properties of their own sound; so fete them in pastoral sceneries to ensure the safety of numbers. Remuneration is not enumeration; though cause to consider the (re) amplifies in all sacred scenarios of naming. Dear (who), dearly named (to be inserted as inspiration) continues from one end of the spectrum to the other; as a rule.
End part one.

On the firmament of many names...

2006-09-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

“Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless.” ~Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Dear Diary,

In my sleep I was told by a sleeper cell you must not be called Diary anymore. Now whether it came from an ethereal daybed or an insidious apse in my lexicon doesn’t matter. The cell slept, and the cell didn’t show: its message snored. Instead, crosswords appeared—larynx across and yes down. Daisies were daubed in the miniature airspace above that, and there was a peal of bells. Later, nothing moved again. Eventually, in a springing breadth of light, behind that appeared ligature across and game down.

And so I woke obedience. Also, I woke obedience and astronomy; I woke obedience and astronomy and music. I said look. I said I think Diary is a meteorite and a diploma and future. Responsibility falls on all of us. Everyone please turn around. So we didn’t face each other during the imagining exercise a long time. Grief made us want to, at moments, but we fought like hell, stoics against hell. Greif because there are too many names. Greif because each one is good and then vanishes. The lists thronged. The lists carried torches of fire…, I woke myself.

When I opened my eyes I knew this would be a ferial day. I would make certain not to gaze at screens or other vehicles of bafflement. I would put on clothes. I would put clothes away. I would put water on the dirt my plants lived in, and try not to feel so venerable. Images of your face upbraided newly thin air. Standing still amidst owned objects I acted like a solar system to me: a bigot of space. Your face became faces. I said I am a bigot, I bigot, I am big. Bigger than you Diary. I absorbed sentimental humidity as an absence. An uncommon thirst doubled over. I resisted missing you again, but was not certain what missing meant. In this way I failed at longing. So the burden of your replacement pressed again.

Then an urgency to write for words. Send off for a stratagem to gain spectral crystallization. Questions renew: Are you forensic anymore? Are you a solution of loose nucleotides? Are you going to photograph well in this light? Does your geometry spell a prayer only children’s' inner ears understand? Theory and tests, theory and tests: these are the nearest neighborhood frequencies I associated with the great number of names. If I am the messenger how could you listen? How can you hear me when I do not know what you will be called? I am contained by too many answers.

I leave the house quickly. I leave with the assembly:

Rabbit; zigzag; glove; bishop; seashell; wave from nowhere; horseback…

The earth reports.

Whenever.

the untenable jingo of a heaviness

2006-09-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

"One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."

— (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Dear Diary,

I miss you. The dust doesn’t care but to cover flat surfaces meticulously. None the less. I forget what for. Is it missing I am doing? Fingertips cake after a brief pressing down. An after matter: To be rubbed away. Impractical, and rude. So a sleuth of wind (a secret measurement) interjects meaning to a room. A room I live in with or without you; how small matters.

Nevermind. I am replacing you permanently with another diary. I am replacing you with one which has no operating manual. It would be much too arduous, in fact impossible to write. I make no excuse, it’s just that. Such a thing makes me feel so therefore-ish, congenially speaking. In other words one considers the tasks at hand. In properness, I am writing the operating manual to you while I replace you. This will go on for as long as it has to in order to dissolve my abandonment issues. I am in one valid mood about you continuously. I like to say definitely, but if I speak ill I trust you will keep a record.

This is less a superficial homage than you might leap to argue. Please listen, to these illicit figures I pronounce by construct; I mean I construct them this way (figuratively), for a very dark reason that counts. Or I mean watch out! I have imagined you over, many a time. And I am no Aristotle. (Nor Pope, nor Valery, nor Homer). Least of all John Paul.

I imagine this whole thing is an idea: your manual of operation. A manual inwhich I will attempt to express a nature separate from which you represent—specifically for the purpose of protecting my sensitive areas [in particular whatever immortal parts of me remain undead]—from which (yes, again) you represent. As a Diary of course: nothing less. You must remain utterly hypothetical, and I must love you or I don’t. You are conditional and you have been verified. There is mercury in the barometer you are, holding as still as a bullet. But holding still, as a bullet cannot. There is a grammatical difference between bullet and mercury…

Am I not allowed to humor you? You used to laugh. I remember your racecar fast eyes forgetting to come to a conclusion—those were happier times. The rules were general, the contradictions mildly pathetic, and the galaxies flashing above weighed immensity, eternity, infinity. All these words were inescapable. I wonder if I should use them in the manual…I wasn’t thinking of that. But I will consider this, and also types of automobiles.

I do not know if there will be a moral to your story. This will eventually be converted into a limitation, and thereby particularized in random creation. Tit for tat. I will distribute the episodes, each as an assertion—not a proposition—which will become square in time. As square as we are doubtful of each other. Yesterday was a good day is not as true as it was Tuesday. I am bound to be consistently inferring this way to maintain a balance. Mine, dear Diary. So please commence imagining a faith for us. One that frees God from page numbers. I will count on the sound it makes to guide me…but then, other sounds too.

Please do not feel obligated to reply.

and now a word from our sponsor...

2006-09-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Mister has joined the digital fruition bloc. M's in the houuuuuse! And,
Sonora Review will take one of my poems. That's the news.

?

2006-09-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Just looking at things with your eyes open isn’t enough. This lesson is hard to get. It is hard to get the lesson and it is even harder to know when you’ve been given it. The only certainty is that when you do get it you know you’ve gotten it, and once you’ve gotten it you can never see a thing again without knowing its there. Everything doubles and breaks at once: a heart is also a pump that underneath the town, another town’s pulse. Another hill under the hill, and under the smile the mark of the frown. The eyes don’t have it and stars aren’t even a thing that is there. Light is there, but its source has long gone. The words carp or delicate don’t know of themselves. Faith is not stored in the nostrils nor can mucous store away in the nostrils. Charm is never in reach nor is charm coming in handy when you need it. If you are a man you are also a woman, and this hurts once each month as full moons pull water. If you are a witness, you are not an expert. If you are an expert witness, you are also a mother or daughter and have been so for longer than you’ve been an expert witness. If your eyes were closed when you saw it, what did you hear? A drop of water also sounds like a grasshopper landing on wrinkled sheet of tracing paper. Tracing paper had water inside of it, or the grasshopper certainly. Wax is produced by the ear and hearing wanes depending on the waxing of a certain voice. Playing it by ear is dancing with shadows. Shadows make a kind of sound you feel on your skin—air closing in and of skies going—and blood leaves the skin without leaving the body. The body is a closed system, and this is. You are the seer of that system, and this. Close your eyes to see if this is so.

Three Times a Lady...

2006-09-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

We stayed at the Prescott Resort for the wedding. The "resort" is on the Yavapai reservation, so the rules are different. You can smoke drink and gamble in the hotel. Throughout the hotel there is an impressive collection of southwestern art on display all year round. Bronze sculptures of horses and cowboys and Indians. Enormous paintings of the Grand Canyon, fields of cows, and hay. Every Christmas they host a gingerbread house contest here. The most elaborate gingerbread villages you every saw are set up in the lobby and conference halls. There's a big fountain inside the lobby, next the bar. The west side of the building that faces Prescott is mostly glass for the view. Outside, they are reconstructing the road that climbs the hill to the hotel. Workers with bandanas tied around their faces flag traffic coming and going. Dust covers the cars that trickles from the tractor's overfull loaders. It might be a quarter of a mile up and down.

The rooms are set up like suites. Two rooms. The hotel is high on a hill overlooking all of Prescott. You can stand on the balcony outside of your room. The wind picks up momentum as it sweeps the town in the valley-bowl below and then collects itself at the bottom of the hill so that it explodes against the face of the hotel with a formidable thrust. Five stories up you can stand on a balcony and feel that unreasonable jumping urge. Spit over the rail. Pull your coat close to your neck and cry, the wind will wipe your tears.

Most of your family loves to gamble, and when they are not eating or gathering, you will find them in the casino. Bucky's casino is attached to one end of the the hotel like an awkward collection of misshapen boxes with unfinished paintjobs. Out of the main entrance of the hotel, guests flow with luggage and garment bags. Transport busses unload retired folks and crazy people at the door of the casino all day and night. Everyone in the casino looks poor, desperate, dazed. Like the crazy lady I saw once each day while I was in Prescott for my mother's wedding.

The first time I saw her was the first night I was there, in the casino. I went to the bar in the casino to order a beer. Since I don't really gamble, I usually grab a beer and walk around the casino from family member to family member, visiting and checking out their progress. So, I was elbowed up to the bar, in a daze, the machines ringing and beeping and clicking cacophonously around my ears, not realizing right in front of me on the bar was an open wallet bursting with receipts, papers, photos, money. My elbows were touching it, and I didn't even notice it. In a minute a wild eyed woman appeared, reaching over my shoulders and grabbing the pile of money on top of the wallet...I backed away from it startled by her and the idea that I hadn't noticed it. A flash of unwarranted guilt passed through my eyes...she--about 50 or so, with salt and pepper pig-tails (huge pigtails) and bad teeth, in a man's cowboy shirt and dirty jeans and dirty white tennis shoes--smiled at me and said, "hey, watch my stuff for me," while I simultaneously spurted out, "I didn't see it, I'm sorry," but...it didn't seem to matter to her. She looked me hard in the eye and just smiled her rotting tooth smile at me. A goofy, tricky, strange smile, and then she walked off. I felt caught at something I didn't do, or had I been "served" with some kind of message? There I now stood, stuck in charge of an open wallet, at the bar waiting to order a beer. Suddenly I didn't want the beer anymore and so for a few moments, I struggled with whether or not to leave my assigned post. I walked around the corner, tapped her on the shoulder where she sat hunkered down at a slot machine, kept walking...I left my post.

The next day we had to go to the mall to get K a jacket. Before we left home K left her coat in the hall, and it was cold in Prescott. So we drove out to the mall for a quick shopping jaunt. The parking lots were packed, with cars driving up and down the aisles searching for open spots. It was chaotic and I was frustrated and tired. I was driving the car, also searching for a spot. All of the sudden I came around the end of an aisle and had to slam on my brakes...I almost got in a head on collision with another car. Both cars screeched to a halt within inches of each other's front bumper. Beat up oxidized black Camero to shiny white Malibu rental. The driver of the Camero was that crazy pigtail lady! Again, she looked me right in the eye and gave me that weird smile. I cringed and shook off the chills before I drove on.

On the last day we left the hotel early in the morning to get K's mom to the airport in Phoenix. We didn't have time to get coffee in town, and the coffee in the room was NOT good, so we decided to get out of there and pull over in Prescott Valley (about 15 miles out of Prescott) where we knew there was a Starbucks in a Safeway store there. I missed the main entrance to the shopping center and had to double back via back streets to reenter the shopping center lots at the back of the store. I parked on the far end of the store in a dirt lot where no other cars were, K jumped out and ran for the coffee. I decided not to sit there and wait for her because I hate sitting and waiting. So I turned the car around to drive around toward the back alley, where the loading docks and dumpsters are. As I pulled around a blind corner into the alley, I had to swerve the car in order to miss hitting a parked car's open door. Yes, it was the pigtail lady, hunched over the trunk of an old beat up dirty white four door something or other...unloading cardboard boxes. She stuck her head up just in time to give me that freaky smile again, and wave! I sped up the car to get through that alley as quickly as possible. Without thinking, I had waved back.

Nothing more interesting than that happened. I cried a lot this weekend. I gave an ok toast at the wedding reception. My little sister gave two toasts, one sober and the next toasted. Five other people gave toasts. The toasting went on a long time. My Uncle Sal opened a magnum of champagne my grandpa made--the last bottle of it he's been saving for 30 years--to toast my mother and her new husband. Everyone cried and drank it, though it had lost its bubbles and tasted like vinegar. My mother said through tears, "I can taste my father in it." Thousands of pictures were taken, thanks to digital cameras. I lost my wallet and keys about a dozen times, and found them. Nobody won big at the casino.

I just woke from a bad pun

2006-09-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

I fell asleep reading Atwood's Oryx and Crake, sometime around 2:37 a.m., trying to keep my mind off the wedding to come this Friday--i was woken early this morning, propelled from sleep really, by embarrassment. In an apparent dream I came onto the reception floor and took the microphone from my Uncle Sal--in the spotlight I thanked him, gave him a big squeeze said I wanted to toast my mother and her new husband Charlie--and then proceeded to take out a silver toaster from a bag, set it on a stool, unwind an extension chord and run around looking for a plug in the reception hall with this enormously long chord following me everywhere--the hot spotlight following. Then I plugged it in, set the microphone on a stand before the toaster and walked away...after only seconds of bearing the painful silence...I woke. Some messed up hybrid John Cage Steve Martin subconscious logic. I leave for the home front in one hour now...family reunion with lots of loud and loving italians, wedding of my mother, and a whirlwind celebration ahead. I've tried to write a toast, take notes on my thoughts, and even say things outloud to myself in front of the mirror I thought I might say in a situation like this...but I can't sound eloquent enough. I hope inspiration hits me soon...I want every moment of this event to be uniquely and genuinely happy moments for my mom. She is 58, finding love again, being set free from poverty and a life of bending to her knees to clean strangers' toilets and floors. She will once again own her identity, and when she crawls into bed each night, I know a good man will be there to share good dreams beside her...hopefully not punny ones like mine.

A Little Strange Reason for the Day

2006-09-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

"...Love
releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life
to think about. Take R-the only thing
R could credit herself with was having lived
her life and so she not only kept an account of it
but did so not in the privacy of a diary but in the form of letters
-- abundant, porfligate, indiscrete -- that I want to write
to you so as to note something that I read
this morning: "It's not that this or that means something
to me, but this! or that! -- means something to me." Musically
R beqeaths herself to posterity as a scholar might
bequeath his or her library blowing twisted veils of rain
past the narrow and curving windows in the last hour that will carry us
along
to the time when those who come after us will learn what we know--"
(Lyn Hejinian from Fatalist)

***

This coming Friday my mother is remarrying her high school sweetheart who was not my father but could have been, if he hadn't wanted to move to Mexico all those years ago. My six syblings and their nine kids and I, my many cousins who I can not count, aunts and uncles, and family and friends excluding my grandparents (all deceased) will be present. And Chuck's family who none of us have met until now, will also be there. We will be meeting my mother's new family for the first time. I can't even describe how odd this all is. Two years ago my mother was one of the saddest people I knew. Working as a housekeeper, cleaning doctor's offices and wealthy people's oversized homes for much too little pay because she couldn't bring herself to charge more, and living in her tiny house with my sister and brother in law and their two daughters, she was lonley and tired. Now, she has met (re-met) the man who will love her for the rest of her life. A man who can take care of her, show her the world, hold her in the dark--away from the dark she dreaded. My father abused her mentally and physically for many years, so she became the smallest size a person can be while still seeming to exist. Now she has grown large, like a magnolia tree in bloom--and smiles and laughs and jokes and even gets angry when she should. For all this I and my siblings are both stunned and happy. But with her happiness comes sacrifice as we will have to let her go to live in California with Chuck. By the end of the month she'll be moved from Arizona, where she has lived for over 30 years, to move into Chuck's house in San Jose. How maudlin I sound! It's hard though, and so I mention this as this is what's going on with me these days...preparing for big changes...how love changes us...for good.

***

Of new and old friends: Last night K and I went to bed discussing how continuously blessed we are. We had a very down to earth, relaxed, and stimulating backyard dinner last night with new friends we feel confident will become old friends soon. So many interesting and dynamic people come through our lives here at Casa Libre, and we seem to make connections with each one...some you love over time, and some you just adore immediately. Kinship, I think they call it. We have been aching and missing our dear friends M & K who recently moved across the country from us, and it's been strange to miss friends as you would family. But we are fortunate to have met and begun cultivating friends and new family here in Tucson. I mention this, because I'm grateful to know good people, and, I'm a cheeseball.

***

I hope soon to be able to afford Jen Tynes new book, The End of Rude Handles, and read it again and again. It's really good. I recommend it. I am confident a captivating reader review of this book will soon appear on OAR.

***
Recently read? Lyn Hejinian's Fatalist, Brent Cunningham's Bird & Forest, Harpers, Cue, Cutbank, a very strange book published in 1950 by a man named Stephen Potter called Lifemanship: The Art of Getting Away With it Without Being and Absolute Plonk, a very old children's book [I collect children's books and read them regularly] called The Monkey Who Would Not Kill, and some of Laura Riding Jackson's The Telling--even though I would have rather been reading her Four Unposted Letters to Katherine [excellent prose/poetry/epistles]. On a side note, in some ways I feel like I identify with Laura Riding, as she was so disturbed and conflicted by the egomaniacal climate of the literary world in her day she quit writing poetry--quit poetry really--and devoted the rest of her life to writing about writing and poetry instead. She was caught somewhere between Tolstoy's What is Art? mindset and a suppressed Song of Myself headset. In my opinion anyway; she never stated as much. Kristen reads Don Quixote to me at night in bed [this has been going on for months now.] I want to re-read Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel after that. I was gifted a very lovely two volume set of Rabelais works a few years back and haven't touched them. While in Cincinnati I purchased a copy of The Praise of Folly for M & K, intending to read it aloud to them, but I never did.

***

I just received an email from a guest I thought was coming tomorrow who is now coming today...I have a lot of work to do, and my coffee cup is now drained.

Some Thoughts After Morgan's Thoughts...

2006-09-12T15:45:00.000-07:00

This post is in direct response to a post on Morgan's blog: Whatever Happened to America of 9/12. K and I were living in NY on 9/11, and have plenty to say about it, but the one story that has haunted me is recalled by this blog post. Three days/nights after the terrific series of events we went to a rooftop party in Brooklyn/Williamsburg with a lot of Cornell graduates who were mostly working for the Democratic party. Not political activists, per say, but interns and campaign assistants and behind the scenes political working folks. Mostly young. Mostly glued to their cell phones, and mostly heavy drinkers. We had a front seat view of the site which was then an enormous hole, still copiously smoking and clouding with dust/debris, and illuminated by hundreds of industrial work lights. At that time, the “rescue effort” was still a valid effort. Helicopters were flying over our heads, beaming search lights on and between random buildings, military planes intermittently flew by, the continuous sound of sirens interjected alarm, and the elevated train passed right by the rooftop we were on, empty each time it passed; a ghost train. On the side of a building just to the right of this view, was a huge billboard lit up, a car ad, with a blurry photo of some fast little Japanese car (I can’t remember which) that read, “We have a cure…may cause excitability.” It was the most eerie scene, if not for the obvious reasons, but because all of those attending the party didn't even look up, talk about it, or acknowledge it. Seemed a world away from the highly unusual activity buzzing all around us. K and I sat on the parapet with our feet dangling over the edge of the roof, holding hands, heavy in our hearts and unable to form many words. We watched the other side of the river a long time as the party raged on behind us on the roof. At one point, a couple of friends and a few other people came to sit with us and tried to start conversation. After there were about 5 folks sitting with us, I waited for an opening in chatter and said to them, "so, is everybody ready to go to war?" knowing in my heart what was to come, and one guy said, "I’ve never felt so jazzed to be an American!" (in that fuck-ya kind of way). I said, “I’m scared…and…” Little by little everyone got up to get another drink, or answer their cell phones or "take a piss". Within moments of opening my big mouth, everyone had gone, and K and I sat there alone again. Like the young people lunching by the river in the photo on that guys website, these people seemed overly capable of moving on. I had to come to terms with why that was happening. I thought to myself, these people work in politics! These people have CHOSEN to work in politics, and are the ones who are up on the most current issues--political issues--challening their work each day. I did not understand why they, or HOW they could turn their backs on the ultra-real horror surrounding us at the moment. I also lately, during the Lebanon Israel war, had to come to a private understanding of why all of the most intelligent people around me were mum about it. While I was scouring the internet for blogs from Israel and Lebanon each day, reading opinion pieces and news bits, and agonizing about the future of the world, virtually no-one I came in contact with each day even mentioned it. My heart was breaking and anger began to creep up inside me—and almost boiled over in the form of a scathing blog in which I did nothing but judge and point fingers at everyone—thinking there should be less talk about language and poetry and more discussion about these horrific events taking place in our world. I stayed up late one night, while some ten or twelve friends sat by my pool drinking, smoking, enjoying themselves in various altered states...I sat in the office tearfully/angrily typing this litany. I didn't post it, obviously. But I came to something I hadn't realized before. I had to ask myself how much correct information, negative information, convoluted information did I have— about anything and everything from U.S. election inconsistencies to criminal prisons to civil rights abuses to information about the various wars (on “terrorism” and civil wars included)—that would put me in a position to be able to formulate an intelligent, if not productive, conversation about any of it? Is having a conversation and venting your feelings a form of activism? I guess a part of me thinks it is. It occurred to me that most people that have half a brain and can intuit that there is a whole lot of evil taking place—so much so fast and coming all the time—can’t think or articulate as fast as they can process the continuous piling of bad news. And not only that, bad news that more often than not reflects badly on our own country, and more often than not is incomplete or false or completely wrong. Intellectual people are less apt I think to try and enter a discussion they feel they can offer nothing to. In other words, most smart folks will avoid approaching a topic (especially political, religious, spiritual, [though not philosophical—interesting]) where they might end up taking an ill informed stance, and ultimately, sounding over emotional or irrational or—stupid. And beyond that? Talking about something leads to a need to DO something about it. And what should we do? Well, writing comes to mind. As in, most of the people I interact with are writers, poets, critical thinkers, and have good hearts. Why so little writing about it? Again I come to the conclusion that writers are mostly emotionally and philosophically inventive/inspired/inclinded and so how appropriate is it for poets and writers to write about these things? Or natural even? All this is to say, I’m still surprised by the quietness of my U.S.ian (I have difficulty saying American) counterparts, and also at the general silence of all U.S.ians on matters that seem to be deeply effecting and concerning most everyone else in the entire world these days…but I have no foot to stand on to judge that silence. And more, I think I understand why we’re so quiet, even though, all things considered, it seems there should be riots in language and bodies sprouting up everywhere at once…I will go gentle into this goodbye…

First Segment Flick of Trip:Tucson to Montana

2006-09-09T22:36:00.000-07:00

First Video/Slideshow of Trip on VimeoPlease have patience, as I am a baby at this video making game. I wanted to share this with you all anyway, because I finally figured out how to upload longer vids to the blog. Hope you enjoy it, let me know! I'll upload the second segment when it's done...(if you enjoy this one). I'm a little slow, so hang in there...also working on poetry submission deadlines, and still landing from the trip. Soon...

Last Night in Cin City...

2006-09-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

First of all, does everyone know that Kristen Nelson got a flash fiction piece accepted by Cranky? Yeahhhh Kristen...I look forward to holding it in my hands. Congratulations to your writer bones.

Secondly...this is my last night in Cincinnati...the city that is lost, and yet you can mail things here. I'm tired. M's tired, K's tired...we are all exhausted. M & K made a lovely dinner of pesto and goat cheese stuffed shells tonight, and we shared a bottle of Three Blind Moose cabernet...then we all sat on the porch and tried desperately to get internet (steal internet that is) from the neighbors...unsuccessfuly...so we came back here to Arlin's (see pic below). Now we three sit here in the dark, happily sipping our one alotted drink (as per K's orders)...before we head back to the Victor place to relax, maybe watch a movie.

It's been a sweet visit for we three friends. We fought, we argued, we laughed ourselves to tears, we read outloud to each other, we told stories, M and I stayed up late and got very drunk and watched a bootleg copy of the 40 Year Old Virgin (so goood), we cooked food, sang and danced, played pool, tried new beers, punched eachother in the asses and guts for a long time to check our stomach muscles cuz we were drunk, talked with homeless people, shared combs, explored Cincinnati and got lost every time, and...we also sat in silence together for long periods. I'm amazed we didn't get sick of eachother after 6 days on the road and 5 days in a small apartment surrounded by boxes and an unhappy kitty. I'm starting to feel a little sad as a look across the table at these two most unlikely, strange, but somehow perfect for me, poetry pals...ahhga;sfjsldkjaf;lkdjf;;ll....ahhh blecht...at least I know they're writers, and we'll all write, right? See 'em at AWP next year...anyway...

About that road trip log, or whatever...I really have been distracted actually as I started working on the film/slideshow thing. I stayed up late by myself the other night and worked on it (K was quite generous to share her new desk with me). I got really into it. It's really cool and I finished part one. I tried to make it under 30 megabytes of data so I could upload it to my blog for all to enjoy, but I went over by 6 megs and therefore...I won't be posting it. I'll have to take the time, when I get home, to make a more simplified slideshow thing for the blog. But I decided I'm going to make the second part as big as it wants to be and invite all the folks who'd like to see it over to Casa for beers and a show...that will have to wait until about a week after I'm home and I'm able to sort it all out. It takes a long time to edit clips and find music and choreograph it and such...SOOOOOO>>>>what you will get here will be the blog log: writing it down. I like that incarnation also. I hope you do too...I have a 5 hour layover tomorrow in Chicago, so you know what I'll be doing. For now, I look forward to coming HOME to my beautiful desert and my love and Casa...see you then.

In Mourning

2006-09-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted the trip photos or whatnot...right now I'm in mourning. I'm so sad the Steve Irwin (aka crocodile hunter) died. I can't explain it, but it makes me incredibly sad. Cincinnati, at Baba Budan's wi-fi coffee/beer and babe bar...(i added the babe for my own amusement)...god, i miss steve...(not being ironic).

Tucson to Cincinnati: Installment One

2006-09-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

Ok. Here we sit in Cincinnati at a bar called Arlins in the "gaslight" district. It's a pretty "fans" area (as K quips), very nice or upscale, if you will. Large sprawling olde buildings with columns and brick and ivy and tall trees. Many professors live in this area I hear. The bar is great! You can smoke, drink a beer, and be on the free wireless internet at once. Here the three of us sit, drinking and working on our computers...welcome to the future! I do beleive M is in a good mood for the first time since we arrived. About the trip blog...

I'm going to publish it in installments. During the day at their new place on Victor 2360 Victor Street Apartment #1, Cincinnati, OH, 45219 (for anyone who wants to send them welcome mail), I've been spending a lot of my day writing the blog. It's not done, but I'll put it up as I have it. I'm working on a slideshow and a little movie too: I'll post it later. For now...

Leaving Arizona:

We left Tucson around 11 or so, a little late, but with Michael and me in the Penske and Kristi and Polly in the bug, we strove forward with a quiet thrust (and a few jerks, as M got accustomed to the movements of the truck). We set up the ipod and situated our gear (snacks, drinks, books, music, smokes, etc.) for the trip. Then we tested our walkie-talkies—affecting trucker-voice to the best of our knowledge; instead of Kristi saying “over and out”—she decided to say “chomp” –to go with the “handle” Michael gave her of “nailbiter”. Yes, that’s how it starts, a little smartassing to spend and then silence out of town. So much anxious energy; we didn’t talk much. It wasn’t until we reached Flagstaff that we began to feel that the road under us was actually going to take us somewhere far away. M & I rolled down the windows and took in deep gulps of wet mountain air…cranked up the music and leaned into the drive. It had just rained and the pines seemed to be releasing bursts of exhilaration in the form of sharp green scented breaths. It was so good to take in and hold. A few miles north of Flagstaff Michael and Kristi switched cars and I drove the Penske with Kris awhile. We rode together in a cheerful mood through the Painted Desert and Hopi reservation. We saw lots of Hogans(traditional Navajo structures new to K and M), both old and some of newer material, and horses and random houses spotting the vastness. The late slanting sun lit up the rock formations and alien planet landscape like a cosmic birthday cake…the varied oranges and reds softer as the purpling shadows lengthened the way. I thought a lot about how much I love Arizona and how familiar I am with the northern part of the state especially. Many childhood memories, in the forms of smells and sensuous contact from the light or from the sun or color or shapes of rocks or trees came pouring through my thoughts, but not just my thoughts. I was feeling memories too. My body remembers Arizona sensorially as much as pictographically. I seemed happy driving through it.

The last stop in Arizona: Page -- the last page. We stopped before sunset to comfort Polly who was less than pleased with her caged ride, and absorb a greasy bite or two at Dennys. Our waiter, who might have been 16 or 17, informed us he was in a lot of pain from football practice. He demonstrated the exact punishing exercises at our table, while squinting and repeating, “I’m really sore today.” It was kind of an awkward moment; what does one say to that? Another waitress-“Kell-Lee” (according to her nam-tag) delivered a bottle of catsup without a word, leaving us confounded by her name. We all laughed until tears came…I don’t remember what about. The fun with words never ends on the road and by this point we had begun to realize the signs were going to be a major source of entertainment– or I should say – all the pun we were going to have reading signs along the way. “Kell-Lee” was early fodder. After we weighed down our guts with the grease and finished guffawing we headed out. We shoved off again in the last light of the day over Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, wielding our cumbersome load into the quickly darkening desert. The stars began to fall into place, close and crisp, and the last leg of road into Utah was long. In an hour or so we all began to think about where we were going to sleep…

Utah’s Backways:

About this time is when I started to have intense cramps. Uhhg, yes, you-know-what hit me at Dennys, and the pain came shortly after. I was feeling queasy and cranky, but also curiously calm about it. It’s hard for a short legged gal to drive that kind of truck; to reach the gas pedal I had to have the seat so close that the steering wheel was in my chest, and then I could barely reach it. No cruz-control on the truck and it has a speed-governing mechanism on it so it can’t go faster than 75 even when floored. M & I were the truck drivers, and K drove the little bug. Altogether, it would be M who’d drive the truck the most. But the first night K & I were together in the truck until we landed (still the first night we left Tucson)— I tried to stay awake and alert to the wandering road, and K’s wandering imagination helped—K hummed to herself as she pondered over the pages of the atlas, and narrated idiosyncrasies of signs and of landscape to me. Michael was the one who could handle Polly’s frantic crying and still keep his head, so he followed behind.

On 89 in the dark we tried to avoid many suicidal mule deer (sounds like the name of a garage band). My hands were gripping the steering wheel too tight for many miles, and my eyes ached from shooting back and forth between both sides of the road hoping to spy the deer before they shot out into the road. Almost killed one that was standing in the road and wouldn’t move though the truck came barreling her way. Finally I honked the horn and the deer moved just before I was about to slam on the breaks. K said, “he just stood there, like a deer in the headlights!” By this hour we were feeling punky and laughed much too hard at anything remotely funny.

Early on we stopped for gas and a girl named Shi told me where to buy beer that had alcohol in it. We didn’t think to buy beer in Arizona because we didn’t realize that in Utah, where all beer is referred to as “near beer” (3.2 percent alcohol content), most everyone who wants beer and can buy beer buys it in Arizona.

I said to Shi “She?” she said, “SHY,” correcting me politely, and then asked me, “what kinda parents would name their little girl She?” I said, “riiiiight,” thinking, what kind of parents would name their daughter shy? So then she, Shi, told me how to get back “over the border” to Arizona to get beer. Arizona is to Utah drinkers as Mexico is to underage American drinkers. Shi said Helen was the owner and Helen was a nice lady and sold “every kinda liquor under the sun.” She said all this while writing down directions for me, and writing down some more directions on how to avoid going through Zion (a real place, not a metaphor). I could go into that, but I won’t.

It seemed crazy, but at this point in the trip we were still willing to go off the beaten trail to sniff out a little adventure (truly, I make it sound more remarkable than it is). We thought if we got settled in a motel early enough later on we might want to have a cold beer and celebrate our first successful day of road tripping together. So we followed Shi’s directions to Helen’s place, and though we gained an hour by traveling a whole three miles and quickly slipping back down into Arizona again, we drove up to Helen’s place just as she was closing. All the lights were off except for over the register, where we could see her counting her drawer while her longhair yellow cat strolled back and forth on the counter’s ledge. No beer until Montana—time to get back to Utah. Would have been nice to meet Helen.

All things considered, in some ways the beginning of Utah is one of my favorite parts of the trip. However unnerving Utah is, especially on the back roads, there is little adventure to be had when traveling by interstate. 89 is not an interstate but a highway (says K)—though I wouldn’t have called it a highway—its more like a two-way paved single-lane road with intermittent spurts of an added passing lane to help keep traffic flowing. I think it’s officially called a “primary road” by the Atlas. These kinds of roads take you through towns, on “scenic routes,” and through lonesome country where most everything closes down by sunset. It’s both spooky and exciting for me to travel through these wayward places; they never seem to enter my thoughts until I’m there.

And why aren’t they in my thoughts? This is what most of the U.S. is after all! Had I forgotten so soon? These remote villages are like the town I grew up in (Prescott Arizona). I know these faces, smells, sounds. I know these looks I’m getting…I’ve gotten them before.

Here, it is claustrophobic and your dirt shows (if it doesn’t, you are hiding something). People speak to you kindly—to each other, nicely— even smile, but every action comes with a creepy caution. Art is impractical—useless—except for attractive crafts (things you use like quilts [reminding me now of Alice Walker’s short story Everyday Use], and clothing and shelving and jelly and umbrella stands and statues of jesus made of beer cans), pictures of people you know, and lets not forget hand carved gun butts. Dreamers are not to be trusted, least of all the day variety. Recreational drugs are aplenty and easy to find, and you know somebody who has a family member who is addicted to the worst kind of drug now wending its way into the local youths’ temporal, tender culture and bodies. Everyone knows someone who lives in a trailer and also a preacher’s kid, and has also gotten “tipsy” with both (not necessarily at the same time). In New York City you can’t get different from everyone else fast enough; in a small town you could be bludgeoned to death for being even a little different. Different is an issue, a big big big issue. I could almost swear that during this road-trip M and I saw a billboard at one point that actually screamed it: don’t be different, different is bad. Maybe I am just thinking of a summary of all the billboards: the collective message (especially poignant in Salt Lake City and around there…whoa.) That’s probably more likely. Whatever the case, in small towns everyone and everything feels unintentionally naked, exposed, underdressed—the paint peeling buildings, the glare of the sun off parked fenders, the signs, the dogs—the sky.

Pretty much, that’s what the entire trip was like. Every place we stopped was much like every other place. I hadn’t realized how empty and vacant most of the country is. I’ve driven across the country a few times now…but this time I got to be a passenger a good part of the time. I got to observe and see the side of the road for myself. I hated to see how much sameness there is between places—every new place a variation of the last. A variation of itself! Long stretches of open space where people are farming, ranching, filling space and taking space and chunks of earth and moving earth and filling the gaps with wire, pipe, steel, rust, junk, junk, junk…and more wire. Where there is nothing, there is always a wire. Wires stretching from one end of the country to the next, dangling, curving, blowing in the harsh Dakota winds…wire everywhere. It is wire that connects these places where hard working people live, work and die.

The first night we went through town after town looking for room at the inn. Alas, each inn we found was closed. Nobody home, lights out. Closed signs turned against the glass. Each inn had lots of cars parked happily in front of each rented room, people sleeping peacefully inside; the pool equipment humming dutifully to the cricketing night. Polly was going nuts and we were so so tired. Everything in town after town was closed. No gas, no food, no inns. There was nothing to do but to keep driving. It was quite late when we reached route 20 West which we knew was our gateway to the interstate. By now, the interstate had become—the glorious secular interstate—where there is something open 24/7 all year round. Inns, food, gas. Inns, food, gas. Inns, food, gas: all you need on the road and pretty much, whenever you need it. Where folks are used to seeing “different” people. When we got to the end of route 20, K and I, delirious, thought we could see the gates of heaven ahead in the dark…we swooned a little, swayed, and then I pressed hard on that gas pedal saying, “lookout dumb deer, we’re headed for heaven!”

Turns out it was just two semis parked lengthwise on either side of the road with all their cargo lights on…two brightly lit red rectangles, like architectural- sentries welcoming us to the federal highway system. It was quite an entry for all of us. We finally finally stopped in Beaver, Utah. I was never so happy to see Beaver in all my life. We lugged our gear and the cat inside and dropped to the beds. We slept like rocks.

Utah (Day Two):

Saturday Morning - Day One

2006-08-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

It's early. At least it's early for me to be up and running around making last minute preperations for this trip. Kristen still sleeps. We were up late last night visiting at the Red Garter after Cody's reading at the Poe Center. Lots of friends came to see K and M off so we all played musical chairs (the kind where you add a chair when the song is up) and took turns visiting with different friends. That's the best thing about K and M leaving. They leave lots of friends behind...friends they are significantly responsible for bringing together. I am glad to live here and know when I return these good folks will still be here...

At midnight we drove over to Mister & K's empty apartment to deliver our pull-out mattress bed to them so they'd have something to sleep on their last night in Tucson. Everything was clean and all the rooms bare. Polly, the cat, was acting kinda weird and meowing sort of frantically...I took the old painting/collage that used to hang over their bed...later, I'll destroy it and then give it a new look. We left without hugs or tears.

I wasn't tired enough when we got back home and stayed up talking with Cody by the pool for awhile. Politics and poetry...one of my favorite topics...and then K came out to remind me of the time. By the time I came to bed I was very very tired and fell asleep pretty quickly. But this morning a fly woke me up at quarter to 8. Like an alarm clock, every 10 minutes or so it came to land on my eye or my mouth. Every 10 minutes, every 5, and then it just wouldn't go away. I got up. It's a beautiful cool shiny morning. I have cleaned to office for Kris so she can claim the space while I'm gone. I made coffee. I wrote this...it's almost time to go. If I can find a free wireless connection tonight, I'll check in.

Now, on to breakfast at the Cup, then the goodbyes...hugs and tears...see ya!

Mister on Mipoesias

2006-08-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

Check this out...Mister is a gooood reader...

Hitting the Road

2006-08-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

For the next couple of weeks I'll be out of town. Yes, I am leaving Casa Libre, and leaving all in the capable and loving hands of my beautiful Kristen. Hittin' the road; just me and Polly (orange cat) Kristi and Mister, headed for big city Cincinnati Ohio. I'll be bringing some reading material with me (yeah, finally reading time!)including a couple of friend's manuscripts, David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, Laura Riding Jackson's book of essays The Telling, Jena Osman's An Essay in Asterisks, The Fatalist - Lyn Hejinian, and two more books I haven't decided. I'll have to mail them back to myself so I don't have to carry them on the plane on my way back, and hopefully, I'll pick some new things up on the road. I am looking forward to uninterrupted reading time, writing/reflecting, and the chance to feel the country's spances/spaces. I wish I had that one life-changing book at this time...I need one, any suggestions?
Along the way I also hope to keep blogging--with photos of the trip and possibly a couple little films. But I will try to keep the blog updated either way.
I haven't yet thought too hard about missing my friends, because of this trip I think, but I'm sure it will sink in somewhere between Montana and Ohio. Most of all I know I am going to miss Kristen and Casa Libre and the desert...but hopefully, I will really utilize this opportunity to focus my energies/thoughts on poetry, my art, and my state of mind. My goal is to return refreshed, inspired, and with a stack of new writings and ideas. See you round the bend my friend...

Que Scais Je?

2006-08-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

Que Scais je? on Vimeo
Experiment 2

Here it Comes

2006-08-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

Here it Comes on VimeoThis is my first attempt to put video on my blog...more to come when I get this down better...oh, the song is called Here it Comes by Modest Mouse, and the link to the story in the vid is here.

Yes Please

2006-08-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

Prefatory Letter
by Desiderius Erasmus
To His Friend Thomas More(1509)

During my recent journey back from Italy to England, not wishing to waste all the time I was obliged to be on horseback on 'idle gossip' and small talk, I preferred to spend some of it thinking over some topic connected with our common interests or else enjoying the recollection of the friends, as learned as they are delightful, whom I left here. Among these you, my More, came first in my mind, whose memory, though absent yourself, gives me such delight in my absence, as when present with you I ever found in your company; than which, let me perish if in all my life I ever met with anything more delectable. And therefore, being satisfied that something was to be done, and that that time was no wise proper for any serious matter, I resolved to make some sport with the praise of folly. What sort of a goddess Athene put that notion into your head, you may well ask. In the first place, it was your own family name of More, which is as near to the Greek word for folly, moria, as you are far from it in fact, and everyone agrees that you couldn't be farther removed. Then I had an idea that no one would think so well of this jeu d'esprit of mine as you, because you always take such delight in jokes of this kind, that is, if I don't flatter myself, jokes which aren't lacking in learning and wit. In fact you like to play the part of a Democritus in the mortal life we all share. Your intelligence is too penetrating and original for you not to hold opinions very different from those of the ordinary man, but your manners are so friendly and pleasant that you have the rare gift of getting on well with all men at any time, and enjoying it. I am sure then that you will gladly accept this little declamation of mine as a 'memento' of your friend and will also undertake to defend it. It is dedicated to you, so henceforth it is yours, not mine.

There may well be plenty of critical folk rushing in to slander it, some saying that my bit of nonsense is too frivolous for a theologian and others that it has a sarcastic bite which ill becomes Christian decorum. They will clamour that I'm reviving Old Comedy or Lucian, carping and complaining about everything. Well, those who are offended by frivolity and fun in a thesis may kindly consider that mine is not the first example of this; the same thing has often been done by famous authors in the past. Homer amused himself ages ago with his Battle of Frogs and Mice, Virgil with his Gnat and Garlic Salad, Ovid with his Nut, Polycrates wrote a mock eulogy of the tyrant Busiris and so did his critic Isocrates, Glauco spoke in favour of injustice and Favorinus [of Thersites] and the quartan fever; Synesius praised baldness and Lucian the Fly [and the parasite]. Seneca was joking in his Apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius, as Plutarch was in his dialogue between Gryllus and Ulysses. Lucian and Apuleius both wrote in fun about an ass, and someone whose name escapes me about the last will and testament of the piglet Grunnius Corocotta: this is mentioned by St Jerome.

If they want they can imagine I've been amusing myself all this time with a game of draughts, or riding my stick if they like that better. How unjust it is to allow every other walk of life its relaxations but none at all to learning, especially when trifling may lead to something more serious! Jokes can be handled in such a way that any reader who is not altogether lacking in discernment can scent something far more rewarding in them than in the crabbed and specious arguments of some people we know — when, for example, one of them endlessly. sings the praises of rhetoric or philosophy in a botched-up oration, another eulogizes some prince, and a third sets out to stir up war against the Turks. Another man foretells the future, and yet another invents a new set of silly points for discussion about goat's wool. Nothing is so trivial as treating serious subjects in a trivial manner; and similarly, nothing is more entertaining than treating trivialities in such a way as to make it clear you are doing anything but trifle with them. The world will pass its own judgement on me, but unless my 'self-love' entirely deceives me, my praise of folly has not been altogether foolish.

Now for the charge of biting sarcasm. My answer is that the intelligent have always enjoyed freedom to exercise their wit on the common life of man, and with impunity, provided that they kept their liberty within reasonable limits. This makes me marvel all the more at the sensitivity of present-day ears which can bear to hear practically nothing but honorific titles. Moreover, you can find a good many people whose religious sense is so distorted that they find the most serious blasphemies against Christ more bearable than the slightest joke on pope or prince, especially if it touches their daily bread. And to criticize men's lives without mentioning any names — I ask you, does this look like sarcasm, or rather warning and advice? Again, on how many charges am I not my own self-critic? Furthermore, if every type of man is included, it is clear that all the vices are censured, not any individual. And so anyone who protests that he is injured betrays his own guilty conscience, or at any rate his apprehensions. St Jerome amused himself in this way with far more freedom and sarcasm, sometimes even mentioning names. I have not only refrained from naming anyone but have also moderated my style so that the sensible reader will easily understand that my intention was to give pleasure, not pain. Nowhere have I stirred up the hidden cesspool of crime as Juvenal did; the ridiculous rather than the squalid was what I set out to survey. Finally, if anyone is still unappeased by all I have said, he should at least remember that there is merit in being attacked by Folly, for when I made her the narrator I had to maintain her character in appropriate style. But why do I say all this to you, an advocate without peer for giving your best service to causes even when they are not the best? Farewell, learned More; be a stout champion to your namesake Folly.

From the country, 9 June 1508

Sharing a Hunch I Have With You

2006-08-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

Click here for your eyes.

Man, boy poefiying

2006-07-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

What does anybody think about this?

Blah blah blah...on a pretty rainy day

2006-07-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

On this gloomy day, of rain and dark skies, I take in the increasingly disturbing news from the world. It doesn't make me want to write a poem, or "play" with language, my love. But I am determined to find something like comforting impetus in my dust coated coffers. It seems like that's exactly what I should be doing! But an uncomfortable silence falls around me, more intense as the months drag on, among aquaintances, family and friends, and I am distracted by it. I know they all know what I know, but we avoid talking about it. I refer to, dare I say, the wars and political unraveling of our national "ideals" and "human rights"--here in the U.S. as everywhere in the world. The unfettered flow of political and cooporate corruption and pillaging of the earth and the poor who work it. It is as if we (as in the folks we share our everyday lives with) all know so little, even collectively, that we are unable to formulate a useful discussion--even suggestively--and so we speak nothing or little to each other of it. Who is the we I am speaking of? Perhaps I shouldn't drag others into my personal realm of fear.

Fear that I am failing my responsibility to art, which for me includes all life I come in contact with. In family situations my role is that of clown, fool, jester. Normally, when I've sensed tensions rising too high, I will make fun of us or myself: fall on purpose, sprain my ankle attempting to sillify a serious martial art move, mis-quote a bible verse on purpose (which in my family goes a long way), or rattle off a completely inappropriate remark to unstifle the flow. When things are too instense, I will almost always try to manipulate the situation toward moderation. When appropriate; some things are good intense, like mourning the death of a loved one. But the line is so fine it's easy to cross without realizing it. After a certain amount of emotional intensity--my brain shuts down and it's impossible to THINK. I happen to love thinking, and find it has helped me avoid the nuthouse most of my life (to now). But thinking too...thinking without emotion...that too is dangerous. Perhaps less so, if one is truly in touch with their own cognitive powers. Shish...what am I thinking anyway? What is emotion? (Better question). Am I talking about emotional intelligence? There is such a thing--I adore it.

Don't laugh (or pity me). I know I am rehashing (publicly, and for a reason) an age old problem. But I happen to be presently worried about my nation's soul. It may be foolishly sentimental, but it is real never the less. How I envy poets from Chile, Spain, France, Italy, Iraq and Afghanastan even Ireland whose "hobby" is taken (more) seriously than in the U.S. By the poets and the people. Hence their work tends to reflect that seriousness. Is it there a collective national guilt among young poets? I know we all feel the state of emergency: our states of emergencies (national debt, human rights, civil rights, military state, trade debt, for sale sign on our labour limbs, border issues, health care issues, low education expectations, contribution to global warming, rising cost of disappearing resources and everything, and on and on)...but I suppose it does not equal the emergency (immediacy) of falling bombs. Falling bombs. No, it doesn't equal that emergency--not collateral.

My terrorist (U.S. style) is a different terrorist who damages the psyche. Even more ghostly than "Al Qaeda". Closer, too. Maybe that's why I am psychically paralyzed and can do no better than grumble, shake my head, rub my hands together--scribble out notes in code to be misread--worry. Write stupid blogs like this one. Some join organizations like Code Pink, as the poet Brenda Hillman, who personally asked me to join Tucson's chapter of Code Pink, which I did not (why? Because I am not that kind of warrior? Not a resister? Not activist? Shamed of hysteria?). Some compile anthologies, like Sam Hammil, with his Poets Against the War book and website, which for this guilty poet, seems pointless at times. It unnerves me to take it seriously. So many poets out there working it out with words. But why am I so stifled? I seriously wonder at times if my paralyzation isn't due to my misunderstanding of my own microcosmic cultural norms. Or, that I simply find it heinously incongrous to have to go against my fool-heart grain.

I put this out there publicly for this reason: I am using this forum (at this moment) to help find myself accountable for fearing giving a voice to my disgust, horror, anger, frustration, and love. Afraid of rejection, not being "artsty" enough, "cool" enough, or the worst thing: becoming preachy. Fear of isolation. Fear of not making any sense! Fear of not having fun doing it. Having fun? I love writing poems, and that's it, isn't it? Enjoyment, connection, disappearing, finding, fixing, fucking. Playing. Ha. ha ha...

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
- Jules de Gautier

Of Vacuums and Other Sucky-Folly

2006-07-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

In the way of answering to Steph's curiosity about vacuum worship, I'll say this: On Thursdays I've been sitting with my nephew from 8:30 (barely two sips into my first and last cup of coffee) to 1:30 p.m. He loves vacuums so much that when he starts to get cranky or bored, we haul out the Dyson. I recommend Dysons to vacuum enthusiasts because they have so many wonderful snap-on snap-off parts and pieces to fool with, and, well, they suck good. He actually pronounces vacuum, "dahkoom", and when he sees it he literally exclaims; "DAHkoom DAHkoom DAHkoom!" and does a little, what I can only call, dahkoom dance, spinning around and jumping up and down. He doesn't just worship the Dyson, no, he isn't picky at all. Often, we will pack up the stroller and head to Value Village (the best thrift store around) down the block. We aren't going to Value Village for any other reason than to visit vacuum heaven. There, at V Village, are slews of vacuums all shapes sizes and colors, and in every condition. Once through the door of the store, Zavier usually climbs out of the stroller and runs ahead of me (cuz he knows where they are) crying out, "DAHkooms, DAHkooms!" all through the store. When he arrives at the place where they always are, he immediately begins a rather serious and ritualistic inspection of each one. I am thankful that the vacuums are located directly across the aisle from the books, and so I amuse myself by thumbing through them, some of which I've already thumbed through for months and months. He is more interested in the vacuums than in all the broken dirty toys on the other side of the store. When back at home he will take a piece of paper towel tubing or a stick or anything you push that rolls ahead of you, and pretend to vacuum the floor. He says, "dohtee dohtee flow" to the floor, and "kween up kween up," sing songily along. He also makes various noises I suppose to mimic the vacuum's noise. This can last a long time, this pretend vacuuming, so I encourage it. Sigh. * Yessir, it's damned cute.
Not that any other topic in the world is half as heartening as Zavier and his vacuum fetish, but I do have a lot of other things on my mind and going on in my life. Like, dealing with insecurities about poetry submissions/rejections and where to put the stuff in real life. I say real life, and well, I actually mean real life. I'm not putting poetry down (never kick a man when he's down), but the passed few weeks I've been growing cynical and worried. You know, pesky things like war, global warming, poison, child molestation, friends leaving town, family crying on the phone, intellectual foddering from the poetry hipsters, and the t.v. news suck. I mean that like t.v. news-suck. Newsuck. News uck. Same no matter how you type it. I'm kinda restless about these things, and the words on the page aren't comforting or petting my thoughts to a calm anymore. Am I about to complain alot? Maybe...naaahhh.
Really, I'm more feeling humbled than fumbled. Taking a spell to observe my folly proactively--laughing at myself and my condition--throwing shit at the page to see what happens, and laughing some more. Sounds like I'm losing my mind, eh? I hope so.

We Must Face the Face

2006-07-18T08:33:00.000-07:00

I had a sneeky feeling everyone needs to look at this face today. Seriously--I can't handle it. This is my nephew Zavier, he is 1 and 1 half years old. He calls me buddy. I call him buddy, peanut, zay, and little man. He is wearing my pink bandana in this photo. He likes trains, helicopters, airplanes, motorcycles, bicycles, tractors, semis (big shemis), and ladysmith black mambazo. He worships vaacuum cleaners. If you say, "i love you," he mostly answers, "i love meee."

The Fourth Dimesion is...

2006-07-16T17:37:00.000-07:00

What was this weekend? Well, there was the ambiguous, as Harry Lockhart (played by Robert Downey Jr.) says in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; "imagine this bullet in your head," (while holding a gun to someone's head)...and there was the not so ambiguous, as M.R. said (I've decided to call he who I refer to as M.R. as Mister, from now on) "you guys are all so smart," while holding a tiny violin in the palm of his hand and trying to conjure music (not necessarily from the tiny violin).
It was a weekend all like that and then some. I decided, not much before that moment, that the fourth dimension is Reflection (though i'd like to spell it reflexion right now). I capitalize it, because it was pretty important when I figured it out. It was Mister who pointed it out to me. I was standing by the spa at about 2:30 a.m., staring into the water of the spa, which had no light on inside (under water), and these black fuzzy round spots seemed to float either on my eyes or on the surface of the water, I couldn't tell. Mister said, "see those spots, see that?" I was so releived because I thought it was just my eyes, "yes, i see them" I answered kind of excitedly, "you see them too?" Then he pointed to the wall above the spa where sundry suns hang for decoration. I realized then the black fuzzy spots were reflections of the suns hanging on the wall behind the spa. Mister said, "it's 3 dimensional," referring to the spa, in which you could clearly see the water, the inner shape of the spa, its steps and the bottom of the spa, "and that's what everything is," he said. I said, "no! it's four dimensions!" I said it like I had just realized something big, though it probably wasn't so big after all.
It was for me, one of those exciting realizations, especially since I've been working on this art project (all 3 dimensional) that is based on, not the literal but the conceptual, idea of self-portrait--or more to the point--reflection. It was a perfectly lovely leap that brought many points of many ideas i've been thinking about together all at once. I feel refreshed, interested again, in these ideas. Something definately new happened to me this weekend, outside of my current family tragedies and troubles--I came about. A little help from nature, friends, and distance from both and intimacy with both--a little help from the moon, glow sticks, water, flashing eyes, music and memory. To go back in is a good thing, I remember now--

Winch One Will You Be?

2006-07-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

I hardly kedged off with the last post, so I figure I need to keep working. The day has a small hole in it and the sea aims for it. I need more rope to wind. Here's where I may stumble off the deck, and here is where I may be clobbered by the boom. No matter, I will try to keep my balance on the thwart and trim my jib. Eventually I will come about or fall off.
I have to figure out how to BE the winch I need to use. Rigging of language aside, the tour is going to be riddled with ugly. Horizon acts constant motion; I feel a little going sick. Sky tacking, or am I tacking? I need more rope to wind. Astern or to the pulpit--one has to decide--I will ignore the fish in this emergency. Hunger not an option or detail and fish are free. Fear is buoyant and I have only one anchor.
Stop
Why am I coding my feelings? It's what poets do. It's a salve. Language. Nothing else for it; exercise (exorcize). I am sincerely this thing now that isn't what I was yesterday. Dreams, worries, not just opinions...the mailman is here...the phone is ringing...a complaint is lodged in my chin like a rusty stay.

Words for Kedging Off

2006-07-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

I can't breathe in my dreams two nights in a row. I wake with my chest tight and barely able to lift my eyelids. My family is going through an extremely rough period that threatens to sink every passenger. We've run aground. Everyone is in that kind of panic that makes you hold still and breathe shallowly. Meanwhile, the world's in state of emergency of equal intensity, and the tide is going out. As I do everyday I checked Riverbend's blog. She hasn't written since early last month and I've worried something happened to her. I was releived to find that she had posted a new entry, however depressing. If you haven't read her blog, I recommend it. The whole thing. Poetry even makes an appearance in the last paragraph today. The word.
In other news I got today, developers in Puerto Penasco are trying to bulldoze a vital environmental center, CEDO, that works with governments, conservation groups and community members to protect natural resources and develop sustainable, non-threatening ways to use the ecosystems of the Upper Gulf of California and Sonoran Desert. A measure of success of these efforts has been the establishment of protected biosphere reserves and the development of management programs for their operation. CEDO is recognized in the region as a leader in community outreach.
CEDO's community based programs focus on understanding and responding to the needs of four groups throughout the Upper Gulf Biosphere region: Teachers; Artisanal fishermen; Community leaders; Tourists and general public. Bulldozers belonging to a the development Fuentes del Mar from the company Clifton Meridian are illegally destroying established roads, demolishing parts of CEDO, and constructing new fences on CEDO property in Puerto Peñasco.
I have to think about what I am doing now. What am I doing? I have lots of work to do here at home to keep the center alive and keep my hearth open...

Ahhh meeee (amie/amore/amah)

2006-07-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

This is my self-portrait of the day. Will there be other self-portraits? Yes. I am working on the 3d series which is mostly self-portraity (recognizably so from this distance or not) and then this today. Today.

part two (first photo of Reflexive 1) see post below

2006-07-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

Add Image4/320/reflexive1.jpg" border="0" alt="" /> I guess you have to click on the little tiny box in this post to view pic. Weird.

Imparts, from a Cage (part one)

2006-07-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

Add Image4/320/reflexive1.jpg" border="0" alt="" />No, I've not been writing lately, but I am diligently sitting back and letting the rejection slips flutter in each day. I have 3 good ones so far, and 16 journals left to hear from. While waiting for my writing muse to return I have been working on a series of 3D pieces in which i employ chickenwire in all or most of them. Chickenwire, papermache, lint basket strips from the dryer, found objects and all. Here's a couple of snaps of my workspace (I have transformed half of my livingroom into a studio of a sort) and of the first piece which is completed: Reflexive 1 (of 1). I'll also post more snaps of the two other pieces I'm working on later (you can see one of them in the first workspace photo...

And Another Yellow Umbrella

2006-06-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

apogee blue

I have gone out at night, when too warm and there are too many bodies right now I don’t understand…two things thinging at my temples; mis-describable; each orbiting at opposite poles in the nearmost breathing space; a tangential succor for my wonder clad’d skull.

A glass-like globe spins well light in fragile hollowness; (blue) the only
color it can not digest—being heavenly least; the globe between is very clear.

No-one will touch it. It is strong like an exact dream and could burn like abyssal rock probably burns. What I want to call hearts go afloat—splay and thrum; breathing hearts in breathingspace; religion the constantly globed.

This aroundness swallows whole prisms and leaves hollow little shapes empty of color; but like tiny starfish doves, they drop against the glass and spin emptily. Never speakering a friendlier kind of sound.

Seeing feathers as scale(s); some bone’s washed in light air as mute as flakes of isinglass. I forget the ground immediately, then

my gorgeous pretended bodies don’t know or can’t remember how to love other forms—the shape of arm, the wet of mouth, the press of hand.

Time of day emergencies; magically sluice the sky of cleaned cloth. I make story of it I hope my hands will someday tell; palatially speaking.

Below the tide creeps back and folds itself with salt and undertow; gulped by the cracked earth like an anti-drink; reminding how the mouth’s involved in burial and birthing; my grave swimminghole;

after which, I come to prefer the tide’s tale of all now; above which, the sky spits birds as points of exclamation.

Another Yellow Umbrella

2006-06-29T22:37:00.000-07:00

(annotative) accompaniment to the book of karma

Some of the images I worked with; this material from
envelopes, ripped printed paper, hands on fire-
scissors, queen Isadora, razorblade, inkwell, coffee: those
refutable stain patterns in the clouds. One key—aqui;
What I mean is your heart is an eye,
which is to say that you have a good heart
for good things we all might.
Take it into consideration: all the night-time
I spent humming myself to glue in the sound booth.
Torn strips of a stolen roll off medical tape; trying
to gain advantage over my bleeding hatches:
There is more than one way to compose a letter to a painter.
If I am on some boat with this; I take a walk—astern;
away from the table, toward where the beginning of the ship
sits low in the sea, low. Seat of propulsion, position
is where you put it; I agree. Like a mirror
agrees with whatever it opposes; as this
slippery devotion knows the winged-wake of the boat
& square of a stern. In the page I built
we woman around in lifejackets,
crack bright red lobsters on white porcelain; ignore
the sea travailing through the floor: I will let
the water prove there is no straight line.
Time breaks water, a meal in half; tension
in the mechanics of a woman’s fist— the American
Woman! is a broken time-piece I think I’m looking back
at; the winged shape of that scissored wake waking; breaks
and beats the distance between suns set & abyssal plane.
My hands pretend to be stained with bloody clouds
of krill; tinted a pathos-ian white-blue and complain
of the ways love is not a night-cruiser; with all due respect.

Improvements to the Library Table and Me

2006-06-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

At this very moment one Ms. Jean Andrews rubs my library table. She has come by bus this morning to fix it for it was "quite scratched" up by the looms the students used in their weekend bookbinding class, this passed. She is cheerful and rubs while smiling. I watch her from my office desk and awkwardly, the word delightful sounds in my head. Not an altogether comfortable word for my mouth to mouth. She colors the scratches with many colored crayons from a small makeup tin, and rubs and rubs and smiles. She is using mismatched socks she bought from T.J. Max for polishers. I go in to chat with her and check on her progress. As she talks, with her clear English (British) dialect, and her smiling face--everything from eye corners to cheeks to brow--i find myself laughing outloud. She is being funny afterall, and means to make me laugh.

Funny how you don't know someone at all, but with a few minutes alone sharing a task such as this one--a task I hadn't thought of doing but she offered to do--you see into a person. A lovely view.

Lust (part one) & A List

2006-01-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

Lust Part One

The dining table is set
and the silver and stemware
wait with a shine

that hurts most
the eyes
that will not see them.
uninvited.

A List

For my birthday
I want to tell them (with a slow Scottish accent)
How I do not deserve their friendship
but appreciate it anyway.
That I am a simple man.
That I wane and wax.
That I do "indeed" feel older.
And that I wish I could be more
available for confrontations.
To smoke a small pipe packed with sweet & sour tobacco.
To tell them I regret I cannot read every book recommended to me.
And that I regret I have not liked all those I have been recommended.
Describe my growing stacks.
Read the names of the books that build those stacks, aloud.
Read them passages, and take silences while sipping Drambuie,
between (hopefully) only sighs of releif.
I want to open fortune cookies handmade by my lover.
I want the fortunes to teach me back to her.
I want to suddenly know all the words that soothe.
I want to finally understand what I can do to live less broken days.
I want to be forgiven for my transgressions, of which there are many.
I want to feel forgiven.
I want to be quiet.
I want to give back what I have been given.
So much, so much I can't say how much.

The Jelly Fish Summit and I am a Fisherman Too

2005-12-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

The jellyfish summit is coming up in Japan.
It's going to be a real smack down.
If one went it would be you
and then no one would miss anything
important. Like help!
I feel awful about all this.
Like an island surrounded
by empty deep waters forever.

Oh how I miss my sponge diving days!

Blind Among the Flowers

2005-11-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

It's an old tourist's song.
But I agree.
And I ask myself.
What if I ever showed up not myself?
At the crossroads, between
then and now.
My only wife, in this life.
But she is drifting beneath the sunset's colored glare
like a colorless desert bird
I do not know the name of.
I let her drift.
It's how I know I am still alive.
Each step I take in the dream is forward
but really not...really...
i keep walking in the same place,
and this feels like it will never end.
So I pretend to write a memo, now.
That's what this is.
To the sky.
A memo to the sky.
I am not myself.

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog

2005-10-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

It's not so easy to ridicule an agile fox. (Though the animal lovers and protectors do try). Not when the lazy dog is the lazy dog and the fox is quick and brown. Can't help but admire his sheen and luster as he flies through the air of the greater imagination. Secretly, I want to be a quick brown fox. Not a lazy dog. Though, to witness the lackluster antics of such a dog, one almost has to laugh. This poor pooch is intellectual fodder for politicomic relief. Here is your sign, when you know you are a red neck.

The fox and the dog are related. The fox and the dog have a job. The fox and the dog carry all the integral information necessary to have a conversation in American.

They are the two pieces of the larger 26 letter conversation. You can't make this stuff up. Someone else already did.

Getting Into It

2005-10-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to give up on it
because i said it was over, and I still beleive it.
Something is wrong. A thing insists.
Another way to say it.

It insists and yet
won't return my calls.
Hello, hello?
And nothing.
It is demanding, and yet
it isn't specific.

Fill this bucket with sustinence, I dare you.

It instructs.
Go and take it with you.
Bring it back full.
Upon your return
Pour it along the invisible perimeter
of without-further-ado
to mark your way in.

Describe it: give it homage.
The thing is,
animal, vegetable, mineral, not
any of these things. Difficult.

The thing is,
not able to fit in a bucket.
It kicks the bucket.

It it it, and it it it good.

It keeps talking or I do.
You can dance to it.
It has a good beat, but
it isn't fair.

It hurts.
What?
However.

How I love it -- how is it
it is almost as if I could
taste it?

What was it like?

Cold water, lemon slices.
Soft-edged ice cubes bump
tinly against a bucket wall.

Do you hear it?
What a great sound.
So real.

Hold it over your head.
Pour it in your open mouth.
Be you drowned.
Drop the bucket.
Fuck it.

Waiving Philoso Fists

2005-09-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

A special difficulty arises when I try to decide
what it is that I am (is) I mean__
in terms of deep belief.
An essentialist, conceptualist, pragmatist, categorist, existentialist, nihilist,
the list goes on.
I often browse the list, and then come to realize
I am (is) more of the mind of mud than man.

You may know of
A mathematician named Gottlob Frege
who invented the quantifier
and variable construction to formalize
expressions of generality in natural languages -- (I quote)
which makes sense if you believe
that the axioms from which truth starts
are firmly planted. Period.
Like some cornerstones.
The same cornerstones, by the by, that still support
very old and somewhat famous buildings
now depressingly condemned.
He was right you know. To put it plainly.
To have invented such a tool
for his special kind to use. So why wouldn't we
wonder: what have they done with it?

I ask because I am an activist
and want all important findings dealt with
right away. But I am also an atomist.
And believe in the frequent rearrangement of our smallest
enduring parts, but more than only for
their spatial extensions; as well
These things may smell like hot asphalt
or be the color cobalt blue,
And quite possibly have language!
I believe my magnitude on this is near a six
On the astronomical scale of value (faintest visible).
I try to remain confident. None the less.
In this way, I am pretty sure
I am also epiphenomenologically handicapped.
Simply because
this is difficult to say
I never announce it, not even to myself.

The epicenter of one’s tomfoolery or reason
For antecedent filibustering must remain
A private matter. It’s somewhat mad to manage this,
but why bother? As it is, the diagnosis is
too sophisticated to inspire a revolutionary rise
out of the Ordinary. For this I am careful.
Knowing with relative certainty
that some may posit acrimoniously—
if they are (since they are) likely
overbrave positionists— that
I think therefore I am (is)
Not a good rule for the
“Direction of Understanding” to follow.
Rather, this (and/or that) nonsense better serves
The more commonly practiced
“Method of Doubt” among men.
It is entirely possible
But I am more a ghostist than a manist,
And I cannot concern myself with fear
Of the way of water, force of light and ocean waves
And unseen origins of wild game theories.
Perhaps I am an idealist, but…
After all my searching I still dine
on a diet of worms and deeply
detest mob violence and dogmatists
And lug my disdain for this corporeal dross around
Like so much reformist enthusiasm
and with it I can’t hide:
There,
Now I am (is) finished.

Cut Watermelons

2005-09-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

I.

Because they are full of sweetest wet
Because they bleed illustrious red
Because their seeds are many and black
Because they give life to thirst
Because they may quench desire
Because when they are not cut
they are too strange
and hold secrets
that may put us in danger:
we have heard
a rumor
they are
the gourds of happiness
-of the gods.

II.

Take eat
This is my body
which is broken for you.
This do, in remembrance of me.

III.

Uranus is the personification of the heavens.
I am his ubermensch.
For now, this is my clearance code.
For now, this is my clearance code and my knife
Is raised ready.
When I get in I intend to drink deep,
But please watch my back with without pity.
How I choose to act like a Sabian virgin
is my business.
You have seen from this that I am aware
of sweet danger--all other things pretending
to gush needingly, like some perfect fruit does.
So I have no secret intention.
I will openly blame your desire for mercy
for having to come up
with a plan to bring hope.
As I live in the Land of Nod with you
I swear the doors to the heavens are green.
That is why I will say it this way.
Ubermench, ubermench! Open the ripe sky.

IV.

Cut watermelons leave a legacy of wind.
As in to inherit the wind.
Flies know this, and so do you.
Outside: your outside is in.
Eat and belong.

Message from a Golden Calf

2005-09-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

This hill I stand
(positioned) on top of is
a gloriless place
except for my self
self-helped here: there
but for the Grace of God (go I)
free'd from the grass and guns
tacking down the blood drunk slopes
of the smoke choked valley below.

The valley of death and dolls
home to those (whose hearts and minds are grey
and soft as ash)
who I am sorry for
but can not save but pray for
with strictness bright as my gold sheen
that blinds all desparate climbers
from their way to me
from getting to me
kneeling by me
getting from me
what I am charged to guard.

I stand, one of millions, like me
on a million hills surrounding
all that doesn't matter any more:
what has not risen here that will remain
where it will die because
it must die, because, it is dead, because
it can not help itself.

Up here, the voice of God is a light
that shoots swiftly through the hills
and glances from every calf
on every hill to every next calf
on every next hill, leaping like a laser
from one calf to the other calf
and back round again
in a great closed ring
that rings so loudly it deafens
the pinned ear of the valley
to the voices of the clouds.

The language of the Golden Calves is that light.
We are praying to eachother of that voice.
We are telling eachother to hold still.
We are held upright by that voice.
We will not topple from these hills
as long as that voice moves through us
and keeps the hungry mouths
of the drouthy clouds above
forever shut with its bright noise.

Excommunicating Dream

2005-09-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

It has become necessary to switch our mode of tractation
though should I whether or not be speaking for us
is not an issue, but also as necessary as it is becoming one
as soon as I get on my knees and clutch my breast
](of course) The One in the Middle]

clutch: with two open hands: pressing
effortlessly, because, in order to properly represent

us, I have to be so careful with us

as we are the lovers of the in betweens.

and for we, for we ourselves and, for eachothers'
not dreams are, but vision is
tantamount - (one of us has said)
dreams are dreams - to forget
naming them (dream, dreams, dreaming) - we must
(how ominous) do something else as is
more penetratingly correct, like
as in, here to fore, try to give a name to this.

(Looking back) How sorry I was I could not fool dreams
into leaking an image of me so much I fell
on my knees and did not
beg but banished myself
from showing my green capitulation.

How foolish that I so and as such
betrayed my own disappointment
and betrayed my good sense for going through

and stopping at nothing.

For there are names for this other
than the names I have been named for naming
that I don't know, but given one
glacier of a chance, I might
have collected ice
cycles
or bicycles, because they are related
to fish or boats, in a (like now)
somewhat disappointing way (for some)
instead of (please no, not again) dreams.

Cut it out is appropriate.
Stop doing that is also right but not as fun
as brutal sarcasm, with its crisp purplish
under hand gesturing to the liver.

The underworldly appreciate such subversive aching.
Why we keep coming like dutiful reporters
at eachother kissing ass around the bush

like brave protectors of the bush. (no, it's not a dream
it's like, like. Liking it. [what's another word for dream?]

Careening? Keening? Cleaning?
Ahh, I see your point.
That's better.

Life-proof

2005-06-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

Not the umbrella, which has fallen twice already.
But love, you need it immediately,
and I don't mean feeling
out in the cold
is unhealthy.

Rage

2005-05-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

The most painful offense is the sound of such peircing silence
mutely pummeling the closed surfaces of my soul
as the world quietly goes about its business forgetting.
I woke this morning wondering if there really was a world.
I woke sluggish but shivering from a terrible dream sequence
where I envisioned the only place in the world was Amerika--
an enormous fishbowl of theatrics, where everything was fake
and nothing was actually happening anywhere else because
there was no where else, really, it was all a joke.
Not a joke, no, but a nightmare, reeling and reeling
faster and faster so that the more you watched
the deeper the trance you fell into.
No-one was dying in Africa, not 1 out of 3 of AIDS,
No-one was raped in border towns in Mexico,
No-one was pillaged and murdered in Iraq or Palestine,
No-one was tossed in a dumpster in China, or Central America or Africa or
in any other far off imaginary poverty stricken or communist place
No-one was the Queen of England
or the Prince of Wales,
No-one was starving in Cuba or freezing
in Russia or no-where north of the Caspian Sea.
Black Sea, Dead Sea, Indian Ocean -- all not real.
All rumors.
All FOX NEWS.
All Hannity and Colmes.
All Associated Press.
All Fear Factor.
All over...all over.

The Caspian Sea and The Dictatorship of Relativism

2005-05-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

Only the soul matters.
This sea wants to know.
I can not say it is only the soul that matters.
Does the soul eat black caviar? Does the soul fish
contaminated water for sustainence?
Does the soul thrive in the far right regions
where man stands with his guns raised
toward mediocrity
next to and between his various gods?
This sea is sick.
This sea is not well.
This sea does not praise god, any god.
This sea tells god to go to hell.
This sea is surrounded.
This sea has a fever.
This sea is too high.
This sea doesn't pray.
This sea takes what it is given
and gives it back, unfixed.
This sea attracts survivors
who fellow man has forgotten.
Thick black arteries of steal
pump away from this sea
and into this sea
"Today the promised Messiah rides
on you, donkey of the Antichrist"
what poison flows freely.
Far away, men decide, nothing is relative.
One must decide and remain firm
in one's beliefs.
As firm as a Shia practicing Muslim
As firm as an Amerikan Neo-con
As firm as a Jewish Prime Minister
As firm as a Russian Pope
As firm as a Corporate Lobbyist
As firm as an Angry Christian
As firm as a Suicide Bomber
As firm as the Taliban
As firm as a soldier of Hamas
Decide and stand firm.
The harder you believe
The stronger your voice;
The louder your righteous message
the truer your soul & sword.
This sea reflects the setting sun.
This sea turns gold at dusk.
This sea barely moves on the surface.
This sea is black at its greatest depth.

Feeling Timeaholic

2005-04-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

I wish my mind were more like a secretary instead of the boss. "Here," I'd tell it, "write down whatever comes to you." Then I could go about my business and not resent losing time with my imagination. It's as if there is a separate part of my head that thinks it has all the time in the world--and that part is constantly creating beautiful writings that no-one will ever read--and there is no messenger or delivery person to carry it out here; because the other part of my head is thinking about what I'm doing out here. If I sit down and try to work with the boss--like a secretary--nothing comes. The boss seizes up and complains that I should be doing chores: cleaning, preparing, building, fixing, calling, answering, recording figures...the clock ticks and tocks like a metronome hooked up to an amplifier. I don't have time to even write this. Earlier, I considered exploiting my greatest weakness: that I am the most easily distracted worker bee in the hive. Then I heard a voice chide, "didn't I tell you you should never reveal your weaknesses?" Last night I wrote a letter to Osama, Bush, my father, the mayor, Ariel Sharon, a suicide bomber and Barbara Boxer. No I didn't. It was one letter to no-one who is everyone and that includes a child I will never have. I don't have time in this life for a child. Dear that, I meant to have you, but you wouldn't like it here anyway. Love, your never mother. You were supposed to be a poem. You were supposed to be a teacher. You were supposed to be unafraid and conquer the world. I thought Obama had hero potential. I saw him "interviewing" John Bolton, candidate for U.N. Ambassador to the U.S., on CSPAN and my dreams were slowly displaced like a handful of sawdust in a puff of wind. That was about as much hope as I had for that guy--and there it went. How the hell did Barbara Boxer make it so far without selling out? These are a few of the stupid questions that clutter my bosses desk. I need more time, I need more time, I need more time...

Ward for Ward

2005-04-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking of him since I saw him on CSpan's Booknotes (see blogtitle link), and I have come to the conclusion that I have an obligation --to respond --a responsibility to weigh in and out. I think. I think. What is happening around him, in him, from him is important to us all. I do a little research into the background of this man who cries like an angry eagle. I don't know if that is an accurate description. I think of Amiri Baraka's 911 poem that caused him to be ousted as New Jersey's poet laureate two years ago. I had wished to tell him I wish he hadn't said what he said--but I was thankful he had the guts to say what he felt like saying anyway. Did I think there was another way of saying what one thought? Feared? Suspected? Itched inside with? I think of old boyfriends. I don't know why but Ward reminds me of one of them, a little. Arrogant, but often right. Then again, I know he sounds right, but he feels wrong. Then I think of my relatives, as Ward likes to greet his audiences thinking of. I think of Che Guerva's movie character in Motorcycle Diaries--who called South America--America. He called a small village in the middle of Sudo America--the heart of America. How this made me feel ashamed. I think of Ward Churchill--with his unfortunate name and face--and his pulsing hot blood he calls by name but can not account for. And what does it matter anyway how he got where he got; what did he do after all? I find that he is on his fourth wife. I too am on my fourth "wife", only I am a lesbian and never married--so it doesn't look like I'm in a fourth marriage. I find that he plagarized a print--and I am not sure I understand why he would do such a thing, so I can't account for my resentment for this action. I find that he was very likely abusive, controlling, and dangerous to his former wives; this stops me in my tracks. What is he saying again? What is he trying to say? What is he doing again? What is he doing right now? I understand what is coming from his mouth. I hear what he is saying and can not argue with what he is saying. I used to work in a psychiatric ward and know from experience that there are dangerous geniuses walking the earth who we should be listening to--and this fact neither makes sense nor comforts me. A man with blood on his hands should not be crying out about the blood on other men's hands. Should a crazy man be pointing to other patient's in the room and be calling them crazy? Perhaps. But not with such self righteous passion. His actions, words, and his passion are correct and violent at once. Somehow this seems perfectly natural under the circumstances--as if he as he is is following the laws of gravity, physics, air. How can we all not be feeling violence and violent at a time like this? A life like this? Most of us are silent and turn our violence inward while unsuspectingly conspiring with the violence all around us. Too weak or too overwhelmed to admit that we have been made ugly: guilty. But not guilty actually, I don't know the word right now. I only see one element missing from the ward--compassion. He appears to be crazy, and this means he has lost control of his stop valve. This makes his actions and words more proof or evidence of our collective symptom--rather than any valuable help toward real solution or positive action. I consider that I ultimately beleive that his terrific rawness may be the only end result. Or, I may mean, that in the end, all the beautiful minds will deconstruct and separate from the soul because it is time. I don't know. Ward for Ward

Dear Sqaure Inch

2005-03-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

Or should I salutate
Dear size-of-a-stamp-land?
Either way, I miss you.
I miss you on a leaf
I miss you on the tongue of my beloved
I miss you in the air.
I would ask you where you have been
but I know you have been everywhere
and kept to yourself.
You don't write.
You don't call.
You don't expect this letter.
But you don't feel small or square
or inch from one place to another.
Some stamps are even smaller than you.
And some square inches
are larger than foreign countries
I have never seen, but never
larger than life.
I'm curious over you.
Overwhelmed.
Do you realize how long my days are?
Do you wonder why I have gone blind?
Looking at you, not at your picture
but at you a long time
hoping
you will finally
say something.

Day One

2005-03-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

I had an idea that I will write a book of poems. It will only take me one month to write this book because I can only write thirty or thirty one poems or twenty nine to make up a whole book. I could write poems every day for one year and narrow them down, but if I pick one month in particular the poems will be that particular. Particular is good. Every poem in the book will be called Day One. The title of the book is Day One. So all the titles in the book and of the book will be Day One.

Birds* Eye * View

2005-03-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

Looking into the mirror this morning I feel a wave of shame come over me. Suddenly I imagine what the baby sees when he looks into my eyes. I can see clearly, what has hurt me is not hidden. What has changed me shows, as years of cigarette smoke turn a lampshade. Though I may be smiling, my eyes reveal another layer of myself that is not smiling, never smiles, or smiles only when it accepts itself for what it is. Rare moments of content when the heaviness I have collected of life drops into every empty crevice of my body, wholly, and I do not resist. How strange to see it, looking into the mirror, into my own eyes, it is there and I can't adjust my eyes to hide it. I am ashamed because I feel it is a weakness that I am not able to muster the strength to clear my eyes of that taint. How hard he looks when he looks into my eyes, as if every part of him were aimed like an arrow for my soul. He has the look of a birdwatcher. Looking through the binocular of innocense, his new lenses, so advanced and magnifying they bring him closer to his subjects than an electronic microscope brings a scientist to the nucleus of a cell. Does he see my anger, fear, repulsion at the injustices I know he will inevitably suffer? I do not want him to see it. I do not want him to see what I have seen and become tainted. I do not want to frighten the birdwatcher away, who is looking for the flight and colors of beauty in the new world around him. Who is looking for the shape of my wings, the color of my breast, my unique behavior in the frantic map of sprouting branches of trees. I know it will be awhile before he can relax and understand that I am wounded and not a threat. Now, as he is only a few months here, he can not understand what that taint means. Maybe one day, while his eyes are glued to the lenses of his binoculars and he is walking through a tall grass and stumbles over a hidden rock and falls into an ant hill...causing him to drop his binoculars and panic...I will come from behind him and lift him from the hill, brush the ants away and his tears...and he will look into my eyes through his tear-blurred vision and understand. In that moment I will hand him his binoculars and tell him it's ok, everything's ok. "Keep looking."

What's In The Box?

2005-02-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

I don't know what happened. First I was sitting at my desk watching the morning traffic navigate itself into the new day, trying to remember the curious details of a dream I had last night where I gave birth to a baby boy that at first, looked like me (too much), and then morphed into a tiny tanned surfer boy with curly blond locks and round (anime) brown eyes. Whilethe dream unfolded fuzzily in my head I sipped coffee and smoked my cigarette, letting my hands travel over the untidy stacks on my desk - reaching for something - a foothold; then my hand found what it wanted and took it up. I opened a book; a fellow MFA graduate's newly minted first book of poetry that just arrived via UPS yesterday. I read awhile, until this line; "when the appetite stops clamoring / you're as good as dead." Then I woke up. Without knowing why, I immediately turned to the computer and looked for "Pandora's box" on Google and found things I didn't expect to find. An hour and a half later I had forgotten what I was looking for to begin with. I arrived where I was, hungry and shaken. Where I am now. It is passed mid-day and I am still hungry and I am waiting for a fiction writer from New York City to arrive so I can see her to her room and help settle her in. When I am done recieving my guest I do not know what I will do. The sun is shining strong though the weathermen promised hail, rain, wind, cold...painterly clouds drift wistfully through a perfect blue sky--I don't know what happened to the weather, I don't know what happened to my go - somehow I lost the rythmn of my doings today...

Broken mind wait
for the wind is not arrogant
as it passes your open accident
You may interpret breath by breath
its passing as desire, but the wind
goes without wanting where it will
and what you wait for is not of the wind
but of what is already, steadily still
in a place more near your skull than you--
the inner workings of what you're wondering
whether or not you need are with
you, and you with themselves--
wait and if you want to move, wait more
for what is broken that moves breaks
valuable things in its path if too reckless
and broken mind as broken you are
much too reckless.

Giving Art

2005-02-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

In our house we have a simple rule about gifts; If a thing is very difficult to part with, then it must be the perfect gift. If you see it at the store while you are looking for a gift and you stumble on a thing you would love to have for yourself, then it must be the gift you are looking for. This idea helps us when we begin to feel too precious about our things. Art, on the other hand, something I once stood on a streetcorner screaming to noone: "I have no time for ART!" about--is a tricky object. Art is both a thing and a necessity. We need it to live. On one hand, if you are very poor -- you buy groceries for the children, not art. If you are very poor and your soul is right--you will make and give art. If you are very poor and your soul is trapped in your fears and worries about being poor--you will need someone to give art to you. A long time ago I was very distracted with the idea that everything I do, make, touch, and think about must have an awareness of its artistic quality. That's not true. I still think this way--only now my soul is a little trapped in fear and worry. A long time ago I designed a tattoo which is now on my body that reflected this idea. I wear it on my back and never see it and so it is easy to forget I have this mark. I don't want to discuss what I mean by art. When I say art I only mean art. Something created or born in the act of human creation. As an artist, I have had trouble thinking about how to price my art in the past. My instinct was always that it must be given away. The making of it was my gift--and it should go to someone after the making of it who is separate from the making of it. That's how I thought. That's not true. I still think art is not a thing anyone really owns. Like land. We only think we own it. We only think our borders are real. We only think this patch of dirt is one county and that patch of dirt is another county--but really it is all one land separated by imaginary dilineations. Our friend J-Dawg called last night to tell us she has some art to give us. She said some of it is a gift and some a loan. Another friend let us borrow a painting awhile-months later she came and took it back to hang in a gallery. Now that place on the wall is empty again. The room the wall looks over is different now--something is missing--wanted. I like to buy terrible paintings anonymous artists--too likely poor--painted, paintings that ended up in the second hand store. Lately I have enjoyed finding these paintings and buying them. I buy sculptures, pottery, and paintings for one dollar or two dollars and hang them or place them around. If they fall from the wall and break it will be easier to understand that this just happens sometimes. It is sad sometimes when they are not signed. Often, they are not signed. I painted over one of them which I found offensive but liked the shape of the canvas. That painting was signed, but it bothered my soul, so I painted over it. I used the original artist's paint texture to determine the shape and content of my painting. I wonder whose painting it is now?