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

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Not dead, just different.

what we refuse is this

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

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

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

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...

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

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...