musings un poeme

2011-07-24T18:56:00.001-05:00

the fallen angel satan
there we are
what separates us
is ...

on recklessness

2011-07-03T13:23:00.003-05:00

Reading of recklessness, the idea that nothing bad will happen if we all, every one of us, were to write a poem. Right now. But if every one writes and no one reads then the point is? Poem making as another empty gesture we all can share in as equals. Like pornography. Yet there are always some more equal than others, and they are those who write of recklessness and tell that we all, every one of us, can up and write a poem without consequence. Or none of the bad ones. If we all, every one of us, were honest right now with who ever might be with us would there be no consequence? If a tree falls in the forest and all that. Crap. There is no sound that is not heard and no poem that is not read. If we write to amuse ourself then perhaps it is not so. But a poem is meant to be read. It is an honesty from places other than. A poem is two ways or it is not. We get little from writing but that it connects, communicates, goes beyond. Perhaps nothing bad happens if we all now, every one of us, writes a poem but then what is the point? Recklessness, yes, without regard but it is more on the others part, not ours

2011-06-12T11:39:00.002-05:00

Language aspires in redolent
circles pulsating but never reaching the far
shores draped in willow and moss
The tension of words not spoken, fobidden,
matched only by that of the words we dared to speak.
No.
Never spoken but reduced to symbols depeted of power
some. Like a school of fish convulsed on a stony beach
tearing the protective film. We see they also bleed red.
Still there are some that escape, committed,
flying if only briefly before falling to a gravity
we did not see yet feared all the same.
The stillness of our anger subsides.
Another history unknown.
We have no other choice.
We have no other words.
We deny even these.

2011-06-12T11:33:00.002-05:00

Choose your words. Carefully.
Chew your words.
Twenty times. They won't come out so wrong.
Then it was time to dress.
There was nothing. But skirts.
There are no metaphors. Without awareness.
I will not wear any thing. That bites. Today.
Tell me then. How
It is that we learn to. Start. For
getting how we
Remember

nothing else less

2011-06-12T11:21:00.005-05:00

books of words like
hope is dying
others we can't yet sound
the meaning is keening above in the night
like the owl to the cat who in black
comes slinking in only after
roaring round the corner like
a bat out of hell
proverbially
and then
you come
riding through like a wind
through the mountain alps
and there
is one other
another
a solitary friend in shadows dusk
soldiering on
like a child's toys battered missing their color
to the craters and the dents of exploded artillery
with letters nonetheless
to write to those left behind where not
once written not
left is much more
is left
to roll on but always
the birds fly on their famous vees
no longer for victory or anything
of the sort
we are all
weirdly armed
on this night
for this night
the one after the one we remember
that never ends as though
it never was.
But still we know.

nother

2011-05-01T14:20:00.002-05:00

Probably we won't ever ride an elephant again.
You can come and take notes.
Then you can remember us, remember for us, when we forget.
There is no past where we never lived in the first place.
The second place doesn't count.
Sometimes saying things to get a reaction but whose?
We have to quit doing things just cause they feel good.
We can't keep doing things just not to feel.
There is no good reason to call.
You don't really like any of this.
We don't either.
We have to keep our expectations low.
If we don't the others will help, will do it for us.
We are used to only this.
Sometimes it may seem like to be so much kitsch
The drama of what can only be imagined.
But I didn't really want to tell you.
None of us did.
Not that you really wanted to know
any way.

thuds

2011-05-01T14:00:00.003-05:00

this is the line
next to which we breathe
words detach
are shed of us
we them
falling on this or the other
side of the line
next to which we breathe
some wafting, no
drifting like the roses
shredded in the heavy rain
that passed last night
when the others slept
red like blood but fragrantly
staining the pavers
lining the space
next to which we breathe
and who the hell does that
kind of thing?
others like our severed limbs
or selves
red like the rose petals
painted with the sun or more
like a magic marker and the smell
bleeding onto the slaughter house
floor
where they fall
the cuts to discard, no one wants
making slick their metallic taste
like nails
lining the surfaces
through which we breathe
uncommunicative
without a reason

not, may be

2011-04-22T17:04:00.005-05:00

Things you don't know. I don't know. Unless you tell me. Or someone. Like that I am. I am here. You see me. Or someone. That tree in the woods. Clapping. Crap. Room. Was where it was. One of us. One of them. All subject to recalls. Yours. Mine. The cause undetermined. I only see what is shown. The rest unseen. We will pray for rain. If I don't say you can't know. So faith is blind. And justice. Parents. Never to rain again. And what if there were none at all? One species wiped out. Then another. Wasteful. Not necessarily. Only on certain occasions. But even then. How to be if not seen. Heard. Touched. Not that way. I am what you tell me I am. Except you never said. I was not. You never saw. Directed elsewhere. I am what they said. But they never said. I am not not. We are. We are what they did. No one ever saw. Or said. It was nothing new. Lola gave us peanut butter. On spoons. Dancing on the table. Bare footed. Small. For that problem costs three dollars. We got it bad that time. All the time. But that was the only time with spoons of peanut butter dancing on the table. And the last time for Lola. they say they are writers. No one disagrees. No one says any thing ever. Maybe the rest are here but not really. Somewhere else. Like another room. It was windy. That's what he said. Dark in the closet. Without wind. Without air. There was no wind. Can't be. Unless he is trusted. Not lying. Spinning a yarn. None of the above will do. We are all cynics. Still we want to believe. We want to believe. To know. Someone to tell us we are. Not a thief.

word

2011-04-17T18:28:00.003-05:00

word like tentacles paralyze small
fish and hope of all ages
maybe though
dead cannot be found
maybe then
dead is safe
at least the time being, at least for now

we headed north up the coast
til there was no more
we always believed there must be a place
some other time, when they like us
they would go to hell

But how would that be different?

There's no gain in wondering why

they were boxed

2011-04-17T17:59:00.001-05:00

It was never one of us but
once all of them were phenoms, the good ones
of blond-ed hairs and blu-ed eyes
fat cheeks
endless smiles
lacy ankle socks and mary janes
and then the rest of us, the ones you never saw
or if you did
unremarkable

planned out our lives according to the ones we had
our own childishness hiding the missing -- what of it?
We are a dangerous species
no safe place for our love to flow.
As if.
There was never need of love,
to become embroiled without fear of pain.
Anatomy never a friend, yours or mine.
Neither.

THe telepathy of words, the sounds they make unsopoken
Aware consience brings only conflict
There is no personal philosophy but narcissim
And control.

Everyone had a roommate but us.
To be alone, kept alone, is key.
One alone will never be believed
so much the easier for what it was
Yet we stayed
Were we waiting for them to show us our ends or did we never care?
did we never matter
so much as that?

Even yet.
Not.

naked

2011-04-17T17:53:00.001-05:00

They then were in
the days of john birch
the kkk
mandatory sunday mass
pretending
i the disruptor still trying to dream
through to the end.
Whose nightmare it was.

Roaming the world through its sewers
chipping round.
some on, some off.
There's a price to pay.
Always.

Savoring a smooth cool barrel
with all that implies.
Infinite promise.
Freedom.

A fascination all my own.
Not any business of theirs they knew
but looked the other way
refusing our existence by those eyes
averted

There are no more pioneers.
Everyone knows everything yet no one
knows one damn thing worth knowing
Abominations that for nothing else can be
when labels run out
no longer marginalized
instead simply ceased
the being.
It should take another two weeks.

carick

2011-04-17T17:44:00.001-05:00

the parasitics within they make us
famous for things they say we should
hide
a realness of one of me that none can see.
I am
we are
invisible to the naked eye

it is not
rebellion certianly not
in this strength only
in isolated instances.

It's just that we
wanted to go the same way

now over and through it is blood, burnt flesh
a dry empty body waits to be
used, reused, discarded, recycled
Laying on, not near, absent use
emptiness reverbates, then shatters

it's literature and drugs
unrecognizable
to all who wonder at the sameness
All of it is
nothing more than this

there is not more than a modicum of challenge
but for the vulgarity of some life some live
it was not a happy time but only the sameness
hiding these violent loathing selves

there is nothing of importance here
or there, only you.
spiritual liberation is not yet
liberation of any sort breeds fear
like the wavering signals coming in over
late-night radio snuck under the pillow of a stick-figure
girl, a caricature is all and so
neither can it be true what she thinks they were
did or she saw felt.
Empty lines never fill in

Nothing is until it is
observed.
They refuse to see what is in front of them.
WHat is behind them.
They refuse to be seen.
Then we are not.

meats

2011-04-17T17:26:00.001-05:00

We were never
explicitly
loveable
Synchronicity
we once cried
without knowing
the mind foresees out future
We weep
for the aura of it
we restrain ourselves
Going off
we miscalculated
tongue-tied
babbling
Then we finished
Would apologize
Didn't know what to say
Luminaries legends devils and saints.
It wasn't just a baby's terror.

artnot

2011-04-17T16:20:00.019-05:00

Words imprecise unfamiliar complicated
imprecise artistic transliterations
to illustrate any dreamers
thoughts
no mere approximations but only
things indescribable
for lack of words the use of which
render bluured the dream
Ayy dream

Making fun, ruinous fun

There is no art
Only paint and words
the subtlety of nuclear explosions
And blood

Only blood will do.

0

2011-04-10T12:34:00.003-05:00

i can't do any
more writ
ing be
cause
i
have not
to say and i
might run out
of
room to say if once
words come or
thought to be
and
i don't
have time to
read every
thing
they say
in
response to
my
nothing
ness
isms

no se

2011-04-10T12:23:00.002-05:00

Morning to night walking round
a thought in my head

Go ahead and say it the others
In the corner sitting with their concepts, their precepts
I sit but cannot know how it is they learn
I understand none of it
I tested their feelings and failed
Magic is not i must but i can't

It is no matter that you again are sure to be absolutely right
But then I came late, hating the knowing
the making of a living and not just to be
before that great committeee an urge to vomit my ending truths
instead we shed those those things like a mocassin's sin in the jungly overgrowth
Yet the index remains there for the committee
for you
waiting to be found

It is not just only you and me but there are
others hiding in the woods, behind my cerebral cortex.

Who knew.

not me

2011-04-10T12:15:00.003-05:00

one of themm a father tied
one rope fr the sky thinking like
that he said is a sin but to be
saying things like
that worse than sin
how worse than I don't know

Pummelled like a piñata
a father I heard say
said some breathlessly sin
removes you from god
your father
wondering how many fathers to make just one
life and then but only later if sin
removes me from god then how
can talking be worse than that?

perhaps that then is why even
now our ghosts are bruised

Meme les pigeons vont au paradis

thought after

2011-04-10T12:12:00.001-05:00

When I leave I will go off
as a note.
Only one or a piece.
There will no offerings.
Of course providene and all that has a place.
Things that have no name.

"Long ago and many years was my my music taken."
Who would listen to such talk from a man like that?
Much less a vaguness called girl.

Perhaps
it just vanished like the tide.
That one no longer able to be with that she gone
so went
the music
Many
unrecognizable by choice then
became and the music
simply departed
it wasn't the farewell he hoped for

hospital sunday

2011-04-10T11:51:00.002-05:00

fishes bubbles
on the surface only one
producer of grand babies
two two year olds
i love you
he makes a good hamburger
beeps and songs and buzzes and all the other
electronic detritus
it's a whiz on sunday
cause the lines aren't that long
or young
babel babbles
bot never The Test
only children and food and family that
no one knows, will never be seen or maybe
isn't even
all this easy talk covers the not talking thant can't be and
is not allowed
some more full of himself than others and
he's not even wearing boots
still the fishes bubble so they
for one or however many is there
can leave alive or
naturally dead

and i'm not here either

2011-04-03T20:35:00.002-05:00

i am not here but not there am i either.

where you are is not where i am,
else you might know where i am, or
could be, or
have been.
the human leavings incapable of cleaning.
wiping free of memory, of
thought, whatever
it is this consciousness we are
blessed and cursed.

come to think of it i've no
idea not only the place of
absence but of
your being as well.

we all are hid behind our
personas crafted, disdain and aloofness, no more
joining with another, no connection, no communication.

you write you say is enough is all you deign
or have to give.

not that my selfishness was ever a secret
i am human still i think
though uncionnected yet still
selfish narcissism springs to life anew

like you.
like all the rest.

you may say or write or post as you will and i
need not be commital, you expect nothing.
i too fade away,
making no constraints.
it is after all nothing to do with me
but only you

of time we have just so much.
who am i to take of yours?

you're tight, yes,
pretending other, but then i already knew.
i am no one and
i am not here

wednesday eleven twenty ate

2011-02-20T18:46:00.003-06:00

The dream it was not sudden. Not so as you'd notice.
Hard and pointed as rocks tumbling from low grown mountain. Still they're hard to cipher as a single bluebird wing. Nigerian Afro psychedelic rock holds it's own in the early morning dark.
The final hours.
Tendrils of smoke and all that early morning imagery if it suits you.

Tomorrow is. Could be. Another busy day if we arrive in time.
I dreamt there was but only a single, one-more day.
Vibrant colors. Flying fish. Sailors aswagger with zeal. Finally come the drums.
For now only seeing stars but we don't know where we are. Or they. Living on in such a modern style. Far from all reality.
Over in the corner we placed the large void. Covered the evening.
Promise me the star, the seas. The phosphorence of creatures smaller even than me. The cold of a body greater than the depths of those who know.
Empty spaces, vast as Siberia. Waiting for a faith.
Probably any one will do. We have noting to compare. No grace from earth.
A circular motion we fall through languid airs.
They didn't want to turn this way.
A bag of totems for life and luck. Maybe a set of tickets to something.
The end.
It's coming.
But the end is only more.

I wash my body.
It disappears.
Joyous can be but silent so it is that we remain.
A singular new business each dawning day, washing all but that we can't. Leaving in mid conversation but whose the talking none of us know. Good enough then to know much as any can. Once when they are the rest are not. Taking away from any one leaves more the same behind.

Never want to grow to be a man.
Some did anyway.
Men. Eunuchs. I can't say.
We're not in imperial China anymore.
Same as always. You know it. No matter your denials.
Expected means no surprise. No fascination.
Deny your likeness. What it means to learn.
If god made man in his image how can he expect anything more?
What's done leaves no changing for any of it now.

The us, the we, the one you think is. Never enough. We can't take on like them others. Don't want to grow to be a girl. And not the other. Not one place we've been is safe for that.
Things might be bad in Cincinnati but that's pretty far. Least so far as we know. Could be. Probably is. More than we can know, so how to know where they mighta run too? For there and then we have no worries. Not here with these ones. No one else we know. Perhaps to cleanse. Whatever is.

As easy to breathe under water. Now. I find room for me. For the rest.
Should I thank them that thought this?
I wash my body and it disappears. Then on wakening I'm already found.
Love defined as absence of violence overt. Your own conveniences and temper. Convince me to please you, just me as we are. I am. We are fast beyond that place. Doubting ever the random possibilities of love. Your heart I have no use or want but dripping in my hand. Metaphorically. My synergy sinking.

Show no fear.
Destroy. Revive. Destruct.
Rebuild.
Wash rinse repeat.
Dress your best for the simian disco.
Moving to the other side of my head.
The chances are that you are, come undone. Or that we are confused.
Of every rope there is a tension.
Trips of perversion.
Truths wildly untamed in the manner of superstition.
An avalanche I've yet to see.

wednesday late

2011-02-20T16:30:00.002-06:00

The customary number and variety.
A full set if you will. Or not.
Everyone scared, the first one, more or less.
Some have ideas but no account of yours.
Aligning the stars, bliss peace reverence. Ignorance.
To never tell the father when the child is born. Only the girl of many uses. Some do don human form. Like dogss. Yes. And all manner wild ones.
But to be a man, none agree on that meaning.

Breathing not more than shallow quiet solitude.
To sleep disappearing.
As any decent geographer. Washing myself to pale fainting. Even as.
Filling my soul. Overflowed though it be. With out familiarity. To stillness. Other times with planks of music. Some time strange to meet again a some other. Never known. Or not. When there's to be no remembering any way.

When there's nothing left to burn all there's left is to set yourself on fire. Between lines color congealed. Our own to claim if we can but say.
Deep in the sun. Beyond rows of knotty olive trees. Fewer to see than come to say so.

Some time 'round seven there's nothing left to say. Only those as came packing take the space. Some times better understand saying in silence. Speaking. Listen the synsethete. Here is the engine room for those who stomach. Then come geographers claiming what could be.

Tell me how you claim a man. His skin his bones. Or girls. Women. Whores. Additional adjectives available on request. Some may find offense. Or take it even though. To maintain a certain decorum. Paint a picture. Make believe for you. Those around but they are different. Easy even, all things relative.

wednesday later

2011-02-20T16:05:00.003-06:00

Five miles of road.
Three hours of conversation.
Never enough room to be anywhere else.
Too late for games but never still, never dark.
Enough.
Dreams.
Always they say just one more time.
Until not.

Turned down one more time.
But we lost our time, no more turning away.
No more sorries. Sincerities fall aside.
We are they who grew up. No matter.
No more. Hurt lets go like.
We're come and done. Did and then.

Empty.
Air sucked from the heart, gone dry as the eyes.
Some feel the dark only long enough to see the light.
Flat as muds parched to famine.
The next to last might be the only one that grows.
Yes.

Only I have such free time for these things.
No physical weighs on us. No more.
We jump to the beat one more time.
What it's all about.
It's not me knows.
Not here.
Not now.
Not then.

soiled

2011-02-06T16:57:00.001-06:00

Tomorow truncated
Living segment to segment,
A road trip counting mile markers, peering past lines blue, lines red
Counting trainloads of graffitti rolling by
Clacking
Swaying this and that, lullaby of the rails
Though we dare not
To sleep

Gathered the largest, swept together the others, held together
a large silvery ball, sticky duct tape
Kicked far and away then it too is all gone
Nothing left but suicide
but first to shear those seven rams
I wanted tonight to be different, but this place isn't us
Not that we're planning any funerals
just going out for another roll

Dancing here on cliffs edge almost guarantees we fall
There are no spontaneous energies, only hard fought thoughts quick to slip from conscious and being. I care not to Run after - there is no point. I am told to embrace all of it -- downs and ins and disappointments and not and expectations shattered and life's despair bad and good and death hopes
But we know in the next step is no
promise, no urgency, no reason
The air we breathe I cannot feel, but all around me it I see
Who are you to see these things I feel?
To feel the things I think I see?
A twinge of recognition, like deja vu, not even.
Even if I told it with outloud language then even not,
you wouldn't know me not if you could, not wanting can be strong
Like you. I am even though not to you
No, I don't
want to dance
you didn't have to ask
Pretend
I already know.

In the end
Thoughts flutter like bats from the bridge
Dark beginnings. Brighter ends.

Pausing fiercely then to repopulate
Floating in the fray, sea foam populated
but there is nobody here
Digging a hole to the sun
Leaving the other's grave in the attic
Maybe for another day to fill with hymns and prayers
Letting loose the rabbit to howl
To run
To run and howl one more day
Til we all fall down

quiet at night

2011-02-06T16:38:00.000-06:00

Om natten
too much sickness
in the lobby.
For those who don't believe Christmas is overrated.
The operation is risky -- dii or paralysis. The better? dead and know not or to know all with no recourse?
What is mercy anyway?

Without somethings we all die.
Define worst case scenario, use it in a sentence.
The music tinkles along even after the globe is smashed, snow glittering over the floor. I see you speak but your words have no sound. Of course you're not nervous waiting for it to end. What I said yesterday I'm sorry. It not my business. Religious crap. A whole year. A cold blue light, sharp edged, dispensed our secrets in quick short whispers. For there's no telling. It never really was a secret after all. Futility, sterility, and another bottle of beer. This will be our last party together. Infrequent calls become none. We never hear from you again but to read what is wrote to others. Of which we are no part. So we tidy up more quietly, putting this new absence to rest with the others. Wanting. Knowing. There is nothing for it. On a narrow thin bed in the ward we lie. Only six. How can only six be sufficient. But tomorrow will be another day, or not. Then will we know, or not. I'm not so brave as you think I am. Else we would not stop at six, wondering about the morrow. Someone should be affected when a person dies. Someone should grieve. To show it matters a person dies. Many died alone. Not even I knew.

A babylonian drone. A banty rooster coming down the alley way with wings akimbo. The subway clitter and clacks. No one looks. At another. No one talks. To another. Pages stared at. Or through. Marks made. Charlie breaks rank. Charlie speaks. Charlie listens. The others hear only one man. Now they look. For only a second. C'est magnifique. Notes from the margins. A man. A margin. Little tolerances. Small thoughts. We're not like the others.
We'reallgoingtoburninhell.
Tomorrow.

ruminescence

2011-02-06T16:23:00.001-06:00

We're still hoping someone will see us.
Hear us.
Pretend ... whatever, maybe.
Like things we've done and let be.

Another chance for eulegy. Breathing in, breathing out with out assistance. Cut from your cloth so there's nothing left for a pair of trousers.
Coming up out of the sea.

Couldn't find my voice so we went shopping. Where everything's the same. There in a dingy tethered to saggy shiny myylar clouds. Buy one get one. Discontinued. As is. The knives were one aisle over. Memories big on things that never were. But I see you there destined in a darkling world, Like a sun that never wants photographed. We have left no focused circumstances as those, nothing so grand as a big red lollipop. It's just us, here alone like, letting ourselves be swallowed. Whole we slip away. While we kick our feet against the angels coming. Never to go against the rhythm; rythm is the everything

Rythm and the melody and the day and the night. We're all out of words now. Waiting a shipment but expecting it to blow in Mumbai, raining down verbs and nouns on children who never think twice on anything comes from above. Still
the brains to think diagnosis and cure but it's only just and nothing more but the world's own hard and futile place. Flowing like water out of ourselves. For the moon gets a do over while we stumble long down another street
Solvitur ambulando.

the purge

2010-12-18T20:53:00.004-06:00

what follows now from another writing
alternate wednesdays, various times tween noon and midnight
choices to read, watch, think or write
the occasional nap
the order there is none but only the words are left
and in miserable shape
if ever we doubted us as "writer" then no more
at least one question answered in certainty
All the others knew, for a long time they knew, so did i but for my own dishonest narcissist
over and again, selfish narcissism in search of anything other than real

i didn't do anything with it til wedesdays ended, and whether i might do anything else your guess i good as mine... maybe run a spellcheck, not sure the reason. To run a spellcheck presumes a level we've never occupied

follows is all i had in me alternating wednesdays, too the times i had nothing
it's log, it's messy, it's poorly written. it's here because ... where else? it's not the quality of rot discarded by real poets, writers
it's all we've got
we started without you, it seems we're still alone
i go to work, no body's there.
Everyday goes by the same.
But digression never built a granite foundation
Another day perhaps
bones for the dogs

wed again

2010-12-12T13:03:00.005-06:00

So far this journey I learned
John Brown's body
rots the same
as the rest
Noise is infinite
but silence has an end
A you and an I is not a we
visible

2010-09-30T17:14:00.003-05:00

body frozen and rigid
lies
(like we always do, they say, the lies we tell)
still as a corpse waiting on the slab
for the knife
(but i never had to wait for a knife)

it's not a question
whether one likes it or not
what will happen just happens
as inevitably as the lesions and sores of paranoia
fester and spread the craziness far and wide
til all we know know we are not to be believed.

Yes, the world's a crazy place.

that girl over there
(she's not a nice girl)
raped and beat and fucked and kicked
and that is that whore's life and
that is what happens to sinners like that
who drink and drug and know but stay
(everyone knows, they all say)
he would never unless she did something
so it must be that dirty girl
and it must be okay cause she's just a dirty girl

it must be okay.

And the brother says, that golden child, sullen
she drinks and drugs and takes all she can get
so it must be okay and
she is using her body to get what she wants
and that is what her brother thinks.

He told me so.

that daughter of his is raped and beat and kicked and fucked
and she doesn't tell him no and
she doesn't fight back even though
she fights with others
(they stay away from her, the other kids)
but never raises a finger to him again because
(she's afraid she will die)
so it must be
that it's okay and
she is just a whore and
this is what her mother thinks.

that daughter of his is raped and beat and kicked and fucked
and she doesn't tell him no because
(she tried before to get away)
she knows she must honor her mother and her father and the wages of sin
is raped and beat and kicked and fucked some more
and really she doesn't know any why because
this is what she knows, it just is, and
she doesn't feel it any more so
it must not be that bad and
she goes away with his drinks and drugs
and leaves
only her body
to be raped and beat and kicked and fucked and
beat and fucked and kicked some more
and really she isn't there
and she doesn't think a thing at all

2010-09-30T15:50:00.006-05:00

poetry in ruins
pain by proxy

what we can't believe we speak
what we speak none polite believe
worst of all is the one who does
just enough
but that is beside the point now

it was a new south city with the old south sensibility
where we never did belong
the virtues of work and church and country club
protecting the polite, the good, from the filth we bring

once then we went swimming, close to the earth
to see the ravens prowling the park
standing guard
against the way they choose to live
a pleasing symmetry, grace and substance
pearls and cocktails
over and against the rest of us,
in our remnants of chaos and violence and disorderly
mindlessness

first you plant something
the ground, the earth, tells me what to plant
not what will grow
so i do it and then to hell with that

they should live by their own rules
whatever they got i could care less

they got no idea what they got til maybe that last second after the trigger is pulled
when it's finally too late
maybe then
crumpled dusty and used-looking in the late summer heat
who's gonna make it pretty now?

later in the night a small rain chiming in the garden
cools finally the suffocating air
calming the night if nothing else
letting the others move on to talk of forgotten
silliness, feral smiles sated , the primal hunt

a shitty way of looking at things
the lackness
it never wavers
the savage smile closing in
we know what's next
everything gets too much
a familiar but nameless prickling clambers though our limbs
takes us in its grip
to that final and inevitable loneness

we feel the whorls, the eddies, the currents
carry us along and are weak against the tide
perhaps we just don't care
just this minute

maybe later
before the locusts come

we weave a soft shroud against the day, the memory
the light that shines on the truth that is unspeakable
the unbelievable we cannot speak
we know well the feel of cotton swallowing our sounds,
stilling our soul, what's left

there's something to be said for silemce

in the night the cold wet rain soothes
prowling round the corners
teasing thoughts like thin wet twigs
they bend with the wind but we
we snap them off like a tornado of summer
leaving behind only shriveling brown laces of death
nothing else

death has its own perfect symmetry

this is sane as we can expect this lifetime
this one we have come to with the inevitability of our madness
the faceless invader of malevolent gaiety
coming through a field of sun-drenched poppies
improbably yellow in the snowy ice born of fear
and finally
silence

2010-09-30T15:42:00.002-05:00

The rimless horizon above.
Caverns of guilt, yours and theirs.
On what was everything
Taking a walk surrounded by
Seeing a song above my head
Spinning a dream out the window to free
The sun falls away

All the people said
that was what was what and every day

One body else then has to walk
Time to bring in the guns
One long overdue thought
losing my mind to Jesus

2010-09-28T16:08:00.002-05:00

Duct tape keeps the words from spilling out
Like a refuge, but cold
Like the dark air at the bottom of the sea
or an avalanche
Immoveable
Not even the whitest heat of hate can penetrate
the duct tape
keeping the words from spilling out

notes

2010-09-28T15:54:00.003-05:00

it interests you not so why the notes?
Here I smile and that and I talk when I have no reason, no business, no idea
only the bruises to show for it
We're not so versed in these matters, we just empty the piss pot
is all
like a parlour made

if I said to you
all my life they said
do you know what i mean or who they are or even
what it means, all my life?

there are those who know to run the faucets
twice a day in the winter to keep the pipes from cracking

there are those who know - they say they know - what i'm made of
but if your life is to empty the piss pots how much more could there be?
More it's the lack perhaps,
we all know a lack even if we can't name it

there are those who know the everything, the all there is to know
even through clenched-teeth denials
with fists so tight the blood is drawn
a chorus of death efforts
with no awareness.

is it what it is

2010-09-20T18:46:00.005-05:00

no screaming during the baby's sleep
don't wake it cause then it needs
demands to be taken care of
screaming again with no words to say
asleep you can forget the baby
asleep it needs nothing

you're not the first one
the girl in the camera already knows
we had a first kiss, thought i liked it
but now, now is so cold
the vigor of insanity calls me out
like sirens in the sea, i go

all it is, i am, we are, lazily unformed
on even the most beautiful evenings
there is no time to listen, less to talk
it isn't til later i will want to kill myself

the only difference is
you are bigger
older,
they say you are wiser

i can't
it's not fair
i din't do anything
still
all it is is lazy

i never met the arbiter of fair
i suppose that would be god
but we have not yet made acquaintance
i called once, or many times
and more than those were calls unmet
i am not an invited guest

simply adding the years
the things we see and you
have no more innocence

And you never had a say in it either

i'm gonna scream
not me, no
but someone's gonna scream
and i
can't wait to hear

do you spose it will be louder, the scream
than a single shot?

2010-08-08T15:04:00.002-05:00

the centerpoint of broke love
camels on the promenade
burning
i asked for mezzanine
but here the piss burning the snow
turning to me
lazy eye don't want to see
who would?

pulling flies apart
dismembering
wings shimmer even as crumbling
fat nasty fingers
dirty torn nails

they were right you know
all of you

what did anyone expect?
not that often
sleeping like death, waiting to disappear
always there's waiting some problem
like that echo

keeping my head empty of thoughts
best that's the way
cept all the room it leaves
empty reverbates
echoing as laughter from a drunk
smelly old sweaty drunk,
things we never asked for
that we dont want
to want
but worse are the echoes
what we saw once on tv
never coming to this part of the world
too small for attention

our wishes
our prayers
folded into small pieces of paper
swallowed
now we're not hungry
no one can see our swallowed words
no one can laugh
at least not for that.

i don't see was crap

2010-08-08T14:35:00.004-05:00

i've missed your writing or really what i mean, could mean, i miss you
of course not - it's an idea, a representation, an image
what else is there?
it's true its rude to eat everything in thailand
food like memories moving in a circle
you know you did wrong when you say "my jeweler" and some one answers and those around know the one to whom you refer.
it's not so much that i care for jewelry but only that friends are, no more
one appetizer, one entree per person, sitting pretty on a lazy susan spinning round
like the sun and the moon sitting across the universe
obscene mountains of food - obscenity like vomit

the most beautiful women i've seen are men but
i never met anyone from Tegucigalpa or Teotihuaca

we don't eat worms all the time
even prettier, speared like rows of sunshine
scorpions and beetles, glazed a beautiful orangey red,
waiting in a line, their bamboo skewers, perfectly parallel
as though waiting for the firing squad
again

all the way sober,
homesick words flying and others float in eddies,
scaring the spiders inside trying to find
what i feel, what i think that is of no moment
for I am not lined up on a skewer, dripping my orange syrupy glaze

perhaps i need to chew my words a bit longer.
as you lay there with stars above would you wait for me, the other one?
not for that, god knows the complications to run with the devil.
not to be good and not to be be bad but only just to be,
to be alone,
to be alone
with a friend but what is that?
are you? is anyone? i thouhgt i was but then i say i do i say wrong do not and so that's then the end of that.

wandering soft sands of dead crushed beyond any semblance of glorious past coral once nurturing the ocean now trampled as though nothing.
Just another road to nowhere

(rev 9/28)

2010-08-06T23:20:00.002-05:00

thank god
someone for buttons
you don't gotta put out there what you wrote
before
just look later
see what an ass
frosty bitch
wooden

lately i
what
life long short
gone away from me

there's more than one life
even before you kill yourself
or someone else does it for you
would any offer for free
no penalty
no questions asked

however it is
walked away
the rest remains there
for a while
cries and trembles
making quiet screams
gone away from me
the one you might see
so it all looks fine
like a rotten egg
before smashing the shell

what a god was crap

2010-06-20T22:32:00.005-05:00

I can't talk about anything
anywhere but here; here is safe enough because no one else
is here.
Yes I wish
Whatever that means.
Too much means the mustard is squirting out the end of the bun or
you can't take a drink without spilling your coffee.
People say my thoughts, my prayers
meaning ... ? yes, I am.
some time there's some thing I can do for anyone.
Period has but a single use though it might mean many things
depending
Tell me then what is
an acceptable use of any one's time?
I know but to what end?
What matters?
It means nothing to refuse to cry, anyone can manage that
I don't know how ... I don't want ....
I tried to climb out the hole hole but there's nothing there either
The time I don't have is too much.
Trivial is what really matters now

for what was here before
mea culpa

(rev 9/28)

2010-05-29T22:03:00.004-05:00

life got worried
got tired, wary even
we took what we could carry
in pockets not so deep
arms not as strong as your heaart
We took what we could
to the purple wood
sat at gray falls
breathing in the damp
listening to romance in F sharp
dreaming
eyes wide open
unfocused, we see each drop pass by

But now it's just the clouds
crying like lost ch someild
not really wanting to find a way home
not knowing where else to go
once aware here there was no home

Without air we are not
we are nothing but watery illusion
breathe, it is not optional here
Breathing
not a thought what goes in
what's expired
sooner or later each must open the mouth
Life

That was the first time round
a third-world marketplace, shit in streets
poking cow ribs, crooked sticks
From Paris we come to sit with the devil
only but we were there
alone, cross legged
cross-legged under the Bhudda tree

Up in a flat-toppped banyan tree
learning to fly like kites
free as the blue

First I heard, the steps were down
the hall, then it was
tomorrow's mourning come back to me
thankful for the altitude, the blowing rock
and the redemption songs, save our minds

Breathe

whose

2010-05-29T21:47:00.002-05:00

Yes, then once
it was revealed they belonged
to him. It all made
sense spintered
faith torn tender flesh hung
shreds putrefied
hung shreds
petrified witing honor
your mother your father
commands for you who are
are not but children
belonging to this man or that
and after there will be another.
Some more
subtle less evidence
remainder carries over
overlooking like the others
simply things that are
belonging to another
they spoke of a holy bejesused
son of virgin
mother god one
father loving all but these
through smoke like
ignorance
one broken faith selfish
not one but many floating
among revelations threatening
swallowing us whole
This we can believe
with apologies to tom

to be edited

2010-05-23T13:23:00.003-05:00

awake at night with poem in head
at night I wake, words in head
With words in head I wake
Words in head wake me at night
but is it poetry?

I lay with sheet, dog, cats, body
seemingy quiet all
all but the words that woke,
writhing in my head
awaiting some response, some one
too late, gone now
but a lingering sense, a place, left roaming

I breathe the words
I breathe with them but I cannot say them
fleeting they are, like foxes hunted, dogs baying, hidden away
The words envlop me with sloped shoulders
With sloped shoulders we hear the words that wake us in the night,
tiring themselves, immune now to poem speak

I hear the herons, the owl
who hooing and raucous, one slender one not
crickets rub their legs, singing life away
the sky winds through trees tall in the night
intersecting moon clouds, silhouettes of the night
chirps coming down, rooster crows

(to be edited)

2010-05-16T19:49:00.002-05:00

i need to learn to edit with blogger so i can compare the first version of crap to the second crap.
i want to write, i was ready to go, but i read some of the stuff here and thought it needed editing but i didn't know how, so i re-wrote some, and still it's not right so i just gave up for the time.
there's not many folks i can talk to about writing
there's not many i can talk to about god and religion adn all that stuff
maybe i'm not supposed to be doing any of it and that's wht there's no one around.
would i have been not better off without that letter?
who knows, never will, cause that was a long time ago and i took it to heart eventually and that's the only reason i came this long and far away
just shows you never know

who knew

2010-05-15T22:40:00.005-05:00

dressed up and excited but no one wants to be first
staring at toes of shoes, seeing scuffs missed while polishing
maybe you shoulda just bought a new pair
she said, he looked
not to each other but the others to see
was it time

no time like the present
keep me posted, who's late, who drank too much before getting here
I will tell you who will be the dirty winner
then you can accomplish your next goal

Unflappable. Who made that a word? Who gave permission?
This is what America's all about, blustering and blabbing
never asking or listening even when it's too close to call.

Everyone thinks they have a shot at history but first,
you gotta get up and go to work and no one wants to do that
so it's stupidity we choose.

Currents curl around, cold arms, taking us away
taking our options with it.
What about your childhood dreams?
Crap, nothing but crap.
Sucking the air til your lungs hang out, wet bags gasping like a fish on the dock
A disturbing debut, marked by tears and scars,
now they call it character.

SO the festivities keep going, shine or rain flowing
waiting for another stupid question
whose answers, some were overlooked, some thwarted,
but mostly they were never heard since the only point was in asking
so we would know how smart you are.
No answers please,
don't want
don't need
don't care
because sometimes to know requires to do.

Distance is what it's all about.
Sooner than later, sometime someone has to go there.
We can't all be last, or lost, or anything at all.

i went to the race, made a bet

2010-05-15T21:49:00.004-05:00

when no one reads or listens or knows what you say you can say or do whatever and no one the wiser. Not one of those they talk about in the morning when they come in to work and have nothing exciting to talk about but make up crap about other people. Did you see that story?

Personally I don't think it's right, or that's what the church says, or it used to say that, but one thing is if you change your mind then it's too late cause when the times they kill you then you are out of time. What the hell were you thinking anyway?

There's lots of people killed by all the good times they had.
Is it worse if it the bad times kill or you kill to have no more?

Every one of then thought they knew the moral of the story.
What they didn't know is everyone in America was waiting, listening, trying to hear, eavesdropping on none of their business. What business of yours what any of us do or how many survive? But all they heard was nothing but the wind whistling through parched lips of little girls, permanently pursed, won't suck again. All of these we hate, we hate our own more than that. Running through the park knowing there's not another way.

Once I thought it was my house where we lived but they set me straight early on. Maybe the mistake is thinking they were supposed to love me. Or maybe they did and we didn't know it for what it was but bought into a story tale. All these people came from only Adam and Eve so after all, do the math. I'm no good at math. I can't even breathe.

It was my house but I only lived there to do bidding; whose bidding? All of theirs. Didn't I tell you, did you never see? I was there, out in the open, except the ones hid away. Even I forgot where we left them.

All films are propaganda but many are quite amused to sink into the seat. Give the rumpled damp dollars to the kid standing there behind the security glass, safe from everyone but the ones that do them, all for a little piece of paper to go through the wash later in the week. All I did was I was born but I never asked for it.

Many people in their jesus pose think they are friends but that's when they don't know me. Then one of us gets away and everyone is gone, we are alone with only the others of us. There is such a thing and we're not crazy. Just don't let me go. I just need some help to see myself before we disappear and forget everything we thought we knew before all of this. We're probably not here much longer.

Many people in their jesus pose have swastikas on their skins but it's okay because you can't see them if you don't look. Not looking is how we get from there to here. But no one sees or no one cares or no one believes or they see it all and don't know what they see. Or no one cares what any of it means.

Then one will say I know how you feel but we all know that lie. We never told you really, not a thing. My brother's dead. When he was born I was two and now we're fifty and he's been gone a really long time. You don't know even how you feel so why pretend to know about us? Whatever is not this one or any other of me.

If all you ever do is say the right things can you tell yourself what - you're smart? a poet? Doesn't mean you know jack shit about the real world. So maybe one day you're the hero and the next they're all over, looking, waiting for you to pass the cross hairs. When all you want to do is get the hell out, you can't.

In the bathtub sleeping or something like it. Whatever, whyever, none of your business. Because that's how they do it, in tubs full of water. I don't know why I have to fill the tub with water cept that's how they always do the movies. See the black dull chips, the dull white dirty finish. Now it's just me and nothing more. Like always if you stop to think about it. Slow drip like my first metronome, bleeding myself. Looking down the drain I feel the voices rush against the open wounds screaming, what I can't say. None of us speak that language. How long we've been here I don't know. Does it matter?

I only said it so it couldn't hurt me. So they couldn't use it against me. Everyone knows they are good and we, we are not, we are liars. I gave permission to die, I'm not afraid, none of us. I only did it so they couldn't do it to me. So they couldn't take any more. Nothing's left.

The barrel doesn't feel cold after you wrap your tongue round it. Not very cold in your mouth. It's just where we're living, it's the last that we're giving. Only a second to pull the trigger and then we won't need to do it again. You can just keep walking and no one will ever know. Even if you're not done I am.

Waiting for the noise to die down but the chanting grows louder louder and louder.
Everything
something
nothing matters.

sunday second not a mass

2010-05-02T17:23:00.004-05:00

I was going to go but I didn't.

The darkness is there waiting.
Not the fear of night type of darkness but an empty space.
Rapacious.
If I don't do something I won't find it.
I won't find anything this way.

I should be, I should do
I should never, I should not
but here i am and what I do is
i just am.

the answers are not volunteering
maybe its the questions are wrong.
Voyeurism, egotism, narcissism.

Feel that, then ask me if you care
It's not academic.
It's just confusing and lost.
Chances are it doesn't matter, I'm come too late for any of it.
Truth be told you're tired of it too
No one likes to be questioned for answers that matter
It's only the polite questions acceptable even if you say we're friends
But how could that be?
Here is nothing but distance and time and stories
you never asked for
but I told anyway
Wanting for close we create distance,
seeking connection we're flung further away
Telling the we never helped either
although the we cannot separate from an I not discrete.

2010-05-02T17:07:00.002-05:00

There it was
one big shadow in the door
with a drawl going on so listlessly
the clouds above shuffling through the heavens
feared even to make a sound

There were people buried in those crypts
smooth white marble
cool and soft
luminescent in the moonlight
some covered in slips of papers
written in prayer
but do any of them answer?

The cobbled streets slick with rain
steaming plops of horse shit
the spreading light of midday sun breaking through the storm
and there are only the same people now as ever before
unchanged

Inside
so much space
heart spaciousness to go on forever
but it has no use
peering through the dry dead bones
Is there no hard way to lose a soul?

There it is now
my sanity rearranged, sitting pretty,
shiney once the tarnish removed.

You never know what sort of people live in your house.
It was just a little story I meant to tell but
truth is the last thing anyone needs.
Better to be lost, even to banish yourself
like a sick old cat left out to die.

In the end all things are linear.

2010-05-02T16:44:00.002-05:00

Over there in the south lies the truth
Here, the light is here, in the east with the sun
Dreams, more real than truth, nowhere to be found.
They be hidden away real good.

Here in the playground
they dance, they play, they bully and fight
You watch, misremembered, til you get in the way
a little bird looking for a nest
grabbing on the rails of other realities.
That was not just a soldier knocking
this morning on your door.
We can't stay any more.

It's gonna be a while for we can go.
Go ahead, put your bones in the bag, all ready.
What shoulda been a ten-minute ride
keeps rolling, under the
wide blue sky ending not even at the horizon.
Somewhere in all this lies a child.
That's where he'll find his power.
But it's not love,
love will never be
Crying won't change it
It is what it is is all it is
nothing else.
It makes no difference
after all.

seven

2010-05-02T16:14:00.004-05:00

one hand proffered another swung
back poised
waiting for the fall of that minute next and
then after next, another
seconds, crumbs falling like rain.
Who would know the ten eternities
preceding the grave?
the birth of a soul
convicted before even one breath,
sins never imagined.
Hanged like a thief no mother would claim
we waited for another day, next,
certain one would come, followed by
another from faith without basis.
And without reason, without cause
it was sanctuary we betrayed, not ready to be sold,
ingratitude was a word learned well then, well earned even
Ah, but that was before we knew there were none
others to take us in
as though it matttered - we knew not of other
but still childish things and fairy tales we wanted
Oh we tried, really we did, for a time.
Bless me father, for I have sinned the words
recited with evil tongue unknown to me,
not knowing what even yet a sinner we could be.

They say, those men, that god made me in his image
so why not in his thoughts as well?
What's just one bad day.
June second is inevitable, it has to be.
I pray but for silence to hear but one
voice, to know only what I was meant for
and I pray for you, I think,
but is it really, whats prayer?
Then without doubt we were but just a girl
to whom hope came easily, faith not
or perhaps was the other way round
not belonging in
this mans world
but for to discharge a debt
I fail to understand.
And so fall the hands, the minutes, the crumbs of the day
passing one at a time, single file, heads bowed,
passing through the palace of god.
Would not the lord deliver some soul
before the cold stops my blood?
Not here, not this vessel, yet I wait
I wait, I wait til the waiting is done,
while blood runs cold,
living in compulsion of fear.

Ready for Disciplined Writing, to Learn how to Write

2010-05-01T20:42:00.003-05:00

i have notebooks and pages fulls of lines and snippets and ideas i write, esp as i work and review thousands of pages a day, on the most mundane topics, like the 3G and WiFI networks and the patents accompanying all that stuff, and pharmacology and exclusivity and first to file for generic exclusivity and the rapidly diminishing returns once the ftf exclusivity is over ... see? Nothing there to excite, to incite, to inspire, to aspire. But here comes something, I make a note. All I do is stare at my several screens a day, all work on the computer but personal computers are a security issue so at least i have an iphone and can check facebook, but there's a limit to any real writing. Friday I worked 4 hours (3.5 actually) and reviewed 878 documents, 100% accuracy. I want to write - I don't think I'm any good though R does or says so anyway and though he certainly is a very good guy, better than I deserve, he is also very honest (never in a mean way) and supportive to the max, but really i don't think he'd say he liked any of it if he didn't, nor go so far as to select a handful for a competition ... so maybe with practice i can write something more passable. I need a regimen, a discipline. Feedback, criticism would be nice - I tried to edit some stuff I'd posted earlier but the originals went somewhere leaving me with the revised, so not anything left to compare to look at edits. So I guess i'll give a try, to force myself to write. The starters I don;t know - perhaps all the stuff I start with at work -- might be very Kafkaesque. He too was a lawyer who hated his non-thinking job and wrote as an escape though there are in my little brain absolutely no illusions to have such a gift as he. It seems much of his response was molded by the circumstances of his father's shop, his school there on the main square, and both the great discrimination shown him as a Jew and the tedium of the bureaucracy he faced just trying to do as he was asked while at the same time there seemed to him to be some motivation that favored no one completing their tasks.
If anyone has a idea, a discipline, I'm certainly open.
I've nothing to offer in return but my friendship, for whatever it's worth as I know I can be aggravating, dense, obtuse and annoying ... yet always I am grateful and thankful, and I've even been known to say prayers (whether they are heard or not is a whole different matter)

trees

2010-05-01T19:10:00.001-05:00

trees
marks meaningful
as defined by those who know
what's best meant by this or the other
some more than others.
Not one a poet writing with fingers and with toes.
The fingers and the toes have their own insistence
and what are we to do?
Swpet away to wordlessness.
Washed the words we set them to dry on towels,
aside the pots and pans from last night's dinner
More people eat dinner than poems, it's true.

Poems feel a void, replete with
electro tech babbling backgrounds like streams of consciousness
with nothing heard,
ends loosened once and never tied to anyone or anything
we float along these shadows,
and the work is never done.

Went to the bayou to see the trees,
what they had to say to my silence
Reaching out above the sky,
scraping dark clouds and sunbeams with equal abandon
shading bayou waters, catching bodies and other debris
wrapping round the trunks muddy and dark
fashioning it to something useful
like a poem?
It's mystery we prefer to truth.

Watching waters of the bayou brown and fast
thinking what?
fancy pictures of trees on bottles
that sell the wine, drunk beyond care
subtle foil labels, stark tree
outlines, anorexic skeletons
black and white photos of lonely, shapely trees,
called art
trees of character
trees of lynchings, crucifixions
their limbs beat others limbs
still
no one questions, no one doubts
the trees character

sunday

2010-04-18T17:19:00.005-05:00

strong.
a still life
the bad place shuffles
what to write
of what spirits
these are the questions to which i've no answers.

i called it on myself i s'pose
nothing but impediment.
shaking hands we call it a day

the shrapnel of daily life
american steel
right between your eyes -- not yours, mine
and now we're going home
if they're to be believed.

that's only one way to simplify my soul
but the grace period ends tomorrow.

now whirring through the air, i see colors
in my head,
up above,
breathing in
confusion settles
at the bottom
now picking up the leaves - what else?

Sister Rosetta was right about the music up above my head
but there's trouble too

We weren't always in this Parisian flat,
in fact,
perhaps never
Never is a long time but not as long as the years passed by

so we cleaned up
or tried
on a rainy sunday, headed for church
but they wouldnt let us in
so we heaaded back homeward
thinking
no thoughts,
it's easier that way
comes naturally

walking along, without a sound
but for the doves, the sparrows, the jays, the mockingbirds
laughing,
rejoicing at the rightness of the day.

there is no one here out to see or hear
shredding of the souls
if there are many of us how many souls do we have?
maybe we should keep only a few
buthow to choose?

Still the trees shake as the herons land
sparrows tremble in their song as hawks hover above
waiting for currents to carry them in
just so

But words like these are only experimental
like the rest of us.
You may as well dance if you got 'em
cause there's no answers coming this way anytime soon.

empty s

2010-04-18T17:06:00.004-05:00

sleepy sediments stripped from memory
slow and muddy
sounds of winter rivers watching from
afield
listening to summers memories
everything mostly of simple explanation
once we quit

i almost think the picture is all i can see

but now here in the current i keep
eyes open
mouth open watching the floor remembering
not alone you are when others remember for you the moments
reflected there
wasting time so we don't have to walk through

but what to do when these words are wrong
they always are
never the way i wanted it to come out, always the wrong thing
mine own dishonesty i cannot seem to stop
perhaps for not taking the truth as is

left alone, with all the others
no words are meaningless nor do they have a meaning
without spoken echoes and eyes in concert
they are just bits and scraps lying around
not fashionable enough to be accepted into any real meaning

just words tossed out
like so many cats and dogs along the road
hard of breathing
unclaimed they die

yes it's hard to please you
but still i left the lights for you

no'ne ever said

2010-04-18T16:46:00.002-05:00

dimming periods of stability
losing the period anyway
who needs periods when we can't make a complete thought anyway?

who ever knew the man i was taught to call father, or dad?
was he ever completed or is he still hanging?
was ever he a young child,
a boy playing with sticks and scraped knees,
with little girlfriends poking paper valentines into tissue-covered
shoe boxes decorated for the day, sitting on the corner of the desk
in second grade?
did he play with sticks like other boys?

I decorated my shoe box with tissue paper,
set it on the desk
cause that's what they told us to do
but not to get valentines
not me
when i played with sticks it wasn't nice
and i don't know why
it wasn't them that were mean
i couldn't do different
i didn't mean to do it but it happened
i couldn't take it back

but i decorated the box
the colors were fun, taking me away from what scared me,
it was at least pretty, so i thought,
for a change
though the box was always empty

was his box empty too?
is that why he became who he was that i knew?
but there were more of him than i knew
and i saw a few
liked none, but others did
who was he that they knew?

how ever did he get to be?
he went from there to old man, bad heart
baggy jeans
next to last, they'll all be dead

does he ever think what's next?

not saying

2010-04-18T16:22:00.005-05:00

if you wanted
to you
could, but i
would
never ask.
who wants to think about it?

once i was thirteen,
not much to say before that
not much after.
from there to here,
from beginnning to there.
some survived some longer than some others.
sometimes a truth is known
only to those who can't
own it.
that's pathology.

living, dying, dead,
they overlap and swallow each other.
sometimes what they knew if they thought
they never did know.
who wants to think about it?

there were
some remembered some
more than some others
but i wasn't ready to dance.
still.
I won't dance tomorrow either.

only two there were in a funeral week.
less before the week, more the week after,
as if.
probably i thought of me
only a child,
not reason for anything.

in the cemetery
separate, parked in the far back,
unbaptized dead, in sin a contagion
plain stones lean drunk like sailors
on leave stumbling cross
a grassy plain

can't but wonder what's
underneath, nothing, after all is
rotted, gone
porcelain skin, coagulated pools,
rust stained eyes
like an old porcelian sink, chipped black iron holding fast
against drunks who vomit, girls washing blood from their face.

i think they did
think, that is, but no one ever did
ask
once the proper face is put on things
there are no more quesitons.
yes, i think that's it.
no one ever said they weren't smart.
who wants to think about it?

twelve

2010-04-17T22:16:00.005-05:00

if ever you remember anything i know will you tell me?
i believe doesn't make it real
there's no stopping thinking once thinking is started
truth can be imagined so can't imagination be truth sometimes?
at least that's what they said - not so nice but you get the idea

whatever the ideas i have no idea where they came from

sometimes i just couldn't help but fall asleep but now
i know i wasn't asleep just gone over there it seems
but all the time there i was.
did they know i was gone, watching from afar or not at all?
what did you think i was doing, hanging around, needing?

city

2010-04-17T21:57:00.002-05:00

soundtracks racing by as we watch lives,
the door always open but never going in
out in the dark the light from the door may as well be another poison
we are just a daughter of a father
there are no qualifications to be one you know.
neither one

a stale and moldy mass of limbs, call it humanity
and you misspoke,
we are not your equal

soggy with tears in the muddy moldy city on the river
swollen slowly, stench rising like a mirage in the desert, wavy
waiting for another heartache
we let our heart get tired of it all and went looking for Ra

does anyone want to tell us where we're going?

if the city lost its people and the people lost their souls
then what will happen to the muddy brown bayous?
out from the club sings the sax, people draw near
drowning out the birds now they want to hold it in

it can't all happen and be at the same time in the same place all the time

for now it's another late day downpour
leaving the church so we can follow Jesus
twirling once a lacy white umbrella in the second line
keeping step next to the little red wagon and its urn

here we are again back in the streets but not homeless
but we can't find a priest anywhere
I waited too long for asking -- you're already gone.

song

2010-04-17T21:17:00.003-05:00

i called, yes i did and then i hung up,
no i didn't want to talk but only for you to tell me what i
thought i wanted, needed to hear
nothing to do with you
the road to closure is over there
but we have no idea what we're trying to give up
since we were never there
it was the other one
that's all

and then i was a drummer
depressed for a month dents in the flesh
hammered and ironed, sunken scars
anchoring thoughts on the bottoms
where the muck keeps visibility none
and then i hit some more

we just grew up different
all of me and us and you and them
we don't even know who all they are who talk in the stillness of alone
still more chaos than you'd think

it was another concert in another town
driving all day with various activities along the way
of the concert i recall nothing
only sleeping on the side of the road
entombed in safety there alone
so far away
but i don't know where

i told them not to come
but they did anyways.

Did you know it was me?
Would you have talked to me if you knew?
What would you say after all this time, these many past years?
All I want is everything there is left I need to know
that's all.

lost cat

2010-03-13T01:54:00.003-06:00

what a lousy blogger -- not that there's a following, but it does sometimes for me something and knowing that it yet remains a low priority or so it seems. Ambivalence in practice, though often my mind composes and if I've a slop of paper I'll make note of same, thinking it will be a good start later if nothing else, yet this generally ends as nothing else. Whatever it is, sometimes I think I might like to be that person. Whoever that is.
Lately I've been puzzling that the less I have to do -- compulsory, mandatory, money-making, productive stuff -- the more I find myself doing, most of it fairly unproductive.
Unemployed -- apparently unemployable -- busyness
I am lazy? Yet I have so much running around ... I thought I'd have at least something to do, even if made up stuff, like art, writing, photos. I do little or none of these, at least not with any effect. Haven't touched a photo since christmas, have to figure out what program to use to work them. Work with my ladies doing jewelry as they prepare for a show at St Ambrose and have bought some stones with every real intent of making something, but there's a bag here, a bag there, another bag over there ...
I don't have a coherent writing schedule - actually there's not much coherent about me at all in terms of writing or any other form of self expression much less the more important or at least time-sensitive things like gardening, laundry, etc.
More than writing I long for communication though I fear most everything I have to say is shallow, superficial, irrelevant, childish and asinine. To go from being around adults all the time all over the place and hard pressed to find a quiet moment to unemployed talking to cats and dogs and little old ladies every once in a while, and this month there are all the drunks at the rodeo. One guy short some teeth sat there yapping and actually had a stream of drool go down his chin; just wiped it, yapped some more, drooled some more. In any event, not a lot of connectedness or communication.
I don't want any more plants to die. Mango, avocados, kaffir lime, grapefruit, peach, assorted oranges all dead. A few are green on the trunk but brown everywhere else, I guess they'll be dead in a few weeks but I hate to take them out when they're still alive.
I need a new kaffir lime tree, and lemon grass.
I need to do something but I'm afraid --- afraid I don't know what to do, how or why. I want so to get right with god, which I guess requires too I get right with me (is that self-centered or what?) and truly can't get a hold on what I need to do. There's nothing I really need to do that I can pinpoint but at the same time, I know there's tons of stuff needs doing. As in cleaning the house, top to bottom, every corner, which hasn't been done since Ike -- some here and some there, but not a specific top to bottom methodical cleaning. And paint -- I have an idea of some colors I'd like but it's gotten no furher than that. One would think that a person my age without a job could make a plan and execute it, to at least have a totally clean house. I get stuck though on the floors, several of which still have tar on them from the floor replacement after Ike, the only way to clean it is on hands and knees with mineral spirits and everytime I do it the skin comes off my knee and that's not a lot of fun. Still I oughta just do it.
In my head I know things chosen for me by others are not my responsibility ... huh?
Sometimes things get jumbled.
It's easier to migrate elsewhere.
The first option to do nothing and remain whre we are but that's not working so well right now.
Floundering, I guess that's what this is but why?
Aimlessly discomfiting.
Roses, hollyhocks, a handful of potatoes, beans, tomatoes, squash, cukes ready to go in the ground, once I get the grass and weeds cleaned out and the holes dug. Herbs placed but not in the ground. Sweet william. All kinds of seeds of flowers I love, probably they'd bloom this year if I can get them planted soon. Today is rodeo, and Wednesday, and maybe then I can pass over this plane of ambivalence and make a schedule, make myself follow it and just knock this stuff out. I need to and soon --not as badly as I need to find a job but still -- if ever I get another job I won't have all this time to not do stuff so perhaps I oughta kick into gear and just get it done. After all the flowers won't seed themselves.
And coneflowers - I think they all died.

The Pope's Call to the Net

2010-02-08T14:33:00.012-06:00

“Thanks to the new communications media, the Lord can walk the streets of our cities and, stopping before the threshold of our homes and our hearts, say once more:"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me" (Rev 3:20).”

I can think of all sorts of reasons to reject the proposal as phrased by the Pope, though I agree there may be room and reason to use the technology to supplement to other forms of communication. Again the quote: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me." (Rev 3:20). This is a call and a response, a question with an answer. The failure of electronic media as a major avenue of communication is precisely the loss of our breaking bread together - the tendency of so many to rely on this impersonal media without really engaging in communication. It is not a problem inherent with the media itself so much as it is the power of the media to lure us to laziness, to talk but never listen, to preach but allow for no questions.

“The problem with communication...is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” George Bernard Shaw.
If you post the most enlightening thing, what does that do? You have only said what you wanted to say but if no one reads, what does it matter? Do you talk to hear yourself talk? Some do, and it seems increasingly that the electronic media encourages this sort of "talking." But really do I or you or anyone else really need to know anything that can be tweeted in 140 characters or less? a message whose information can only be relayed by replacing syllables with numbers? Ok, so we're increasingly spread out and we're not going to visit over a beer or lunch, at a museum or poetry reading, or even at a movie. But perhaps you go and hear the poet and post about that experience. Why did you post? Was it to share your experience? Why would you want to share, to take the time to collect your thoughts, impressions, feelings and find the words to write even a sentence? Maybe you even found a link and included that in your post. What's the motivation? Did you share anything if no one read any of it? How about you post about different events, curiosities, revelations (real or imagined), books, movies, music and whatever else strikes you as worthy -- posting stuff and no one ever reads it, or if they do they never say a thing, and therefore you don't know if anyone read a thing you said. Lots of people I think are fine with this; there is an option on facebook where you can post what you want and preclude any comments or even "likes."

But what of communication?
“We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.” Marcel Proust. We all of us have suffering in need of healing, some viewed as relatively minor and other that is deeply rooted, recalcitrant, slower to heal perhaps in part to the discomforts (ours and theirs) of such expression.

“Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.” Pearl S. Buck. Perhaps (it seems to me) fulfillment of self-expression of the suffering necessary to heal is in fact the healing; the acknowledgment that we are not the only ones but are part of a community accepting us regardless of the wounds we hold and hide as we work our way toward expression and healing.

Communication to me has always signified some sort of back and forth, an exchange, a talking and a listening. I do get frustrated at the increasingly impersonal use of information exchange in lieu of communication. I want to be heard (read) as much as (or maybe more than) anyone (though I believe everyone has need to be heard and to listen). Communication is how we build community, how we know that we belong to a community. The danger of the "new" (or any) media is that it be employed in lieu of actual communication (or dialogue).

“Generally speaking, the first nonviolent act is not fasting, but dialogue. The other side, the adversary, is recognized as a person, he is taken out of his anonymity and exists in his own right, for what he really is, a person. To engage someone in dialogue is to recognize him, have faith in him." Hildegard Goos-Mayr.

I guess it all depends on the use made of a media, whether it is unilateral or actually a means, an invitation, to a dialogue. If the first, then it is a dangerous and flimsy substitute for anything meaningful or real and we are in fact alone -- without community. "The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.” Rachel Naomi Remen.

How does one know that he is heard if no one makes any reply? Can we live beyond and apart from all community? When the Pope speaks of Jesus coming to my door and we sit and share a meal, is that not a vision of community? “God's loving care for all people in Christ must be expressed in the digital world not simply as an artifact from the past, or a learned theory, but as something concrete, present and engaging. Our pastoral presence in that world must thus serve to show our contemporaries, especially the many people in our day who experience uncertainty and confusion, "that God is near; that in Christ we all belong to one another" (Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Curia, 21 December 2009). I read this as an acknowledgement that the purpose, the reason, for communication is the building, growing and strengthening of community. Yet in his address Pope Benedict speaks only of the talking, not of the listening that talking presumes nor how the building of community will be accomplished through use of social media like facebook and twitter.
“If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.” Mitsugi Saotome.

Other than the sharing of certain important information necessary for survival why do we communicate? Why so many means of communication if its sole purpose is to ensure physical survival? Once you have a piece of bread and cup of water you would have no need for any other human interaction, save perhaps for a mate but even that can be accomplished without community and without much in the way of communication. In fact there are still many societies where the mating is arranged and done with little or no dialogue as the girls are distributed to those males with the necessary qualifications -- namely a house, a goat or some other payment, referred to as a "dowry" in more "genteel" circles. In truth we do the same thing here in this civilized, advanced democracy we call America -- sometimes the men give the girls and sometimes the girls just trade themselves. So even this aspect of survival needs no real communication. Actually, I'd think the more communication, i.e., talking and being heard, acknowledging and recognizing the other, the less likely this way of pairing or being paired.

No, I think there must be something else underlying the human need to not only talk but to also be heard, acknowledged, recognized, touched and seen. This is not my idea -- I am not so smart. But I think Cicero had it when he said “We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race.” Nor is it just an old idea, it persists through time. “I am a part of all that I have met.” Alfred Tennyson.

Is not there a major part of all religious / spiritual life that stems from the yearning to be a part of, not apart from? Corny I know, and perhaps unattainable. Yet there is something in this expression that, were a poll taken, I'd guess a majority would identify with: “We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.” Starhawk.

Who doesn't want free? Even God recognized the need of men for free when free will was given so we could make a mess of things and then try to better the world and ourselves. There is no divorcing communication and community -- not linguistically or otherwise.

“We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other's arms
And the larger circle of lovers,
Whose hands are joined in a dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life,
Who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it
Except in fragments.”
Wendell Berry

No, I’m not much of a thinker. I’m poor with words, not too articulate over here. I write and yes I want read, I want dialogue, I want acknowledged and recognized as an I who is, who is being, who is here. But more, I want to know the answers to questions that have no answers other than as can perhaps be found a fragment at a time sifting through the back and forth of countless dialogues. I think each of us has a religious life, a spiritual being, and that this being, this life seeks just such a community where we are read, heard, talked to, answered, challenged and allowed to be even by those who know we know nothing of significance.

As Pope Benedict says, the media can bring us into contact with a great many people--believers and non-believers alike. But there are countless other means and ways of contact -- a slap across the face, a blow to the head, a rape, all can communicate anger. All these contacts send a message albeit without words, without any
"communication" as the word is commonly understood. The monk walking with his bowl one early hazy, humid morning in Bangkok, whose presence I feel, who averts his gaze - we had contact too though I was so afraid of being wrong that I made no offering -- we had contact and even communication, though briefly, through the eyes. The goal, the end, can't be mere "contact.” I realize this is somewhat hyperbolic but a narrow statement suggesting mere contact, any more than only talking (posting) is good for anything strikes me as similarly simple.
So go Pope go, and use that media, but don't forget to listen every once in a while or else no one will know that any one else is.

small

2010-02-06T19:18:00.003-06:00

bracelets and bangles
unnaturally colored hair poking
tufts this way, that
lip slashes crown
pursed above
splotchy wattles of age
falling to the abyss

black
leather chaps open
pale creamy buttocks
imagined
only but youth
unfazed as above
articulate and manicured
not from here
after all

mullet brained strong
as an ox brooding
wondering
this lot
what place never
enough rain too much sun
powerless unaware
unsettled
without knowing

neither
never saw such
no clue
still
scared
quiet
watching
wanting the same for different
reasons
to reclaim to run to own to save

pushed up
bosoms, low rise
baring jeans
tattoo grey twining
cross low
back
dimples
eyeing all around,
twirling
hapless

its the walk
the little ways
a hunch
they saw
they know
they want
and can't

stranger unknown

life
a small town
chairs lean back
the warped wooden planks
of the diner in the morning
all that holds together
here
the passing of time.

what is a conservative, and why does it matter?

2010-01-31T11:58:00.007-06:00

Politics -- always there's another who knows more, who knows best, who is right. Really? The Republicans now have a platform you have to adopt if you want any support from them. Kay Bailey Hutchison is running for governor of Texas and refuses to say she'd support overruling Roe v Wade. She tries to justify this by saying that there is 40 years of law already limiting the right to abortion and therefore there are already good things happening and so it is unnecessary for her to state her professed, or implied support, for limiting the Roe v Wade decision. So what? Is she a democrat in disguise because she will not toe the line marked out by the Republicans in an effort to define who is a Republican? I don't think anyone could seriously make that argument. Now this is not about abortion at all. It is about the need we all have, apparently, to label and tag and categorize people, put them in boxes and then base important decisions on otherwise meaningless words like Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, independent, tea party. The tea party folks around here are largely thought of as Republicans yet many of then disavow the party. Many proclaim that they are independents, apparently enamored of the word and its connotations while refusing to consider anything that is not put out by the Republican party.

I do not support abortion and I believe the act of abortion is the taking of a human life. This would qualify among most circles as a conservative position.

I support the right of all people to enter into sacred, committed relationships with dignity, grace and respect. This would qualify among many circles as a liberal position, and wholly antithetical to the first stated position but only it seems (in my small world) among those whose positions against abortion and against equal rights for all relationships are based on some perceived moral high ground (in my humble opinion). Colin Powell, a high-ranking member of George W's team (i.e., a Republican in "name") was I thought well-spoken and highly respected. When he was with Bush he supported the military's don't ask, don't tell policy. He strongly supported the policy and now, today, he supports Obama's plan to do away with don't ask, don't tell. Powell's explanation is that "times have changed" and that today's military can deal with open disclosure of sexual orientation. Really? In such short time the entire military, still largely run by the same historically white, judeo-Christian male hierarchy has just done a bout face and so now it's okay in their little world to be open about who you are? Really? Forgive the cynicism but I think not. No, I don't think that's it. I think that Colin Powell has perhaps examined the policy and its implications in a more honest, aware and open way than he'd done previously and now, no longer tied to the tether labelled "Republican," has come to see things as he would rather than as another branded with that "R" might see them.

So what is Colin Powell -- is he a Republican or a Democrat? conservative or liberal? or is he, like so many others, just a guy trying to make sense and make his way through the world as it exists around and despite him, willing to consider, try on and accept different views and beliefs, to espouse other values gained with experience and maturity?

I know few people who want to be called "Republican" or "Democrat" for the very demagoguery these labels invite. Even if forced to run as a Democrat or as a Republican, as one must do to become a judge in Texas -- which in fact has no separate law for the parties "D" and "R", and where one cannot even inquire about party affiliation or votes cast in any manner related to judicial proceedings -- the strict adherence to party labels leads only to cynicism as those who want to win generally run under the label of the party they think will have the biggest turnout in the general election. One critical remark as to what was conservative or liberal -- was it sarcasm? cavalier? merely short-sighted? -- suggested that the label "conservative" refers to one whose attitude might be described as "I got mine; you go take care of your own self" (to paraphrase). I have never had such thoughts -- are there things that I have wanted? Sure, and some things I have been given, some befell me, and some I had the opportunity to work for and earn. But that does not and never did preclude me from offering what I could to another who wants or needs.

What about the folks hanging out along the riverwalk or by the Alamo in San Antonio or sitting outside the courthouses or in the street here? When last I was in San Antonio a few months ago there happened to be a tea party rally right there at Alamo Plaza. And I was staying in a hotel locking right out over the Plaza. Oh, yeah, and there was a full moon rising over the far right (as I looked at it) side of the Alamo. So I took the camera and walked over to try to take some pictures and there's these guys (gender neutral) both on the riverwalk and even more up by the Alamo who are "begging" if that is an acceptable term. Yes, I ignored them, or at least I gave them nothing they wanted unless a smile, nod, hello is what any of them were looking for. But those things don;t usually set well in hands outreached. Back to the point, the tea party around here seems more conservative than liberal yet I saw quite a few give change and some bills to those whose hands were waiting. This sort of charity -- if that's what it were -- seems more aligned with what I'd consider a liberal view of things.

Do I feel badly when I pass by these folks? I do, and I wish I had something so all of everyone could have all that they need. Sure there are times I get cynical and just know that the disheveled person in the wheelchair sitting out in traffic is a fake and yes, I have seen some who have rolled over to the side, lifted themselves from their chairs and folded them up before putting them in the trunk of a car and driving off. And I guess it is not nice of me to make any judgment about anyone, but I'm human. The guys who hang out by the courthouse, who I see all the time, for them I take the time and give what I can. It is or somehow seems different somehow. You know what it is? It's like down there at the courthouse we all see each other all the time and even if we don;t know every one's names we are a sort of group. Those guys will jump up and help someone who's having trouble getting their dolly full of boxes up the sidewalk; they say hi; they smile whether you give or not. They're comfortable. they're one of "us" in a sense.

What does any of this mean? I have no clue. I think the labels we apply are more a way to exclude than to learn or to be inclusive. If you can label me a conservative then you can make generalizations which, once shared, I am quite inclined to find offensive and unfair, as such generalizations tend to paint one unfavorably -- selfish, self-centered, disinterested, aloof, rich, narrow minded. Yet I really have not a clue as to what generalizations might be made about "liberals" other than "not conservative." I suppose it is a failure of my ability to use language in a meaningful way to say anything you would understand but perhaps too it is our collective failure to use language, to think and express anything close or meaningful about who we are and where we stand, relying instead on the labels and the judgments that almost inevitably follow.

Why the insistence of being in a herd, our acquiescence to being herded, the need to differentiate on every possible basis we think makes this one better than that and us better than the other?
How the heck would I know?
And who even cares?
Why?

i did want an answer, a conversation

2010-01-15T15:19:00.013-06:00

i want to write, i need (whatever that means) to write, and the questions are not rhetorical. No. Perhaps they are unanswerable but they are real questions. I have no friends near with blogs, no one near who i know writes, and no one near who has any interest in any of these matters. Expression -- through words, art, whatever - is important for me to process, to place myself. How others place themselves in the world, in relationship to self and others, how they know or define what and why -- these are ideas not discussed.

why do we think we have anything to say anyway?

Some fancy themselves essayists, poets or other writers with something to say - and some seem to write for themselves. Some write and have a following, they're read, elicit comments, maybe set spark to others' thoughts/writing, etc.
But the we in this question are mine. As I sat through the last 6 days of work, reviewing literally thousands of documents a day, listening to my ipod and talking to myself (i suppose daydreaming is the more comfortable term) i wrote ... first in my head a snatch here and there, yet it lacked something and so out comes paper, pen and words. Had I been online perhaps the words would land here. Yet once i write the writing is done, for what it's worth, and there's nothing left. I have at times thought perhaps I would take those paper scraps and transfer here those words but then i think it would be pretentious. It would assume I have something to say and that anyone might want to read it. I decide it is better left on the scraps, buried in a notepad, eventually to make its way to the garbage.
I think I should protest, say that I don't think I have anything to say, but that would be disingenuous as even now I sit here writing ... perhaps saying nothing but writing nonetheless. Perhaps it is only that I wish I could write.

Do I want read? To be honest, yes. I'd like to think I have something to say that someone thinks is worth having been written, though I think the truth is more otherwise than not. I want to be read, I like comments, constructive preferably, but even just an acknowledgement is nice. Doesn't everyone wish for, dream of having, the talent to write at a level, about something, that others want to read? Maybe it's just me.

And what makes me think I have anything to say? Everyone has something to say - right? I guess the better question is why write unless someone reads it, be it me or you, and what so i have to write that wants to be read? Words are only that and have no meaning other than we assign, but if tomorrow i read something written earlier chances are as good as not that the meaning then assigned will escape me - whatever the reason i wrote yesterday is not the reason to read today. Yet at times the words written for some reason i do want to come back to later, but once written if they are not here they are in so many places, whatever piece of paper i had or even at times the phone, i cannot gather them again. So why not take those papers and sheets and repeat here what was writ there? Because when I have done that it feels false - that's the most I can explain. Perhaps I could be very honest about why I write but this is not dishonest either.

How other people write I don't know; me, it's like i close my eyes and do it, so to speak. I don't think or plan or organize, which is probably self evident in many cases. It is more an intuition than a purposeful act in terms of the source of writing, though of course there is the getting of paper and pen or figuring out how to log on here when i've accessed it via the wrong email account. While not a rock or tree or bird i do not often consider my expression before it disgorges on the page as the page may be). Were I to consider and especially to consider some more chances are there would be nothing committed to writing, yet i feel it important for me to commit to writing, which begs the question ... what makes me -- why do i -- think i have anything to say?

does it matter who we are in relation to others?

this question follows from the first - i want to be read, i look forward to comments and however rare, however terse or cryptic, i value comments as an acknowledgement that i am here, that i wrote something and that someone read it and no matter the merits or lack thereof, for even just a second and even if but a short electronic spit through the airs it is some sort of connection, however brief.

But who reads? I know only by comments who reads, and i value those comments not only for the acknowledgement but perhaps more for the connections they represent, real or imagined, and certainly more important to me than to others.

I would say I write from an honest secret space, accessible not so much at will as by disclosure, and a handful people of people know the identity of the writer, few of whom comment, this making it safe,comfortable, to write? What is the relationship that the writer -- any writer -- has with others that enables the writer to commit expressions to a medium that others can access? In this format I can write all I want, as poorly as I do, and never know the reader's true response. Yet i believe a comment left is a true response based on...what? Based on the relationship between me and the few people who know about this place. So what are theses relationships? I know many more people than I would ever tell about this place, and while strangers are welcome there are far fewer who know me than will know this. The absence of relationship with strangers makes it ok for them to come here though, so far as I know, none do. On the other hand it is exactly the fact that with others there is (or was?) relationship and it is the nature of the relationship that allows me to have told them of this place. I think I'm doing a really poor job of explaining ... but still there is the question.

Who are we in relation to others - I'm struggling with the concept but I know that here i can express things, such as trying poems, that are not safe to express elsewhere. Here there is room to be seen or heard in ways that i will not be seen or heard elsewhere, in part by choice but also because my relationship with most people is such that the one who comes here is not audible or visible to them, even though some i would characterize as good friends.

And are we anything other than what we are in relation to others? Usually we define ourselves, and others define us, in relation to jobs, roles and people. I am a wife, a mother, a lawyer. I am a past friend, a good friend, an acquaintance, a colleague. I am a facebook friend, which seems to be an entirely different and more shallow category than even acquaintance. I am unemployed, I volunteer, I mentor, I teach a bead class. I take pictures but I would not call myself a photographer. I make jewelry but would not call myself an artist. I write other than for work, for personal reasons, but would not call myself a poet or writer of any sort.

I just am but saying so is not something we do - we always add the adjectives and often adverbs as well.

If I don't know Jack in Syracuse I am no one to him. Nor he to me. But that doesn't make him less Jack doing whatever Jack does with whoever shares his life. Jack is, but he is no one in relation to me, is he? Were Jack to read this he would know nothing of or about me. He might have some opinions based on what he reads but that would be about Jack, not me.
I can die tomorrow and unless it is in some unusual or tragic event, Jack would never know. Were I to die by my own hand following some crazy rampage Jack might see or read a story and think what a nut, yet he would know nothing. Ditto for Jack. This is why obits, when published, are published only in the locale where the dead lived.

Then too there are some who know me now or have in the past known me and who help form the sense of who or what I am, what I'm about. Many were negative and some positive, but without all those experiences -- the relationship I had for better or worse with these people -- would I be today the same person?

Do I want an answer?
Doesn't everyone?
Do I think there is an answer?
No.
But what fell silent has once more come to, and the noise is rising.

vacant

2009-12-28T10:56:00.003-06:00

i was all ready to write, in the sense i thought or felt i was then capable of some sort of expression and then, like the water roaring under the ice, smoothing the boulders, it (whatever "it" is) was no more.
why do we think we have anything to say anyway?
does it matter who we are in relation to others?
are we anything other than what we are in relation to others?

out on the tundra

2009-12-22T18:58:00.004-06:00

the frozen voices of bodies
limbs frozen
waiting for the thaw
wondering what it is to write
what to write
writing of the spirits
orchestrating words
some fluid as a drippy faucet
wrapping round others taut as
my frozen vocal chords
i wish i could write like
someone else
like anyone else
like some particular people
i will not name
but are several
i wish
i could write the things
other people write
but then
it wouldn't be so good
since i woulda writ it
not them
and then
what would i wanna write
if what i read was as bad as
what i write
a scrap of a life
bankrupt of spirit
nameless
lunacy decaying in the night
strong.
a still life
shuffling through the bad places
dancing out the windows
with a pint to go.
what to write
of what spirits
these are the questions to which i've no answers
it seems
but perhaps the point
is
there are none
a vision or poetry
seen from afar
means nothing more than not

floating away

2009-12-22T17:34:00.002-06:00

no matter what things eventually roll around, so here it is again that time of year. Seems more insidious this year - perhaps that Thanksgiving was so late, that Meg was away and only came home last week - but all of a sudden it is the week that comes with that most magical day, Christmas Day. Suddenly, for reasons I don't understand, there are job postings and even some interviews scattered around. Do I think I will be hired? Not in the least. For the most part resumes and applications aren't even acknowledged. The weather has matched for the most part my usual melancholic ambivalence - 9 days of rains and fog, with the sun out for 2 glorious days and now another 2 sullen soggy days, the skies lowering into the smelly dirty old town. I have a list for Meg and have done nothing at all. Tomorrow. I was going to go today but had an interview that included tests. Either I am really stupid or there are folks making up tests for incomprehensible reasons. There were actually 8 questions requiring me to complete the sentence with either capitol or capital, and another 8 or so dealing with proper use of there, their and they're. I'd hope to have passed the grammar portion but I don't think the whole thing went very well. Whatever. I guess when they are asked "what do you know about "x" and I answered that I didn't really know much in the way of specifics but had a good grasp of the field in general it was probably about time for me to leave then. But I did have a perfectly good job, good enough, and I chose to leave, and other than being flat broke I don't really regret it.
It is hard to get used to not having a set job, just trying to pick up whatever I can find that anyone will hire me for. I have pretty much had a paycheck since I was in 6th grade and this lack of independence, lack of control (i know it wasn't really control but it wasn't whatever this is) is hard getting used to. I buy $10 of gas rather than a tank bc now i understand that having that extra $20 for the next 7-10 days is better than having a full tank of gas that I won't need or use in that time frame.
Most unnerving, and really I don't think it procrastination, is I have no idea what I want to do. Not true really -- I know and have all sorts of ideas about what I'd like to do but none are realistic. Drummer in a rock-n-roll band, maybe a wailer too; cook in a restaurant; paint, write, create; garden. No one pays for any of that, not at my very low to non-existent skill levels in these areas. Heck, I can't even decide if or what colors to paint the house and god knows it could use some paint and a lot of other little stuff requiring more by way of labor than money in order to finish covering up the flood damage. Isn't that ridiculous -- I do know some of the colors I'd like but I have no motivation to go pick it out much less put a brush to it. Ironically, I think the fact that I have no job actually makes it harder to get off my butt and do things like that. I run around all the time doing nothing, accomplishing nothing but in the end having no time it seems to actually do anything. I guess I need to set a project and just do it. I was going to make myself write more but look where I got with that - now twice in a month I have put a bunch of crap here. I have a $50 i-tunes card I haven't used in over a month -- even music isn't motivating or energizing. All that music and nothing to move me. More proactive, more structure is probably in order. A book to read, a journal to write so as to get my head out of this giant mess of congealed oatmeal that sucks out all the thought and feeling, leaving an empty cast for wandering. No, I don't feel depressed, not usually although sometimes frustration is close at hand. How weird to be this old and married and a parent and supposedly educated and half smart and have not a clue about anything, to feel totally unmoored and floating far and away, no idea even what direction the wind is blowing.
Get to it, she said.
And then?
Well I guess there's some merit to this writing bc now I'm ready i think to write but the animals think it's more properly time for them to be fed. So I will go and be caring for a few moments and then ...

holiday when

2009-12-01T20:34:00.001-06:00

who shows at the door i cannot help
but lay on the table as necessary
once introduced
the snow shook to the boards below

the feast of epiphany
is better the day for giving of gifts
with wise men and at least one good woman
passable at least

they have to grant her that

but first we must take to the ledge
as three mortal eyes undertake to dress themselves
in the parish proper
now we are in for a night of it

though it seems only yesterday
rag dolls on the front steps
but now the girls all gone
have come undone

the day that they say
it is of no moment
we leave our things on the kitchen table
and go running the halls
listening to music tormented

for just this one night imagine
any are anxious about the children
as the other s lumbers on
unconcerned, happy for one
that is
that makes
no trouble at all

we all have galoshes now
one for each foot
trotting home in the snowy mud
certain in our drunkenness no harm will come
worse than had we stayed
only more than too welcome

sometimes better a stranger to be
than so lov-ed as you thought of we.

another day and three cents more

2009-12-01T20:22:00.002-06:00

the weather outside is awful ... cold and raining for the third day/night in a row. Listened to Obama tonight.
Listening to the mayoral debate now.
Not sure which is worse.
Perhaps it will snow on Friday which might be nice though I suppose it would finally put an end to okra and eggplant, and the tomatoes and peppers. Worse, or better, if it snows no one can go to work or anywhere else, this being houston and we shutting down the city whenever there is anything resembling frozen precip. Which could be nice except my contract that's supposed to last through Dec 23 got stopped today, and no telling if or when the work might start again. Guess I need to work my other files and go rustle up a few more.
I am actually so tired I have nothing to say. After getting home early this evening I sat in the car in the driveway scribbling away, couldn't wait even long enough to come in the door I so had the urge to write. So all my scribbles languish for the night in a little notebook. Perhaps like wine they will ferment and get better, ripe with time.
Saw some great photos driving home in the dark rain but not a camera. Probably best under the circumstances but maybe it will rain all day tomorrow and I can go out before the old folks' lunch and bead class, or after.

not is heard here but then

2009-11-26T20:09:00.003-06:00

A truth matter
of tinny sounds
how easy to lose
songs they come
through the air,
then go
passing by one
another me.
Sometimes to infinity and not,
not to return
others stay for a while.
I have in Texas
hear some old friends
loitering
with your ghost heart.
That one there is
pretty nice
the words ...
I don't know
the music the final
frontiers, nothing transcends.
Even moving five states away
just one listen blows us
back this way.
Music so clear it sees
right through everything
I do.

got it

2009-11-26T19:34:00.003-06:00

I think perhaps for sanity I just need to make myself do this, whether what I write is any good, whether it makes any sense, whether anyone reads it or comments -- after all how do you know something was read if it was done in silence?
Today Thanksgiving, the start of the holiday season. I think R was serious this morning when he said that since Thanksgiving was so late this year we could go get a tree. Now? Are you serious? That's the last thing I want, the last thing I think we need. M leaves on Sunday and won't return til maybe a week or so before Christmas and that I think is soon enough for a tree.
Fortunately it appears that trees are not on M's radar.
I like the idea of a tree though not necessarily a "Christmas" tree; they are green and they smell nice. In fact I have really always hated fake trees though we did -- for 1 year - have a fake tree bc it was on sale as a large pre-lit tree for about $40 the day after Thanksgiving several years ago. With 12 foot ceilings and a kid who wanted a big tree to fit the space we were having to shop and look hard to find a tree big enough for her that was also affordable. In that light, a $40 tree was about the same as we'd been paying for 12-ft trees plus it was already lit. M wasn't esp happy with it and neither was I. A fake tree is not a tree, period.
I guess most kids want a big tree and all that -- I suppose my view of all this stuff is neither the usual nor the best. But we have always made do and somehow muddle through. R likes Christmas well enough and M has always loved it and there is no doubt in my mind we will go buy a tree at some point this year, hopefully not for another several weeks. The fake tree flooded in Ike anyway and is long gone so that's not an option anyway.
But the day went ok right up until it was time to eat. Eating was the last thing I wanted to do but if I didn't eat it would be an issue for R and M and making another problem to deal with was not anything I was up for either. I like to cook and I made everything M wanted and everything R likes, and managed to keep the dishes more right-sized, and then it was time to eat and I was done. It just hit me like a boulder ... and I don't exactly know what it was. Certainly I never saw it coming. I guess it's a combination of stuff ... having left a job where I loved the work ad the people but hated the hours, at 80 every week it was killing me, now I have a brain numbing contract I was happy to get for the pay (on the low end of low but more than nothing) and I hate it. I have to work 37 hrs/wk and they want 45, but to fit this in there's not much time for much else. Which seems like it should be fine bc I don't do anything anyway when I'm not working -- other than running around being very busy to try to find work but nothing accomplished, nothing of consequence -- but Tuesday I worked til 9 p and that is later than ever I left the office when I had a real job. Contract work you can't take or do at home so it makes the hours in a way longer if that's possible.
Where this started is that maybe if I make myself write on a more regular basis it will make things some easier, or some things easier ... now I have to get off my butt and quit being so damn lazy and write.
Why not write if I like it?
Probably I could come up with all kinds of answers I shouldn't write, shouldn't take the time or space, whatever, but I won't.
So maybe it's just the upset in schedule, the much greater difficulty of finding work than ever I expected when I quit my job, the diciness of no idea if or when I might get work... and then Christmas. It's been so many years since there's been any reason to not like Christmas, so there's no reason for me to have any issue with the season. I know that, I'm not stupid; then again, I know that and still it gets to me so I guess I'm not so smart either.
My routine boring sluggish lard-filled life today, no different probably than most others.

bewildered

2009-11-11T16:53:00.002-06:00

All politics suck, at least if you're not a politician. And I obviooulsy am not a politician, just a person who thinks she can do a better job and is willing to take it on, but the price of admission to just apply is politics.
Especially in terms of writingand such, I had gotten used to being able to come here and write, even though no one ever read it. Now I'm afraid someone will somehow find it and link it so I'm not sure the wisdom of continuing to blog here. Even if no one read it, there as a place to write and in fairness, an odd comment here and there. It's just kind of solitary to have no place to write freely, no one to share with even if the person(s) with whom anything was shared were purely imaginary ... the point -- in part -- is that I did put it there and t cold be read and commented on was anyone so inclined.
So am I willing to continue this path? It may be that the real shot for me at a campaign is 2012, which we can start in June 2011. I don't know; Randy and friends are nothing but supportive but being isolated in a strait jacket -- unable to write and communicate freely -- I just don't know.
There's something about the fact of putting it out there for whoever stumbles upon it (which i know is close to 0 folks) that's different than keeping notebooks tucked away. An act of faith if you will, in a sense...

collecting signatures

2009-11-07T18:12:00.002-06:00

so a friend of a friend is helping me campaign. I hate politics and politicing -- it's not my thing. However it is the only way to be elected as as Texas insists on electing its judges in partisian races, ... we have a lot of totally unqualified folks parading as judges and it is a nasty political process.

Q: How can you be a judge if you never even tried a case?
A: Move to Texas and be a better politician than ever you were a lawyer

SO if it's so bad why bother? Because it's so bad.
That being said I went to a tea party thing today and actually it was pretty nice. There was a huge one last Monday that I didn't go to, and this seems to have been by all counts a lot tamer. It was more like a July 4th event than a pack event and I did get some signatures (only 900 to go) ...

What if I had gone and it was totally extreme and angry? I don't know, I probably would have left.
I'm not sure what the breakdown is for states that appoint and states that elect, or which states have partisian races for judges and which don't but this really is not a very good system. Not that appointment is necessarily a good thing either - the guy who lost the seat I'm running for was appointed and he is by all counts a perfectly nice and decent guy, Eagle scout, etc. but he was never a trial lawyer. Maybe that's why he lost last year. I guess he would disagree since he is my primary opponent, and he has about $20,000 already ...
I guess it's just politics -- he lost last time so they (including the republican party) give him thousands of dollars to run again against the same guy he lost to last time? Too bad I'm not a white guy with a lot of money who works in a big firm that has a lot of money ...

politics sucks, esp the democrats

2009-11-01T11:38:00.003-06:00

in one of the most populous states/counties/cities we do things in a feudal fashion. State-wide and City elections are non-partisian, but everyone knows the party affiliation of everyone else. Judicial elections are partisian. Elected city officials are elected for the purpose of shaping policy, enacting laws, steering the community one way or another so theoretically party bona fides are relevant (at least as the current political system is understood). Judges specifically do not ever shape policy and never enact any law. The job of a judge is to apply the law fairly to everyone, making the courtroom a level playing field regardless of party affiliation, race, sexual orientation, gender, income, etc. Yet we must run as either a democrat or as a republican and while i am neither, i thought i was willing to pick one for the purpose of running. I am much closer to 50 than not and guess i should have known after being in the field for 20 years yet still i was taken aback by the stated reasoning of the democratic leaders that i should run against a more experienced lawyer who actually has tried cases and not run against a younger inexperienced lawyer -- who has never tried a case in her life - for the simple reason that the democrats think there should be as many black females on the ballot as possible. So the experienced lawyer is an older whote male and the one who never tried a single case is a young black girl ...
Why run? because it's the only way to get the job. And why would I want that job? Decent pay, good benefits ... and oh yeah, because I'd be really good at it.
How is this little girl expected to rule in trial when she herself has never even tried a case? How can she make the rulings that need to be made when she has never even made an objection in trial? More than that, why do the democrats think it should matter my race when no one disputes that this other girl is not qualified in the least?
I gave them a check and I will stop payment. Maybe I'm not a republican but i sure as hell am not going to support or be a part of that group of bigots who call themselves democrats.

then

2009-10-11T14:46:00.002-05:00

just wait til i
can find my shoes
i'll go home
then down
to the river
at least where
you can
push us
in hold
our head
under water
with all
its voices
in cold
syrupy
silence streaming
past consciousness
or then
again
we could
go
sell
balloons right
off the street
maybe
if we were
twenty
years younger
we might know
better what to do

hold our own
head under water
until
they come
we will
still one
that put
us in this box
we chose to stay
with ruined faces
maybe we oughta talk
one of these days
again

Thumper

2009-10-11T14:37:00.002-05:00

You have to be pretty fast to get anything to eat in my house, unless you're a cat

He also loves split pea soup, hummus, peas, corn, all meats and animal products, tortillas, dog food (wet and kibble), ice cream, yogurt, peanut butter, honey, gingersnaps, ramen soup, thai and vietnamese food, granola, cheerios, squash, potatoes, fresh peas ...

wormed

2009-10-07T18:18:00.004-05:00

a long dark think
from nowhere to home
lights gone racing cross the skies
when i was them
i was a little dumber
now it's more and some complicated
hidden away in sueded leather
disguised
sos
crossing the skies
my skies and yours
firing up to elaborate
words yet spoiling
spilling
from that lopsided mouth
dabbed in pink
the better to make you think
it is something other
more
than is

jowls
are hanging out
as the squid slides through
the day before once
everything worked
for
against
all that you were
wanting
to be

and finally the bag men
arrive from italy
it may be a different day
yet still it is
the same old story
and tomorrow it will be the same
going on and on
disagreeing over some detail
that no one will remember
later tonight
even if a death ensues
especially yours

but we are not in prague anymore
and so we must do just the best we can
with your friend franz
twenty one hours to go
and still to be done
the work of a lifetime
only so much as time can bear
will be borne
harnessed in
shoes too small
and all the rest

i understand nothing

dump-ed one

2009-10-04T13:11:00.027-05:00

that genesis is to genius
black as to clay
gangrene to hand,
hell, to brains and life and intellect, morals and all of it
everything that makes you better than me
yet there it is,
for no reason,
wholly without
the little dog stands
with his tail docked short

nails long clacking along the wood scarred floor
he's a chesty little bastard
bowleggedly tough
his stance
like any other banty rooster with
razors on his skinny scaly legs

makes it all seem kinds normal, don't it

out the window we can see
everything

it is twenty hours to go
but we know we can't finish
nor diminish
creating so many problems
so fast
the patterns swirling
clothes muddled in a heap
molding soggy on the floor
this flood will never leave
you may as well paint the first coat
rather than dress for some explicit therapy

now at ten in the snow is eleven hours to go
there is no word here to assure any of us
the bhodavistas have gone to the country
blocks to be burned
gloves to be filled
the proper way to play with scissors
is neatly at your desk
better to cut your own gangrenous sin
than the neighbor boy
that's what grandma always said
sides, mess with him and the nuns are gonna get you
their metal-edged rulers cut deeper
sharper than any scissors I ever had

they know the sins that swallow us whole
but if they're so special and holy and blessed
how in the world could they ever know
the flesh-devouring, life rotting gangrene of my soul?
any excuse to beat a defiant liar
god helps those who save themselves
and the nuns to help us

but not this one
this one it is not finished
before we get dressed
is one and a half hours
no matter what
one must avoid all dramas

now the floor is empty
butt scars blacken the long leaf pine
the day before in the rain
we never made
here they are on the rack
in the midst
of backwards prestige
the sage rolled his eyes
and lit another
looking at the mess
just another to cut and remove
dead branches nightmares gangrenous hands
take em all out
in the twenty three minutes left
those skinny waifs, their big doe eyes
shut closed, tight with duct tape sealed
just one last time
as even the beautiful
decay

all i wanted was just your blessing
instead
if not
then to the beach
with no more fear of silence
and only seven more to drown

what do they do with em once they chop em off
i wonder?

whatnot, not what

2009-10-03T21:28:00.003-05:00

I keep thinking ...
I need to write
and I do write, but not write here
and does it matter?
Only if
because I said I was going to
for whatever reason
might jump out at me
later

tomorrow then

nothing can be started
less someone,
something
starts

One for Wendell Berry

2009-09-17T18:20:00.002-05:00

Wendell Berry, the Luddites and the Amish might all get a kick from this ... maybe there's a reason IT are the first and last letter letters in IdioT.
And the birds shall inherit the earth.

the Poetry of Michael Franti

2009-09-16T16:08:00.004-05:00

I do think this is to some extent an advert as the video as I watched had a link to click to iTunes to buy a song and for that I apologize. I cold not find thi content without the advert but I the link does go away as you watch and it's not an obtrusive ad. Nothing obnoxious.

I still wish he'd been healthy and able to appear in concert on August 1. I've got nothing against Counting Crows or Augustana -- it was a really good show. Anyone who can pull it off starting a Houston concert over an hour late when we're all on hot concrete, no tents, shade or fans -- and have everyone stay to finish off a concert when it's still in 95 degrees, bats flying around (some of those folks youda thought someone's trying to feed em to a kimodo dragon) -- by rallying the vote and civic responsibility when there are no upcoming elections, passing out voter registration cards, and then playing "This Land is Your Land" AND getting most everyone to sing along (it was sad how many people knew none of the words, probably never even heard the song) -- I have to say it was a really good concert but I was really looking forward to Frant.

Maybe he's playing Voodoo Fest in NOLA but the Meg who's now at Tulane has a decidedly different idea about us going to concerts together. She used to like going together. Our first concert was Linkin Park with Incubus, Hoobastank and someone else; we're standing in line for t-shirts and the girls in front of us, older than Meg but young enough I could be their mom said, and I quote, "You have the coolest mom ever." They were not entirely sober but it didn't keep me from reminding Meg how "cool" I was. But now I think any "coolness" i may have had has worn off and I'm just the old lady who writes checks, deposits them in her account, whose name is on the credit card she has "for emergencies" -- you'd be surprised what passes for an emergency these days -- and who therefore pays the credit card. So anyway she's growing up and good for her - so far so good -- and seems to have no interest in going to any concerts with me. It's not like she can't drink or do pretty much whatever else she wants -- after her junior yr of HS in Poland complete with tattoos, facial piercings, other piercings, smoking, drinking and other extracurriculars she had to scrub all mentions of from her FB -- I don't know what it is she thinks she can't do if we went together to a concert. Nor do I want to go to a concert by myself, or alone. R says he'd go and he would, god love em, because it's something I want to do. But he'd be miserable, the heat would be hard on him, physically it'd be a challenge so ... I think the reality is simply that M, despite me, managed to grow up and raise herself and is becoming her own person. That's all I wanted -- for her to thrive and be her own person, independent, pasionate, curious, smart, skeptical and questioning, self aware, a world citizen, to feel and to know she's loved and to never settle. Boy did I screw up, immeasurably and continually.
Should M ever find this I need not expand any further but there's a lot of guilt and shame for a lot of things, things I've never told and can't gauge other than to feel worse. It's not like I have any role models -- only two of my friends have kids this age or older,, one has a 2-year old and the rest have none. It's not the kind of stuff R likes to talk about and he is such a great dad ... no doubt he saved M from me but I just didn't know how to parent. My "need" to compare my parenting to others, to ask how to fix or limit damage from my actions and those of other to whom she was exposed, for a sounding board, doesn't justify even the small (I hope it's small) chance she finds and reads this. Still despite my shortcomings and failures as a parent and a lot -- way too much -- adversity she had to face, M is one really phenomenal kid.
I guess I get it that she no longer wants to go to a concer with me. It's ok to go to concerts together -- even all 3 of us -- in August but two months later, in October, a concert together is out of the question. I guess I should really just be glad that she's more and more becoming her own person, not that she was ever anything other than her own person. It's not like she ever really needed me either so it's not about feeling unneeded now.
So anyway I'll look some more for a Franti concert I can make, visiting youtube and cranking up the iPod in the meantime.
And I realize none of this has anything to do with anything except that I found the video while looking for concert info ... Voodoo Fest coincides with Halloween and Tulane gives the kids off that Friday so they can go to the concerts and not miss class so if ...
but I guess that ship has sailed so ...
oh well.

progress of destruction

2009-09-16T12:36:00.010-05:00

Today is the last day of life at the old Alabama Theater, 1 of only 2 art deco theaters left in this squshed up, mangled, stinky oily swampy city of arid concrete and glass. It -- the Alabama -- is not currently the known target of a wrecking crew but it's only a matter of time since this entire place is just waiting for the next demo crew to come along.

The Alabama has not been used as a theater for a long time but was instead converted to a giant Bookstop. It was quite the store when it opened, way back when there was no Barnes & Noble hunkered down every few miles, their hulking boxes hammered onto the corners as though to keep the block from flying away. Like something out of a Harry Potter movie.

There wasn't any Amazon when the Alabama was turned into Bookstop and I'd never heard of Bookstop either. There weren't all these giant chains running -- growing? --consumerism yet. If you had money for books (usually I didn't) you went to Brazos Bookstore. Brazos was the way a bookstore "should" be -- it still is, right there in the same place selling the same sort of selection to the same sort of people ... maybe older, but it's hard to say if they're older cause I seem to have gotten just as old.
Brazos was for a serious book buyer who wanted just such a book, and they had (and still have) poetry readings and authors and such ... but I haven't been in a very long time.
The other place to go was Half Price Books which actually did use to sell books at "half" or some doable price, but that was a long time ago and now it's expensive like everything else ... there are still some quiet surprises every once in a while ... and it has what I think any decent bookstore needs in the smells, the feel of old loved books -- even books that were hated, despised and owned only because someone demanded and forced a purchase -- they're still books after all -- and no one cares if you sit on the floor for hours just leafing through whatever catches your eye ...
But books like everything have become expensive and I think I have a gene that makes it impossible for me to buy only one single book at a time so trips to bookstores must be curbed...especially when you quit a perfectly good job for no good reason and have no more income it is not wise to use your plastic make believe money.
Brazos is small, maybe 2000 sqaure feet? just a wild guess but it's small, parking is hard, too much traffic, takes too long to get there from here -- allow at least an hour for about 15 miles -- buying books should be an experience, yes, but a fun one so for all these reasons I just don't go to Brazos anymore. Not even when they have an author - traffic and people are even more and worse. It's become a trendy bookstore and I'd bet more than half the people there at any gven time are there to be seen in some "right place" pretending to soemthing they aren't.
In fairness I guess we all of us pretend to something we're not, maybe to many things we're not ... pretending too we're not what we know we are and hoping like heck no one finds out ... that's some other topic. But probably this sort of thing is a reason or one of many for lots of the writing people do that that turns into the books people buy but books are something else,, not the bookstore, or the theater cum bookstore cum rubble heap.

So anyway, when the Alabama was shuttered it was a bad thing, one of many such bad things that happen in this large pretended smart city we call home, where anything over 50 years is ancient.

We're like China this way. Chinese cities are always full of cranes. They call the crane the national bird of China and the official bird of Beijing, Shanghai, Xian and other cities. The bird has much importance in Chinese culture. For your wedding you get 100 cranes embroidered on silk for longetivity, love and all that -- we bought one at the Wall at Badaling and it's beautiful, the tapestry and the story, or it would be if it wasn't stuck on a closet shelf waiting for a mat, a frame, a wall for hanging ... so the bird the crane is very important to the more important things in life and the crane the piece of equipment is very important to the modernity of China as they build identical look-alike apartment towers stretching higher than the clouds, knowing even as they go up that these buildings will be obsolete in 20 years and then torn down to build bigger and more, though maybe not better. If you lived in one of those towers in Shanghai especially you should never come home drunk since all the buildings do look exactly the same, all bunched together.

Here as in China the prevailing mentality is to tear it down unless it's shiny new. The only operating art deco theater is the River Oaks. It is (or was) part of a planned (or at least it seemed kind of organized, as though there had been some plan at some point) of similar art deco buildings. Across the street from the River Oaks was a strip center -- matching art deco -- that was fully occupied by companies doing good business in an afflueunt part of town. So first they let them take half the (limited) parking to put a Starbucks because you can never have enough Starbucks, and it was too big for the space, plunked in the mniddle of what should have been and used to be parking for the strip, and what with the drive through and all, the Starbucks pretty much ran everyone else out of business since no one could park. Plus it was ugly - a squat, white irregularly shaped rectangualr sort of structure all ahrd lines and newness, with none of the grace or shapeliness of anything approximating art deco. Nothing decorative at all.
There was much opposition to all of this but money doesn't listen and so the Weingartens left standing the butt ugly Starbucks being so modern and necessary, and ripped out the entire beautiful strip of white stucco, back tile, curving fronts, shiny metal accents ... but they didn't take out the theater across the street just yet.

So there are two art deco theaters, the River Oaks Theater still shows films and the Alabama is still a standing building but it is no longer of use to anyone who matters in these things and if nothing happens it won't be there for long.
The first movie I saw at the Alabama was on some school field trip - I don't know what grade or how old I was or even the movie except it was a Mark Twain story, maybe Huckleberry Finn. I remember riding in a hot big yellow bus with black plastic sticky seats with all the jerks I had to go to school with. I wasn't much liked in school so being cooped up in that bus with girls mean as only girls can be -- especially cute and pupular girls, which was everyone else -- and nasty grade school boys was no fun. It was also the first bus I ever rode that I remember -- not the actual trip to the Alabama Theater but just the being in the bus.
The last movie I saw at the Alabama was the Rocky Horror Picture Show ... nad it was also the next to last, the second to last, the third to last ad so on. They had Rocky Horror at midnight every weekend it seemed, maybe it was just once a month but it was regular, fun and cheap. Some dressed the parts (never I) and this impromptu cast acted out the whole movie up on stage; the Alabama had an actual stage and curtains and they actually raised and opened all the curtains, one by one, at the start of every show. So they acted and did their thing on stage with the movie going on while the rest of there sat and did whatever it was we did. There was at least as much smoking in that movie as any concert I'd ever been to and people carried in beer and other things that made it a good thing no one was checking bags like they do now.

I couldn't say how often I went to Rocky Horror and I'm not even sure I could coherently tell you the whole story of the movie but I think I seem to remember that it was fun... it musta been fun cause we kept going over and over.
Now they show Rocky Horror about once a month at the River Oaks but I haven't been. Meg's 18th birthday last year was to be at the River Oaks to see Rocky but we had a hurricane instead, a week before her birthday, no one could get there, the theater wasn't open, and that was that. No Rocky Horror.
And maybe I'm too old ... Meg thinks so anyway and she's probably right. For sure it wouldn't be the same, not even nearly so.
We can be quiet or we can kick and scream but in the end, no one cares and none of this matters -- does it? -- and probably within a year there will be only one art deco theater building left here and I will probably never see Rocky Horror again.
Irony of irony ... they are putting the Bookstop over in the River Oaks strip they built after they tore down a string of art deco buildings that were fully occupied wiht long term tenants ...

work not

2009-09-16T10:22:00.002-05:00

Top Stories
this "not working" is hard stuff ... i don't get anything done.

not that i'm not working -- i am doing some work. i say i am unemployed and R says i am self employed.
there's no money in it

all the things i thought i'd do are undone, not even started.
i do finally have my own room/office/space but it is such a clutter with boxes and stuff piled and pushed every which way.

seems like first i ought to get my space ready, workable, so i can use it.
but it's time to plant the garden, late even, for a lot of stuff.
but i don't have any shit and the dirst really needs some good poop.
but my car won't carry as many bags as i think i need.
meg's car has more room but is full of stuff that needs to be taken places and dropped off
but i just haven't done any of it.

i ordered the seeds and they came in the mail.
that's all.

no writing, no beading, no photography, no gardening and no money either.

apathy and facebook

2009-08-29T18:16:00.003-05:00

Top Stories

Instead of talking, today we are cleaning or something like it -- I may actually have something resembling my own space by the end of the day, for the first time in a long time, for art, photos, work, writing, maybe even music ... but not a word is spoken.

related
or so it seems to me...
I'm done with facebook. A short association to be be sure but not a good thing. A superficial and very shallow excuse for communication - I don't see it a a means to conect or to communicate. Only twitter could possibly be more destructive of human relationship - the aura, the pretense of connection, of communication, when there is little or nothing there. It is like we pretend we communicated but we never did and when that realization arrives, what a fool I feel ... duped by my own stupidity.
If what I have to saw can be said in 140 characters it probably doesn't need said. If the scope of my communications with another are limited to that little rectangles marked comment, which seem available for everyone to read, i prefer to not rather than pretend communicate.

Not that anything will change by my decision to reject facebook - there was nothing really there anyway and while there may be no one reading this there's also no one pretending they did and pretending to "talk" or communicate by virtue of a few inoffensive, shallow and generally inane comments.

What does it [facebook] really have to do with me? with you? with anyone?

For my daughter I understand it - she's at Tulane keeping up with friends all over the country and the world, but they also skype and email. It's like the message board for her and her roommates outside the door, so they can get and leave messages when they're out. If the entire communicaiton was only what's posted on their little board there's not much being said or shared, is there?

It is the failure to connect and to communicate -- honestly or at all -- that is creating an increasingly intolerant, strident and violent world, so why do we as a society relish and encourage this emptiness?

it doesn't have to be so hard

2009-08-24T16:08:00.004-05:00

really

there's nothing
we're not
all of us
trying to do

name one

so
why
make it so hard
so tedious
for everyone

it
doesn't
have to be
so hard

does it?

what's so
very
important
you
have to
have it
you
have to
do it
you
have to
be it
you
have to
own it

control us
dominate us
alienate us
every
one

to a stranger
you will pay
but not
your blood

sitting there in the corner
alone
by your self

was it worth it?

or it might be ...

2009-08-16T14:09:00.000-05:00

"Poetry is concerned with using with abusing,
with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding
with adoring with replacing the noun."
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America

poetry is...

2009-08-16T13:24:00.002-05:00

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."
T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and Individual Talent"

2009-08-15T19:07:00.003-05:00

in this life
in this mode
indisposed
intellectual
ineffectual
tainted skies
skies painted
shades of grays
in this space
in disgrace
mighty well
might as well
mighty swill
might is will

rain music

2009-08-13T20:00:00.004-05:00

The singly measured
notes
deliberate and slow
a poetry unspoken
waning morns
a flame
snuffed out.

And comes the crescendo
another day
once again we left
much more than before
unknowing.

Notes grow to chords
measured still
deep with resonance
the cadence of repetition
three deep chords.

The whiffle of a pony breath
soft
warm
slightly damp in the hand
and the warm smell of shit
giving life.

This time it really was
the end of the world.
The rebellion so quiet, now reaching
the dark secret coves, the
lichen covered boulders
crouching

Survivors are few
the ones we acknowledged.
Our eyes closed against the day.
We are disowned, from you it was expected
but ourselves, so insignificant it was too small a surprise

Who brought you here?
How did you find us?
What do you want from us?
Nothing, I know, you want nothing,
this is voyeurism.
There's nothing here for you.
You should never have come here.
You have nothing to say - you stand there dumb, waiting.
There is no message -- just keep your eyes down.
No one wants to see.

In the whole world
there is nothing beautiful left.
Sinking into silence
we have nothing to say
but you are right,
we never did have anything to say
We shoulda shut up a long time ago
as in we never should have said anything to begin with.

What's wrong with you?
Sooner or later
and it may as well be now
you realize no one has anything to say.
Not me, not you.
Talk I wish for, but we both know it's not there.

This time I will read it to you,
a promise to never come back here.

Do not move
and no one will see
Do not speak
and no one will hear
Stay as you are, far away
Keep your distance and no one can reach us

We are free
alone.

There's no end to it
from this moment to forever
but here at least
for now, free
at last, for the time,
whatever that means.

A sort of peace for yesterday
just before the lilies died their blooms went to white
Beguiling.

Why should I tell you anything?
Why now?
you have nothing to say
but are a pointed avoidance.

It is a voice I will never forget.
The reasons are forgotten,
but
there is
nothing else.

We stay as we are.
There is no end to it.

village

2009-08-13T19:29:00.003-05:00

Teeming with water
mist against boulder, swirling
resolute
steaming

It's a strange chase.
Laughing children far away
skin to water, those eyes
mirrored perfectly
onyx on porcelain
wet on cold.

There's nothing else to tell
but for the old man peering
with nothing good in his heart.

Gardens full of lilies
a white glow
cool
in the summer heat
some say lilies for death
others appear inevitably
after the rains
rising up in pink
five slender petals sway,
nodding assent to their short life

Time passes
absent some new life
if only that love
could be so easy
just once
needing no words, no flesh
to survive even the deepest of snows
hoping to peek only once more
at another life beyond

The most perfect
cannot be other than nothing
it simply is
or not

Not much is.
You should know that
Of course you do.
Maybe for you prending is fun
Us we find it necessary.

Like the Russian steppe travelled in caravan
so many pilgrims lost
so much busyness
a leery familiarity
a netherworld strangeness
knowing
somewhere in space
we've been here too.

I know you say
impossible
It never happened
never was.
You don't believe us
It's not the first time.

Prayer wheels, toothless smiles
of women
always the women
the rest are disappeared
but where?

The men they ran
grabbed their entitlement
all a girl is good for
they took her and ran
innocents snatched
they ran trampling the garden
smashing lilies underfoot
unable to stand any beauty
anathema to their distortions
Pigtails shorn, bonnets smashed
all thrown in the fire
burning the remnants
whatever's left.

And then they run.

Flat brown rivers, frozen steppes
this time is different,
not as a stranger but one of them
not any better
but with manhood proven.

They stole his innocence
He has only just returned the favor.

And then they run.

give it up

2009-08-09T20:43:00.002-05:00

I thought it was a good thing to quit my job -- it seemed like the right thing for the right reasons at the time and now... now I'm not so sure.
I intended to start finishing up the Ike repairs ... I have done not one damn thing.
I cleaned the oven and the stove, but didn't even wash the vent hood or scrub the counters, much less trim the plants and herbs in the kitchen window.
I haven't even made a list of what I need to do.
I started cleaning the garage last week, since the garage clean is the first thing so we can put in shelves and storage ... but too hot, too lazy and I didn't get it done.
I'm barely working and I have no energy.
I think if I could make a list and tackle rooms one by one that is the only way to make progress ... but not a list in sight ... I don't know where to start.
Limited contract hours means limited money so it's not like we can just go and hire someone ... but I can't put one step in front of the other.
I think I really screwed up, I had a job with security, benefits, steady paycheck, some flexibility ... and the most important thing, fixing the house, is already fallen by the wayside.
I am too lazy, too undisciplined, to be self employed.
But its too late to do anything about it ...
If this is the way it's gonna be I may as well just run as fast as I can and try to get a real job, at a greatly reduced salary no doubt cause no one wants to hire women and especially not women my age...
Boy did I blow it and in this environment, with so many young perky pretty female lawyers I think there's no going back.
Time to buy a lottery ticket ... that's as likely as getting a decent job, especially since I do know only one thing -- I do not want to try any cases.

know how

2009-08-08T17:53:00.002-05:00

We can't always do what's in our brain

Galaxies spin.
complete annihilation
sucks at our sleeves.

Come sleep
not talking, not feeling
not moving, no control
unaware
and there's nothing no one can do about it
forever

We must all know how to have a failure
How to be

Forever with the devil
sitting on my chest,
whatever the space is supposed to carry our heart
I used to think our soul was there
but nothing could be bigger.
Never.

Dead?
May as well, sooner or later
maybe we can enjoy it more now
before we get too old
but that we wake
though only on waking
do we suspect
we may not be
after all.

Sleep the smallest of fears
stranger is the night
like passing
out
only
to wake in Idaho.

----

This is a crowded conversation
the voices of madness only by default
moving on of its own numbing mindlessness
to a past just as real as tomorrow.

... but willie, john and bob were excellent

2009-08-05T18:42:00.007-05:00

So last week we went to see bob dylan, opened by willie nelson with john mellencamp sandwiched in between.
it's been a long hot week, dry but for buckets of sweat ... at the concert all the guys on stage were dropping buckets, they looked like watering cans.

Willie Nelson I saw before at HOB ... but he was a lot better this time. He seemed more comfortable, more at home in the outdoor setting that is Cynthia Woods Mitchell. He sure seemed to enjoy himself a lot more. Willie is long past his prime and I wasn't necessarily that keen to see him again but it was a good show, much better than at HOB. He has a lot of energy for an old guy ... he just started out and ran through (not all) his hits (there are too many) but he played pretty much non-stop for over an hour. I think he may not be around all that long so I'm glad to have seen him put on a good show...

Next up, John Mellencamp. I wouldn't pay to see him, but he was on the ticket so ... passable and I guess it was a good show if you like Mellencamp. He seems to have had a come-to-Jesus moment and his newer stuff is a little more bluesy than his older songs, but I still wouldn't pay to see just him.

Then, on time and as scheduled, at 9:10 pm, comes Bob Dylan. You might think this is a strange grouping anyway -- Mellencamp, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan -- apparently they put a tour together based on their experience doing Farm Aid together ... M said what is farm aid? after researching on her trusty i-phone what the relationship was between the three. But leave it to M to leave no question unanswered, or at least to leave no answer not searched for. I didn't realize how long ago all that was, or how old I am compared to what I used to be.
So here comes Bob Dylan.
First thought ... he's bigger than I thought...
followed quickly by
what big feet
and then
he's really not that big but he has a long waist ...
and his voice is about shot if compared to most of the Dylan you might hear on the radio, leaning not unfavorably more toward Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen ... I thought Waits and M thinks Cohen, who she really likes a lot.
So here's Bob and what he calls his "all stars;" all-male band all in white jackets, black hats but for Bob, he's in all black and a planter Jim hat. Too electric if you ask me, which no one did ... but judging by the mass exodus as Dylan played there were an awful lot of people less than overjoyed by the result. Like a stomped anthill, lines and lines of people in constant motion toward the exits ... and since CW is an outdoor venue with the stage at the bottom of a hill the effect was much exaggerated as we're sitting near the stage and could see the entire "hill" from where we sat.
I don't know why I noticed his boots but for such a small guy his feet are really big, or at least hsi boots were ... shiny black pointy toed boots. Looked like cowboy boots, maybe the pointy toes made them look longer, and the shininess didn't detract from the perception that his boots seem dispropotionately long for the rest of him. No one cares about his boots or his feet for that matter, I'm sure, and I know I don't care, and I realize it's a weird thing to notice about anyone, but ...
The music ... all M wanted to hear was "Like a Rolling Stone" but she figured after 40 years and innumerable requests he'd never play the song but he did ... although M didn't recognize it 'til I told her that's what he's playing. And she didn't recognize Watchtower either, or understand most of the lyrics (they were all pretty mush-mouthed mumblings) but she really did like the show ... the "accompaniment" as she says.
I - not being a music critic, knowing nothing about it - was a little disappointed. I didn't expect him to sound like "classic" Dylan but I also didn't expect someone who seemed to be just going through the motions, overpowered by his band. Still overalll the show was pretty good. My personal preference would be he lose the big electric band and play himself, something more than a wail of the harmonica here and there and a coupla riffs on the keyboard. It was mostly a wall of noise by the white-clad band and some mumblings, almost impossile to discern over the amps. How about playing the guitar, strip down the band, turn down the volume so we can hear the music and the lyrics rather than be accosted by it? Those few lyrices you could hear were promising, and he did play for more than an hour, pretty much non-stop, but he didn't seem to have any fun. No interaction, not that you'd expect a lot. At the end he introduced the band, they're standing there in a line, and it looked like Dylan was going -- was really trying -- to say something but couldn't quite get it out.
Would I go to see him agaain? Sure. But if this was the only Dylan I'd ever heard, or even the most Dylan I'd heard, I don't think I would. I wonder why he's doing concerts if he's having as much fun as he seemed to.
For a guy who was introduced as "the voice of the 60s" and whose status as a protestor was touted the whole thing was kind of incongruous and, in retropsect, the whole thing was kind of sad ... like he had to do a show 'cause he sure didn't seem to enjoy being there.
But what do I know?

michael franti's rotten appendix sucks

2009-08-02T16:14:00.004-05:00

What a disappointment ...
Michael Franti's appendix burst and he went to hospital for surgery
That's all good
but ...
it sucks.
Last night went to a concert at the race track, really just to see him,
but he wasn't back
I never went to a concert at the race track
hadn't been to watch the horses in a long time either.
Still smells the same, honest
The other bands counting crows, augustana
Not that they didn't put on a good show,
play a long time
they were very engaged as was the crowd
But halfway through
no michael franti cause his appendix ruptured and he just got out of hospital
and he thought he'd be for last night's date
but not ...
I would have gone to CC if M asked, she likes them
but my interest was seeing Franti and Spearhead
Tomorrow in Austin, then to Grand Prairie,
NOLA on August 9
Austin City Limits this fall with a slew of others
but M will be at Tulane and it's not the same to a concert alone ...
So it really sucked ...
but at least it was cheap, I guess
and it's not like the concert was bad
it's just that the only reason
i went
was Franti
so
I guess
I'll have to go to some other show
some other time
who knows where?

And there was a bat swooping through
and some big old fireflies
so that was pretty neat.

But I sure wished Franti had played
cause I don't really know
when
I'll have
another chance.

a gift of watermelon pickles

2009-08-02T16:13:00.002-05:00

Never have i sat down and read a book of poetry through and through, except for perhaps when I was very young .... I somehow got a book ... "A Gift of Watermelon Pickles" that I loved ... my grandmother made watermelon pickles and the book was read and re-read, and at least once it was from cover to cover ... and yes, I know how to make watermelon pickles ...

I had a really good friend Perk who ran the neighborhood ice house, was 84 when he died, buried on Good Friday. Looked just like him in the casket 'cept I never knew him to wear a suit when he was alive. Sometimes i'd skip work and we'd go to a ball game - he couldn't drive that far. Or maybe he just wouldn't, all of 5 miles from home and he wouldn't do it ... curious since his former life before the ice house he was a truck driver.
And he never drank either but there he was at the ice house, serving morning beers and evicting anyone struck his fancy ...

Perk never stepped foot when they built the new ball park, fka enron field, now minute maid park ... he loved the astrodome and if they weren't playing ball there he wasn't going to go.
Period.
And he never did.

But I digress, yes...

This was a real honest to good ice house. My best friend's grandfather started it and sold hunks of ice a hundred plus years ago. He died and his son took over but in the meantime came refrigeration and so the place went from a place selling only ice to a place selling ice and beer ... really cold beer ... from 7 in the morn til midnight or 2, depending on the day and how busy. Used to be they had a lot of shift workers come in at 7 for beer, and that was the only shift Perk worked was 7 to about noon, so if you wanted to see Perk the morning is when you stopped. So me and Perk and sometimes the owner would have coffee and the paper and bananas every morning, with watermelon in the summer. Not any melon, had to be a hempstead melon, which is the kind we grew up eating and could buy 3 big ones for $5 back then. But now they were harder to find and if Perk couldn't get one Perk didn't eat watermelon.
Period.

Somebody brought him a mess of melons one day ... they looked and smelled and sounded okay to me, and they tasted just fine, but after one bite Perk wouldn't eat another one. It wasn't a hemsptead melon, and that was that.
I don't know what he did with them, there must have been about 8-10 of them, but I know for sure he ate nothing more after the first bite

Perk was kind of the granddad I didn't really have.
He shined my shoes at least every week, whether they needed it or not, whether they were ropers or pumps. I never in my life shined a shoe, but i know to use a dab of vaseline or chapstick or somesuch to cover up if necessary ...
but that's neither here nor there.

Perk would eat 3-4 melons a week in the summer if he could get the right kind ... whoever was passing through hempstead knew to bring back as many as they could. They all went into to walk in, same as the beer, and if a beer at 34 is great on a hot summer's day melon at 34 is better than most anything.
Cause this was a real gulf coast ice house ... garage doors up and a fan or two in the summer, with the sun beating down on the old shiplap building ... the smell of the place unique, not nasty like a bar but ice and old wood and the city and the heat on the concrete and smoke and whatever might be cooking, usually barbecue...

But we'd have watermelon, Perk cutting it with one of the biggest pocketknives I'd seen, and sharp too, in the hot workday mornings ... he'd cut it, stab it, pass it over to me ... dripping jiuce on the paper we're trying to read... and then he'd save me the rinds, cutting out all the red but leaving the skin for me to take off. He'd save them in the walk-in for me all week and then on a saturday or maybe a sunday i'd make 20-30 pints of watermelon pickles. If it weren't for Perk there'd be no rinds, and no pickles, cause it's hard to eat enough watermelon to get enough rinds to make it worth the work ... you wouldn't do all that work with just one or two rinds, it wold take the whole day and not much to show for it.
I never knew anyone that could eat as much watermelon as Perk.

I have not made any pickles in a long time, nor preserves nor canning of any sort. It's one thing that I can actually do well.
And no watermelon pickles since ... not for a long time.

where it comes from

2009-08-01T15:45:00.015-05:00

What "real" poets do i read ... whatever happens to be available. Most of my books are still in boxes, having not yet gotten round to replacing bookcases and such that were flooded in Ike and had to be taken out. The sheet rock is all replaced but not painted and until that happens, probably no bookcases and therefore no books ... too many boxes to dig through and no idea what is where. I did pick up a book of Robert Penn Warren the other day at the resale shop ... it's all they had. M wanted to read Auden so I gave her Bukowski instead. She's had it for a good week now, likes it. Usually she says Emily Dickinson is her favorite ... she's ok, Dickinson that is.

Zbigniew Herbert. Czeslaw Milosz. Ginsberg.
Plath, Poe and Paz.
Haiku.
Milton, Dante and Blake.

Kafka. I wonder if I could write like Kafka if I rented the same little blue house he rented in Prague with his sister, a respite from his work as an insurance company lawyer?

Shakespeare's sonnets - to read the plays is not so great, but seeing them in theater is great; I survived college Shakespeare by seeing all the plays in England at Stratford on Avon and the Barbican. But the sonnets - those i like.

Perhaps a better question - who or what is not a part of the milieu that prompts me to write...
I can and do read some of anything that passes my way, some i discard and some i hold for a particular time -- that explains so many boxes. Kerouac's "on the road" in the original scroll form, much better than the book all chopped in chapters. As a scroll it reads as though you are on the road, blowing and going and racing and smoking, the sex and the drinking and the trips down south to the bayous and to mexico ... that's a trip.
William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways."
Road trips.
Snatches of this and that, a smell, a feel, the way the light hits something seen a thousand times or never before, like a sun through a thuderstorm not yet arrived
"Leaves of Grass" at different times, maybe just a piece here or there.

Never have I sat down and read a book of poetry through and through, except for perhaps when I was very young I had a collection "A Gift of Watermelon Pickles" that I loved ... my grandmother made watermelon pickles and the book was read and re-read, at least once from cover to cover ... and yes, I know how to make watermelon pickles and i have to say they're among the best I've ever had.
But that's another topic.

I saved and bought that book and kept it for the longest time but god knows where it went to. It was freedom in that book. It was what I thought I wanted and knew I didn't, would never, have.

I don't know that I remember the first time I wrote anything ... mostly I don't remember very much at all ... but I do remember the first time someone read someting I wrote and it was ... it was terrifying.
I don't know the words of what I wrote and i don't know how it is that anyone came to read it but I'd rather it never happened ... except in the sense that who I am now depends on all the things that came before I guess it was a necesary thing, but I'd still rather -- if I'm being honest -- that it had never been written or read.
I don't know.

I was small and probably young too -- though young is not helpful in pinpointing events, I hardly ever know how old I was, but only small is what I remember. I had been canoing or on the water or I was thinking about it anyway because I remember on the water was the setting ... not the setting, but anyway what I wrote was about that, being out on the water. My mother got it, i don't know where ... i recall it was written on lined paper. Where her anger, her rage, the violence came from I don't know. I would have thought my brother went snooping and stole it to show her cause that's the kind of thing he might have done ... he taught me all the nastiest cuss words and beat me til I said them, calling him names and then when dad came home he'd tell on me and then it would repeat, only this time it's dad beating me until I repeated the words that i wouldn't have even known 'cept brother taught me them ... but I guess he was just surviving the best he could. Only one could get beat at a time.
But my brother had nothing to do with this ... I don't think.

My mother got it, the paper and for whatever reason she was as mad as I'd ever seen her. She asked him about it, the poem and where did I get it and whatever else she was screaming I don't recall ... but I think I remember my brother telling her to leave me alone and it was mine and I wrote it and the rest I don't remember, how it ended. I just recall the feeling, wishing I was dead and never wrote anything, not knowing what I did wrong.

Why would anyone be mad and hitting and screaming over something a dumb kid wrote that had nothing to do with them or with anyone or anything, for that matter? I never did figure it out. I never knew what it was she wanted me to say or what I did that was so bad.

Do I know where that one came from?
Do I know what made me want to write anything, much less that?
No I don't.
Did I keep on writing? I don't know ... probably not for a long time, as I found other ways, more acceptable, to keep shut up. When there is nothing felt there is nothing writ.
But then, after a time, I began again, still just as shut up as before, still as numbed as I could be, because even when I couldn't think and as hard as I tried to not feel it didn't always work, probably ... just because.
Writing has never been anything that i much make a conscious decision to do, it just happens.
But I still try to be careful what I call it, who sees it, and I might would disown it in a heartbeat if it would save me from having to justify whatever it is.

not serious

2009-07-31T15:34:00.003-05:00

it was not
serious
only but a joke
one of no particular meanness
but of them we have insufficient familiarity
to be taken less than
seriously

it was not always so
our mistaken perception

at first glance
might a fool
feel flattery afoot?
yes
or an idit

not serious like
cancer
but
like it matters
when after all
there's no reason to matter

those for whom such things matter
would never ask
such a question of us
no, that is not
the way it is

this is not
one of those lives
to which such questions are directed
we are not
such people, of any such importance
to whose answers any would listen

that's just not the way it is

synesthesia

2009-07-30T20:33:00.004-05:00

being one who write more than work memos and to-do lists the process is as i imagine it might be for a synesthete ... or perhaps an autistic person. All this stuff comes in and what do we do with it? How can we process the information, the feelings, the reactions to it all? How do we deal without enlisting more craziness than we already have?

I do not plan to write -- do you? Is it a conscious effort for some, most or virtually all people? Were it a conscious effort I guess I could say, ok, now it's time to write and then write on command so to speak ... flip the switch and there shall be light. WB apparently can do that ... I came across am autographed copy of the timbered choir and really i bought it because it was signed and not because any of it spoke to me really.

My best writing really is in the car ... hurtling down the freeway at 60-75 mph and the words, the thoughts -- i can't really call them thoughts as they are more intuitions or senses coming from seeming nowhere ... driving is a great place to let the brain out to do as it well, that's why I love road trips.

I keep notebooks in the car and when they're full or i can't find one there are scraps of paper here and there, all over, anything to write on will do the job. Sometimes a lot comes to me, cascading over me from i don't know where or why, and then if i can i'll pull over to write for longer and maybe its disjointed, diarrhea of the brain and the pen.
Sometimes its not, it's more coherent.

I don't edit any of it.
Mostly I keep the notebooks though several have hit the recycle bin.
That's a lie -- we don't have a recycle bin and the City won't give us one so it's just mashed in with the regular nasty household crap ... potatoes that rotted, kitty litter, dog poop from the old one's living room accident, snot-filled tissues...

Its a process, an experience.
I have never taken anything from those notebooks and paper scraps and moved them elsewhere.
Ironically the more writing the less I have to show for it here ... it doesn't seem right to take something from there and dress it up, make it prettier, pretend it's something more than it is (rapid scribbles) and pretend i wrote it ... these things write themselves.

Do you think it's all a bunch of hooey? Maybe so. Certainly i'm no purist and i hardly have the right to even come across as though i have airs but the real and simple truth is that I just don;t know where it comes from, the things I write. They are somewhere inside and while I might have an idea or two about that, those ideas will almost certainly confirm as totally nuts the one writing.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be viewed as totally nuts if at least I could write worth a darn.
Speaking of which until i get a grasp of what the next inquiry ... where yr sense of what poetry is/must be/should be comes from ..." i imagine i will continue floundering.

Help me out here -- do you just want to know if I'm nuts? If voices whisper they want me to express for them since they have no voice? is it a trick question? How cna I know what poetry is if I've never had the slightest clue? If you say it is then it is - that's as far as I've gotte with that over several years of wondering.

hmmm...

2009-07-30T15:11:00.012-05:00

"about poetry & yr poetry ... i'm curious what "real poets" you read ... yr influences ... where yr sense of what poetry is/must be/should be comes from ... whose (if any) stuff makes you want to write yr own."

my initial reaction is that this would be a short private conversation.

no -- it was what? why? what sort of questions are these? not a belligerent asking but a what in the world? who cares and what does it matter?

And then, that it would be a short private conversation and that i had wanted to know the same sorts of things of the asker for some time, as i view the asker as much more a writer and poet (whatever that is) than am i ... and have often wished that i knew where the asker finds or gets or senses whatever it is that leads to those writings, wishing that i could write like that ...

And these questions have been there, coming to mind at the most unusual times though perhaps anytime one is thinking about things like this -- so irrelevant in the scheme of things, so ethereal, so self centered as to seem almost absurd -- perhaps any time one of them came to mind it would strike me as unusual.

And then i thought ... maybe this is an exercise for me to figure out what it is, after all ... i often wonder at why i feel a need to write and have never come up with any satisfactory answer, not any answer at all. That you or he or another writes without some impulse to do so ... can it be?

There is some reason but i don't know what it is. I have gone through long periods of much writing. Perhaps it spills out in the form it does because correct grammar and sentence structure is not so important; perhaps because as much as I would like to think I could write I know or suspect that I really can't; that novel lurking in the background is beyond my meager skill set ...

It is not like eating or drinking or feeding the cats or watering the garden ... there is no necessity, there is no untoward consequence to follow ... or is there? I've too had similar periods where painting or collages or music was the means of expression, and then nothing, silent dark blandness descends and there is nothing to do but ... nothing.

So i will take this as an exercise and while having no illusions as to my abilities and lacks, perhaps thinking in a more organized way about the whys and the hows will lead to some understanding.
But why does it matter if I or you or anyone else understands?
It doesn't, but then one need not have dogs and cats and gardens and cameras and paints as any matter of necessity either and still we do.

Perhaps if I was a poet I could answer these questions ... maybe if I can answer them i will become a poet or even a writer.

someone thinks i can sometimes write something yhat qualifies as poetry - i put the five he selected over here for anyone who wants to look.

wordless

2009-07-28T01:49:00.003-05:00

somtimes they get in the way
sometimes i haven't any
when i feel a need
when i haven't any
i can't

what does it mean
thinking i need
to write?
a need to communicate ...
if so
with who
when none read
the words that appear?

are we just talking to ourselves again
pretending it's not really
talking to ourselves
because it's written?

even though
these words are written
we still talk back
in our heads

first day no job

2009-07-28T01:31:00.003-05:00

no job
but to work anyway
nine fifteen -- where are you? I'm leaving at 10;30 so get over here
this is contract work
this is a contract job i said i'd do for a friend i've known my whole life
who used to be friends with my folks
but when i was in really bad shape and he asked what's wrong
like he really wanted to know
cause he really seemed to care
and i told him and he listened and he didn't treat me as less
but offered any help i wanted
and then never spoke to them again...
it's the way he is
he needs help
he asked
it's not so bad
jeans and t-shirts so long as i keep a throw down suit for in case
it looks like the work schedule is til 1-2
monday thru thursday, never on friday or weekends
so i guess i can work pretty steadily
and that's just the way he is

i found the 5 poems that R picked
that he thought were the better
to enter in a local poetry fest
you had to use your real name
he thought i wanted him to pick so if no one liked em it was because he picked the wrong ones
really it's not that
i told him
its that i wouldn't pick any
he says
pick the ones that mean something to you
but do any of them?
when a real poet writes a real poem does it have meaning for him
or is it just that moment in time, passing by, imprinted on the page
having passed through whatever filter we happened to be using then?

I have the five in draft on the other blog
but i want to do something else
five in a row seems kind of dense and boring and numbing
it's not like it's new
only recycled - going from here to there

maybe tomorrow i can finish the post
over there
in my so far so secret
place.

ambivalence

2009-07-22T11:29:00.006-05:00

I haven't done much here -- ok, nothing at all -- for a while. R says I should be excited about the opportunities presented by leaving this job (at which I am currently goofing off rather). I am not NOT excited but R seems to be more excited than I. I got my first "real" job in 6th grade cleaning the school I went to and have worked more or less ever since. I never quit a job without knowing exactly what was next. I have a friend who guaranteed me a min of 20 hours a week contract - I thought the minimum was to ensure I got "$x" a week but he seems to think it means I will work at least "x" hours. Friday I leave here, with mixed feelings -- actually without much feeling at all -- and Monday he wants me there at 9:30. Maybe I picked the wrong thing. My boss announced I was leaving to become a "housewife" as I do not have an actual job to go to; R says I am not unemployed but I am becoming self employed, and the truth of the matter is -- if it could work financially and it wasn't unfair to R I would just stay home and do nothing but work to finish the house repairs and to read, write, photograph, garden, paint, contemplate... it's just not realistic with M off to Tulane in a month... probably it never will be realistic either.
I wanted time ... to watch stupid movies (aren't they all stupid, really?), to clean out and make a space for me at the house, to drive around (that seems to be how I write anymore), to write, to do photos, to read. But instead I am going to work at 9:30 on Monday. If I am expected to show up every day I may have to reconsider but this is a good friend after all -- so I can't just dump him in the grease either.
I wanted to put the house back in some order, to quit living out of boxes, to paint the new sheetrock, to do the finish work on the new floors, to get some bookcases put in since we had to rip out the built-in storage which was flooded and to get to the wood floors underneath that were ruined by Ike. I wanted to unpack the multitude of boxes ... I actually bought books Monday at a resale shop -- some of which I have copies of -- because mine are in one or more of the many boxes stacked in neat piles throughout the house. My reading choices otherwise are some James Alison ("On Being Liked" is proving very dense or I am too dense for this one), one WB ("The Memory of Old Jack"), a book on Islam, and an assortment of magazines and papers I haven't caught up with. M wanted a book of poetry the other day -- a real book, not a download from Gutenberg -- but no such luck. They don't seem to carry a lot of poetry in stores selling used books.
I have been writing a lot but in the car - not a smart or safe practice but for some time driving has been the easiest way to write, it just comes. I keep a notebook for those occasions but it is full and so I resort to the backs of old maps and scraps of paper. And I haven't really decided how I feel about moving things from those scraps or notebooks to here -- it is spontaneous as written but if I move it, it's just copying, not writing -- it doesn't feel the same as writing (it's not, after all, it is copying). So there is nothing to put here bc I am mired in ambivalence and having not written anything other than while driving for the longest time ... the default position is to do nothing.
Doing nothing accomplishes nothing, it helps me figure out exactly nothing, and it's a lazy way for a scared person to go about things, things we don't even know about.
Maybe I will post on the other site the things R selected for the poetry fest ... he is the only one who ever read as many as he did or who ever suggested I should be more public by submitting them for anything ...
I don't expect anything to come of it but it was nice to have that encouragement and feedback.