(( BOOK 1.5: A Year of July)) -- Part 3

“A Hint of the Barrel”

           – 18 January 2012

What goes into death?

Everything but breath:

Every bone and oil,

Every muscled coil,

Every tendon drawn,

Every fusion bond

On every jigsaw plate

Of every skully crate

Around every liquid crib

Over every neural web,

and every rounding rib

(affixed, to flow and ebb

with every sudden start

and quiver of the heart),

and every bend of skin,

and every cilium-pin,

and every hairy trail,

and every milky nail

that crowns a finger tip

or caps a calloused toe,

and every pit and bow

of every limb and lip

and ridge and flap and dip

that used to send a spark

back inward to the dark

through trellised ganglia

to something – less of a

part in us beasts than air –

left traceless in the stare

of eyes death came to find.

Does it ever taste the mind?

Online Dating – Poems of the Week:

(16 April 2012)

"Red Flags"

Her profile says, "I believe in strength

In the face of adversity" -

Which means she thinks that her life is hard

and cruel consistently.

And if I said back, "You're fine," she'd think,

(he doesn't know my pain).

For admitting, somewhere, her world is bright

Means her paradigm's in vain.

(30 April 2012)

"At the Other End"

Roommate broke up with his girlfriend yesterday,
Went into his room and started to play
"Chariot," like now he had the time to be
Here with his musicality.

But he'd played that song so many times before
He met her, and it had always sounded more
Half-lunged than it did as he howled it now:
"Oh Chariot, I'm singing out loud..."

He comes home, every day now, tells me about
His life: how it's good, unhitched, “No doubt,”
He says, “it was the right move,” but –
Still, sings: "Give me your strength, Oh chariot."

(7 May 2012)

"Self-reporting"

I always drive at the speed that the freeway

SHOULD be.

And I never complain unless someone

is doing things wrong.

I've never been dumped

(if I was – she was wrong for me).

And I'll always make sense,

provided you can follow along.

I'm sensitive, and clever, and a man –

a manly man – so

I'll tell you to "buck up" when you need

a shoulder to pour on.

And that's what any sensible woman

would want. No?

You're totally gonna love me,

unless you're a moron.

I don't understand why more girls

don't write back to me

When I tell them that I'm so awesome

and then say "U so hot."

Am I hidden, like a god, by my

incomprehensibility?

Or do they see (much more than me)

all the things that I am not?

“Hold”

(a song)

      – 11 March 2012

You're gonna die some day.

That link will break away.

So while you're down on the ground, here …

Hold someone.

My one-trick dog knows “stay” –

Quivers in his house for days.

But if I sit on the lawn, humming softly …

He'll come out and play.

The girl downtown thinks coffee makes time

& swallows her food whole when she dines.

But when she sits by the pier watching ships crawl, …

Her breath starts to unwind.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

The booth boy at the carnival goes

To the gym each night and sweats through his clothes

dreaming all that cotton candy melts away from him …

As he grabs that bar and rows.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

She ignores it as the sun falls, but then

The Ferris wheel's too bright not to win.

So he hands her a ticket, “Angels free.” She thinks …

(nice arms). My God, amen.

You're gonna die some day.

That link will break away.

So while you're down on the ground, here …

Hold someone – hold someone.

“Eaten”

(Maurice Sendak spur)

       – 8 May 2012

Found it.

In the kitchen, like

It was supposed to be –

Eaten.

But mother said that

Such things meant aches for me.

Still I

Couldn't help but touch

The leaf or spider or –

Ink stain,

Small and beautiful.

I knew what it was for.

Cherish

Even food, they say.

For all joys are born to –

Perish:

fading, scattering,

Tickling young boys' tongues(

You do).

JK's most commonly used Principles:

      – 23 May 2012

*

See a need; fill a need.

Leave it as good as you found it.

(Everything else is extra credit.
But if you move a piece of trash, consider it yours.)

Everybody dies.

(This, my antidote to embarrassment.)

Say 'thank you'; show 'sorry.'

Everything is fuel.

(For un-clinging to things.

A distillation of William Blake's “Ride your cart & your plow over the bones of the dead.”)

Why walk when you can run?

My life is a balance of excesses.

You can learn something from everyone.

Better a dog than a devil.

Make all decisions from your deathbed.

Unless we are discontented, we will never change.

*

(( BOOK 1.5: A Year of July)) -- Part 2

“Color”

      – 27 January 2011

In the life of winter – that is white life, cold life –

watching clouds glow, I thought back on a carrot.

The combination became like summer. Like

cold Tang in a hot hand. Common-but-surreal

was once daily being; nothing beyond.

Once, in the life of winter,

dreams had no reason

to think of anything

but orange: I once

prayed to, and

not over,

what

I ate:

Once

In the

Crack on

The side of

A dry carrot, I

Found a small dark

Dirt stowed away.

Its darkness made it great, and

Stayed my mouth for that instant.

Had the carrot legs, she might have wired

In the ground again. But now she is in the sky.

“Girls as Roommates”

      – 12 September 2011

Girls as roommates will de-claw you,

Dramatize your world and never

Realize your silence is not judging them

(For women speak with their silences, men).

Women laugh to prove communion;

Cook, then sing, then sigh in union;

Speak their minds like running drains;

Glom like black ants under rain.

They dream of boys, then laugh at men

All hungry-eyed (yet dress for them).

They love, as do they mourn, for years.

They use each others' eyes as mirrors.

They talk about the absentees:

As long as she's away, that breeze

Blows hard and honest – but stalls apace

When heels forecall her coming face.

Of course, they love each other, too.

And eat, sleep, breathe as brothers do.

But beware, their heft's like wind, not stone (

You may not be struck, but you will be blown).

“I Used to Think that Way”

     – 26 September 2011

“I used to think that way,”

           I hear an old man say

           while his boys prepare for bed,

           water hissing from the shower head

           and dogs (relegated to a dirt porch) moaning.

           He slides unfilled boxes

                      (now renting, through owning)

           for the sake of those boys

                      (their friends a town over)

           and the sake of his time

                      (daily distance to cover),

           his mother's pastels on the walls

                      (her brain fading)

           and sketches unframed in the halls

                      (boys' creating)

           and black-and-white photos

                      (from a life he'd had prior

                                 of climbing through switchbacks

                                 with lenses, on a choir

                                 of felled cones, with pine needles

                                            skimming his face—

                                 his eyes sharp for beauty

                                            {drinking light, framing space}

                                 and Ansel's panning thumbs

                                 {whose he knew} saying 'here'—

                                            as he dropped down the wood legs

                                                       while clouds thinned and cleared

                                                                                        {Kl-ch*}).

I'd said, “Life is my currency: consciousness, time –

I spend it; I live. Only presence is mine.”

“My Terminable Will”

(“'In The Waste Land, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying,' Eliot told an interviewer.” NEW YORKER, 19 September.)

      – 2 October 2011

Some day all the words in my head will stop:

there will be no more snow on the mountain.

The last flake will add to the last rolling drop:

so will end the white head of that fountain.

As the last trickle rolls down habitual ruts

(which seem quizzically pointless when dry),

Moss cedes to grass in the shade of those cuts,

drinking air from a never-mine sky.

And the shore edge will round out – the vale, fill

with brush (where lips once called currents to be).

And elsewhere, the water will continue to rush,

indistinguishable from the sea.

“Theory”

     – 11 November 2011

Someday I will kiss you

With absolute calm,

And it will feel like

peppermint oil:

clearing and guiltless,

almost too fresh

for my lungs.

      Someday I will miss you

      When you’ve come and gone,

      And it will smart like

      barbecue coals:

      weary and stilted,

      warm still in death,

      raising palms.

                  Someday I will wish you

                  Had known we were wrong-

                  paired, served a hard spike

                  back at my soul (

                  bleary with stillness; it

                  longs for your breath).

                  won’t you come?

{click here for melody}

"Dreamgirl" (song)

     – December 2011

I’m going to find my dream girl.

I’m searching all around:

           I looked through my apartment, but

My hand was all I found.

I’m going to find my dream girl:

They say she’s you’re best friend,

So I said, “Hey man, are you a lady?”

But he started to berate me; he said,

“Dude, this has got to end.”

There’re just so many women:

I met one at a bar:

She let me see inside her,

Then she opened up much wider

           {vomit gurgle} –

I’m still cleaning out my car.

I went to church on Sunday

To see if she’d be there,

But the only one without a ring on

           Was a choir girl cling-on singing,

“Heatheeen, not a prayer!”

                              ...Where are you, dreamgirl?

I took a class in yoga

To bear my chakra yesterday,

           But only one woman would talk to me:

Her name was “Namaste.”

So I went to an open-mic

To dance with swooning girls.

           But all their songs went, “Men! Are! Pigs!”

And they weren’t casting pearls.

I rode the public bus downtown

And smiled disarmingly,

           But all the girls just watched their shoes:

Avoiding gum – and me.

I got off at a dancing club.

All the ladies jived like bees:

I’d buy them shots of pollen,

           But their hives would come a-callin,’

So they’d shake their bum-bles and leave.

                              ...Where are you, dreamgirl?

I’m going to find my dream girl.

I've checked the bathroom stalls;

I wink if they’re good-looking,

           But the ladies all start booking

And they don’t turn when I call.

I hope my dream girl likes me.

The boys in jail all do:

They complement my eyes and

           They sing me lullabies, like,

“Some daaay, your dreeeams –

Will come truuue…

uuu…uuu…

uue!”

Dreamgirl!!

(( BOOK 1.5: A Year of July)) -- Part 1

So, it seems that between books 1 (Ancient Fetus) and 2 (Virgins Are Meant to Die) I left a lacuna of about 2 and 3/12 years unaccounted for. So I'm doing a quick volume in between, before I finish binding book 2 and start posting here for book 3 (Your Reflection is Twice as Far as the Mirror).

As I finish each of A Year of July's 3 chapters, I'll give teasers of them here.
So here's from part 1 ...

“Ions at the Crest”

            – 9 May 2010

My eyes are filled so high with hope that it’s dangerous to drive,

And perilous to speak at all, and wild to be alive;

I am a crash-in-waiting, I am a coil unwound,

I am the crackling runner-bolt that rises from the ground.

I do not know what “lightning” is. I only know you/me—

Like a silver magnet’s drawing power without its gravity.

I’m rising and I’m rising up (I know this means a fall—

But at this peak, the world is air: I can’t retract or stall).

You dwell up there, cool and covered in a static droplet brine.

I draw in from the edges here, working toward your current line.

You are the crackling cloud-dome, love; I am the field below

Who breaks for you so many times you’ll never even know.

 

“Books Versus Heartaches”

            – 31 August, 2010

My books are dead, I see;

Only those yet to die can yearn.

Like—I asked and she said “Don’t”;

In books, you cannot will the won’t.

So my books live in harmony.

They speak high heat, but when I read slow

Then their labored pages pause

And their stilted drama thins, withdraws.

So I’m hungry, and that's good:

We’re only hungry when we know

What we want. Otherwise

We’re just red-lidded, with distant eyes.

 

The First Piano Lesson

            – 2 December 2010

The cat is almost in the floor, softer than

The carpet, luke-warm, golden-gray – Wednesday mist.

Almost just a draft, I come through the door,

Lighter than a child. I lose my fists

Inside, where pined air slows, where the cat’s curr calms.

She comes in – slight and tissue-skinned – then glides

Across piano keys in string-hammer psalms.

I tip-toe a scale, my lids low; she slides in,

Rum-smooth on fingertips, spit in her tone:

“Ta-tee, ta-tee…” – Should I dance like her, then?

Pressing wavelike through keys, cracking white/black bones

Into sound? Strange new notes can make babes of men.

She guides my arm: what work such grace demands.

I think of you (a child once) – these hands that touched your hands.

 

“The Vortex” (a man unplugged)

            – 4 May 2010

Forget nothing: no thing is nothing.

Absence is massive; a lack is still something:

These comma-baled zeroes, a cash architecture;

That one-time event, a memorial specter;

These losses, this failure, some space for ascension;

That God unperceived, still a sentient intention;

My blindness in sleeping, a primal distilling;

Our ended discussion, some shift in my willing;

That hollow fluorescence, a small charge extended;

Your comatose mind, just a wheel suspended;

Her gnawed candy necklace, a cord for collection;

This choice without option, more fuel that direction;

That space in the outlet, a free maiden waiting;

That flat-lined oscilloscope, rests procreating.

This 'nothing' – a concept that persists all on credit –

Should be weightless to carry (remember: forget it).

Maya Angelou, 1928 - 2014

Rest well, Maya Angelou.
Some of my favorite quotes, from people quoting you.
(I wasn't there when you said it, so I'll take their word for it.)

*

“My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.”

“What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.”

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

“My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.”

*

. . . . . Maya Angelou (4 April 1928 – 28 May 2014)

 

Poetry Day 2014 (two found poems) ...

Got to play author for a day - just a room full of AP English students and me.

{to video: 6 min.}

* Period 0 *

What are the positive and the negative aspects of it?

       If you weigh the pros and the cons,

                    I'd say that language is just as bad as it is good.

How do you use your poetry to create

a lasting impact beyond your lifetime?

      'What do you care about; what are you looking for in life; what is your moral foundation?'

              'Give me an example; give me some specific concrete detail.'

                                     I love doing that, and it's good for people.

                                  So my poetry, I think of it as like calls-to-action –

                                     I don't want to be the reason that somebody sits in a hole

                                                           reading a book for their entire life.

Do you plan on having children, and if so,

are there any scruples that you plan to instill in them?

          As far as scruples – empathize.

       Listen to people, understand where they're coming from.

    Put your head in other peoples' heads;

   put your head in animals' heads; put your head in everything's head:

    put your head in your sandwich's head and realize that your sandwich wouldn't want you to scarf it; 

           your sandwich would want you to savor it. … 

                               you will be living your life as a good person, 

                                     because you will be treating everything as precious. 

                                                                    And everything is precious.

How do you stay grounded?

          The things that make you afraid? 

                            Go and touch them – in safe, controlled ways.

   The things that you like too much? 

     Learn how to control that – sometimes you've just got to eat;

                    if you're like, “Aah, I'm so afraid of getting fat,”

go and binge until the point where you can't stand up

and be like, “Maybe I don't like food so much,”

and then eat a salad and enjoy it …

  learn to attach positive emotions

      to the things 

         you know 

                 are good 

                            in life.

{to video: 14 min.}

 

* Period 1 *

A lot of people say that you're not really an artist

until you have an audience to show your art to?

     Anybody who cares about being a real artist isn't a real artist –

       it's like, 'I'm a skater. And I wear skater clothes.' 

                                      No you're not; you are an actor.

      Anybody who says, 'This is what I am,' is an actor.

      So the reason to put your art out there is not to be an artist;

              the reason to put our art out there is because you like your art

enough that you want it to be the best art it can be –

                        and you don't have enough time in your life to figure it out on your own.

                 Other people can help you.

                                                           Cool? 

                                   Don't be scared;

                                           everything is drafts.

I was just wondering – what your favorite sense was?

     I don't – I don't want to hurt any of my sense's feelings.

                              'Cause they're all feelings;

                                    that's all they have.

Do you ever notice what you notice in the world as a writer?

I read something once about how writers notice different things...

     I feel like there's a distance that some

                      self-affected writers –I AM THE WRITER–

                                      those people, they step back and they're like,

                           'What's the next thing I'm gonna write about/OOH, you look like

                                                                 a good character {suck,suck,suck}

                                                             OH, what are you doing now?

                         Oh, I bet you- I bet you're thinking about your

                                      grandma, and/Ohhh {scribble,scribble,scribble} ... ,'

        But at some point–LIVE YOUR LIFE– you're

 like, 'Shit! I've been watching people so much,

I haven't been living my own life.'

     And so I feel like, the best way, to absorb those things

                       is through the path of empathy: you look at people

                                and you try to put yourself inside them –

                                                  not as a literary or a rational exercise,

                                                                             but just to feel it.

                    Just because you're like, 

                             '{leans back, smiling} I wonder

                                                                what it's like to be you. Aw...'

                       Curiosity, right?

         Like, 'What did all five of my senses just go through?'

    that's a rewarding experience as a human being.

                                                            Not as a writer.

                                      So –writer-schmiter–

                everybody should do that.

Werewolf-hunting (a bedtime story)

For my roommate, Jonathan. So he has a good fairytale to tell his niece in Germany at bedtime (to make sure she stays under the covers … awoooo).

{diction}

 

Werewolf, werewolf. Are you there, wolf?

Want to catch you in my snare, wolf.

But if you're smart, you won't be there, wolf

(you tricky-dicky little werewolf).

Werewolf, werewolf, loves the moonlight.

Werewolf, is tha(?)-aatchoo! Gesundheit.

Werewolf – now I must be stealthy

(because the werewolf's bite's unhealthy).

Werewolf's stronger, but – I'm wiser.

Werewolf ON MY NECK, OH SCHEISSE !!!

Still, I think you are a dumb one;

Werewolf, now I have become one. :(

(**Warning: Germans may seek retribution
if you butcher their accents.
... & they may own stun-guns.**)

Book 3: Cover & Introduction (the perfect example) ...

(book 2 is still coming along ... slowly. But inside of that process, I managed to distract myself into throwing together a cover for the next collection -- mostly to remind myself that I'm going to do it 6"x9" this time, instead of 8.5"x11". So here's the tentative cover & introduction for the poems to come.)

Book 3:

The Perfect Example

I used to write toward the dream of “permanence.” I intended my poems to speak in “universal” terms so that unimaginable audiences, looking at the thousandth translation, 100 years post-print and galaxies away, could relate to the spirit of my writing. But I realized that languages' open-source words themselves already contained that spirit, and what I had been writing was just an echo of the dictionary: combinations of the pre-existant; derivative, redundant, bereft of me.

The beauty of poetry is not primarily in the parts that “translate well," but in the parts that stale: that which resonates in its time and place with a local life and – like all things truly alive – dies as that time breezes past.

Some hold up poetry as the pinnacle of language-in-use. So the question follows: what is that use, what is it doing, what is its effect? I thought long and hard on this (neither an act nor a phrase that I coined), and concluded that poetry localizes the universal: it points out where flesh is channeling some spirit; it mortalizes the everlasting. Poetry finds an old idea alive in some creature for an intense and passing moment. This is not a lofty goal, but a lowly one; not an axiom, but a parable; not a thought, but a feeling.

The use of writing and speaking, I think, is not to contain a Concept (that is the duty of the words themselves) but to share a moment – green and brown, living and rotting, subtle and heady (communication is the stalk-whiskered, root-webbed scalp of the soil horizon).

And the pinnacle of writing and speaking, immanent and perspectival as it may be, is to give a perfect Example: visible from a few shifting angles; tangible with the right tempered touch; dead before we hear it speak, but alive again at the moment we perk our ears to listen; a ghost that seems to smell and taste like earth, but really ever only primes us to smell and taste the earth for ourselves.

Like our anchored & radiating hearts, poetry is boundless in its simple limits, true to its nature, a perfect example: no more, no less.

Valentinus (song)

Happy Valentine's Day!
Pass on some kindness.

(inspired by reading the Wikipedia article on Saint Valentine, who according to historical testimony “was arrested and imprisoned upon being caught marrying Christian couples and otherwise aiding Christians who were at the time being persecuted by Claudius in Rome. Helping Christians at this time was considered a crime. Claudius took a liking to this prisoner – until Valentinus tried to convert the Emperor – whereupon this priest was condemned to death. He was beaten with clubs and stones; when that failed to kill him, he was beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate. Various dates are given for the martyrdom or martyrdoms: 269, 270, or 273.” Neat guy, right? So I figured, here’s a song in memory of his values-in-action.)

{melody}

Man, I'd never kill.

I’d never kill a man –

And when one tries to fight with me,

I put a puppy in his hand.

*

He said, “What you tryin’ to do?

Layin’ this dog upon me?”

I said, “Usually if a man is mean,

It’s just because he lonely.”

Even if a kid is bad,

I never strike a child.

A boy was being a brat

So I threw an octopus at him and smiled.

*

He said, “What are you doing

Giving me this gangly cephalopod?”

I said, “Usually if a kid is wild,

It’s just because they bored.”

I’d never call a girl

A ‘ho’ or a ‘bitch.’

A lady was chewin’ me out

And so I made her a ham sandwich.

*

She said, “Well, I was so mad at you,

But now I’m ingratiated.”

I said, “Usually if a girl is pissed,
She just need to be appreciated.”

I have seen all these things

And I pass them along to you.

So next time someone shows their teeth,

You just show them a love that’s true:

Just show them a love that’s true!