A Student Pilgrim

Letting Go

2012-01-31T18:46:00.000-05:00

I realize now that perhaps one of the hardest things about the human condition is letting go of inflated conceptions of possibilities in order to just be who we are. Among the more condescending or elitist of us, it might be called “Accepting Mediocrity.” Among everybody else, let’s just call it “Accepting the Way Things Are.” Maybe it’s a radical idea. Maybe it’s no more and no less than what ancient philosophies and religions have been saying all along.

This thought has come from a strange experience out here in Oakland and Berkeley, California. I’ve been working with Michael Zeligs, who I grew up with in Boulder, trying to make videos and websites for clients, while also trying to kickstart his music career (one that began with the handicap of a vision requiring either that he go big or go home). Talking with him about his ideas of what could be and where he would like to go, I see clearly how I sit in much the same boat as him, except with regards to writing: we both feel drawn to our arts because we’ve always (ever since we were little kids) felt like we had some imperative to share a sort of message or vision, we both have seriously difficult times editing the work we’ve already created, and neither of us has seen a fraction of the success we always thought we would have enjoyed by the age of 24/25 (James, I’ve got my eye on you too on this count).

Talking with Michael about how that feels, and much more importantly, why it all seemed so important in the first place, I feel I’ve opened an interesting door into how some of this stuff works (and how I’ve personally changed in the last few years). I no longer have any illusions about “someday making it big.” Last week I published an op-ed article in the Daily Camera for which I was paid exactly nothing, and somehow I’m satisfied with that. It wasn’t the greatest article of all time (it was even referred to as “less than sophomoric” by one critic). It wasn’t a lot of things, but at the same time, it was a few significant things:

1. It was the best I could do at this point in my writing/thinking abilities (which may either be a sad thing or an encouraging thing, depending on your view of the article)
2. It was the most carefully edited piece I’ve put out into the world in a long time, which is a good sign for someone who never takes the time to edit (incidentally, I’m reading through this blog entry right now, editing it)
3. I voiced an opinion that was read by many, which was by no means original or even remotely unique, but it provided another voice in support of the worldview that I happen to endorse
4. After a long time of not writing, I wrote it, which means that I’m writing, which makes me happy

For the first time in recent memory, I feel completely OK being who I am and doing what I’m doing. This is radical for me. Usually I spend so much time focusing on what I’m not doing or who I have not yet become (and getting seriously down about it), that to do otherwise is refreshing in a way I can’t even begin to describe.

Who am I? I am a 24 year old male with certain talents who enjoys exercising them with limited success rates. I feel stronger than ever. Right now, at least, I simply don’t care where I’m going or what I’m doing, so long as I’m approaching it sincerely, with my eyes open. I’m engaging with my immediate circumstances and I’m letting every interaction be a test of my character. The world doesn’t give a shit about your rhetoric, all it cares about is your behavior and for the most part, all it really cares about is your most recent action. On that front, I’m happy. I’m doing well. I’ve brought my spirit and my mind to the circumstances I’ve found myself in and in a few specific cases, I’ve shined in ways that have genuinely surprised me. I feel great about that.

What do I want out of life? To empower myself in order to empower other. How am I going about that? Learning and exercising in order to be mentally and physically stronger. What will I do with that newfound strength? To paraphrase Maughm, I imagine if I ever get strong enough, I’ll have the necessary strength to know what to do with it. In the meantime, like I said at the end of the last paragraph, I’m feeling really great.

Occupy Ourselves

2012-01-25T16:53:00.002-05:00

This morning I got my second article published in the Daily Camera, Boulder's local paper. Instead of reprinting it here, I'll just give out the link for anyone to take a look at it on the Daily Camera's website.

Of course the comments at the bottom are for the most part really dismissive (and some are just flat out condescending and dickish...society has a long way to go with the whole concept of respectful discourse), but that's why I never read the comments at the end of articles. I swear, the best articles I've ever read tend to be flood at the bottom by the personal opinions of people who contribute nothing to the conversation and manage only to put really bad tastes in my mouth. But, as they say, "opinions are like assholes: everybody has one." Anyway, feel free to read the article and leave a comment. I think this is the last time in my career I'll undergo the masochistic act of reading comments about my writing. After this, I'm just going to present the words and never look back.

With love,
Travis

My Article

As We Sailed Slowly South: A Short Story

2012-01-14T18:02:00.002-05:00

We were up early that day anyway because there was this bridge that only opened for boats to pass through until 6:30 am, and then again after 8:30. If we didn’t make it there by 6:30, we would have to wait two hours to cross. Of course we could have just waited until 8:30 – taken a leisurely morning, moved slowly, savored our coffees a little bit more – but you have to understand, we had already lost three days moored off the AYB waiting for an integral replacement piece for the electrical system to arrive via UPS, so naturally we were antsy. We were hoping to get as far as we possibly could. Added to that was the fact that the waterways were so narrow, and at times, dangerously shallow, that we couldn’t sail at night, so every mile made during the daytime counted if we were going to make it to Florida in any kind of timely manner.

So like I said, we were up early that day anyway. Even still, it took awhile to notice. I must have been the first to see it because everyone else was either highly focused on steering the catamaran, or else, as was the case with Lana, still in bed. Only I was both up and idle.

The first disconcerting sign was that the stars were still out by the time we reached the bridge. It was just a little before 6:30, the last opening, and as yet, the stars remained as prominent as they had been the night before when I went off to bed. I scanned the horizon in all directions and nowhere was there to be seen any indication of the first lights of dawn. Of course it was late in the year – nearly November – so I just passed it off as a late blooming morning. That’s how the axis of the world works, is it not?

Time passed. Nothing changed. Paul, the captain, stayed focused on the waters ahead, gunning the boat so as to reach the next bridge, five nautical miles down, which would only open on the half hour: 7 or 7:30 were the possible target times. Linda, Paul’s wife and second mate, was bouncing around the bow, making the adjustments that Paul demanded of her and was too focused on tasks to notice the change (or lack thereof). But I sat sleepily sipping my coffee, watching the sky, waiting for the first rays of the sun to light up the forests and riverways of the South.

We reached the second bridge after 7 and had to float in place until 7:30. Paul got paranoid that nobody was manning the station and went on the radio, calling out to the authorities to confirm the bridge would open on time. When they finally, with cold southern condescention in their voices, responded to the affirmative, he sat back contented. I, meanwhile, was starting to get nervous. Didn’t anyone else wonder where the sun was?

It was 7:30. We passed through the second bridge. All around us, yachts and motorboats lined up with little lights atop their highest points, faintly illuminating their presence amidst an otherwise moonless dark. Bobbing up and down. The stars sat steadfast above.

I could feel a panic rising in my throat like seasickness. I started to feel nauseous. Something wasn’t right. I wanted to cry out to Paul and Linda about the sun, but I couldn’t find the words. I checked my cell phone, hoping maybe the sun had texted me to say it would be late, but nothing. Nothing.

***

I later found out that there were others like me: in different places all up and down the east coast: early risers, exercisers, working men, commuters, monks and meditatives. All up and down the coast, it slowly dawned on the people that dawn was late.

The early risers, one and all started anxiously checking their cell phones for missed texts. A few of the less secure ones sent frantic texts to the sun, while the more secure – equally nervous but not wanting to put on a desperate face – held back, still pacing around, fingering and fondling their phones; sweating to receive some sort of indication that the sun hadn’t forgotten them, hadn’t found someone better, stronger, more successful, more attractive.

As the minutes and hours ticked by, thoughts turned to concern as to whether or not the sun was Ok. Had it just gotten held up in traffic, or – God willing – had there had been some kind of accident? Maybe so! But maybe it was totally just fine, only just delayed by all the bureaucratic form-filling that accompanies that kind of thing, which can be extremely time-consuming but when all is said and done is an important thing to do when, you know, you’re trying to file the report with your insurance. Maybe the sun was actually fine, not in the hospital, just finishing up some signatures on a form and would be catching up in like nearly no time at all...

Nothing.

It gave no word. All across America, the day passed: from 8 to 9, and then 10, 11. Just before noon, the President went live on air to declare a state of emergency, claiming if the sun wasn’t rising on America today, then it must have been the work of terrorists. He took time to renew pledges that the War on Terror must be won for God had blessed America. We would get to the bottom of this. Scapegoats would be found. Heads would roll, in the name of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, on whose name rests all blessings.

***

Meanwhile, on the boat, we passed cheerlessly from Virginia into North Carolina. It was a state I had never seen, the state my father was born in, and a place I had always longed to go. Now I was finally within the state’s territories and yet all I felt was a thankless kind of dread. Without the sun, what was the point of going to North Carolina? In the larger scheme of things, without the sun, what was the point of going to Florida? Florida is the Sunshine State. Without the sun, what does it remain? The State? That had a cold and ominous ring to it. I shuddered to think.

All day and all night, which were now very hard to differentiate, the people of America moped around their homes or apartments, staring at their cell phones, looking through their pictures on Facebook or Tumblr: pictures of them smiling with the sun, just over their shoulders, smiling too. They realized in those dark and dreadful moments just how much the sun had really lit up their lives. They realized that it’s true: you don’t really appreciate those you love until they’re gone.

A few emotionally wrecked people caved and started sending text after text to the sun with phrases like ‘where r u?!!’, ‘r u ok?!!’, ‘wut did i do?’ and ‘cant we talk about this?!!’ A few others tried calling, hoping that the line would be busy, a sure sign that the sun was just wrapped up in other things and would be getting back to them momentarily, but the line just kept ringing and ringing. A few particularly sad individuals hoped the ringing on the other line would cut suddenly to voicemail mid-chime, suggesting that the sun had pressed Decline when it saw the call. Painful as that kind of rejection would be, at least it would act a sort of confirmation proving that the sun was alright and in full faculty, somewhere, only predisposed.

As the days without the sun turned into weeks, the government frequently made statements such as, “In times of crisis such as this we have found ourselves in, it is the duty of every American to put on a bold, courageous face, step out of his home and go shopping! Otherwise, the terrorists win.”

And the Americans did as they were told. What else could they do? They mostly bought junk food and alcohol, which they sat around their homes consuming between tears and irrepressible bouts of rage and self-loathing. In these drunken stupors they tended to call the sun hurtful names, names that could never be taken back, and blame it for all their problems. How much better off would they be if they had never met the sun in the first place. Yes, it had truly ruined everything for them. Things were so much better in the days before the sun. Most people spend their time on the couch listening to sad old pop songs over and over. Some songs, such as ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by the Beatles, never seemed sad before, but now were downright heart-wrenching.

***

Eventually, we made it to Florida. We didn’t want to sail at night, but as there was no other option - the least of which being staying in one place - we just pushed onward.

When we reached the Keys, Lana and I deboarded the catamaran and soon enough, found crew positions on a different boat that was continuing south to Mexico.

When we reached the eastern shore of the Yucatan, I stepped into the damp chill of the sand. All around, the lavish resorts were completely abandoned. The streets, for the most part, were empty too except for an occasional shivering figure wrapped in thick layers of woven materials. A church bell rang and Lana and I walked over. Inside was a huddling mass of fervently praying human beings, repeating over and over the single word, “Dios.”

How to not get Shot in Argentina, et. al.

2012-01-09T15:24:00.002-05:00

You’re traveling in Argentina, somewhere just outside of the city when a kid, let’s say 14 years old - young enough to be more concerned about showing how hard he is and impressing his peers than any greater sense of a moral code - steals up to you with a bandana over his mouth and gun to your temple. He demands everything you own. What do you do?

I must admit, there are few things I fear more than 13-18 year olds with guns.

I pose this question because I get asked it, or variations on it, all the time. And though this situation has never actually come up for me (Alhamdulillah), I do think about it a lot, especially when considering the prospect of traveling somewhere generally perceived to be dangerous (right now I’m mulling over the idea of traveling in Zapatista territory in southern Mexico). Hypothetically, what would I do in this situation? What would you do?

I’ve considered all the possibilities from breaking down into tearful sobs to arrogantly refusing to simply, maybe even nonchalantly complying. Beneath all possible responses lurks the deeper question, is my life really worth risking for my (few) possessions? Obviously the answer is no, but maybe deeper than that poses a question of pride: how can I travel boldly without being victimized?

Before I left New York, I had a great chat with my friend Mario in an Upper East Side Irish Pub and he told me that the situation speculated above actually did happen to him. In telling me the story, he (as I just did) first posed it as a question. What does one do in this situation? Stop for a moment and think about it. What would you do?

Finally he told me what he did. He introduced himself.

He told the kid, “My name is Mario Ustazio, I was born in the Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic in 1987 to a poor family. I have one brother, Juan, who is two years older than me who is a wood carver and a sister, Annalisa, who is a year younger. She is a dancer. When I was 5, my family moved to Miami in the hope of making a better life. My mother works as a social worker in a poor Dominican neighborhood and my father drives a taxi. I’m in Argentina to learn what people like you are working for in the future, what you’re trying to build, and what possibilities there are for making that a real possibility.”

It worked for him. The kid let him keep is life and his wallet. Who knows how often it would anyone else (after all, Mario is completely fluent in Spanish...a non-speaker could never have responded like that). The underlying point of his story is that it’s far more difficult to shoot someone with an identity and a family than it is to shoot a nameless white person who is wealthy enough to afford the privilege of traveling 4,000 miles from home in search of something as frivolous as “self-enrichment.”

I think this principle is far more widely applicable than just not getting shot in a rough part of the world. This is the essential question of community, identity and human communication: it’s easy to be rude to a stranger, to be cruel to a stranger, or simply to disregard the existence of a soul in a stranger. Our world is increasingly alienating, governed more by stereotypes, generalizations (like the one I’m making now), and broad dismissals than the weirdly empathetic desire to actually see someone else; to hear them, to validate their presence by engaging them with respect. But it doesn’t have to be. Precedents simply need to be set, daily.

Green Africa

2012-01-05T19:16:00.003-05:00

So clearly I've never quite known whether this blog was meant to be for travel, philosophy, fiction, rants/politics, poetry, or what. I suppose it doesn't matter: it's just good to be writing, sharing, engaged. Well, now the time has come for me to add another dimension to it: advertising!

I'm currently working with the indomitable Bianca Griffith to populate her totally awesome Green Africa Conference (April 12-15, 2012) with ticket-purchasing representatives of the world's governments, academic fields, fundraisers, grassroots activists, industry professionals, etc - all descending on the tiny Gambia for 4 days of networking and collaboration to link the innovators and their technologies with the activists and activist governments and funders who have the power to make them the future of infrastructure. With the right kind of turn out, this could be a very significant event for 2012. Imagine if those who have solutions to make entire villages or even cities carbon free and autonomous were to meet the right angel doners or NGOs with the power/finance to transform entire zones from polluting and dependent to wholly green and self-sufficient. Now imagine if entire governments were to get clued in and had the power to implement sweeping reforms from the top down. The event will have speakers, but mostly in the form of demonstrations and hands on workshops, making it easy enough for the average person to feel empowered to make these kinds of changes for truly affordable costs. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. This possibility is not only real, it's urgent if the environment isn't going to be destroyed beyond repair.

So I'm trying to help her sell tickets to the event (and get a commission to help fund my own way to attend). Please visit the site and if you choose to purchase tickets, please drop my name to help fund my way!

The Impossible Alternative

2011-12-21T22:48:00.001-05:00

This article is the introduction to the anthology What Comes After Money? Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency and Community, edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan, just released by EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books. Contributors include economist Bernard Leitaer, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, musician Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, Larry Harvey (founder of Burning Man), and alternative historian Peter Lamborn Wilson.

The money game ... We are all forced to play it, whether we like it or not. A few leap across the Monopoly board with great gusto, building or toppling companies, gobbling up futures on resources and minerals, speculating on currencies. Some market new cultural products -- images, memes, books, lines of software code, musical jingles -- as their gambits and dice throws in the global casino. Others, dealt a worse hand, play a more brutal version of the game in the back alleys of third world cities, begging for baksheesh, selling their sex for a meager sum, sending their children to work in factories or collect bits of nickel and aluminum from toxic trash heaps. Simply by virtue of being born into this single global system, this omni-oppressive world order, we are all conscripted into a relentless contest, a ceaseless tumult.

Ever since the mangling of his ideas led to horrific dictatorships and genocidal regimes over the last century, the philosopher Karl Marx has been out of fashion, neglected and suppressed. This is understandable but unfortunate, as many of his insights into the mythic dimensions of money and the workings of capital deserve reconsideration. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes money as "the visible divinity" in our capitalist world: "By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as almighty being. Money is the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person." Since birth, we have been trained like performing seals to accept the spiteful conjuror's trick that transmutes any and all qualities into quantities-into bigger or smaller piles of cash. Seemingly without an alternative, most of us accept a system in which everything and everyone has its price, and beneath every celebration lies a cynical calculation.

Hypnotized by our culture, most people believe that our current form of money is the only rational way to exchange value -- that a debt-based currency, detached from any tangible asset, is something as organic and inevitable as carbon molecules, ice, or photosynthesis. We forget that money, in its current form, is just a tool. Humans created money to perform certain functions and satisfy certain needs. But just as engineers and computer programmers drop cruder, out-of-date tools and pick up better ones as soon as they become available, we might also switch to more sophisticated instruments for transferring goods and services that function more efficiently and equitably. We could implement new mechanisms and platforms for exchanging value that we have designed to prevent the destructive social and ecological feedback loops produced by our current financial system. As an operating system for society, money needs a major upgrade. This upgrade will not just happen on its own; we need to apply our intelligence and creativity to make it happen.

This requires an act of will, and a leap of faith, from many of us. Personally, I grew up with an artistic New York background and, until a few years ago, I never gave much thought to economics, considering it incredibly boring, useless, and the opposite of anything cool. About five years ago, I began to comprehend that the underlying logic of our economic system was inciting a systemic crash -- that our model of endless growth on a finite planet was bringing about mass species extinction, mass pollution, and was somehow linked to a nihilistic value system that mortgaged the future of the planet for the instant gratification of the lucky few. When we launched our web magazine Reality Sandwich, we made alternative approaches to our economy one of our areas of focus, and a priority. First appearing in Reality Sandwich, the essays included in this book present a range of perspectives on the problems endemic to our current financial system, and propose tangible ways to change it. For those who are not used to this type of discussion, it takes a while to familiarize yourself with the issues and the terminology, but the effort is worth it, as the subject is of critical importance.

Over the last half-century, the mainstream culture institutionalized hipster rebellion and integrated it within the corporate mainstream, which constantly instructs us to "Just Do It," "Think Different," "FCUK," and the like. Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products. The new counterculture, which I believe Reality Sandwich represents, goes beyond easily assimilated gestures of rebellion to interrogate and analyze the underpinnings of our current destructive social order. We believe it is no longer enough to propose alternatives -- we need to implement them, instead of waiting around, expecting that someone else is going to do it for us. For this reason, along with Reality Sandwich, we launched a social network, Evolver.net, which provides the organizing hub for what we call the Evolver Social Movement. The ESM brings together local communities that share a vision of how society could be transformed under a global umbrella, and promotes initiatives in permaculture, public performance, local currencies, and viable alternatives in many areas. Evolver actively seeks to collaborate with other movements and organizations that employ DIY tactics to revitalize civil society, such as Transition Town, the Zeitgeist Movement, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Burners Without Borders, et cetera. We propose that reimagining and reinventing society through conscious collaboration is the avant-garde art form of our time.

While rarely discussed in the mainstream media, an awakening is currently underway: More and more people are coming to realize that what we use as money is not some natural force or omnipotent being, but a magic spell. This spell is maintained by the oracles and high priests of finance from their well-guarded temples -- the banks and treasuries -- where they alchemically transmute little bits of paper or blips of data into valuable artifacts, using occult symbol, incantation, and numerical abracadabra. Indeed, what the financial sorcerers fear more than anything is a collective loss of faith in the abstruse and arcane instruments they use to bind the great human mob in invisible chains of debt, servitude, and scarcity.

The political philosopher Antonio Negri demystified "capital" by defining it, simply, as a "social relation." What does this mean? When a billionaire walks into the room, everyone reacts as though the intangible assets circulating as data streams in his investment portfolio are as real as the armor that Tony Stark puts on when he becomes Iron Man. These streams of virtual data permit the tycoon to control servants, private security forces, mansions, yachts, Picassos, and whatnot. In actual fact, the extraordinary superpowers ascribed to such a personage exist only in the mind.

If a sudden pulse of solar radiation wiped out our hard drives, everyone would quickly see that stored capital was merely a cultural convention, a belief system. The billionaire would lose all of his perceived superpowers and, like an incredible shrinking magnate, retract back to modest size. The vast apparatus of contemporary media and the sleek glass architecture of corporate skyscrapers are designed to reinforce unquestioning obedience and faith in this belief system of capitalism, which gives the privileged few the power of life and death over the multitudinous many.

Antiglobalization activists often proclaim that another world is possible. They declare their faith that the current, tragically unjust orchestration of capital is not the only way we can organize our planetary community, even at our current level of size and complexity. Most people find it almost impossible to imagine a systemic alternative. This seeming impossibility of envisioning and then constructing a viable alternative is an illusion. The corporate media constantly imprints and indoctrinates us into unquestioning belief that the way it is now is the only way it can be. The system keeps our consciousness trapped within a particular set of beliefs, a certain frequency of awareness and closed framing of our reality. The media ignores the alternatives that already exist, and constantly amps up people's fear of losing what little they have. For those who see beyond these prison walls, it is not enough to insist upon the possibility of another world. We need to understand how we can construct the alternative, and then work together to bring it about.

There was a time before our current monetary system existed, and there will be a time after it is gone. We can look, without sentimentality or nostalgia, at the practices of premodern indigenous cultures that didn't need lawyers, accountants, Swiss bank accounts, or land that could be owned. These cultures organized themselves around gift exchange rather than financial transaction. For indigenous people in Australia or South America, power is not something that can be hoarded; power can only be expressed in the living present, through ceremony, initiation, and action. As anthropologist Pierre Clastres discusses in Society Against the State, the tribal chief is generally the one who owns the least, as he gains respect by giving away everything that comes to him to maintain harmony and balance among his people. His generosity is a source of power. These cultures may provide keys for us, models to make use of as we go forward, reinventing our institutions and technologies so they support long-range prosperity for everyone on earth.

When the Thai baht suddenly ceases to function, when the Mexico peso bites the dust, these devastating traumas have nothing to do with the productivity of the local lands or the skills of the people. Neither their houses and farms nor the machines in their factories suddenly molt or liquefy; the abstract data flows manipulated by the financial elites are all that shift. For some reason, we have vested a small coterie of avaricious speculators with the ability to dismantle a nation's economy in a matter of hours, as they follow flickering tugs of fear and greed.

Our current monoculture of money enforces aggressive, competitive, and unsustainable patterns of behavior by creating artificial scarcity. When you get a loan from a bank, the bank gives you the principle, but does not create the interest. Therefore, you are forced to go out into society and compete against everyone else to bring back the interest that accrues. Publicly traded corporations, similarly, are forced to maximize profits to satisfy their shareholders, and therefore must use the most expedient methods to create revenue, even when this means sabotaging environmental safeguards or depriving local communities of their fair share. "Free market" capitalism guarantees there will be big winners, and bigger losers. The biggest loser, alas, is the earth itself. As long as our technological powers increase within a system of domination and exploitation, more catastrophes like the Gulf oil spill and the Chernobyl and Bhopal disasters are essentially guaranteed. As technology becomes more powerful, these calamities will only get more horrifying, until the rotting foundations of our social order are exposed and addressed.

Our currency is not a neutral tool, but a crystallized belief system. "Money" is an expression of ideology, the blinkered reasoning or "irrational rationality" that mortgages the present moment for a future payoff that never arrives. In the interim, the laboring multitudes grind it out, hour by hour, day by day. As we reconsider the meaning of money and the true nature of value, our society will also reconceive our approach to work; eventually, we will change our ideas of what progress means, and even our relationship to time. Once "time" is no longer "money," we may transform the way we choose to live in time.

Many progressives and social crusaders argue that unemployment is a major social problem. They call for more jobs, "green jobs," or guaranteed employment. This focus on employment is also a misconception based on a limited reasoning. In actual fact, it is not unemployment but work that is the problem. Deep down, nobody wants a job to occupy his or her time. We want a mission that inspires us.

As the design scientist Buckminster Fuller noted, most of the work that our society creates produces no real benefit for the earth, and in fact subtracts from it. Most of the work we do requires pointless expenditures of energy and makes more waste. Rather than having people drive to jobs and use up endless Styrofoam containers and toner cartridges, it would be cheaper -- in the real terms of the vitality and thrive-ability of the earth -- to subsidize them to remain in their home communities, support them to grow their own food, foster permaculture projects to increase biodiversity, and encourage them to educate themselves and their children, to make art and perform ritual if they felt so inclined, and to generally celebrate the sacred mystery of being with a minimum of interference.

Without idealizing the past, we know that many indigenous people did not "work" in the way we now understand it. Colonialists were outraged that native peoples only spent a few hours a day doing those activities necessary to support life, such as hunting and gathering, building their temporary habitats, and so on. While zealous application of the Protestant ethic brought the benefits of Western medicine and technology to the human community, it also had the unfortunate result of turning our world from a garden into a gulag.

The human-devised concept that "time is money" has created a wasteland of boredom and nihilism where many of us are forced, as the critic Lewis Mumford cunningly observed, to look into the mirror each morning and ask ourselves what part of our personality we can sell today. Given such a system, some of the most successful manipulators are those natural sociopaths who feel no compunction about thieving from the masses to line their own pockets -- think the "smartest guys in the room" from the bygone Enron days; or complacent CEOs like Tony Hayward of BP, happy to attend yachting races while his company's activities terminated entire undersea ecosystems; or all the "masters of the universe" not yet exposed, let alone brought to justice. Modern capitalism makes sociopathic behavior humdrum and routine. What else can we make of a corporation like Walmart, which takes out secret life insurance policies on its harassed and humiliated employees, utilizing statistical "quant" analysis to cash in on their aggravated death rates?

Our current economic system is institutionalized psychopathology, a parasitic virus, and its perpetuation would likely lead to the termination of the human experiment in an accelerating series of catastrophes, as climate change accelerates and the exploitation of resources and technological domination of nature intensify. The alternative is extremely difficult to imagine, until we realize it. Albert Einstein once noted that a problem is never solved by the same level of consciousness that created it, but can be superseded once a new level of consciousness is attained. We rapidly approach an exciting threshold where breakdown and breakthrough could happen almost simultaneously.

The good bad news is that we are witnessing the collapse of the current financial order, a bit like watching a multi-car collision take place in sickening slow motion. While vast amounts of intangible finance capital continue to amass, the real assets of the earth are in rapid decline, and this growing gap between the abstract and the real is bringing on an inevitable crash, one in which the delusions of finance capital can no longer be maintained. The global system has revealed itself as a massive Ponzi scheme, a debt pyramid, and we are reaching that thrilling, terrifying precipice where maintaining the fiction is no longer possible.

Nobody has ever been in this situation before. What happens next is anyone's guess, but a few alternatives seem most plausible. Over the last decades, wealth has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. According to a recent study, fewer than seven hundred billionaires have a combined net worth of more than $2 trillion. At the same time, an estimated 2.8 billion people survive on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion live on less than $1. Here in the United States, fewer than 7,500 individuals out of 300 million control "almost three-quarters of the nation's industrial (nonfinancial) assets, almost two-thirds of all banking assets, and more than three-quarters of all insurance assets," notes political scientist Thomas Dye in Who's Running America? Members of this small group can be found in the top tiers of the most exclusive law firms, investment banks, federal government posts, and military commands, where they can control the herd.

As the superstructure of the financial system melts down, it is unlikely that this small coterie of the world's financial elite will choose, in a great heartfelt conversion, to democratize wealth and share resources equitably. They will, more likely, seek to grasp onto their privilege and keep their stranglehold over resources, potentially creating an increasingly authoritarian state apparatus in which the divide between the haves and have-nots becomes ever greater. As social pressure builds, draconian restrictions based on trumped-up fears of terrorists, immigrants, and other bogeymen may supplant democratic freedoms. The corporate oligarchy has spent decades mastering techniques of getting uninformed and ignorant people to act against their own best interests, and will continue to foster stupefaction and mob rule. As increasing constraints are placed on us, as security forces patrol the perimeter and drone helicopters circle overhead, as basic necessities like drinking water are sold back to us, as hyperinflation leaves only a few megabanks still standing, we will be told -- over and over again -- that this culture is still the greatest thing ever, that the evil others are to blame, and that it is all being done for our own good.

The other option is the one discussed, from various angles, in the essays collected in this book: the prospect that the rapidly deepening, globally systemic, economic-ecological collapse will provide the necessary ground for a mass awakening, and for the reinvention of our economic system in accord with a design science that follows nature's operating principles. As the economist Bernard Lietaer has noted, what we require is a shift from a fragile monoculture based on one form of money to a diversified offering of many currency tools, providing a variety of ways for human beings to exchange value. The current form of Yang currency that supports masculine competition and aggression must be complemented, perhaps superseded, by Yin currencies that foster collaboration and cooperation.

More fundamental than any new currency is the shift in awareness, the change of consciousness, necessary before a truly equitable global society can emerge. This change is already occurring on many levels, some visible and some subliminal, throughout our increasingly interconnected world. We are developing a thoroughly evolutionary perspective, one that sees human cultures, relationships, and social systems as expressions of an evolution of life and of a consciousness that is perpetually ongoing. We are not passive observers of this process, but active participants. We are the coming-into-consciousness of the Gaian mind, and our actions and intentions-as individuals and communities-determine the trajectory of our future culture.

From this evolutionary viewpoint, we can see the development of capitalism over the last few hundred years as a necessary phase, but not a final endpoint, toward the inception of a planetary community. Capitalism drove technological innovation and a melding of the world's cultures, but kept us locked in an adolescent state of mind. Communications technologies such as the internet have now linked humanity into a global tribe, able to communicate instantaneously and experience simultaneously. The intensifying economic and ecological meltdown is akin to the process that occurs when a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly: There is, first of all, a disintegration of the caterpillar form and the emergence of imaginal cells that direct the process of transmutation into a new form of life. To the old system, this appears as danger, as death, but to the new emergent form, it is necessary as an aspect of the birthing process.

We are inexorably moving toward the realization of humanity as a unified being, a singular organism, meshed with the delicate planetary ecology that nurtures us. As Bruce Lipton and Steven Bhaerman discuss in their book Spontaneous Evolution, the cells in the human body have developed to work together in perfect symbiosis, sharing resources equitably. You don't find one cell hoarding masses of energy while another cell is left utterly deprived and gasping. If individual humans are akin to cells in a greater Gaian organism, we could similarly reach a point at which sufficient energy is provided to all, for everyone's benefit, to ensure the effective functioning of the whole.

The essays in What Comes After Money? are thought experiments that explore our current economic predicament and reveal the path to a new economy, biospherically balanced and equitably attuned. For many people, the idea that our global capitalist system could make a quantum jump into a new systemic paradigm will initially seem impossible and outlandish. However, human culture can change with remarkable speed when necessary. Before 1989, among all the highly paid think tank analysts and political specialists, nobody predicted that the Berlin Wall would be taken down, piece by piece, through a euphoric civilian uprising, while the military stood down-that East would reunite with West without nuclear conflict or vast loss of life. This happened because, on a secret and subliminal level, the consciousness of people operating under that old oppressive order could no longer tolerate a barricade created by ideology and maintained through domination. Today, Wall Street and its "banksta" allies in foreign capitals control the movements of capital and the destiny of people and nations. Is it possible that a civil society upsurge could tear this conceptual barricade down as well? If something like this were to take place, the best-case scenario would be that we would have a new paradigm, a working operating system for exchanging goods and services using different principles, ready for rollout before social chaos could lead to the imposing of authoritarian controls.

Personally, I agree with the visionary thinker José Argüelles, who proposes that time is not money: time is art. The next phase of human development should be one of conscious evolution and co-creative collaboration, when we recognize that society is, in itself, an art project. We have the power to use our intelligence and imagination to reinvent society's operating system so that it fulfills humanity's highest hopes and age-old aspirations. If we can develop and construct a new economic foundation that strikes a balance between the gift exchanges of the archaic past and our modern system of swift global transactions, we might manifest a magnificent art project, an ever-evolving social sculpture, together. Such an expression of our collective human genius will benefit our kin and our descendants, and support the greater web of life. Facing a crisis unleashed by human greed and ignorance, we have an extraordinary opportunity to bring about a new-or renewed-society that is far more comfortable, harmonic, relaxed, peaceful, and humane. My hope is that this book offers a set of helpful tools for thinking through this extraordinary process, and that it inspires you to collaborate on the great co-creative experiment that lies ahead.

-Daniel Pinchbeck
Reality Sandwich

In Support of Bradley Manning

2011-12-17T22:02:00.000-05:00

Last night at 5 pm in Boulder, there was a vigil for national hero, Bradley Manning, who exposed atrocities committed by the US armed forces in Iraq by leaking videos to Wikileaks. He has been held in prison without trial (in direct violation of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States) for nearly two years. He has recently gone to trial on counts including “Aiding the Enemy” which could carry as its sentence the death penalty. The 20 or so protestors in Boulder shared thoughts and statistics as the mostly unaffected pedestrians of Pearl Street meandered by.

For more information about Bradley Manning, please visit the website iam.bradleymanning.org

The Report

2011-12-12T22:09:00.002-05:00

And two women reported back on what they had seen. The first, a young medical student named Jamie reported that she when had stared deeply in his eyes, there had grinned back at her a twisted, sardonic look of malice. It was like the pure condescension of a laughing jackal. He'd taken all she had lived and loved as the fantasies of a child. She'd likened his lips unto a serpent, poised to strike.

As Jamie finished her report, Amanda stood up and said, "No no no, you must have been mistaken, for I was with him all last night, and yes, we wrestled those serpents you've mentioned, but all the while, I seen them in my own mirror. And it was only when I was wailing and he was clenching me tight by the wrists that I looked up into his eyes and saw an ocean of gold: compassion breaking forth in waves. And behind the crown of his lopsided head was a kind of glimmering light issuing a halo.

On Freedom

2011-12-10T14:32:00.001-05:00

I’m moved to wonder, what then are we fighting for? Against whom? for whom? and how? and why? The answer seems to be, “for freedom.” From what? For what? And how does it work? How will we spend those idealized days after victory is secured?
Ask the Libyans, the Tunisians, the Egyptians, and Yemenis. What have they fought for? How have their days changed? What mines have been swept to make passage from birth to death soft and smooth? And who are we with fists in the air and eyes crossed between selective history and utopia?

The ability to play drums and walk the straight path to God’s salvation. To swim beyond the pool of Sodom to the turquoise glass sill of Arcadia. Or into the fires of an African swelter, Allah akbar, to feast in thanks giving, and to make love to Love. To walk and to see and to play, to be gentle in wargames, to climb trees and howl at the moon.

Justice is no final victory, it’s an occupation.

99 Problems

2011-11-30T17:43:00.001-05:00

Here’s the idea: an online journal dedicated to first-person narratives of the lives of the trampled of the world. It’s kind of like the antithesis of travel journalism. Or else travel journalism meets Studs Terkel’s Working.

I’ve been inspired by the Occupy movements going on around the world, but there’s been one aspect that I can’t quite get out of my mind: how can people who’s minds have been so heavily shaped by the evil institutions they are protesting against be expected to forge alternative solutions in the future?

In May I went to a Deep Green Resistance meeting with a bunch of social and environmental activists and one thing really stuck out to me: while their idealism is admirable, when it came to envisioning the post-revolutionary world, debates broke out in a vicious, competitive way that so fully resembled the capitalist values they’re fighting against, that I lost all faith that they could be trusted to form anything other than a carbon copy of the old system. When it’s in your bones...

I don’t know. I’ve given up. Everywhere I look seems so full of corruption. All narratives I hear of history are cyclewheeling repetitions. The environment is being systematically killed. Small victories for one side or another leaves the essential issue untouched.

Sometime I feel so much love in this world. I’m reading Infinite Jest, written by a truly depressed human being, but somehow still bursting with love for everything that exists in this world. It gives me hope. But then I look towards everything that could be worked for and I lose that hope.

I’m working with Dr. Mohja Kahf, a Syrian-American professor at U. Arkansas to spread the word about prisoners of conscience in Syria, nonviolent protesters of Assad’s regime who have been jailed arbitrarily and for the most part, tortured. This is the world we live in.

I want to live in a world in which people don’t get tortured. In which streets are safe and people can live as they choose. The capitalist system is so synonymous in our minds with “Freedom” because, I assume, the phrase ‘free trade’ that the realities of its by-products are either overlooked or interpreted as not so bad. More people have computers and access to products from around the world. True. More people work in horrendous conditions in factories than ever before. Also true. Country sides in every country are emptying of people, who are moving to cities to live and try to work in slums. Culture is dying in the face of homogenization. Everything is getting standardized, happiness levels are plummeting. A few people get extremely rich, but the rest of the world (people, culture, the environment) are getting extremely poor.

The environment is dying in the name of this consumerism that leaves few people any happier. Community feelings are melting to violence and suspicion.

In the midst of it, there’s nothing that I want for myself. I don’t want to be rich or famous. There’s no job I specifically want to do (except novelist and I’ve been trying at that with poor results). I just want people to suffer less. I want to suffer less. I suffer because of guilty conscience. I feel incredibly capable, but like I’m constantly treading water, killing time. Until what? I don’t know. Either I start acting or the world ends.

In the meantime, I’m broke. I have a little money, but Citibank is about to steal most of it because of an account I forgot to formally close, which went from me having a little money in it to me owing over $500 on it in god-knows how little time. And banks like that wonder why people hate them so much.

Can I say that I hate banks? I see red when I think of banks. Just like Andrew Jackson...the guy on the 20.

Human rights lawyer; journalist; shaman (healer); fiction writer; revolutionary (member of the Free Syrian Army)...these are the jobs I want to work. They’re all essentially the same job.

So my idea: Revoyce Productions. Travel around to the far reaches of the world and collect stories. Stories of oppression: the effects of 21st cent. globalization on the lives of the common people of the world. I want to collect their stories and make them available to the world. Imagine a website where you enter and see a map of the world. You click on the country you’re interested in and a list of all the narratives from there in the words of the locals pops up and you can learn what it’s like to be from somewhere. The stories can be color coded according to topic – environment, politics, legends, medicine, violence, resources. Anyone who is struggling can tell the story and others can read it and if they are so inclined, offer aid.

I keep asking myself, what are we working for? The best answer I’m able to come up with is to kill tyrants and let people live how they choose. Of course I’m not so naive as to not realize that that’s kind of how it’s always been and the world we live in is the summation of choices. Everybody’s choices. But somehow it seems like most people are living in incredibly oppressed circumstances.

Wild Irish Rose (11/17)

2011-11-19T15:06:00.002-05:00

Be somewhere where momentum is the atmosphere. What do I really want? Jesus Christ, all I want is peace of mind! No specific goal, specific dream, there was a time when I was well versed in philosophy and religion and it all seemed to be geared somewhere, but really, it distills down to a project to feel good about, someone to make love to. I want to use my body until it sweats everyday underneath the sun. There are so many things I like to do, but almost none that I could never do without. I’m so fucking skeptical of the world and yet transcendent in a nearly childish way: all goes. Anything I could, I could just as easily not. All is a sea of why nots. All is a mushpit of sures and I could go with thats. I have things I want to write but when I sit down to do it, I slog through the same self-defeating thought process and nothing gets written: Yes, the world will collapse, so I guess right now, I should be training myself to live post-apocalyptic. What if technology does save the day and a post-apocalyptic world in which the resume is the only thing is all that remains?!

Aracadia. You could die in your sleep, engulfed in a swirling world of flames, or throw your life away an ascetic. Throw it away treading water in anxiety. There are things to be gone for and these are all always felt, but then the back is turned for what is easy and what feels good, then going for what is not necessarily easy is applauded as the highest virtue and meanwhile, we age.

Capitalism: the gratification for the substance of your soul in the form of a paycheck: thank you. So easy to demonize, equally easy to cite heroes who had nothing like this kind of bad taste in their mouths. How do you write about others? How do you tell stories beyond an everwheeling, poorly described thought process?

Inversion, aversion. A man in mind is on the track of fulfilling his cult-like dreams of greatness. Helping people is his M.O. and his method is self-promotion. A healer. A musician. An activist. If he were to sail a boat for 2 weeks, it would be incidental: to get to his next performance. Miracleman.

Again against the mold: teaching to pass the time, collect a paycheck, while the great movements of world history come and go unattended. I’ll be there. I’ll be minding the movement, and the petty changes chimed by the contro-band sing the rise obliviate.

Beneath the velvet grey sky, behind a pane of glass, warm, enclosed, music drowning the otherwise silent room. Lost in stripes and ongoing songs of possibility. Tales otherwise untold. Otherwise, I will never know. Lock me in a room, entomb me this pressure cooking day amidst the glassblown glaciers, blue rain of burning sunshine. Seeping into the questions of hairthick possibles. 1,000 words have come before...and will come again.

What are the potentials? How we will fill our aching bellies. How do we fill them? Loneliness is desperate. The family way, the working way, the fighting way, gives no space for that burning oblivion.

It’s as simple as a moss. To rise to the occasion. The handed question, somenow, is always already occasional. If war comes to you, you go to war. If challenges come to you, you rise to the challenge. In the meantime, eat. It doesn’t matter what. All is a vote, but health is more important than politics. Just like writing an editorial explaining your vote is more important than the vote itself. You may not even reach the polls that day. Ice cream and coronets. Is the experience of conviction more potent than the act of creation?

History comes and goes, the only value it can hold is the experience of the front lines. The Portland Clowns have courage and conviction to exist absurdly in a hopeless age. Stay weirder than the Joneses, get laid, live politically and refuse to vote.

Lift me, air suspended by a breath, deepened by the dreamers and crying lots.

Otherwise, Anyway

2011-11-17T13:07:00.001-05:00

In a lie, he found the truest words he’d ever heard.

Today I come as Dionysus. Naked, but for a single leathern strap, knotted hip-round, under giant flaming wings. Silver bones. Carrying as arrows down my face, bloods and palm-frond forms of fire: deep painted drags. Above: a headdress of horns and thorns and flowers and feathers. Shoulder-strapped: a taught and twisted bow, enormous and palmpolished. Strung vibrant by skinned sinews from a felled hellbound wintry wild boar. Hanging from my utility belt in clipped and roughsewn knots of raw twine: a flask and a tomahawk. My eyes gleam and my feet are cracked and ageless.

A hunter: I deem in miracles and cut the throats of tragedy’s beloved: the tyrants and soulsnatchers. I look at her. One hand smearing blood across my face, one wrapped in knotted muscles, sweat dripped, and quivering: heartbeat in the flesh. Eye two ‘I’s complicity: the night is a powder keg of purple: volcanic for a velvet bed.

My claws are sharp and my talons dig deep. Soil is transported from here to slightly over there. Prints: I’ve made my mark. My canine aspect gleams as milk teeth in the insincere sun. Poison drips from the corners of my lips: lavender snow. She licks a drops and falls falls falls into ecstatic convulsions. It’s something fails us.

Reinventing the sacred: all lines of parallax fold inward in transcending dance, the cancerous worm of the Logos: humiliates the body, sucks the dregs from drained souls: making space a caffeinated fire of desperate competition.

And in this twitching, sweating dream, my hand is a map of the stars, singing the forest footpaths fearless. Dreams alive as lightning lighting dark and desperate silhouettes outlined boldly in the clouds and all but forgotten: reforged in memory’s autonomous smith, renamed, reimagined, reiterated in defiance of origins. The only cup the future tips is each other. A shoulder ax at bay and a prayer rug on the ground. There is no god but...

Pick your lovers carefully, for in their hearts’ mortal muscles, you pour nothing short of God and God is near the most dangerous tincture known to man. Drunk on dreams in smoke rings and Arabesques. Somewhere scream the lost boys from halls beyond vines beyond asphalt strewn with upturned dumpsters, snow and blood. We smell incense and hear the gentle chimes of sword fights: them in wake now make love to their masters. Sea?

‘Nothing short of God’ but harden bricks drip molten when (and only when) in certain conflagration stokes a body’s heat to combusting. Melt God out molten into the Other’s heart. Look into my eyes. Hold nothing back. The quivering howl of submission, Islam, to the everpressing ache of...

Snakerings and venom. Towers and masts of myth in suggestion. Tis we are the stormies, the furies, the thing in and of itself, L—E, to share to melt to burn to fall to dream to hold each Other’s hand to step the gap to mind the spring to spring to summer’s swelter in incubation and banishments. In and out, in and out. Sweet Kala, my assassin, pilot light of bearable oblivion. Underneath my skin. Somewhere in my heart.

The perfect pace. Viscous, dripping, running whispers of sand caught ripe and riven of her whispered surrender: cosmographical. Greater than any stone on which you’ve ever stood. Whipped into a tremor, drunk on blood from broken hearts – a pomegranate – the swirling stimulus, sucked out as the boardroom bureaucrats crack and crumble concrete goblins locked lost and pus-filled in vault, ‘communities’ behind gates and walls.

They fear. We do not. They dream of colors that we paint our bodies for the dance. They hold some truths to be self-evident, while we are the selves that evince those truths.

Occupy Wall Street Hangover

2011-11-10T12:36:00.002-05:00

'All day, all night, I occupy my lover’s head!’
And bodies beds, the world’s charade,
Now stretch to think just what she said
But surface words were just a pass
To sacred instance lover’s grasp
And this is when time melts away
And rhetoric was always play.

I ask ‘What have we fought here for?’
A thousand answers clog the air
The primal one screams out, 'Class War!'
But somewhere in my mind’s recall
There’s something deeper than it al.
When freedom comes to pass at last
Take me back to that sacred grasp.

From the Sea

2011-10-30T08:58:00.003-04:00

I have been on a sailboat sailing from NYC to the Florida Keys for the past 10 days. I would have liked to post stories and updates during that time, but it's amazing how things like this work. You wake up gradually, spend 30 min to an hour slowly cooking and drinking coffee and breakfast. Then it's your shift to drive the boat for 2 hours, after which, a breather, mostly to warm up from the whipping eastern winds. Maybe you pull out a book and read a few pages, but the scenery floating by is passing and will not come again, so you watch it awhile and suddenly its 1:30 or so: lunch time. After lunch, there's finally some time to do something, but for one reason or another, it seems late, or you want to watch the scenery a bit more, or you sit down to write and the words just don't come out right, so you read a bit more until it's time for another shift and then the sun is setting so as a crew we find a good stopping place and fiddle around with the anchor for far longer than is reasonable. It's dark and approaching dinnertime. Dinner lasts an hour and maybe tonight we have a conversation that takes us later into the night. Maybe there's rum involved or beer and suddenly the idea of getting down to brass tacks and doing some real work is farthest from your mind. Yadda yadda yadda. And the days go by, water flowing underground.

Anyway, now would be a good time to update where I'm at. Where I'm going, but there are far bigger things at stake in this world than my own petty presence, so I'm copying something I've found to be incredibly inspiring:

As I mentioned before, I got involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests when I was in New York. Now that I'm in Beaufort, North Carolina, my only option is to watch the protests from afar like much of the rest of the country. But still, I want to voice support and I want to help spread the details of the argument OWS has in a way that mainstream media would be more inclined to just skim over.

I'm therefore choosing to reprint verbatim a letter of Solidarity written by a group of protesters out of Cairo from the official site of Occupy Wall Street:

Solidarity Statement From Cairo
Publié oct. 25, 2011, 2:39 après-midi EST par OccupyWallSt

To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces forgathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.
But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.
We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28 th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never givethem up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011

How to Lie Your Way into Awesome Places

2011-10-19T13:52:00.000-04:00

I step onto the boat, ready for my interview. The captain asks me, so how much sailing experience do you have?

I smile, oh you now, I spent a few good hours on an old water rat up in the glaciers of Alaska, worked as a fisherman – menpachi fish mostly – on the Kona coast, in Maine, we were lobstering; now granted that was primarily outboard, but on a nice day after the haul, you know, sometimes we’d throw out the gaff and boom and kick it for awhile under the sun. Beyond that, you know, I’ve planted my feet in any old hull that’s floated my way in the last ten years or so. What can I say? I’ve got a natural attraction to decks.

I’m grinning. Mostly because I’m not kidding about the few good hours in Alaska, the Hawaiian boat was not a sailboat, there’s no way in hell the lobster boat would have had sails, and any old hull that’s floated my way (if my memory serves me) consists of a single sailboat I snuck onto floating in the Seine in Paris, just to pass a drunken night and sneak away before the sun was up. If I’ve been on any other sailboat in my life, I have no recollection of it.

But here’s the thing: I want to go sailing. I want to learn a new skill, have a new adventure. While my friends are making money and building up their resumes, I want to commune with God on a two week (all expenses paid trip) journey that ends in Key West, with rum and sand and Cuban girls. Do you know what I’m saying?

So what did I do? I put my $150, 000 education to work and went on Wikipedia. The first sign of an experienced man is language. To convince anyone that you know anything about anything, you need to know the vocabulary. Find out what everything is called. Everything. If you suck at handling the equipment, you always have the twin excuses of I’m rusty and the boats I’ve been on in the past were different, I just need to get a handle on this and I’ll be alright. Or else flatter them: Your boat is much newer and in much better shape than what I’ve been on in the past. Give me a little crash course in her particularities and I’ll fall back into the swing of things in no time.

But once again: Vocabulary. Look to your friend and say, beautiful mainmast, huh? Can you hand me that stay, I want to see how tight it is. Run the running rigging through my hands to get a grasp of the play she holds. Try out the halyards and the sheets.

Then you turn back to the captain and say, the other boats I’ve been on were all smaller than this, they didn’t even have either a foremast or a mizzenmast. It’ll be a small learning curve for me, but I’ll pick it up in no time, don’t worry.

Toss jib and spinnaker into the conversation somehow and you’ve got yourself some sea cred. Now naturally, anyone who has ever actually sailed will be able to see instantly that you don’t know what you’re doing when it comes to knot tying (it’s good to know at least one knot – how ‘bout the bowline? that’s a classic) or running ropes through and following orders. But establishing the vocabulary gets you to the point where the captain may have to show you a thing or two, but won’t throw up his arms in despair that you don’t know the difference between port side and starboard. Hopefully, you’ll already be a few good miles out to sea before he realizes you have no idea how to sail, and by then he’ll have no choice but to bring you all the way to Virginia, at least.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-16T12:48:00.003-04:00

I support Occupy Wall Street. In the last week, I’ve visited the camp in Liberty Park a few times and yesterday, I added my body to those of thousands marching on Times Square and then slowly filtering down to Washington Square.

Coming from across the media spectrum have been thousands of voices of criticism of the protestors, mostly from people who claim they have no focus, they have no leaders, they have no clear goals. I’ve been thinking about that aspect of the movement a lot (and having a lot of conversations about it), and I’ve decided what I think is best now is self-reflection followed by enunciation.

First, the movement is so nebulous because it is against something so fundamentally rooted in our daily affairs as a society; something so integral that it’s actually quite difficult to give it a name (instead of pointing to random symptoms of it). Furthermore, everyone who is alive within that system has a different relationship to it, a different experience of it, and a different visceral reaction to it. Each chant, demand and form of expression that pours from this shifting crowd is going to reflect that. Individually, each protestor has her or his cause. Collectively, we’re against just about everything.

From here, my plan was to lay out an explanation for what, exactly, in the system I'm so against, but I found myself paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the task. So I turned to the man who has swiftly become my favorite journalist in America, Matt Taibbi, and unsurprisingly, he's already written the article I found myself having so much trouble putting to paper. So I hereby defer the reader to his article and let the professionals enunciate that which the amateurs only feel in their guts:

Matt's Article.

Life Lived for Lobsters: Matinicus

2011-10-09T13:10:00.001-04:00

Nobody wears watches. Why would you when the only signifier that matters is the sun? If it’s out, you work. If it ain’t, you don’t. Well, you might...it depends on how ain’t it is. In rain, you probably work. In fog or wind, maybe not.

And everybody works. All are lobstermen: captains, sternmen, and the occasional third man. Third man is the least amount of pay, but also the least amount of work and responsibility. Smelliest, though. The big tank is full of fermenting herring, maggots, pokey, rockfish, sheep bait (which comes in big frozen blocks...that slowly unfreezes and rots over time), and maggots. Third man fishes through that soup with rubber gloves that get holes in them easily and collects the ingredient to fill a bait bag, as per the captain’s orders. (“I’ve been out fishing with dozens of captains over the years, all of whom had different methods for baiting their traps, all of whom swore that it was the best and/or only way to do it. And you know what all of them had in common? They all caught lobsters.” said June) Sternman pulls the trap aboard - or traps, sometimes twos and threes (doubles and triples) - third man flies to attention and empties the rotting old bait bag overboard to the psychotic ecstasy of flocking seagulls, then sews in the newly filled bags while the sternman sorts the lobsters, throwing back the vast majority of them: too small, too big, female with a notched tail signifying an egg layer, female with eggs, in which case you have to notch her tail, then throw her back. The keepers are kept in a keeping spot where, when the action dies down, the sternman and the third man band the keepers (rubberbands on their pincers), double band the hard shells and selects (double the price), then send them through the tube to the tank like an airlocked transport that launches off the news. And so the day goes. From dawn until one third or half of the legal allotment of 800 traps have been checked and emptied and rebaited and thrown back down to the bottom of the sea. Three days on, one day off. Pretty standard. All season. Sometimes through February where the numbers are pathetic but the prices are not.

It’s the market that keeps many of these men above comfortable six-figure incomes. Walking home with thousands of dollars a day. Before expenses, of course. If there were no expenses, then every hillbilly with an inclination to the sea could grab his cut. Licensing is pricey, but then of course there is the boat and upkeep and bait and fuel and your sternman and third man and new traps and buoys and paying those tourist kids from Alaska and Colorado to paint them. Etc.

Then you have to stake your territory, which is about as easy as joining a clan, mid-war in the Highlands of Scotland. A tribal council of the locals gather to determine how worthy you are of laying your traps around the sacred formation. The qualifications are birthright, family ties, length of time on the island, property owned, favorability with those whose grand-grandpappies are buried in the cemetery, etc. They vote and probably not in your favor, but next time it might go through.

And all this money pours in. The kids who dropped out of high school and spend a fair amount of time with a can in hand, or playing with needles and fire, are the richest bosses around. Three months out of the year, the brutal ones, they’ll probably go to Florida or somewhere warm where they can live a high life (whatever they choose to define that way) without work and enjoying the sun, before the new season begins in March and all are hard shell, though if everything’s the same, then prices rarely reflect the elite.

It’s the only industry around here that the corporate model has not overthrown. Maybe it’s because there’s a real limit on what heavy machinery can do, maybe it’s because the laws keep an individual’s yield to a minimum, maybe it’s because it’s the last real thread of ancient local culture in the region, the death of which would spell the death of so many identities and lead to rootlessness, poverty, abandonment, the complete loss of self. Who knows, but for the moment it clings on. The great islands - Monhegan, Matinicus, Criehaven, Vinalhaven, North Haven – full of historical houses and fiercely defensive locals. Maybe the most organized lot you’ll ever see. Life depends on it. Whether it’s saving your worst enemy in his time of true need, or showing up to town meetings or discussions of regulation changes, life depends on organization. Perhaps because of it, this remains the only sea-based industry that has not declined in recent decades: lobster numbers, apparently, are as strong as they’ve ever been.

But life maintains its fair share of bureaucratic nightmares. The environmentalists, bleeding heart whale watchers, who’ve mostly never spent a day of their lives doing real man’s work on the sea, keep changing restrictions of rope type, buoy breakability, distance from shore for trap placement, doing what they can to drive the lobstermen out of business. And then there’s the land management people. When Craig’s house burned down, he moved into the shop, which the LM folks told him he couldn’t legally do for it wasn’t considered sound. Where else was he going to go? Then he got a letter demanding he clean up all evidence of the burnt house in 30 days as it was a liability to the public safety. The guys got together and cleared it and when they were done, he got another letter from the government demanding he leave the fallen house exactly as it was for appraisal by the historical building association to defend it as a monument to local history. He sent the first letter to the source of the second letter, then went and got drunk.

For what else is there to do on an island two miles by maybe a half mile? Ride your 4-wheelers around when it’s warm, walk through the snow, drunk, when it’s not. Visit your neighbors, read, fish, watch TV, cook, fight tooth and nail against the inevitabilities of nature. Get in line when the fuel tanker comes for it won’t be back for months and if you run out of propane or kerosene in the meantime, put on a sweater and start praying.

Build. Your house, a garden, a shop, a new boat with every part imported from the mainland. Invent projects to keep yourself busy. Sit on the porch and sip your Canadian whiskey. Watch life come and go. Fight the never-ending battle against clouds of highly trained attack mosquitoes. Watch a spruce tree topple off in the distance as they are liable to do in mature adolescence. Watch birds from a rocking chair with a aviary encyclopedia in your hands. Talk to the cats. Go to church - but only when it’s open (when the minister is on the island; the summertime) and not on Sunday mornings because everyone else is out hauling. They’ll snicker at your piety while you’re gone. Listen instead to the harbor bell, ringing all day and night as the waves rock it back and forth; ringing like a church bell and playing the same role, calling all the fishermen to God’s great cathedral to start another day of work, pre-dawn. Perhaps work on green innovations. Bring the island into the 21st Century, even if high-speed, wireless Internet has already been here for awhile.

But be careful, for that too can get you eaten alive by your fellow men. Them, who call the land sacred then throw their Bud Light cans into the water after hauling. Them, who burn their trash and tires or else take it out, early in the morning, before the hauling really heats up and dump it overboard. Them, who can’t conceive of waters needing respect, though this high life of millionaire rednecks is entirely dependent on it. Watch out for them, for if they can’t respect their own source of livelihood, or their own bodies (have you seen what they stock their refrigerators with in bulk from Walmart?), then you can be damn-sure-certain that they have no respect for your pussy assed green technology bullshit that only flocks the island with reporters like greedy gulls to stroke your back and look to them with cameras and expectations to tow the story line in quotes. But they aren’t like that. They don’t crumble in that way. They say what they want, what they think, and they aren’t law school graduates like you. Most didn’t graduate high school because there was no money in a diploma for a reckneck (and proud of it). They dismiss you to your face (and to the reporters’ as well), but they turn you into sheep bait when you’re not around.

And the days go by. Life moves on. If you need supplies you can ask a neighbor to pick them up if they’ll be in the neighborhood, but probably they won’t be so you’ll have to charter a plane for $50 to $100, which obviously flies only when weather permits. You could be stranded out here a long time. Luckily there are blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and apples to keep you fed, and all the lobsters and crab claws you could ever dream to eat. An old law permitted a land owner or warden to feed his slaves or prisoners lobsters a maximum of three times per week. But what else do you do with this infestation of giant sea bugs just swarming the water floor on all sides of the island? Eating lobster too often may just be a sign of poverty in these parts.

And now it’s time to go. The season is starting to turn nasty. The mosquitoes are fading out and the yellow and black spiders with the massive, perfectly symmetrical webs are appearing in every corner, every morning, constantly fixing the sabotage that bored hands exact upon them whenever they pass by. Eva’s bakery closed in the first few days of September and now there is no longer a single establishment open that sells sustenance of any kind (except for Donna’s gallery, which sells art: harbor scenes sculpted out of driftwood). Jobs have come and gone and now all we’re doing is reading books in the shop. The time has come to get our bodies back in motion; so sadly, our island resort vacation has come to a close. We’ll send you a postcard and see you next year.

Reconciliation of the Self and Meaning in the World

2011-09-14T08:09:00.002-04:00

I'll get to the self-servingly grandiose title of this entry in a moment. But first, I have to explain my absence from this blog for the last month. In short, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with myself (the second half of this entry will be a return to some essays I wrote in college, which are ironically, more relevant to my life than they ever could have been when I wrote them).

I finished my residency in Vermont and was simultaneously offered a job in the lobstering industry on Matinicus Island in Maine, which is the most fiercely independent, clannish, don't-fuck-with-us stretch of land on the Atlantic Seaboard, if the locals are to be believed. I visited some friends in Boston and then made my way up to Portland, where I met up with my friend Kristen, who got me the job alongside getting herself a job, and then we took a tiny jumper flight out to the island.

I've been here two weeks now. The first remarkable thing (I'll describe Matinicus culture in a separate entry) for me was that I didn't actually have a job waiting for me when I arrived. I had to ask for one, which has led to three separate engagements - working for the lobstering middle man who buys all the lobsters off the boats and then ships them to the 'major' buyers on the mainland; painting buoys; and actual lobstering - the third of which has been my favorite...by far.

The rest of my time has been spent exploring the island, reading, writing, and engaging Kristen in sometimes too intense explorations of the substance of our souls, and by that I mean a lot of complaining about how we don't quite know what to do with ourselves, where to put ourselves, how to live, what to live for, where to live, how to make money and still be happy, how to be happy, when we feel our best, given all options in life what we would truly like to pursue, yadda yadda yadda.

Which brings me to part two of this entry: reconciliation of the self and meaning in the world.

The two essays I've revisited were both written for grad level courses in my final semester at NYU. Something about feeling young and naive in those classes forced me to perform at my best and I still look at these two essays (written in my apartment in Brooklyn under the intense care and supervision of Kate Ray and Nik Hanks in December 2008) as perhaps the two best I ever wrote in my life.

The first I read is an investigation of the similarities between Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Lacan's The Functions and Field of Language in Psychoanalysis and how they both grappled with the meaning of life and death. The life, or libidnal drive, Lacan concludes is defined by our desires and it is through them that we seek out self-recognition. But there's a major difference between recognizing the self through its lusts and finding 'True' meaning in life, something he claims is only discoverable only in Death - the return to the pre-symbolic. The essay ties that idea into Finnegans Wake, but that's not relevant here. The point is that True meaning is only discovered at the moment of Death, which is not helpful for someone looking for meaning now, or helpful only insofar as it forces home the point that it's a lost cause.

The second essay is about 19th Century novels and how all of the ones we studied presented the world at large and a protagonist (usually male, but not always), who was out to find meaning in it. The endings of all these books were presumably the author's conclusions on how, ultimately to live a meaningful life. The form was known as the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. I believe that's all you need to know for the excerpt I'm going to copy and paste below to make sense:

[This suggests] that the true philosophical discovery of the novel was not the human experience so much as the experience of the world itself, apart from any human engagement in it. At the apex of the form, the heroes are not the fictional characters, but the flow of time itself (as in Flaubert) or the language of society (as in Balzac). With regards to the human quest for meaning and reconciliation, both authors would throw up their arms and declare it a lost cause. Since Dante merged with the transcendent light of God at the end of his Paradiso, no author has been able to portray the world as an epic totality that also contains “the sphere of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as a social being nor as an isolated, unique, pure and therefore abstract interiority.” (Lukács 152) This was the self-appointed task of the Bildungsroman, but, as Moretti concludes, after Flaubert it was all but abandoned in the face of the conclusion that either a character must submit to the way of society (as in Goethe, Austin), follow his own individuality to its inevitable tragic end (Stendhal, Pushkin), or simply recognize the fundamental irreconcilability, as did Balzac, who “ended up dismantling one of [humanity's] greatest illusions: that social progress and individual growth could be parallel processes.” (Moretti 163)

Sitting here on a stool in my little cabin on Matinicus, I'm once again forced to look at life in that light. [WARNING - existential angst to follow, anyone who gives me shit about this later on down the line is in denial about how universal this feeling is even if it moans out like Holden Caulfield when it actually comes around] That inability to pick a direction in life and to simply follow it, smiling and confident. A belt, heavily-laden with tools (or weapons) for the road: a diploma, a portfolio, a resume, a wardrobe of snappy outfits, manual strength and skills, a polytropical mind, a dash of faith sweetened with mysticism, the love and support of a diasporic community, confidence and experience from thousands of miles of walking hitchhiking flying training bussing and driving, and a strange kind of literacy that perpetually whispers 'you should know better by now.' Maybe Balzac said it best: the impossibility of making social progress and individual growth parallel developments. To constantly want to cultivate the two and in trying, to cultivate neither: too nervous about money and a lost future to truly commit to the journey inward, too convinced that the journey inward is the only one worth taking to actively pursue a job, a skill set, or even the publication of my better work.

This is the dilemma (in the classic, two-horned sense). The solution: pick one and pursue it sleeplessly. Of course I choose the journey inward, but still, trailheads are lacking, mentors and guiding footsteps, or maybe those are just excuses. The nomadic pilgrim, a student of life with wax in his ears, and the drain cap forgotten at the base of his memory's receptacle. Larry Darrell returns from India, penniless, ready to be a mechanic or a taxi-driver. The hour grows late and misshapen bones begin to calcify. Twosome twiminded, only the road for restless soles, but tattered and lost potential floats softly off on the slightest breeze echoing the question, 'potential for what?' Who's to say, it just seemed present and for brief moments, palpable. Weariness takes over, and frustration is its own little coup d'grace. O lost bemoans Eugene way down yonder in Ashville. 'You'd fit right in there,' they say, 'lots of likeminded folks.' Yeah? Doing what? I've minded and reminded myself of all the great works being done all over the world but somehow can't convince myself that that plunge is where my heart truly lives. Home! I go back to you as the oldest refrain in this stumprotten folk song, strung over and over in the cords of my mind: tangled. Maybe a few more steps? In which direction? Why Home of course: to the people that you love. I'd walk every latitude if that were the case, and when I arrived, I would softly say, I'm here. And they would each in their turn rise, arms around my shoulders and whisper quietly, "It's good to see you." And our souls would catch up until the stay was worn and work would need to be resumed. But what is that work? Walking from home to home: the harbinger of news, like the winged-sandled Mercury, patron saint of poets, traveling merchants, alchemists and con-men? Just like him. My God! I see you over my left shoulder, twiddling your thumbs, shaking your head at me in disappointment, then wandering off to the bars, stumbling back to me in the morning, reeking of stout, whiskey, gin and sex, grinning with the question on your lips, "Did I miss anything?" And then me looking shamedfacedly at the floor, blushing and muttering, "Nothing much." You smirking and us conspiring, but you far too hungover to contribute much to the conversation, so I lighten my load, send belongings home, and begin to walk, feeling holy and righteous until my feet start to hurt and the weather gets a little cold and I haven't talked to anyone in awhile and so I lay down my pack, feeling like I felt years ago, seeing so little spiritual progress, the impotent pilgrim and once again begin to grumble...God damned it.

After Fanon: A Poem of Bodies and Desire

2011-08-22T13:46:00.001-04:00

Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white.
I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white.
Now – and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged – who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man.
I am a white man.
Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization...
I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.
When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine. I am full for the moment.
For the moment, I am realized.
But then the moment passes. And all that was white and held its head high with unsmudged linen becomes as Harun al-Rashid, the caliph who had it all, embodiment of perfection, who wanted more. He wanted experience of the Other. He wanted the richness of psychosomatic memories. To touch and to have been touched in return by that which he wanted to touch.
Suddenly I am a vehicle, an exotic thrill for she who owns those same white breasts that I have caressed, thinking it was I who was caressing them, when in fact they hung plump as bait for my fingers, to lure my body into her body for to fill her with that richness of memory, those mental lines that must persist long after my flesh has fallen away.
I think I have attained but I have not attained.
Like the young virgin who pays the woman of the night to teach him about love and she, obliging, lightens much his wallet, and returns him to the street empty-handed. No longer with love to hold or to hang on to, quietly, alone, he journeys home.
And meanwhile my white woman has moved along, with stories to tell and richness in pose to expose out to a world of the elite. That world, I, hoping to touch, entered just long enough to elicit the little death, and thereafter died, or returned to that same shame that inspired the desire to make myself white to begin with.

Voices in Words

2011-08-21T20:19:00.001-04:00

If Pollack painted with voice instead of paint,
perhaps he would conceive a city block.
Each sound in spectrum, prismatic and alive,
and yet, all sounds, all sounds, all sounds.

In excerpts from writings, all cut and rolled together:
a living spliff to smoke upon:
Alive
All words, all words, all words.

And if I wrote an autobiography,
as did you, as did you, as did you.
And if we cut apart our works
and shuffled them all together,
Who would see? Who would see? Who would see?

At what frontier do words remain words remain words?
In what phrase does my voice raise colors to the sky?
And yours: when and where and why?

The Portlandification of Brooklyn

2011-08-18T10:48:00.002-04:00

"Hippies, hipsters, homosexuals and other deviants moved to town in waves until weird started to look normal. Consequently, those who wanted to keep defining themselves as weird had to worry about being more alternative than the Joneses-"

-Adrienne Jeffries

Read the article here!

Epiphany

2011-08-17T01:11:00.001-04:00

Writing is the story of how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.

The Clash of Our Cries Til We Spring to be Free

2011-08-10T10:53:00.002-04:00

It's amazing how in an idyllic, quiet setting where nothing much tends to be happening at any given time, there somehow seems less time than ever to do things: make phone call, write letters, etc. I will say that I've gotten a great amount of work done. I suppose the only question is whether or not it's the right work.

My first chapter has 11 sections to it and I've written 7 of them. Today my goal is the 8th.

I got frustrated last night and decided to skip ahead and start working on chapter 3, which I discovered, to my delight, worked a wonder to expand my view of what I'm doing. I have a much better idea of what I need to accomplish in Chapter 1 if it's to get me, eventually to Chapter 3.

The feedback I've gotten mostly revolves around the fact that everything I write is too dense: too many images, too much philosophy; when it's clear that every word is carefully chosen, it makes the whole thing feel overwrought. This PhD anthropologist gave me some very honest but hard criticism saying it felt like I didn't love the reader and I was making him or her work too hard for too little of a payoff. That nearly made me want to quit the whole thing and I sat for hours on my floor with the lights off asking myself over and over about what it is that I think that I'm doing. The solution proved to be to just work on Chapter 3 instead and I think that got me on a better track.

Later that night, I went to a dance party and a few people sat me down and made the point to me that they had really enjoyed my reading on Sunday and they gave me a little hope that perhaps the anthropologist's critique was less universal than I feared. Maybe the whole thing just needs to be heard read aloud.

I don't know. My new goal is to aim to finish a solid polished draft of Chapters 1 2 and 3 - the first 3rd of the book, but also something that hypothetically could be published as a separate thing: Volume 1 of 3. As volume 1, it will probably prove to be about 60-65 pages single spaced.

Beckett

2011-08-06T10:36:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was crazy productive. I was working on p. 5 of chapter 1, which I thought I would be done with by 4:30 (I hoped so because everybody was going to a swimming hole then and I wanted to go). Ended up working until 6, eating a fast dinner until 6:20, then working until 8, when there was a poetry reading (Ranjani Murali, Marie Ponsot) after which I returned to the studio and worked until 11:30 that night. But I finished part 5, and I was really happy with it. Not sure if I have the courage to return to it today and confirm that I'm actually happy with it (I started drinking around 9:30 last night, so the last little bits in the end might have come out of a mild drunkenness.

Pessoa says, "If a man only writes well when drunk, I would tell him: get drunk. And if he said to me that his liver suffers because of that, I would answer: What is your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you do, while the poems you write live forever."

Now I'm on part 6, which is exciting because it's the first section I've gotten to that I have brief notes for, but have not yet written a single word of a single draft of. That is to say, I've entered the realm of completely fresh construction, write new, not rewriting. The prospect is scary and exciting.

Part 6 is all about the Law, so I'm going to include some parodies of Kafka and his critics, with some Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' thrown in there.

I leave you with the last few sentences of one of my favorite books, Molloy, by Samuel Beckett:

"But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understood it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report. DOes this mean I am freer now that I was? I do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."

The Lion King

2011-08-04T13:45:00.003-04:00

Today, I finished my rewrite of p. 4 of chapter 1 and it's only 1:45. I still need to write my daily poem for today, but after that I'll begin work on p. 5, which was my goal for tomorrow. There's a great feeling in being ahead of schedule, though the catch is that p. 5 is as far as I got on my original stab at this novel. After that, I have my notes, but the real work of creating from scratch will begin. My method so far has been to print out everything I have for a section and lay it out all over the floor, looking at it from a bird's eye view with a correcting pen in my hand. After p. 5, I have nothing to lay out, so I will return to drawing diagrams of the development of the section, dancing the voices that I've set out to establish and meditating on the best course of execution to follow.

In the meantime, here's the super super intense first draft of p. 4. My new draft is totally toned down from this, but I need somewhere to deposit all the original prose poetry that composed it, most of which is only to be found on the editing floor and in the recycling bin at this point.

Jean didn't want to be Nala but it seemed there were few other options. Milos had suggested Zazu, but Zazu was bossy and even a seven year old could tell that nobody liked him, so Jean rejected the idea out of hand, and Jamie had whispered while the other boys giggled that Ginny was best to play Zazu anyway. Then, giving it some thought, Jamie had, with some hesitation, suggested Mufasa, for he was certainly a prominent character in the early part of the story, and besides, he argued, Jean had a quiet way of talking that reminded them all of Mufasa anyway. But Jean said no, feeling somehow that it would be presumptuous of him to play such a grown up character. He didn't know how to be that grown up, plus (though he wasn't actively cognizant of the fact) he instinctively felt in his heart, a fundamental aversion to the idea, as if playing the role would be a kind of transgression against an authority that, without having the slightest clue what it was, he felt a natural respect for. Mr. Rostau, Jean declared, had to play Mufasa, even if he was busy working upstairs, and even if it meant he had to die halfway through the game. It was only right. Jamie flinched at the suggestion of his father's death and reminded Jean that his babba had to play Rafiki, for he was the only one wise enough.
So Nala it was. Though it meant playing a girl, Jean took consolation in the fact that, gender handicap aside, she somehow seemed to be tougher and more adventurous than Simba, for after all, it's she who inspires Simba to enter the elephant graveyard, not the other way around. This point he kept to himself, though, for the odds were, if he said it out loud, Jamie and Milos would jump on it as fuel for another argument.
Meanwhile, Jamie and Milos were in the thick of another argument. Jamie argued that he should play Simba because they were at his house, and the movie, at least the first part, took place at Pride Rock, which was Simba's house. Milos claimed the point was irrelevant because they had never given homefield advantage to anyone in their games in the past and when they had played Aladdin the week before, he had let Jamie be Aladdin, even though they were at his house and he had wanted to be Aladdin. Jamie didn't buy it and pointed out how at the time, Milos had insisted, in fact on being Abu because, he had claimed, Abu is the real hero of the story. Not only that, but he had also played the Genie because his songs were the best. And anyway, everyone knew Jamie had to play Aladdin because he was Arab - his mom had told him - and therefore, he was practically born for the role. Milos was dubious and asked if that meant that Jean had played the Magic Carpet because that was the role that Haitians were born for. Jamie said no, that only certain people were born for certain roles and everyone else could play whoever they wanted to play, but Jean was born to play the Magic Carpet because he was so smart and he didn't say much. Jean blushed but didn't say anything.
"If you play Simba, then I have to play Scar again. I hate playing Scar!" Milos whined.
"It's only until we get to Timon and Pumbaa! After that, you can be Timon if you want…and next time we play Donkey Kong, I'll let you be Diddy Kong. Ok?"
Milos groaned and swung his head in an exaggerated show of acquiescence, but finally accepted (it was Jamie's house after all and if they fought any more, Mrs. Rostau, who was watching them from the loft like Sarabi on top of Pride Rock, would probably intervene on Jamie's behalf and so the whole thing was probably a lost cause anyway).

Tara, who was indeed perched atop her own Pride Rock, sat sewing disinterestedly golden thread into black cloth, and kept shifting her view from the art on the walls around her - mostly abstract impressionist pieces done in acrylics that she had collected while living in New York - to the cubs singing and playing a half story below on her expensive Moroccan rug. She regarded her son with a peaceful, satisfied grin. Got the makings of lawyer. A politician. Speaks like King David. Authority. Gets what he wants. Dreams up the rest. When I grow up, I'm going to invent a money machine and buy everything in the world! Better get started, kid. Need it now. And all of his questions! All the time. About everything. Driving home from school: What if we got a flat tire right now? Who knows, buddy. What if? Could Superman run faster than our car? Why don't rocks grow? Who would win in a fight, Babba or a tymanisoreus rex? Why is Dracula so mean? What if I turned into a vacuum and ate the whole world?
Creative. No doubt about that. Milos saying bang! bang! I shot you twice, you're dead now! Jamie, for whom, of course, it is impossible to die, shakes his head, nope, I'm a robot now. Milos, So my gun is a wrench and I'll unscrew your head off! Jamie But my hands are lasers and they melted your wrench! Meanwhile Ginny playing like a normal kid, cooking up big stews in empty pots in the backyard. Jamie jumping in and splashing around, Ginny wailing No! no! no! Get out of the soup! Wow, that's been awhile already. Seems her games stay indoors now: dolls and horses, watching TV. Not Jamie. He likes movies, but he's happiest when building legos, making up stories, giving cars voices instead of rolling them around, taking stuffed animals on journeys to the end of the world. Always talking. You'd think he's already got all of history down in his head. Intimidates some. But he's cute. Already tell he'll be good looking. Skin and eyes like his father. Lips like his mother. Fair hair, too. For a dark boy. Advantages. Baby fat sticking around, but baseball will fix that. He's got the tools to. Weapons too.

"And vultures are flying around him and landing to eat him up when EEEEEEEE-YAAAAA Pumbaa and Timon come running in and they beat them all up and Pumbaa says I love bowling for buzzards ha ha ha and he sees Simba lying there and says I think he's still alive so Timon lifts up his paw and gets scared saying it's a lion and jumps on Pumbaa's back and tells him to run but he isn't scared and says he's just a little lion can we keep him but Timon says he'll get bigger and Pumbaa says but then he'll be on our side and Timon says that's stupid but then he thinks it's a great idea that he thought of himself and Pumbaa picks up Simba with his nose and they carry him to water and shade and wake-"
Milos cut Jamie off, "And I say, you ok, kid? and Simba starts to-"
"What do you mean you say?"
"I'm Timon and I say-"
"No I'm Timon! And Jean is Pumbaa!"
"What?! That's not fair! I had to play Scar! I get to play Timon!"
"But you wanted to play Simba, now it's your turn to play Simba!"
"I don't want to be Simba, I want to be Timon!
"I want to be Timon!"
Jean rolled his eyes then suggested, timidly, "Why don't I play Simba and Jamie can be Pumbaa so you both can sing Hakuna Matata?" From the loft, Tara heard his idea. Quite the diplomat. Reasonable head on his shoulders. Too young to see what it's about. Not the song. It's power, desire, will. Over others. Over your self: what you become.
Jean's compromise did not strike either of the other boys as reasonable. Nor did his subsequent suggestion that they forget the story and all just sing Hakuna Matata together.
Jamie groaned and replied, perhaps a bit sharply, that Hakuna Matata was only fun when sang within the context Simba's metajourney over the course of the film: Without the contrast of his upbringing, which instills in him predominantly, a filial reverence for his responsibility to his royal bloodline (and a loyalty to his late father), a song like Hakuna Matata (which provides a glimpse into the possibility of an ideologically alternative lifestyle geared ostensibly towards the gratification of hedonistic desires, and lacking that sense of responsibility), proves to be little more than empty rhetoric.
Jamie lifted from the floor a marker used earlier in the evening for drawing characters from The Land Before Time, and rose it over his head, a magic wand, then with a violent jerk, hacked it down, a machete, hard in front of him, as if to sever all possible continuation of the argument. There was something in this movement, something detached from the moment, timeless, that reminded the boy's mother of a young painter she had known in New York when she was only nineteen or twenty years old and a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology: The Factory. How they would all be. For fifteen minutes. Dressing folk singers and revolutionaries. Giving life and voice to the inanimate. Mass. Old awe to new names. New eyes to old objects. Production. Together for them. He lifts his arm in birth: Be you! Express yourself! You've got a million dollar idea in that heart; let it free! Let your style carry you to the top!
"And besides, if I play Simba, then I have to return to Pride Rock and kill Scar. I don't want to fight Scar! I want to stay in the jungle with Jean and go swimming. That's why Milos has to be Simba because he likes to kill!"
Whoa, easy now, tiger. Stand up for yourself but don't get misquoted. They'll eat you alive. In this together until a little appetite. Give you all they can to fatten you. Until the day. Peering through your eyes. Through your work. So beautiful. Brilliant and the like. Come to coffee to pick your brain. Or a show. Apartment: dinner with us where. Like to introduce you all, the terribly talented: good company. Fascinating, up and coming: Woman. Designer. Cough behind a fist. Fishing for keys to the chapel. The spirit of sanctity. Oh Lord, let me profane. Tell me what you really feel. Not bad for a woman. Model. For me. In the name of art. What you really feel. You understand: an artist too. Good stuff. Your clothes. Close. Vestments. Beneath the smock. Walking into my room just so. You understand. Close the door. Behind the clergy. Scrubs the chapel with holy water. What's that sound? Tara listened up the stairs. Virginia whining. Talking to Khalil. Probably wants something.
"I do not!" Milos protested.
Touched him wrong it seems. One and all of us. Stand up for yourself. If it's a game you must play, play to win. They'll shit on you when you're small, so grow. They'll look at you the same one way or another. To fuck you. So scare 'um. Nothing more powerful than an intimidating woman. Fierce. Body and mind. Still see the body. Climb into my, to climb up the. Compromise. Actors, all of them. Performing art. Faint thoughts. A pretense. I'd love to see your portfolio. But would you like a backrub first? Play by the rules. Go far. But where's that? Dime a dozen like cans of soup. On the rise. On your knees. Strategy. Scripted words. Worked though: Like a charm.
"Oh yeah, then why are you a war then?"
Who was a war? They were all a war: Handguns in New York. Graffiti in the subways. Man clubbed to death this morning in SoHo. Over the news, napalm dropped in Vietnam. And us too, all of us, drinking wine and name dropping. Fireplace lit in flames of false sophistication. The newest work of Pat Myback. Oh yeah, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And have you met my friend: a great admirer. My clothes? Naw, something deeper. But what about your friend, the songwriter? Didn't you hear?
Upstairs, Virginia's whining was getting louder.
"Mommy told me that Bosnia is a war and you are from Bosnia so you are a war!"
Alright now, back off. He is what he is. Leave the boy alone. If he's a war then so's your mother. Every body a battlefield. Trench warfare as shells scream over all and nothing. Heart beating on the line, in throat. Rainforest hillside, all those trees. Vietnam. Images of the dead. Pieces blown out of heads, arms missing. A threshing machine, chopping people as fuel into pulp. On TV. Now Sarajevo. Concrete block buildings crumbling into piles of rubble, fingers sticking out. Bits of hair, melted flesh. Ethnic cleansing. Must have been real dirty. Stoic empty faces: the dead. Rifles in hand. Sunglasses, to shield their eyes. All of our eyes. The streets of New York. Behind concrete walls. Steel cages. My chapel. Lead me not into temptation. But deliver me: a child. Wasteland full of predators. Consumption. Only chance is to learn-
"I am not!"
She said no, and she refused to be like that. Live your own damn life and feed your own damn belly! Away. Escape the lions to face the wolves. No. Not like that. Create yourself. Change yourself. Fuck their fangs and their appetites. Be, on your own damn terms. Shift like seasoned fashions. One step ahead of the game. This body. This weapon and piece of meat. Pound it like it is. Reform, restructure. Cut back pounds here so they want to stick it in there. Paint over, dye, accessorize: suicide to whet a tongue. And the words. Choose right, learn. Talk an expert. Infiltrate the cogs. With boiling blood. A stand. Wail wafting through walls and slamming feet on floorboards. Virginia was howling now: an all out tantrum.
"Yes you are! Yes you are! You are a Bosnia War!"
Leave him alone! Can't help where he comes from. No one can. All in bunkers or looking for refuge. Dodging Gatlin gun deaths by the thousands. Street scrapping to claw bloody into her pulpit. Mind and mark on which she stood. Her body. Chelsea generals and gratification pegged status. Level over level. Haunting eyes of ghosts, the footpaths of the rising. For yourself. Poison destroying the weak nourishes the. Success is the only fucking option. To lose is to die. Starve in the gaunt face, cold and hungry culture of vultures. No warthog salvation to the cool of water. Carry me alone, daddy. Lost. Picked dry in the boneyard. While bullets smashed the jaws of neighbors and carbombs. The Television. The paper. Deliver us from evil. Our own recesses. All a war.
"But I'm American!"
All too American! Iron fucking erections. Financial District. Monuments standing stark naked over a foundation of…like the Chinese buried under the wall. To progress! And women. Forced entry not as a trauma but as a way of life. A hundred million hungry voices howling out their needs. Sucking cocks like rungs up the ladder of. Massacres. Slavs. Vietnamese. Our might is right. America the grand! America the erect! Jacking it into the melting pot where she might sooner drown than. No more! No fucking more! What the fuck is Virginia fucking screaming about?! Stop it! Tara leapt to her feet. Have to stop it. Stop the boys! Do something!
"Why are you killing people?!" Jamie, breathless, screamed out.
"Shut your God damned mouth you stupid spoiled little girl!"
The answer came not from crying, quivering Milos, but booming down through the floor like a voice atop Mount Sinai, tinted faintly with an aging Brooklyn accent:
And then there was Silence .

Wind could be heard breathing softly against the rotting boards that held the house together. Outside, crickets panted steadily in a perfect, unbroken rhythm. Inside, the first noise to break the silence was a barely audible sob wafting gently through the halls and dancing in light pirouettes down the staircase. The sobs were soon accompanied by the pitter-patter of eight year old feet, bound up in thick wool socks, scurrying across a carpet, then the slam of a door.
Tara looked from one face, frozen in confusion and fear, to the next of three six year old boys, then immediately began speaking, stuttering, explaining. She didn't know what there was to explain for she herself had almost no idea about what had just happened, but her motherly instinct told her it was now her job to explain the ways of the world to the boys, explain why the sky is blue and all the other things that usually can be tabled with the platitude, "you'll understand when you're older." In that moment, older no longer seemed a deferral but now an immediacy, a confrontation starkly present that somehow seemed in its very essence to be a judgment of character. A shift had occurred in the world her children had been inhabiting. Something in the air made it excruciatingly clear that in the real world, animals didn't talk and sing and if Mufasa died, he sure as shit wouldn't appear, drawn out in the stars, in your time of need, to tell you he loved you.
"Everything is OK. Everything is going to be fine. Babba's only lost himself for a moment, but Mommy's here. You're OK. You're safe here with Mommy. Everything will be fine."
Will be.
Jamie looked into his mother's face. There was something harsh and determined about it, as though she were midway through seizing a moment she knew might never come again. The boy recoiled from her outstretched arms and folded back instead into the unsteady hands of Jean and Milos, who, not expecting his weight to be thrown at them so suddenly, fell backwards - falling, dropping bodies, back, words, fallen - to the ground in a tangled pile.
As they struggled to recover from their fall, Jamie's inexhaustible tongue was finally loosed and he began explaining to his friends in terms that did more to add to their confusion than assuage it that his father was, as they knew, the gentlest, wisest father in all the world, and that something must be terribly wrong for him to have yelled as he had.
Tara failed to catch the end of Jamie's apology, for, having finally come to her senses, she took off running up the stairs to find and to hold her paralyzed daughter.
You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch. You will not treat my daughter like that. You will not talk to my children like that. I swear to God, on my dead mother's Bible, that you will pay for this.
Virginia's door was locked. Tara knocked and pleaded soft words through the wood, but the sobbing girl refused to open up. Tara relented and marched instead into her husband's study, where her eyes caught, not the man she had married, but strangely, a painting on the wall, hanging over his desk: the only piece the professor had ever painted himself, as far as she knew. It was done in heavy layers of oil, wild thickstacked strokes, and depicted a snowy forest scene behind which was barely discernable a small cabin, lost and buried, with only the faintest hint of light seeping out through the trees. Tara, entranced, studied this painting for perhaps the first time in her life, losing momentarily, all sense of her purpose in entering the professor's study.
Hours later, reflecting on the one-sided argument that had followed, Tara could only recall two aspects of it: the image of Khalil Rostau's face, grave and humiliated, and herself, shivering, walking lost and alone between trees, through the snow.

An Arab in Brooklyn

2011-08-03T09:27:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I rewrote section 2, a task that proved far easier than I ever could have guessed. The community here is everything I could have hoped it would be: good conversation, plenty of options for walking and swimming and dancing, etc. I'm posting the next section in its entirety because it mostly consists of two sprawling prose poems and then a couple tiny dialogue sections that hold them together. My task is to shorten the two poems dramatically today, while still maintaining the argument that they were meant to put forth.

James burst like John the Baptist through his father's studydoor, yelling his head off in proclamations from his first day of kindergarten.
"Babba! Babba! Guess what, Babba! Babba, there's another bwack tid in my tindergarten twass!"
Startled, Professor Rostau looked up from a cluttered desk on which lay buckling bound folders coffeesplashed and torn, ragged upturned books by W.E.B. DuBois, bell hooks, and Frantz Fanon, a plate crusted over with tortilla shards and dried hummus, and a cold mug of stale coffee, the culprit of the aforementioned splashings some seventeen hours earlier. He ran a disconcerted collection of fingers across his bare chin, where a fierce beard had once reigned tyrannical, but, now, sabotaged, was only a muted ghost. He stared at the boy, trying to reassemble the words that had just been hurled so freely in his direction.
A black kid? Hell, has the boy learned to discriminate already? How? From whom? Another black kid? Who was the first? Was it that girl, the daughter of what was his name, the designer from Atlanta, who came to talk to Tara about their clothing lines last year, who they introduced to Virginia while the boy was - where was he at the time? - but there was so much space between them, something keeping them apart, until booming paternal voices forced them together to shake hands and the first thing out of Virginia's tactless mouth was 'why are you black?' like a gunshot at the starting line (though he supposed it was only natural for a six year old), the beginning of a Race, and he'd seen immediately after, the look of death across the trenchlines or call them picket lines of suspicion, but the four year old handled it well enough, shrugging back, 'because my daddy is' she'd said with a pout on her lips and a hand on her shoulder, the reassurance of divine old daddy, support in your time, need, when your back's against a wall, who Rostau could have sworn was gay, what with the fashion but there she was, a daughter, southern angel of coal, Georgia plum, and Khalil looking into his eyes thinking all along god damn, brother, why'd you move her to Colorado, the continental divide, amidst pasty faced hillbillies and spaced out mountainman yuppies, milk pastured, naïve, only color ever seen round here's the Mexicans cleaning their floors or token Chinese and Indian flares behind counters at restaurants though he supposed there was the Shambhala center and all of those Nepalese souvenir shops, and the designer returned his eyes to his eyes with a look that held back a four hundred year deluge, pleading 'I'm fucking trying here' with his mouth closed and the muscles of his clenched jaw silently throbbing the word, History. But in a moment those eyes of that other, that artist, shifted, and held a growling bristle of accusation, the angry look of a heart betrayed because of course they had been standing out front of the house, four stories of excess rising up behind them, obscene, and they didn't ask but demanded 'no! what are you doing here, this city on a hill, looking down over the trailers on the plains, licking your lips, eating steak in your white job mastah professah-man, you ain't foolin me, I see through you, within your fortress you're still a fucking towelhead, and you know what justice means, I know you know, and all we've struggled, all the pain and the violence, cocktails of fire, what language did you learn, trading in your tongue to the first buyer, hope you got a good fucking price to afford you protection against this-' Nightmare. And Khalil couldn't take it anymore and had looked away, looked down, where he'd studied the dusty red rocks imported to form his driveway, curving elegantly over rocks that were also red, thinking sadly, if you knew if you only knew my brother, my lover: Amma giving birth in blood and infected filth on the ship to Brooklyn, and Babba, cut down on the docks, and that year, 1948, when all we'd wanted was, all they'd asked for from it all was simply to be, to let us live, from out of all the death and the violence, all we'd wanted was refuge, simply, to Wake. He returned his eyes to the man, now armed with a determined squint, mustered compassion, trying to balm the fire of hatred beginning to flicker in his eyes, but the man's previous look of pleading recognition was now completely lost without a trace and, knowing not what else to do, Khalil had looked, impotently, back at the ground.

Rostau, disoriented, cleared his throat and asked his son, "What do you mean by another black kid?"
James looked surprised. "Another one! I'm not the onwy one!"
Khalil coughed a short, nervous laugh, which having cleared his lungs of their strain, gave way to a fluid rush of giggling. Stupid little genius.
"So you're black are you?"
"Of tourse! Just wike you, Babba!"
Just like him: an Arab: a Palestinian: an immigrant: a raghead: a black man at whose expense this country built itself into the self it had always dreamt of becoming: the expendable proletariat or worse even: An American. Maybe so. Maybe not. Rostau wondered: off the boat and straight to work, Amma and Babba (no maternity leave for political refugees), their new life urging forward, unceasingly toilous, forming endlessness, endlessly forming and working and waiting for ever, for evermore, forever more behind in the name of God, the most beneficent, sustainer of the worlds, they pledged allegiance to the flag and the Untied Statements of American history, 101, lightlifelove: down Atlantic Avenue, the great cultural corridor, boulevard of Brooklyn, a botanical garden of culinary samples, every homeland pollinating the air with smells of their essential spices: all they'd left behind yet also carried with them, and their clashes of times, sweeping street skirmishes, entrenched turf warfare, where the muffled cry of a transplanted muezzin interlaced the prepubescent whistles of newsboys and hoarse hawks of fishmongers and restaurateurs: survival of the loudest in a polytonic chorus of upstart possibilities, forging the air breathed in and out, sewing through his neighborhood and scissored in ribbons by keen menacing eyes furrows fucking sand nigger demon worshippers spat pollution in bloody toxic contamination fed roundly by a boundwall of tradition: kissing the book with stony faces of fuck-off determination, stoking fires out of greasepits of whathaveyou survival, backstrung, for the whispers and the looks didn't carry rifles titles and badges like back home had they stayed . They laid down their hopes and holds and hearth in smoketide, reinforced the door, and cooked eggplant like Amma as a girl crossing in and out of Lebanon: old stories injecting fresh contours and Babba got work down at the dockyards where the white people still spat at a Muslim, yet clasped hands into hands when the work needed doing, melt to build, but none too long at all then the strikes came and with them the rioting; course no one could afford it, especially not with children, but it was rights, human dignity, the words had been professed: it was everything they'd fled forming Israel so recently to find, so he'd stood fast to the frontlines, stood fast, an American, bloody-faced but present so his family could eat another month, and it was there that they'd shot him through the head, and he fell, hands still clasped with a Paki and an Italian on either side, in-line . The funeral'd been nothing to write in the papers with no money even to eat and Amma howling on her knees, making living and crying one in the same, kissing al-Qur'an, praying God the Merciful, believe, just believe and He will protect, while tears wearing through Babba's old rug, air getting too hot to breathe as all eyes turned to him, little Khalil, heir apparently, the boy of the times, to carry on like his father, rise up in madrasah, to fight, ulema, for jurisprudence, pride, and year after year of breaking his back, how he disappointed her, such a smart boy, but a shame, his head in Jahannam like a Jew, watching the sun set from the East River, skyline of the Financial District, hiding on Fridays, performing prayers, but whispering instead in his head to his hero, Benjamin Franklin, and kneeling west, until she slapped him across the face, kharah, and he'd crept out of the wroughtiron furnace, wafted up the through the vents like a puff of smoke and ran to Manhattan, home of the Jews, with the sky forming limits to new views, filling lungs and lunging, breathing in the oxygen . A steelglass explosion with more stories than the Arabian Nights, with more and less walls and ceilings, in all counts, a boundless surge of discordant chords slamming out the music of the future: a totality, so large and so loud that he himself ceased to be, and he bounced along, a depository outside of control, his own, a dirty ball of mudsweatspitsmoke, vaguely brown, vaguely black, exchanged, walking hot across the frying pan of civilization, breathing free of abandoned bigotries, boiled down to stock in the indifferent sludge of meltingpot bigotries, warlike in thrift, a mug to an ocean, dishelmed, dissolved, mo.le.cu.les d ta ch ng, ed-dying, swallowing, carrying time with space and history's fictions away with those never mastered until a hook - caught! - yanked his protean mass out of the sound, downed roundly bound sink, and plattered him out - ca-shing! - the boy with the Words, thoughts watched through golden eyes, down encreased the seaport, regenerated, flesh cut from fish, seeing in his mind's I, engaged, educated, reading and washing, convincing through presence, workwordworld: conception through black, what it says is everything to be.
Professor Rostau looked from the blank of his mind to the works splayed on his desk to the anxious eyes of his five-year old son and perhaps betraying, accidentally, a deep conviction, asked, "What does that mean? What, in your eyes, does it mean to be black like me?"
James squinted while his eyes settled intensely at a point in space somewhere over his father's shoulder until a thin smile caressed his face, then all at once his expression lit livid. "Fun and adventure, wike Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Not wike Ginny and her Barbies, they are boring wike the other tids in my twass."
The professor looked deeply into the eyes of his five-year-old, a sense of seeing what the other is seeing, like Van Gogh reinventing the sky, he's learning how to read already, so young, prolific, knew the alphabet before he was two, he could see it and he could know it, signifiers, signification, everything, now strapped into bourgeois private country day school, learn to shelter self against the sheltered, or acclimate, but they'll teach him French and Latin, how to teach himself, but still, the damage to his self, already feeling the looks on the first day, sensitive heart, symptomatic rearings, violent and consumptive, hypocrites, trains of them dressing pet projects in tiny Polos with rich lapels. He'll have to stand in silence, alone perhaps, an exile in the only world he knows, but transcending rules the great mind forges, an artist, as an infant in puzzles and songs, tales of how he wants to, growing fly by the time he…has eyes let him see, if even only two sticks he held, immediately, to feel, to see, to stand up and sing.
"But Jean and me pwayed Twistofher Towombus today at wecess! And we distovered Amerita and Hatey too betause Jean says his pawents are fwom Hatey and then we were bugs battwing giant spiders and supermans tilling bank wobbers and megaman and mitwoman tilling all the bad guys and he knew all the things we could be and when he said we were somewhere I saw it just wike it. Anything! anywhere! And I said we were fighting Spwinter and Jean was Weonardo and I was Waphael and we fought off all the foot twan."

"Why did you encourage Jamie, tonight, in believing that he's black?" Tara, incubated in warm silken sheets, draped by a mostly see-through nightie, demanded of her husband. Her auburn hair hung suspended, loosely lit in the electric glow of a cantaloupe nightlamp balanced neatly on her bedside's nightstand.
Khalil looked slowly up from the book he was reading, then turned darkly to her.
"First tell me why it matters to you."
"Why it matters? It matters because the reality of how people will-"
"People will what?" Khalil stabbed in, voice pitched, piqued.
Tara paused, surprised, a look of distrust in her eyes, then, twisting her hair into a bun as she spoke, continued, "Oh people will nothing. It's a question of the reality of how he looks at himself, what he learns now will shape who he grows into. He's not black, he's Arab, half Arab and it's important that he knows that. Important that he takes pride in it! And as far as I'm concerned, the sooner he learns to embrace his cultural heritage the less fucked up this world will leave him in the long run."
She could see a slight bulge in his cheeks has he clenched his teeth behind tightly sealed lips. Finally, slowly, he spoke. "I never encouraged the boy to think himself black. I never discouraged him either. As far as I'm concerned a five year old child needs as little discouragement in his life as he can get. God knows he's going to face plenty of that as soon as those spoiled peers of his grow old enough to think like their parents." He paused, staring through her, coldly.
Then he blinked and shook his head and his eyes softened noticeably. "And anyways, Tara, these days, who is to say who counts as black and who doesn't anymore? I see enough white kids every day, down at CU, trying desperately to dress and talk and move like they've got soul."
A sharp laugh popped from his lips and he kissed his wife's forehead, petting her little red bun, then pinched one of her nipples and turned back to his book.

Day 2

2011-08-02T10:52:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I completely rewrote part 1 of chapter 1 (out of 11 parts). Today my focus is on part 2. I'm not going to post all of my first draft of it, just the sections I imagine will get a major overhaul.

Pale, frail Jamie Rostau looked upon his sister Ginny, her cheeks rosy with glee around her open mouth full of baby teeth and stained still from the chocolate pudding enjoyed by all before their nap. Her hands were outstretched, fingers spread wide, and she jumped up and down. All around her were throngs of likewise bouncing children, all maintaining similar looks of anticipatory ecstasy. Stationed over all of them, rising above the din of their chorus, sat patiently the Television set, recently commissioned to play VHS videos of technicolored dinosaurs singing educational lullabies to aid in enforcing nap time. The Teacher's Assistant pressed rewind on the videotape, and the frozen image of a muddy orange puppet with glued, stationary eyes was replaced by a cackling static behind which one could just barely make out the image of the President of the United States and the sound of his words read my lips. The screen flashed a sudden white then receded into black and the static roar muted instantly.
On the floor, amidst the refuge of soiled blankets and roughly strewn pillows the squawking children flashed fuzzy suits adorned with trains and teddy bears, clouds and little fishes, princesses and happy monkeys, and one boy wore a shirt printed with the face of a clown, frozen in silent laughter, eyes rolled back, pale as a cadaver. Jamie too was dressed in fuzzy pants with booty socks (he wore crude geometric sailboats all up and down his legs), but unlike the others, he wasn't smiling at the offered host of free cookies. He was looking into the eyes of the other children. There was something in their looks of wild determination that intimidated him, terrified him. He didn't like it. He didn't want to be here. He wanted his babba and his mommy, up in the quiet refuge of their beautiful mountain fortress where the air was luminescent and clear, silent. Where there weren't any other kids (except Ginny, but up there, he knew all the best places to hide from her), where his babba held him and told him about the lemurs of Madagascar, and where he could walk around in the trees and hear the sound of them kissing each other in the wind.
Not knowing what else to do, he fell to the floor, his little fuzzy bottom landing squarely in the unblinking eye of Elmo (who was too busy juggling wooden blocks in the safety of the floor rug to notice the intrusion). Little Jamie began to whimper, then, collapsing under the full force of his confused isolation, began to cry, louder and louder, until his reddening face became a solitary beacon of warning within the frenzied sea of cookiechumming, fuzzypantsed babies, and the rising pitch of his monotonic howl cut through their static din like an air raid drill. Failure.

Tara commanded her Audi 90 Quattro through the painted lines of the September streets of Boulder, Colorado while her son whimpered pathetically in the backseat. Again. What did those books say? If your child, something something, not play well with others. The laws of the playground. So little changes. Growth. The boy needs to learn. A little spine. With them. Can't have him. Coward. Suckling his father's god damned mystic.
"Jamie, listen to me, honey, you can't keep doing this." In her rearview mirror she saw her son's red face still whimpering, but looking now with fascination out the window at the trees and houses as they smeared past. He pressed his forehead to the glass. She turned her glance back to the road, catching briefly the look of her own eyes reflected in the windshield. Something about her harried look embarrassed her. She looked through her eyes to the colors of the foliage hanging down over Broadway. What kind were they again? Balsam trees, linden, maple, popular. Poplar, which one is which? Must be poplars. Popular trees, should be turning soon. Adapting to new seasons, new fashions. Nothing like upstate, but they have their charms. That purple tree blooming in front of the high school. What kind is it? No clue. Beautiful, though. Should be dug up and planted in a gallery. Then everybody would be able to see. The boy. "Jamie, are you listening? If you can't learn to play along with the other kids- Hey! Buddy, listen to me! All the kids like your sister" ("Me!" Virginia yelled out upon hearing her self referenced) "play a certain way, the right way, and when you play, they'll accept you and you'll grow up into…have all the friends in the world. But if you can't learn their games, discipline, then they will treat you pretty - pretty awful actually - and you wont become like, you'll be left lonely. Alone. That's bad, really bad….Do you understand? Are you hearing what I'm saying?"
God, that sounded stupid. Why did she always sound so stupid when trying to explain things to the kids. Jamie, really. With Ginny she could usually express herself pretty damn well, but words always broke down limp when she thrust them at her son's ears. Not like Khalil, he could say anything to James like the god damned pope. Ill Papa. All these old churches. Ironic, just thinking of: Trinity. Lutherans, back on Pine with the old bell and records of the settlers. Small town gossip more likely. Congregational. Daddy before the people back in Greeley: straight-backed, unshakable lips, sneering. Give us this day our daily. Receptacle of a tradition, one sneering son after an old pioneer. Back from the old countries, Luther and St. Patrick, guess old hammerhands won out in the end. Pike's Peak or bust. How many of them busted? More gold than an alligator could sink his teeth into! Fools gold more like it. Radical fools wagoning out to that wasteland. Paradise reclaimed! Not the garden, the one that came next. Mind your own stake of slop in the cracked fucking earth now before it's too late. Each man a millionaire. Generations of chicken scratch. And forgive us our trespasses. Condemn us more like it. Fucking tyrant about what would the neighbors say, God damn me. And mama with her lemonfaced sinner this, sinner that, why can't you be like your. As we forgive those who trespass against us. Sniveling trashhole for all their expectation, carrying their crosses while they sat back in whiskey and judgments you'd think they were their own damn Saviors. Backs at their little girl, redhaired, redeyed, looking out to. Mountains on the horizon, spiking where the sun sets, but out there: cow shit and slaughterhouse. Smells washing town. Dusty, splinterdry farmhouse with the peeling gold crucifixes spackled over like fucking wallpaper. Screaming goats outside before dawn even, tripping over stones and the roosters telling you the struggle didn't dry up in the night. Day after day after year after year. Alone in their cutting words. And lead us not into temptation. Over the damnation howls of bloody America, pastoral into horseshoes. Hardest worker. You'd think the land was sin itself. To be broken. Make them all see. In the church to prove your devotion. The arrogant sneer of demonstrated piety. Ethics in spider webs. Hard work for sweaty clothes. But deliver us from evil. Sharks in the rocks. Alone. Powerless. Until: Light of refuge in seeds of steel, new artifice. Across form: trans. Thy will be done, looking in the I. Escape. New words, recognition, an own Self. America. Times changing, no status quo but creation: ideas, built self, safety in obscurity: gold not found but made. Love for beauty, no family name. Command and conquer on terms flexing stems over deepening roots. To become, to own, terms. Tired of the rural roll? Act now and buy your ticket on a boxcar or forever held in pieces! Bleeker Street. Radical proof from the wasteland to. Penetration. A way. A blossoming collective: salon. A man.

Chapter 1: part 1

2011-08-01T10:03:00.001-04:00

The following is the beginning of my aborted start to my novel, written in 2009. I present it here as a record of change from what (hopefully) the novel will ultimately become.

On both sides of the mountain, snow began to fall. Through the valley, the winter weeds shivered as an icy breeze swept over and across them while flakes stacked up on the red rocks that held them apart. Night was setting in and the last indigo glimmers of a fading sunset turned the view through Khalil Rostau's window from the mountain to a reflection of his face, lit dully by the soft light that surrounded him in the fourth floor attic of his canyon home. He looked into his own eyes with curiosity, set as they were straddling the peak that was swiftly vanishing with the moonlight. A damp whiteness grew across the window as he gently exhaled, careful not to wake the sleeping infant he held against his bare chest.
He thought his eyes looked tired. The feeling of weariness had been creeping into his movements more recently, but now, it seemed, he was really starting to look it. Behind his curly chiaroscuro beard, the skin on his face was beginning to droop the heavy droop of disappointment and his eyes had a smoky lackluster about them. He felt he looked substantially older than he had ever seen himself, and for a moment he wondered how he would look if he shaved off his beard.
Professor Rostau (for that was what he was generally called) turned his gaze from his reflected self to the warm and snoring mass in his arms: his two week-old son James, a little god in his freshness, he thought, all powerful because he was still too young to smile. James (or 'Jamie' as his mother was already calling him) was everything that he himself no longer was: The baby’s arms were little rubber sticks that could bend wherever the boy might need them to, while the professor’s arms creaked with an old pencil stiffness from forcing numbers through the grinders of abstract social theories for too many decades, though he was barely thirty-nine. The baby’s mind was free of any kind of discrimination, while the professor, who’s field was economics, had spent the whole frosty day in his office trying to apply one of his general principles of social and sexual growth among proletarian teenagers to the accounting measures of some deadeyed bourgeois assholes (on commission, of course) whose money had failed to buy them any shreds of compassion. On the other side of town, a tadpole dotcom was paying him to speculate over some stock market business for them, when really, to be truly honest, with a business plan like the one they submitted…he was too tired to even get depressed about all of it. He took a deep breath and thought about how nice it would be to maybe take a short walk through the woods: clear his mind a little; but looking out the window again, he remembered the snow. The mountain was completely whited out now. A full scale blizzard was seeping in. It looked like they could be socked in for a day or two. He exhaled harder and the view was once more shrouded over with breath condensed across the window leaving him only to look upon himself and his son, incubated in their home by a state-of-the-art central heating system that worked by pumping hot water through pipes in the floor.
Barefoot, he now noticed the soft and comforting warmth his house radiated, enveloping him. Then he noticed more acutely the greater warmth emanating from James, straight into his own heart. Thoughts of the boy dragged his mind to his wife Tara, who he now saw reflected in the window, standing in the doorway behind him, looking vaguely annoyed about something. The thought depressed him that once he found out what was bothering her (probably troubles in her salon), he would yet again have to choose between either comforting her with obvious words or standing a beacon of understanding silence. Both options, he knew, would seem condescending to her, but how else could he respond to such redundant, childish complaints? A gulf was eroding between them, he could feel it without even looking at her: somewhere between his back and her front, like she was falling slowly farther and farther behind him, forgetting how to walk, while he just continued plodding along as usual. Her mind, he felt, had been slipping for all of the last two years: ever since their first child, a girl they had named Virginia, had been born prematurely.

From her position in the doorway, Tara caught Khalil’s Arabian eyes reflected in the window. Piercing her. Sinbad's curved sword, jingling hoops of gold and sharp ivory minarets singing out the songs of the dawn. A hot itch crept up her spine (Kundalini was it? or Mahayana?) even now, after three years of marriage and six years of touching this man: her breath coming asthmatic - in and out - tight, irregular spurts.
What about the salon? Green fabric with winterlace- Her husband…she lost her train of thought. Avoiding his eyes: too sharp. Graying hair curling his back. An old man already or more now distinguished? Changes. What would they say if they could see? Dignity, wrapped in his arm, the great thinker, silent revolutionary like who was he? Lying in his bed with all his great thoughts…Baudelaire? Or was it Baudrillard? Sculpted too, didn't he? Standing half naked on his coasting merrels. Breathing. Up and down his shoulders: those nameless people in his ideas. Ganesha the Destroyer cradling her little-their little boy.
She stepped forward and ran her newly manicured palm over his back. Ebony on ivory: no wait, other way. Moist and warm, or hot, like usual. Unreasonable amounts of body heat. Tara smirked. The money they could save on heating bills if they only piped the system through his bloodstream. Desert blood. Her hand tingled moist.

The professor felt cool the request of her touch, the love behind her caress, and it eased his mind a little. He smiled and turned to face her. An anxiety flooded suddenly her blue eyes, as if she was mentally bracing herself for a suckerpunch expected any moment. Lately it seemed she was always wearing some degree of that look around him: an observation that disturbed (and embarrassed) him more than just a little bit. But there was warmth in his eyes now and that warmth seemed to thaw her out for the time being. He bent in to kiss her, carefully leaving enough space to avoid upsetting the baby in his arms. Tara jerked forward suddenly to meet his kiss halfway, arching over Jamie, who, had he been awake at that moment, would have looked up to see two inconceivably huge figures colliding above him. In his sleep, however, the rhythm of his dreams began to shift as discordant heartbeats sped up on both sides of him. A tonal duet.
Jamesie softly moaned.

The Green Mountain

2011-07-31T11:39:00.002-04:00

This is just to say that I am now firmly entrenched in the Green Mountains: a state of mind and body. I'm at a writer's residency in Vermont for the next 28 days. My goal is to write a 300 page novel in that time. Doable? Probably not. Tryable? Fuck yeah.

I'm going to be mostly out of contact. Emails will work but I'm trying to keep my phone out of reach while I'm working in my studio, which is fly: room 8 (my lucky number) on the second floor overlooking a wide, placid river with green banks pouring down the sides to keep the water clear. I'm in the tiny town of Johnson, which has one bar, which doubles over as a pizzeria.

My Tarot reading about this venture said a new period of creative output is dawning in my life and the only thing that will stand in my way is, unfortunately, the Devil himself. That is to say material temptation is my largest hurdle. Leave behind wine women and song to find the turn where I went wrong. And focus all my vision inward, to reach my goals before this winter.

So here's my proposition: Ima try an' write a poem every day while I'm here as a warm up exercise. I'll post them on the blog along with a word or two about how the work is coming along. Email me if you want to come visit, but apart from that, don't be offended if it takes me a long time to reply to email.

Here's a poem I found in my journal from last summer (read it slowly, out loud, the rhythm changes a lot and only works if read slowly to accommodate):

You said you need to notice you
a thing I think I needed too,
But when the time came to reach out
through love's lost twine tangled about,
The broken bracks of unseen spokes
encycled spoking speaking out
And by the fire's flirting flare
we sought out what was gorging there,
But point and tack and take it back
and let on where your hopefuls lack
and find yourself within a mirror
wondering what heat is near,
Because your thoughts are nonetheless
(and mostly writ just to digress)
on fences burning on the the plains,
in cityfolk who dress the same
to fit in with our joint vocation
submerged as one alien nation.

I realize that I just don't care
about the topics written here
and whether they are strong or weak
and whether I stay mute or speak,
The well is full and monochrome
and all they ever want is home
(and rhyming couplets are the same
as every other tired game)

And somedays you have energy
and life is bursting with what to be
and sometimes heart and mind are beat
and every face echoes every street
and what is green and what is black
are only one (reverbing smack)
and angels watch from towered walls
as mankind grows and mankind falls
and maybe we are only ants
(they watch us cheat and watch us dance)
like hungry jackals taking treats
to lonely corners for to feast
and my oh my how they are tiny
and the wisest poems simply whiny.
And other days, as sunbeams grow
and light the skies, the people know
that God and love are only functions
that give this wiry life its gumption,
but once again I can't quite tell
if writing's just like ringing bells:
there is no need beyond aesthetics
and swollen prides are dead prosthetics.

So there's that. And here's a poem I wrote a couple days ago, dedicated to James Collector:

Escapism rebounding distraction:
a sense of responsibility-
that is the ability to respond
(to provide a response)
-under the guise of building character,
as if it were a building.
[Max coughs his consciousness back to life]
To live a life of laughter after all,
one need only travel through that world;
insular eyes to the yuppie view
that paradise imbues
(the mystic "possible")

Meanwhile, the concrete realities
of the "we" we recognize
materialize

Starting tomorrow, I will post sections of my new novel. Not how I'm writing it now, but how I started it 2 years ago. What I'm working on now should be waaaaaaay more accessible.

The Tipping Point

2011-07-22T16:08:00.000-04:00

A pine waits for indigenuity,
(with faintly pink snow),
A chorus of repair;
Renewal, alchemy of the quiet shift
at noon
on winter solstice day

Vision

2011-07-11T23:28:00.001-04:00

To join a band of gypsy pirates who engage in acts of poetic terrorism to undermine the dominant culture of economic subjugation and exploitation in the name of freedom of soul and indigenous rights to self-determination incorporating at all times the spirit of laughter. Aka: anti-colonialism, both economically and spiritually.

7/6/2011

The Avion Assassin

2011-07-09T21:42:00.002-04:00

An excerpt from my book, I sadly have to cut out, due to the fact that it's completely arbitrary and irrelevant. But I'm quite fond of it, so I'm publishing it here. It must live somewhere!

The Avion Assassin carries a waterbottle and he can't be trusted. His steps are sharp like a hatchetblade, and his eyes, the gateway to his soul are thick as syrup, opaque, dark and deep. His head, a sculpture hurried to completion as if to meet a deadline, is curved and fine in parts with lumps left unsmoothed and mysterious. The waterbottle in his hand is half full before you meet him and half empty when he leaves you dead.

Pirate Rant

2011-07-08T15:05:00.002-04:00

"You are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security...They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage."

-The Pirate Bellamy, Captain of "Robin Hood's Men"

T.A.Z.

2011-07-08T14:41:00.002-04:00

The following is Copyright infringement. I don't think the author, Hakim Bey, will mind. In his own words, "all this material...appeared on the early Internet (under the anarchist anti-copyright agreement)..." I imagine if you copy it from this blog and paste it on Google, you'll find enough other versions of it to clear my plagiarizing name under the pretense of precedent.

The following is an excerpt from T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism: Second Edition with New Preface!

"Surely someday soon some real opposition will begin to cohere. A new movement will appear based on both solidarity and difference, as opposed to the sameness and separation of commodity culture and the Global Image. No one can predict the shape of this movement because it will be in some sense post-ideological as well as post-religious: spontaneous, experiential, popular. I suspect it will be passionately Green and somewhat anti-Civilization, with a touch of Luddite technophobia. It will be "poor" and deeply spiritual (not religious but perhaps shamanistic). It will be "social" and resolutely anti-Capitalist. It will probably emerge from the former so-called Fourth World and the cutting edge of resistance to genetic imperialism and corporate neo-colonialism. It will take different forms in different places, avoiding big confrontations, using new guerilla tactics of resistance and opening up new kinds of liberated space/time areas.

"And if we're dreaming, why not dream big? A whole country or bioregion transformed into a Permanent Autonomous Zone? If post-modernism offers us the melancholic freedom to pick and browse the ruins of the Past and salvage whatever shards we may find amusing, why not dig up once again (surrealist archaeology) some of the shattered relics of resistance, revolt...even revolution? Can these antiques ever prove dangerous again? Can we evade or even oppose the Final Enclosure - and learn to create our own Outside?"

xii, T.A.Z., Hakim Bey

Another Hymn to the Apocalypse

2011-07-02T23:05:00.002-04:00

man oh man, the grand tetons!
the crumbling appalachian plains
the growing din will rise to meet them
but in the end it's all the same;
to cook and clash then sing out sweetly
hymns to resurrect the soul
we correspond our tirades neatly
then end up with a glaring hole;
so take the bait to end it swiftly
and rise in false apocalypse
the lips of killers feign to miss me
but die in tiny gasping slips.

happy birthday tv!
(i wrote this at the downer while you were playing foosball!)
june 29th, after midnight (so technically june 30th, but it's cool)

The Fox Romantic

2011-06-29T14:45:00.001-04:00

The Fox Romantic wore a costume
sewn of words he’d heard around,
the clouds of sounds that would accost him
made the pose he took to town.

And in those clothes there was a secret
demonstrated in the streets
each lady, once she’d look upon them
was instantly weak in the knees.

For they were forged of her desire
the Fox himself had nought a say
as such his posture was a mirror:
unconscious lusts all on display

The Fox Romantic took advantage
of hearts he need not comprehend
but likewise, he was used as footbridge:
an object for to chase an end.

Untold Tales

2011-06-28T20:49:00.001-04:00

Mow the lines of treachery: a history bequeathed to thee
and see what we believe we see, to dictate collectivity
But dialects are just a way, to specify a way to pray
To take a god and give it flesh, and to refresh, to take what’s left:
Now inflate to a titan’s height, within the fight, we find our bite,
and bore straight through inheritance, a bonebent way to script a dance
Macabre, macabre! The sailor lands, and speaks all that his fate demands
By standing by an ocean scene, a face struck still, complete, serene
And what more is there left to say, when faces tell a wandered way?
And what more is there left to know, when all of it is simply shown?
In each step of a livid man, his skin burnt to a telling tan
And in his question for some gin, he tells where all that he has been,
And underneath a placid sigh, a timeless cry, and the he dies.
The story is not relevant, for all his strength clearly is spent,
It’s more of what he is a part: a jigsaw piece, a human heart.

6/28/2011
1:27 am

Bloomsday Poem

2011-06-16T18:16:00.001-04:00

Ineluctable modality of interpolated memories, what being this size, as they say. And sometimes, sometimes the words just won’t come out and the world of people, a prison, a prism that cracks and dishes light that I can only breathe in, in tiny gasps of breath because otherwise it’s too much, my lungs just aren’t that large, but still the soulfulness of the sounds and the symphony of the spectrum from feeling ten feet tall to a tenth of an inch to be stepped on, thought through my eyes. And we all hold it. It’s a coarsely feathered nest that surrounds us like a wearing, tearing halo by our guardian angels who hold our logos in their robes, and temperature and air and the view of sky from beds that can be hard to soft to anything always reflecting an experience ineluctable to words, just a childish need to bark ‘I Am’ for otherwise we could only all be readers, glinting, glaring from inside our sleeping sacks, contemplating, unworded, the Signatures of all things I am here to read, I am here TO read, but is that really it? Is that the best answer we’ve come up with? For maybe it is just to play pinball. To bounce and hit and hope and let the lights bright up yelling ding! ding! ding! And the glass above recalls only the Limit of the diaphane but as such we are limited, as such, such are we children, with little stints of fashionable display and rebellion and pointed ambitions, all of which eventually fall, sleepily, back into sack, for to Fall, like the crest of a wave, back into the mass that is the ocean. Shut your eyes and see.

Kill your Darlings

2011-06-13T17:41:00.002-04:00

Apparently Ernest Hemingway once offered up the advice for young writers, that in order to edit a piece to what it truly needs to be, you have to 'kill your darlings.' When I was a freshman at NYU in a creative non-fiction class, this quote came up frequently, and it was usually applied to poetic flourishes in which the author flexed his or her creative muscles to an unusually strong degree, but in doing so, offered little to moving the story forward. While we can all appreciate a nice paragraph, if it plays with language, leaving the plot untouched, there's a good chance it has no business in that particular story.

At the moment, I'm unemployed and focusing all my time and attention on editing my novel 18, Alien Nations that I wrote when I was 18, and that's the issue that comes up the most. I know the novel is too long, it rambles, and it has no real discernible plot. And yet I have the hardest time bringing myself to cut out sections that I know don't belong, because, frankly, I'm surprised and elated to discover that I had the ability to write as well as I did 5 years ago. That's not to say that the whole thing is well written - not by a long shot - but there are glimmering moments that give me comfort and encouragement. The quote below opens up the second to last chapter of the book, and while I think it's a lovely little description of rain, I know it ultimately has nothing to offer the story at large (and when you need to cut 100 pages out of a 345 page long book, the story at large will always win out in the end). As consolation, I choose to print it here as a prose poem instead of letting it inflate an already engorged novel.

"Way up Boulder Canyon, high above Denver, where the snow falls on misty valley days, I felt tropical rain in October. Laying on a futon, resting from the world, the hypnotics of the clock droned on and the sun passed by overhead, shroud, rainclouds thick and intransible. Drip tock tip drop. Tin roof above, glaring hot furnace steaming my skin, breath creeping out like whipped cream, the sky opened up and little marbles of bells jingled and jumped for hours, so soft and hard like forbidden sex, soothing my mind, warming my spirit. Tropical rain."

Cannipitalism, Infantilism: Part 1

2011-06-08T17:13:00.002-04:00

Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Perhaps we could go further and say that the act of storytelling is synonymous with the act of living. And what do all stories have in common? Motion, animation, the difference between atoms jiggling at their lowest threshold and Absolute Zero: as cold as cold can be, motionless, truly dead. But nothing in this world is ever truly dead. There are always reverberations, continuing streaking fierce momentums carrying a state to a state, or a loss to a dispersion.

And finished flesh still holds heat and potential, as the carrion of the carcasses of those we love are eaten to nourish a predator. But predators want to live like prey once wanted to live, and life is always all about living, as love wants to love, and life wants to live and lifelightlove wants to rejoice in loifve (I miss your friendship CJR).

But Hell. Talk about collapse. How have you been lately? Answers are stories told, and I could say good and the story of my life, the ongoing unfurling is ‘good’ or I could tell the laughtrack in my mind, which I usually do ad nauseum, but in doing so build a foundation on which to walk, not unlike the sculpture on 30th and Canyon of the Self-Made Man, who is literally chipping himself out of a solid block of stone, but you wonder, who initially made his wrists?

The Story:
The tipping point. Writing obliquely for self-protection, though they say the truth will always set you free. Freedom is the story and it is the tipping point and there are so many ways to dig through a ditch, but only one way to eat an elephant: one piece at a time.
Cannipitalism is at it again and this time instead of inspiring metaphysical views through the clouds of the clockwork of time and fortune, I feel fierce, I feel bloodthirsty, I felt like the Lorax who speaks for the trees for the trees have no tongues. I was a wounded wolf, with no pleas for pity, only an acid hatred for the men in white suits with hooked wands, tasers and nets. If I’m going to go down, which I am, then I will yell as Lucifer once yelled (for a very different reason) non serviam. They tell me I’m paranoid. They tell me I’m taking too much of the world’s pain onto my own shoulders to shoulder too much responsibility and eventually it will crush me. That’s OK, I don’t mind being crushed.
Every morning I’ve woke up since I was 14, I’ve tasted a vague and inconsolable nausea in my mouth. [Here now begins the story, flourishing poeticisms completed.] Starting with my own dearest Mother, I saw that our consumer-oriented culture was always at the expense of Her: that is to say, we slice and scorch and suffocate and poison our Mother Earth for every plastic bag that conveniently helps us conglomerate and carry our mass consumptions back to our isolating and alienating boxes of dwelling. But at least it’s comfortable, right? Why is it comfortable? Because of the 70% of the Earth’s population that has not, not because they are lazy and didn’t work as hard as the average American after finishing high school, but because the average American, whether consciously or not, stole their money by way of an unjust system of economics built by the beneficiaries to be winner-takes-all. And we have taken all that we can take. Which has led to our glowing radiance of happiness, right? Yep, that’s why most of this country is on anti-depressants.
I wake up nauseous. So I search for a solution through travel, study, alternative lifestyles, investigations of consciousness, and I conclude that to save a victim of abuse, the first step is to separate that victim from the abuser. If that abuser has an ax, would you really try to sew up the ax-wounds while the ax-happy aggressor remains in the room, swinging the ax?
But there are always excuses: excuses of stagnation, excuses of comfort. It’s easy to ignore deforestation and the decimation of the oceans when the hills are so green around Boulder, Colorado. Meanwhile, I work hard for money in order to turn around and purchase products that reinforce that system of infantilism, a system that does nothing but belittle me, keep me dependent on the tap, and the light switch, and the supermarket. A system that tells me that so long as I’m not the most beautiful then I am next to worthless, valueless: a system that measures a man’s soul by an economic standard.

All the while, the Earth is still being killed, the Brazilian government just announced they have finally (despite the monomaniacal efforts of far too many environmentalist who should never have had to sacrifice their lives and their time to fight against something that shouldn’t have existed in the first place) approved plans to build a dam on the Amazon.

A straw broke my camel back. My ship through the desert has sunk and I can’t live this way anymore. I can’t continue contributing to the system that continually breaks my heart. I can’t allow the excuse of paralysis to hold me at bay anymore. I have nothing but options and need only a direction now. There’s a certain point where we must draw a line in the sand about our own moral stances and begin walking forward by way of that foundation. Moral relativism carries us so far through philosophical debates but when the time comes to actually act, to actually decide ‘how then shall I live?’ Nothing is more paralyzing to actually living in a concrete world.

These are my moral beliefs:
1. I’m against cruelty and exploitation in any and all forms.
2. I’m for personal responsibility and the autonomy to live by (and die by) the decisions we all make in this life.

I’m thinking of environmental activism, walking to Argentina, making a documentary in the Middle East, learning wilderness survival skills, writing a novel in Slovenia, etc...Fuck, who knows what's actually useful, what will help and what will just play back into the system. But for now, the world is wide open, it always has been. But now, finally, taking a stand, I quote Cesar Chavez, “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

May 20th, 2011

2011-05-20T15:15:00.000-04:00

Whether tomorrow is Judgment Day or not, I’ve got a lot on my chest that I need to lay to rest.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’m turning 24. And I feel at this moment like I already miss the world. Last night I told Max that I feel like I’m either on the cusp of enormous and thrilling movements, or I’m ready to throw in the towel and stop getting out of bed in the morning. Pretty extreme opposites, I realize, but I feel somewhere in my spine, creeping in a kind of desperate faith that describes the conflicting world views I’ve been wrestling with since I was 14 years old. 10 years now. I never thought the term ’10 years’ would ever mean anything to me.

I turned 14 at the end of 8th grade, my last year of Middle School. Centennial Middle School in north Boulder, Colorado. I have no recollection of what that summer was like, but I do know that 9th grade at Boulder High School, during the course of which I remained 14, was the hardest year of my life. It got better from there. In fact, it’s always gotten better: year after year, I feel my life gets twice as good as it’s ever been. Of course there are some exceptions, some stark low points, but in general...

It seems to me that it has always been a question of faith: a question of what do we believe in, what are we working for? In response, plenty of people would say something along the lines of ‘the joy of being alive’ or ‘the beauty of each successive day.’ No matter how great that sounds, that’s never been me. I’ve always been too dark, too heavy for that to be an apt description of my thoughts when I get out of bed in the morning.

What is an apt description, however, is the kind of bi-polarity I mentioned in the beginning: either the grand cosmic forces of unity and love created a world in which people work together to heal and to love and to celebrate the beauty of each successive day, or this is a cannibalistic environment where one has to work hard to feed himself and to create friendships based on a certain mutual lust and mutual suspicion. When I’m at my best, I’m working for true good in this world; working to foster love, create beautiful things that remind people of God without needing a single word, make people suddenly feel so rich and so full in their skin...But when I’m at my worst, I’m holding my breath to avoid the spread of malignant tumors in the heart, clawing desperately at the surface level of a pretty face, watching my bank account, and counting down the days until freedom comes at last.

I have good days and I have bad days...that’s not true. I have good moments and I have bad moments.

I’ve always felt like I was given this twisted spine by God as an everpresent reminder of the weight of the world, which is so unbearably heavy, and an awareness that no matter how I choose to get by, nothing in that essential weight has ever changed. But one day (I’ve taken consolation), one day I will do something that will free myself from everything and I will finally stand tall (I wear a juju, given to me by an Imam in the Gambia for that exact reason: it’s a prayer from God that will keep my back straight, both physically and morally, make me an upright man). Right now, on the cusp of my birthday (the day of my birth...to be born anew every year) all I can think about is strength and weakness. I’m thinking about the meaning of courage, what does it take to walk through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in order to be all that you can be? Or is that even viable? Am I weak, a coward, (mal)content to keep working jobs to keep paying rent and keeping myself fed while I get older, while the world degenerates more, while my health fails, and while the stories of indiscretions, “fuck ups”, keep piling on and on. Meanwhile the weight grows heavier. I always thought that the weight came from a certain responsibility I had to the entire world: to save it, to reform it, to do something drastic. I now realize that that weight comes only from my self-criticism at my inability to live up to my own expectations.

I feel lucky because my family has never had expectations for me. They’ve made it clear that anything I’ve ever done up to this point is enough for them and they love me for who I’ve become. I feel infinitely blessed for that. Because it means that all my expectations, all my hopes, are only to please myself, this is a battle I face only against myself, and I suppose that makes it a little easier.

There are times, though, when I don’t feel the weight. They come at all the expected moments: when I’m writing something I feel proud of, when I’m having a conversation that seems (in the moment at least) to be important or progressive, when I’m discovering something new, or when I’m doing some kind of meaningful work. So what does meaningful mean, then? Anything. Anything you’ve got faith in holds all the meaning in the world. With faith, with direction, and love and courage, all steps in the right direction feel meaningful, and there is no weight. When that faith falters, or when I’m just having a bad day, I do nothing, I flounder, I tread water, I tell people about all the great things I’ve got in the works, and then I procrastinate. This situation has led to a very all or nothing outlook on life for me. Either I find my purity, solidify my faith, and work for peace...or I can’t get out of bed in the morning.

Tomorrow on my birthday, if I don’t ascend to Heaven in the Rapture, what’s next? The line from the Tao I’ve quoted by far the most in my life, If you want to be reborn, let yourself die, once again comes to mind. It’s my day of birth. To be born tomorrow, I have to die today. What does that mean? I don’t know. I feel like it could mean that my hesitation needs to die, or my laziness, my lusts, my egoism...something. But who the fuck knows? Maybe it’s just my sense of ‘I have to...’ that needs to die.

It would be great if I ascended to Heaven in the Rapture and so could finally get some rest, but I’m not counting on it. Instead, maybe I need to take it as my 10,000th wake-up call to get born, to move forward, to stop using finances or economics as an excuse, to straighten my spine, and be whatever it is that I know I can be on those days when I feel my best, on those days when I have Faith.

Weakness and Strength (a Santa Fe poem)

2011-05-07T22:55:00.000-04:00

I remember that time when we were laughing with arms across each other’s shoulders, looking to the future like predators, and when we got wild there were slices and bruises all over our bodies, but we didn’t feel them at the time, no, not at all, and in the morning we couldn’t believe how many slices and bruises we had and where did they all come from? But it just went to show that when you’re feeling ten feet tall, you’re too big for pain.

I remember that time when I was sick and alone, stumbling with sloughed shoulders to the bathroom and back and back to the bathroom, so soon after, and I stepped wrong and stubbed my toe and fell to the floor with tears in my eyes because no toe stubbing had ever hurt that bad in all of my life, and I didn’t know it was possible for pain like that to strike a body, so willing was I to just give up the ghost: to let my broken body finally be at peace.

I remember those times when we were walking or driving and I was being mean; I was being mean because you made me mean, and I say that not to scapegoat you and sidestep responsibility for my own cruelty, it was just that: when we were together (and almost no other times in my life) I could hear myself being mean, I could feel my body being nasty, and I hated that, and I hated you for bringing that out of me, for making me feel that, and you got defensive (rightfully so), and you would try to be mean back to me, you would try to play my schoolyard bully game, but it didn’t work because I didn’t care enough to let it work, for as far as I could tell, everything I said was fierce and right, and everything you said was unconsidered and desperate, and you couldn’t touch me, you couldn’t touch me, you couldn’t touch me at all.

I remember those six words you said without any preparation, only because they were true and so simple, and in their honesty was everything that needed to be said by anyone to anyone and they fucked me up for months afterwards (I still feel the occasional shuddering flashback) and I couldn’t look in the mirror without wanting to cry, without seeing my stupid showy tattoo telling everyone who never cared everything I intellectually concluded about the world, and in your six simple words, the hypocrisy of it was the only living truth, and in the days and weeks that followed, an unkind glimmer of an unknown’s eye could make me crack, and I would crack with tears in my eyes wondering how it could be that everyone everywhere, in every pair of shoes across the world could be so cold and cruel, and what were we wasting our time on this planet for if it was all only to be so cold and so cruel, so I hung my head as I walked and I didn’t want to see anyone’s eyes because no matter who they were, it would hurt too much, it would hurt too much.

But I also remember that other time when you said I was so sweet to you, you said I was too good to you because I wouldn’t back down, I wouldn’t let it slide, I wouldn’t give up my grip during those few so precious hours, and there was no outside world, there was no such thing as time because no appointment, no obligation, no physical need could have been great enough to take me away from you right then because you needed me, you needed me and I was there, and I didn’t walk away, I didn’t leave, and you came through to the other side, and you said I was good, and I knew I was good because I felt good, and I could see the sweat and relief on your forehead, and I knew that together, we had done good.

Gayle Crites: Passport

2011-05-03T16:30:00.003-04:00

Now that I've completed (over) 30 poems for National Poetry Month, my next move is to...visit Santa Fe, where my mom has a solo exhibition, opening up the summer season at Chiaroscuro Gallery! Anyone interested should check out her work online, or (if you can) Come to Santa Fe! It's sure to be quite the party for the opening and I'll be looking around to groove with some fly folks while I'm there.
http://chiaroscurosantafe.com/exhibitions/54/

On the left is my favorite piece in the show, called Bloodline. I wrote a poem called 'Blood' that will be included in the show (I think printed on the wall), which I will post here at an appropriate time, which aligns with this piece pretty pretty well.

con besos,
t

To You, Anyway - April 30

2011-05-02T22:43:00.001-04:00

Nevermind because it’s so damn simple, but you see I have to say it to you anyway, I have to say it to you anyway because if I don’t, I have no choice but to remain silent, which in itself is not a bad thing, but if that turns out to be the case, then I’m just sitting here alone, naked, with all of my imperfections caught in the moonlight and you looking into the mirror, putting on your lipstick, talking over your shoulder to me about your schedule for the day, and me listening for the subtext, looking too deeply, I say too deeply because masks aren’t meant to be deep, they’re meant to be diverting, and there are reasons why people feel the need to divert this or that, and I notice it in you, something obscene like a lie to a child, meant to be malicious, so I look away, out the window, and I see the rare flick of rain slide across the pane, keeping the light soft and concealing like liquor after everywhere’s closed and you have nowhere else to go, so you go into someone for the sake of the feeling, with your eyes closed and words that are either hilarious or kept to yourself, but I can’t blame you can I, I can’t blame you because I’m guilty too, and so are they, and this being human with the space between, and the ache in that spot just beneath the sternum for it all to melt, to release, and those people with signs that say Free Hugs no longer being novelties, but real feeling people with families and joys, talents that bring joy to others, like singing, which brings them so much joy, performing knowing it’s making someone else happy, it’s making someone else feel good in the heart, it’s bringing tears to their eyes, and they don’t know what else to say but hallelujah, and it’s like a prayer, more than a prayer because it’s a reference to a feeling in both the head and the heart, but also to memories and connections, dreams – or should I say plans – for the future and that supreme feeling of interconnectedness to the world and the magnetic energy field that seems to marionette the branches of the trees and the birds as they take off in unison and when two strangers on the street lock eyes in simultaneity and they don’t look away and from eyes something spreads to smiles and they don’t turn away and that something spreads to feet and they walk closer and can’t say anything because there’s nothing to be said, nothing to be communicated, it’s all held in the gaze, walking straight through the doorway to the soul, and maybe eventually one makes so bold of a move as to say ‘hey’ but that would just be for the sake of formality and formalities are never to be taken seriously beyond the gesture as a showing of respect, and maybe that’s what seems to be lacking as you slowly put your lipstick on in the mirror, and it might be the only thing I really have to say, but I might as well not say it because maybe to you it would come off as harsh, or antagonizing, or worse yet, needy, vulnerable, insecure, and maybe, if that were to happen, you would turn from the mirror and look at me, condescendingly, and maybe even laugh at me, which I thought I couldn’t take here, naked in the moonlight, but maybe that’s not the case, maybe I can take it, maybe I welcome it, maybe that’s the special sauce right there, maybe that’s the heart of the matter and I need you here, now, I need you to look down on me, I need you to be better than me, I need you to belittle me for me to cease to be little, for me to be better than that, and even if I don’t quite know what That is, I can, for the first time, feel it in my bones, and feel it in my bloodstream, and feel it in the magnetic field that plays the marionette and makes me sit here, naked and invulnerable, grinning and glowing, with my heart rising, with my heart flying, with my heart as one with the rain on the window and with my heart as one with your lipstick, even as you rub it across your lips, and with my heart as one with your mirror, and as you look into your mirror, as you look into my heart, you finally see me, you finally see exactly who I am...that is to say, you finally see yourself.

Colorado Haiku - April 29.5

2011-05-02T22:42:00.000-04:00

Fifty degrees,
Bright blue sky carries bird songs-
Snow falling in May

As Words of Parting Draw Swiftly Nigh ("Epic" poem) - April 29

2011-04-30T04:27:00.002-04:00

Epigraph
“I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.”
-Walt Whitman, “So Long!”

Prologue
So here on quiet Friday sits,
a perching revelation,
I fear yon pirate mighty spits,
his cursing consternation.

Introduction
To boundaries and bayonets this night I sing,
To armors o’er that supple mass that lies beneath I sing,
To dreams and fears and courage three, and how they ring together, I sing,
To God and all It stands for, I sing.

I
The How that can be telled, is not the eternal Hell
The Why? that can be whined, is not the eternal Wine
The Game that can be gained is not the eternal Grain
Yet all of these, syntactically, symptomatically, stitch the fabric into blankets;
In through our clothes, for fashions, for warmth, for commerce, for industry, art and history.
The world is a snark (o what a lark!);
Snarkness within snarkness:
The gameway to all understating.

II
“Faith, pray, tell me what it is you fear when the Lord’s heart is so near.”
“I fear absence, abandon. I fear the cold, the dark, hunger, and failure.”
“And why (may I ask?), do you fear such things as these?”
“There is no justice, no order to believe in. This world was made by cannibals through currency and as such, the only Capital is for shielding our selves by way of trophies and costumes.”
“Into this world came we naked, and only in that state are we home. Open yr heart to see my heart, open yr heart to see my head – at least the heart of my head, the source, my God!”
“Whether I see you or you see me or we are all together, or not, is not the point. The point is work, and the point at which work works is when you’ve earned yr place through a resonating resume.”
“When yr heart finally opens, you won’t need a resume, Neo.”

III
Through chastity is purity and focus on divinity for cleanliness is godliness and the Lord was born unto this world by way of a virgin - who like a canvas began empty but soon after *prick* and a drop of blood, a line of blood and now seen the surface be bichromatic, glory be to God, sounding in volumes - but only certain tones, for after all that, what more is needed than what is simply stark, together, chiaroscuro, complementary, godliness, completion – can only be found centered in the self as the poet said you travel the world in search of what you return home in order to find, apart from all distractions, where the inner sound echoes, reverberates the whispers from the autumn leaves and after empty winter melts the buds of knowing begin to bloom – from garden to garden, each upon its own molecular structure wafting singular smells linked to tastes of honeys pollinated by slightly different stamen, with subtlety it strikes the palate, and for God’s sake it can be fun – when felt in conjunction with a soul built to be your soul broke to be your soul’s bait to let your soul Mate...

IV
...to wake to the revelations of death within life within death of revelations after the wake in the mo(u)rning time soon after which comes aging acceptance of how it is or new light to speak the dawning of a day in the tongues of the Age after Wake when we work in love or for love from out of love as we pass Judgment on the lives of the light that illuminates our shadows built of doubts about the steady hand that strokes our backs and feeds us this day our daily bread once able bodied now only stalks of cultivated sugarcane to hack down with machetes in hand or build new structures to the sun who casts heat without bias or interest indifferent to something so important as a heart which pumps blood for to warm frostbitten fingers or for to flow to brain and through heart and to members remembering for to wake into life out of death after death into death...

Conclusion
They might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow.
Just as well.
The sun shines for you, he said to her.
And he was right.

Limited or No Connectivity - April 28

2011-04-29T16:19:00.000-04:00

A connection could not be established with your IP address.
Please contact the manager of your server.
Though the signal is strong, you have limited or no connectivity.
This is a user error; please make sure your coding has been entered correctly.
In the case that it has not, please re-enter the code correctly.
I repeat, this is a user error.

Unity (A Sonnet (not really)) - April 27

2011-04-28T01:51:00.001-04:00

When unity inspires me to be those things I wanna be,
I let the air enrapture me, to laugh through me, and capture me,
and drag me out across the floor, and show me what a heart is for,
to teach me to communicate, and move me to facilitate,
massaging out the swollen knots of refugees sleeping in cots
and helping all of those who’ve got to give it to those who have not.
And lifting up a camera lens the time has come now to pretend
that I am a non-entity: no baggage of identity
Now disappear into the void, and cavalier right through the noise
and hear the aching beggars’ sighs, and all the lonely victims’ cries:
No more excuses, no more dreams, the future’s no longer unseen
we’ll build it with an iron back, and reel in all the rotting slack
everything’s always in our hands, on courage stands all we demand
open yr eyes, and sew yr heart, each single soul must play a part.

No Wonder the Water (A Rap verse) - April 26

2011-04-27T21:03:00.005-04:00

No wonder the water was the way it was when words alone were thrown through the surface and purpose had grown:
the structure faced a rupture, which realigned atomic lines, a sorter to order transgressing borders of mortar, needless of time, like kind, or fancy rhymes, only showing the world the power unfurled, the power, the power of mind.

The Historicity of a Train of Thought - April 25

2011-04-26T16:39:00.007-04:00

That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch!(1) What the fuck he thinks he tryin’ to pull here?! Next time I see him, I’ma say to him in Japanese, ‘I’m gonna kiiiill, you!’(2) But wait, how do you say that in Japanese?(3) Anata o watashi wa something o shimasu...something like that. What’s that verb, though? I have no idea. Luckily I have a translator on my phone (thank God for the new age we live in!)(4) type in ‘to kill’; source language: English; target language: Japanese....stupid phone, why is it so fucking slow?!... 殺すために. Great...Something sutameni. What’s that something? Why isn’t given in hiragana? If you don’t know the kanji, then translators don’t do you any good! Even if I knew the kanji, though, I assume my grammar would be off. Anata o watashi wa something sutameni... A threat should be written in the imperative, right? Fuck, I don’t remember (things I don’t remember).(5) I wish I had kept up the study, or maybe I should go back to Japan,(6) this time to really live there, get fluent, participate in something: maybe the Sendai earthquake relief efforts. Be useful to people but also get to live in Japan and get fluent, maybe get a cute little Japanese photographer for a girlfriend, or a journalist: it’s so easy to think a journalist would make a good girlfriend, but I have nothing to base that off of. Could it be that I would like to be a journalist and somehow sex is a form of becoming like through osmosis?(7) And why Japan? Why not the Middle East? Or Latin America? If I could speak four languages, I would want them to be English, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish. What about French? Fuck French, that’s so 19^th Century. Japanese for the spirit,(8) Arabic for the cultural roots and the global communications idea,(9) and Spanish, just because it’s useful. Any of the above, really, just so long as I actually pursue any of them. I’m getting older. I’m almost 24. If I don’t really commit to learn one of them soon, I’ll never really learn any of them. Why do I always jump to the end result: being quadrilingual, when I’m doing absolutely nothing to further the efforts of even being bilingual right now? I’m working right now, getting out of debt, opening up future options.(10) But I have to hurry up with that future, get back on the road, start working on the ground in countries that will teach me those languages. But I keep talking about going to Slovenia or Bosnia,(11) and they speak Serbo-Croat there, probably Slovenian in Slovenia, which isn’t even Serbo-Croat! I’m sure it’s similar, but it’s still a different language, like Lebanese isn’t quite Arabic and I had to study them both simultaneously in Beirut, which was way too much and in the end, I didn’t even learn one of them, much less both of them.(12) Maybe I should just go to Lebanon and finish what I started there: be a journalist, have an in just by being American (you know the ruling class there is not impressed with the American nationality), and then rise up to prominence through talent and gumption, nerve, though nerve is probably the best way to get killed in a place like Lebanon...so fuck that, how about Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America, and be a documentary film maker: make films about tribal battles and colonialism, poverty, and the objectification of women...That’s way too many things for one documentary to be about. But then again, if there’s one thing I learned in Critical Studies,(13) it was that all of those are essentially the same subject (Power!), it will just take a truly visionary artistic mind to make a cohesive documentary that shows that without being 17 hours long and full of boring tangents...My mind isn’t up to that kind of snuff. Why not just come up with the idea and then strongly encourage someone else to realize the vision? Because if you keep thinking that way, you’ll never be anyone or anything.(14)

1. This is a reference to a real person, who through unkind, backstabbing behavior had brought much pain to the narrator and his family in the weeks that preceded the writing of the poem
2. The stylistic flairs here are indicative of the narrator's tendency to take on a kind of urban slang when overly excited or feeling eccentric
3. The narrator's go-to of trying to translate phrases into Japanese are the result of 4 years of study of the language in high school, a 5-week trip there with his mother, as well as a generally pervasive belief that the most amusing way to garnish life or speech is by giving it a Japanese bent
4. This is a reference to an iPhone that was given second hand to the narrator by his father, but which subsequently proved to be a veritable 'piece of shit' because it froze nearly every time he pressed a button
5. This the chorus of an Ugly Casanova song that echoes in the narrator's mind every time he uses this particular phrase
6. This is a reference to the aforementioned trip to Japan with the narrator's mother, circa 2006
7. This is a gesture towards a larger, ongoing internal conversation of the narrator's: his consistent track record of rarely committing to girlfriends monogamously continually gave him an excess of grief and led to much self-abasement; to combat the feelings of inadequacy that these experiences interpolated into him, he intellectualized the idea of partnership, and translated it into a kind of narrative of becoming...
8. This idea probably dates back to the narrator's 14th year when he somehow became convinced that Japanese Zen, Shinto, [Chinese] Taoist, and Teaist thought were representative of this highest aspirations of human kind; that is to say, the student who could master these philosophical thoughts would also, inevitably, master the strange art of Living
9. This reference is at once to the narrator's ethnic roots on his father's side to the Arab world, but also to an ideological view that the most important language for a Westerner to learn in the 21st Century is necessarily Arabic because that's the sorest point in current international discourse and learning the language of the Other is the first step in massaging out the knots of human pain and friction
10. This has been an ongoing monologue in the narrator's life; "I'm working in my hometown at the moment to dig myself out of student loan debt...I'll be in a position to start 'living' once that debt is no longer weighing on my shoulders": this narrative has been repeated so many times that even the narrator is achingly sick of it, so the reference here is meant to be ironic
11. Both of these are countries the narrator has visited before (circa 2007), the current appeal for the narrator of Slovenia is based on the daughter of journalist he knows there, who is a three dimensional artist and a writer; they have recently been in communication and the idea for him to begin a new life in Ljubljana has crossed his mind more than once; Bosnia, in contrast, is symbolically linked in his mind to self-destruction and excess: Sarajevo is a city he has frequently cited as somewhere he would like to move to in order to write a novel, do many drugs, engage in many orgies, and drink far too much coffee all of the time; this idea digs deeper to a (mis?)conception that only through ravaging one's body and mind can one shed the burdens of life that are only (according to Japanese thought) an illusion, and through the shedding of such, one is able to be reborn as the all-capable magician he or she has always dreamed of becoming; furthermore, the appeal of Sarajevo in particular for the narrator is due to the 'rawness' of the city and the fact that nearly everyone there has fresh running wounds: this connects the city in the narrator's mind to humanity at it very realest, for right or for wrong
12. A reference to the narrator's stint studying Arabic and Lebanese dialect in Beirut for 6 weeks in 2008; the bitterness behind these phrases are in part a reference to a moment, upon his return to New York, when his friend Christopher, who had never visited the Middle East and had only studied Arabic from textbooks, tried to engage the narrator in conversation in Arabic and the narrator was at a loss as to how to respond even though he recognized all the phrases from the textbook that he too had studied from in Beirut
13. This reference points both towards the narrator's self-defined major at university (what he called, 'the topography of ideologies') as well as the underlying global/metaphysical view that led him to study it in the first place: the connection between language and power, colonialism and racism and chauvinism, and the nature of subjectivity
14. This sentence reaches to the deepest core of the narrator's insecurity: a seesaw effect persistent throughout his life in which he was happy and open, putting his faith in the world around him and living easily from day to day, in faith...contrasted by a kind of overly abasing self-deprecation that maintained faith in a cultural pressure to be successful (by a standard of fame and fortune), failing which, a human soul would be nothing and therefore, Nothing.

The Son Also Rises - April 24, Easter

2011-04-24T17:21:00.002-04:00

The archangel Gabriel symbolizes resurrection;
He is also the bringer of the Word (al Qur'an) to Muhammad
And the Word (immaculate conception) to Mary, mother of Christ.

Through the Word (Logos, Tao) comes resurrection
(For Christ, who was the Logos, need not be anymore than
The Heaven which He promises, a utopian view, in short, a Word)
After resurrection, comes Life, as dictated by the Word.
There is no World outside of the facts we choose to recognize,
These acts of recognition take place in words, each casual utterance a Gospel.

The guiding principle is Purity, the means by which we realize
The thoughts, actions, routines, and sources of inspiration
That define for us our paths.
The challenge principle is Faith, the means by which we
Leap into the void, wander blind into the dark,
And recognize the act - as the profoundest form of
Procreation - of giving life and light to our own personal destinies.
The sustaining principle is Peace, the state in which
We become, each by our own skill set, Magicians.
The calm and quiet of the all-capable being,

Kazantzakis' epitaph:
I hope for nothing
I fear nothing
I am free.

Lord, give me strength to lose myself in Faith,
For my Self is defined by lazy skepticism, impurity, and hesitation.
Lord, give me strength and courage to follow my inner light,
And walk between the bombs and bullets
Of outrageous fortune and tribal warfare.
Lord, imbue me with Faith, lift me up,
And lead me to Peace.

Before the Resurrection - April 23

2011-04-24T16:02:00.004-04:00

Beware the Ides of March,
When those who love you most,
Love more, some things within their hearts.

Beware your exposed back,
When whispered voices link to hands
That reach into your slack.

Beware the coming Spring,
When rains and voices, birds and light,
Announce a rebirthed king.

Mostly just, beware your Self,
Beware of all your dreams,
For dreams and courage make believe
They know of grander things.
And drop your pack and lace your shoes,
Touch fingers to the dirt.
And breathe in deep, prepare your spine,
This shit is gonna hurt.
But hear me out, and see my soul,
And know I am sincere,
The time has come to shed your life,
To dive straight for what's dear.
We have no youth remaining when
We talk about our futures;
The future's now or soon long passed,
When lifelines all were sutured.

Yo Billy Moe! My man, my king!
They know not what they do.
So rise up now, yes rise supreme!
You know my heart's with you.
And one day from a higher perch
You'll know what games they played:
Just children lost in make believe;
But your heart's what remains.

I love you, Papa.
Happy Easter

Wholistic - April 22

2011-04-23T14:57:00.002-04:00

Everything that could mean anything
is the case.
That is the world.

All else follows.

Feeling very worldish at the moment,
I will say, that the world is not made up of things
but of facts:
lovely liquid facts, in fact.

All else follows.

And how you see is a matter of
enlightening facts - that is to say,
imbuing them with light.

All else follows.

Look to the end:
your utopia.
What is what?

All else follows

And the way you graze a lover's breast
And how you comb your hair;
And whether you think Iran should have the bomb,
And all else right or wrong;
How you paint and how you dance,
And whether or not military intervention is ever justified for humanitarian purposes, particularly in the case of overthrowing a junta...
And what you eat and where you shop,
And cryptic turns of phrase;
The truth and style of how you live,
The kind of Cain you raise.

All else follows.

Truth and beauty within this life are always already only a syntax
We acquire as a whole:
And it shifts and grows and bites itself,
But throughout it always knows
Who you are and what you feel
And the world you aspire,
All else follows in perfect line,
To your world this world inspires.

Narratives - April 21

2011-04-22T19:35:00.002-04:00

"A plague on both your houses!"
Shouts Mercutio in his last dying breath.
He dies.
The scene ends,
And the actor shuffles off the stage.

"All the world's a stage."
Shakespeare observes,
Then lifts his pen to prove it,
To pave the way to today:

Today is the day when dramatic reproductions, reinventions, and reclamations rise out reverberant from throats interpolated with the history of society, from Beirut to Belfast, a canvasser on the red bricks to one man throttling one man and throwing his dreams out the window to the pavement below. From campfires to courtrooms, treaties to tribunals, the great narrative plays out, is acted while lives are lost or made. Horatio Alger made a dream that broke a generation. Henry Miller made a dream that broke a generation. Barack Obama made a dream that broke a generation. And I woke up one morning, my bedroom flooded with last night's newspaper clippings, all printed off from every source, piling high, drowning a sea of being, and my friends and my family, and my self, and my world was all composed, laid down to a track, recorded in a studio some four states away, and one man throws a punch in hopes of breaking another's neck, and one man throws a game in hopes of breaking another's losses, and the yellow stars smear golden painted when the story suddenly calls for it; and we all look up, in a moment of wonder, from our smartphones, and think, "what story am I writing here? what world am I creating by stringing words together? where am I going? what narrative will take me there?"

And I look around, amidst all the puffy eyes and broken jaws, and grin ironically saying, "all the world's a stage...you can get up now Mercutio."

A Course in Miracles - April 20

2011-04-22T01:26:00.002-04:00

The ego always speaks first.
So speak,
But listen close to your own words.

Whatever made it stick out in your mind is what it means,
A happy dream,
The wishes we work for to be real.

And then he said, "I'm too busy to be nice."
Working with this scripture,
Enlightenment is just around the corner,
If only I could get rid of these damned distractions:
That world of sounds around.

Seeing - April 19

2011-04-20T02:28:00.002-04:00

It takes a human eye about an hour to adjust to a completely dark room,
Once adjusted, that eye becomes 100,000 times as sensitive to the subtleties of light.
On a clear, moonless night,
From the top of a mountain,
A human eye with 20/20 vision,
Can see a match,
As it's lit,
Fifty miles away.
Maybe life is just a matter of seeing,
Which requires adjusting to the light.

Poem Stolen from Real Life:
"I love Israelis, they're so much fun to walk on!"
"What did you just say?!"
"These railings: they're so much fun to walk on."

The Thunderstorm That Never Came - April 18

2011-04-18T17:42:00.002-04:00

I feel invincible in the worst of all possible ways:
I feel like I can see through the history of the world and give it back in mint condition:
Desperate scrapfighting and re-re-re-gurgitation,
Eventually the nutrients get chewed right out.

I feel vulnerable in the best of all possible ways:
I feel like I could tell you how tiny I feel and let your cold cruel laughter wash over me like hot sunshine reflecting mirages across a sandstorm.

I feel like a mother with her daughter at the beach,
When the tide is high,
Playing pitch and toss with her daughter,
Into the water:
Sink or swim.

I feel like a vagabond:
Tragic and sick and brilliant,
Dressed like a mime:
Striped nautical shirt,
Yellow suspenders,
Face painted reflecting death,
Through life,
Laughing in life, from within death,
Penniless,
In a thunderstorm:
Heaven's pouring water now washing the paint off his face,
Filling his mouth:
God brimming his belly in
Immaculate conception.

I feel a momentary drowning in everything I never had the courage to say:
Give me Freedom or give me Death.
I prefer the former, but...
You know, if it's not in the cards,
I live by the sword and I die by...
The pen?

The thunderstorm never came.
It swoll in, ran its fingers through all the leaves and flowers
now blooming on old branches,
It breathed the buildingtops in deep,
And wrapped everyone in shadows.
Then it moved north for some reason without ever once spitting down on this town.

After the Show - April 17

2011-04-18T17:37:00.002-04:00

Just us kids:
Kaleidoscopic.
Stripped:
Sex and other drugs like roaring crowds and roaring spotlights,
Silent as a wink,
A heartbeat like the storming of Normandy.
There will be blood, you old ladykiller.

"I feel shitty when I look at myself in the mirror...I'm not competing, I'm not ripping my shirt off and trying to sell my body. But when I stand in front of the mirror and really look, I wonder: What the fuck happened here? Jesus Christ."
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, voice of America
(Commentary by Anna Peele, voice of America)

Before the Show - April 16

2011-04-18T16:15:00.002-04:00

I was born a century too late, a continent removed;
Back then and there, there was a feeling like all the tragic suffering of carrying your head in the air was an aesthetic revelation; there was a fashion that said aloofness was sexy and promiscuity poetic;
I was not made for these times.

This is an ode to every who has ever been told to 'just live in the moment'
And to everyone who has ever wanted to punch someone in the face for telling them that
The only reason we pursue philosophy is because something fundamental, a precursor to words, is not working, and we have no alternative other than to ask ourselves, 'why?'

Which came first, the chicken or my fist in your jaw?
Rye humor, whiskeyman, rye humor.

Midseason Slump

2011-04-18T11:23:00.002-04:00

This is not my Monday poem. Nor is it my Saturday or Sunday poem. The truth is, I wrote a kind of a poem on Saturday while sitting in a chair at a salon. I then proceeded to have a wild, exhausting, somewhat nonstop weekend ending with passing out in bed at 2 am this morning, only to get up again to go to work at 7:30. I'm tired. I'm lagging behind in more ways than I can count. But my intention is to keep going, make it work. I'll probably just publish my Saturday poem as I wrote it (though it was full of interruptions). Sunday's poem I have in my head, and I was hoping to make it a fully fleshed, well thought out, polished poem (in contrast to a lot of these stream of consciousness rantings I've published lately). But then there's today's poem and the days keep passing and time is not on my side. Today I work to 5 and then leave work to go to work to probably 11. Then I'll need to find my way home, find my way to bed, only to get up again at 7:30 to go to work, etc, etc, etc...

I'll find a way.

Astrology - April 15

2011-04-16T12:20:00.002-04:00

She asked me, "What's your sign?"

I told her, "School Zone, 25 mph, Fines Doubled."

Drunk as Hell - April 14

2011-04-15T03:20:00.002-04:00

I made out with 3 different girls tonight,
in plain sight of each other.
This is that scene from Dr. Strangelove,
when he rides the atomic bomb from the plane to the ground
and is eventually liquefied in a blaze of apocalypse.

Meanwhile, at DPS, the peoples read their deepest dreams
and laid their souls out on the stage,
and James and I
just whispered jokes
and stoked by-standers' rage.
But maybe we're just hypocrites
or perhaps we see it all,
Serious stands and heartburned staunch
Give nothing to our souls.

So gimme shelter, JML,
And tell me what is left,
upon this tabled stage of lies,
we repeat trouble cleff.
The bass beat bottles' bulge is burnt
and no more breath is lived
But carefully the stars align
to give us what is meant;
And Jeremy, Jerome is empty,
carefully we wrought,
the words that catalyze the comforts
and predispose what's taught.

So away, so away, sir JML,
and preach the bottom line:
this world, these words and all your poses
fail to speak what's mine.
And if in doubt we build a finish
upon the sea that folds,
then maybe there's still hope to vanquish
our shivers from the cold.

Me 'n You Haiku - April 13

2011-04-14T10:52:00.002-04:00

I
Alone in big room,
all around, electric hums,
Rain is company

II
So go back home and
build your next life without me
Lebanese Autumn

III
From coffee eyes to
moans and sweats, bodies in beds:
after all alone

IV
If I took you right,
and I believe that I did,
you want to stay closed

V
Legs on the table,
all ideas are welcome game
I'm falling asleep

Ellen - April 12

2011-04-12T22:21:00.002-04:00

This is a short story I've been thinking about writing since Saturday, stylistically inspired in part by To the Lighthouse. In a Word document it's three pages long. That's probably too long for National Poetry Month, but it its defense, I will say that I feel I express in it a kind of breakthrough: something I've been working at and failing to say in so many words for quite some time now. I hope you enjoy it.

Ellen

All the while Ellen had been walking around San Francisco, the day had been fine: the sky clear with only an occasional breeze wiping through her clothes to make her bundle up; but since she had decided to go see Sausalito for the first time - because she had always been meaning to but had never actually made it and why not now? Now was as good a time as any to go see Sausalito for the first time – and had made it some distance across the Golden Gate Bridge, she saw the fog rolling in like a pipeline: first enshrouding the end and all the rocks and trails where they once had gone wandering because he was like that: taking her places she had never been like it was nothing to him, just the kinds of things he did, day after day; then surprisingly quickly, curling in to her until she literally couldn’t see two feet in front of her (not ever her own two feet) so she had to stop walking and she had to start waiting for the fog to roll on by like it always eventually did (she knew this because she had always had a view of it from her apartment window and one of her favorite things to do was to sit by the window, watching and contemplating the fog). There was nowhere for her to go, so she stood stock still.

And where was he now? God could only say, or rather, only God could say, she thought, somewhat literarily, or the abstraction that we call God but which is little more than the conglomeration of all of our deep-seated ideological views of what is and what is not, but we call them God anyway because it’s easier to have a single name, a single label, a unified image of all of those things, than trying to hold them all up at once, keep track of them at once, just like you wouldn’t define your own way of talking and the sentences that define your world by listing off a whole list of every word you say, no you wouldn’t, no instead you would just sum it up with the phrase, ‘My Language.’ In the same way ‘God.’ Right? What would he think of that? He would be proud of me because those are the kinds of things he used to talk about a lot, or probably he would secretly be proud of me but because of his nature, he would tell me I was wrong or maybe ‘what if I thought about this,’ which would totally contradict all the things I know he actually believed, or at least all the things he thought about (God knows what he actually believed), but he would do it anyway just to contradict me and by the end he would have me convinced that the other way was right and I just didn’t understand it enough to see how short sighted I was for trying to say it like he would usually say it, and then he would laugh so much because he’d proved me wrong – or is it ‘he’d proven me wrong’? – by proving himself wrong and I never knew exactly how he felt or what was really important to him, but when he wasn’t laughing those suddenly really explosive laughs, he was always brooding: brooding brooding brooding and he would only talk – to me at least – if he wanted to pose me a question, but he never really asked to hear my answer, only to hear himself asking the question and maybe to demonstrate how deeply he was thinking about things like that. But that’s not really how he was either, at least not all the time; I mean, that’s how I remember him the clearest, but sometimes I saw him talking to other girls and he wasn’t brooding at all and he seemed so much fun, so electric, so I knew that he had that in him, at least, but when they weren’t there anymore and it was just us two again, he would get all dark and quiet so I would always tell myself that he was just putting on a show for them but he was his Real self when he was alone with me and that’s why I knew him best.

I knew him best.

She looked around her. The fog was pouring forward steady with no change in visibility. A damp wet began to snake up her back and she wrapped her sweater tighter around her chest, a little shiver rattling her teeth. She tried to look forward but there was no sign that any world had ever existed, or ever could exist in front of her, so she decided maybe it would be best to put off Sausalito for another day and maybe go back to the city, but when she turned to look back to where she had come from, the fog was equally socked in that direction. She could no more easily see a foot or a hand behind her than she could in front of her.

She held up her own hand a foot from her face and could only see it ghosted in intermittent flashes and she thought of his hand and how it felt. He had rarely ever used it to touch her and she had to focus through her hand into the memories of her past like skimming through an old encyclopedia, searching for even just one memory of his touch, which was odd because it was common knowledge among the people she knew who had known him too that he did a lot of touching, a whole lot actually, way too much if you ask me, but why then can’t I remember what he felt like when he touched me? And why then can I remember so distinctly the color of his skin, like a chameleon according to his mood: bright red all full of blood when he was passionate about something and yellow – honest to God, yellow! just like the clichés from cartoons – when he was sick and I swear he could shift from bright and golden when he was being good and helping people and talking about happy things, life-affirming things like dedicating his life to healing other people or bringing clean water to those who didn’t have any; to a dark sweaty pallor, like he had been sitting out all day in the slums of some Mexican village when he was talking about how nothing’s worth anything and its all vanity and greed anyway...but I can’t remember what he felt like?

And if she couldn’t remember that, then what did she have to hold on to now that he was gone? She remembered so many words he said, so many expressions that seemed to just burst out of him, completely in discord to what he was talking about or what was going on around us, like their sources came from somewhere so different, so detached from that moment, or else they were nothing but that moment and at first glance, you couldn’t see anything of his self in the reaction at all, like he was just water reflecting a prism of light or letting the image of the world on the other side pass through without disturbing it or distorting it in the least. And that world - that one he could reflect - that world was still here, still surrounding her! But without him, without his touch...then what did she have any longer? She thought for a moment. She still had her mother and her best friends and the stories they would tell each other and the ongoing struggles like when Sara and Emily would go out together and Emily would like a boy and Sara would see that and she would flirt with him because she could see that Emily wanted him, and for her, boys were always so easy, it was so easy for her to get them to ask for her number and she could see it in their eyes that they were aching for it and maybe she would give it to them, but sometimes she wouldn’t, but sometimes she would just go home with them and call Ellen and Emily in the morning and maybe apologize for leaving early but mostly just suggest in her tone of voice that she wasn’t sorry at all and come on, would you really expect her to act any differently? But the rest of the time, I mean when boys were not involved, she’s so sweet and so cute, getting all flustered about her dress or animals passing by and she’s so fiercely loyal to her friends and no matter what I’ll always be there for her and Emily; and she had her essays, which the head of the department, her advisor’s supervisor, had read and said were really very good and if she kept it up she would have a strong career in academia some day, and how her analysis of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse through an Irigarayan lens was really so spot on, and he always used to make fun of her for liking Irigaray, calling her a mindless reactive who wrote the most pornographic theories she was capable of, not because there was even a shred of insight in them, but only because most of critical theory is made up of rubberneckers, but seriously, could he even once have been supportive of what she was doing? His criticisms always left such a tinny, metallic taste in her mouth and why was he always cutting at her or getting defensive when she tried to offer even the slightest hint of criticism about how he treated her or anyone else and he always had such a reasonable answer – at least cognitively reasonable - but even when he won and there was nothing she felt she could say in response, she still felt like he was wrong because his words just didn’t sit right with her heart. But now she felt that she was being unfair to him because he was really actually so good when he wanted to be and she knew that no matter how long it had been since they had seen each other, he would always surprise her on her birthday and if she called him he would call her right back or the next day with an entirely understandable explanation for why it had taken him a day to get back to her...but what did it matter now? He would never be calling her again, even if she lived to have 200 birthdays.

Ellen heard through the fog, the sound of a chain, rolling, clanging towards her. It sounded like a bicycle, but who could possibly see well enough to ride a bicycle through all of this fog? A body could, as easy as nothing, lean a little too far right and careen straight off the bridge into the bay below. But the sound kept coming, closer and closer. Suddenly she was terrified. What if the biker couldn’t see her and slammed straight into her? What if he or she – it must be a he: only a man would ride a bike so recklessly through fog like this – ran her over or broke her bones and she couldn’t get back? What if nobody came to help her and she was left worthless, broken and lost, unable to ever get off the bridge, to die out here where the wind sweeps from the ocean and comes alive, takes on substance and wraps everything: people, trees, cars, buildings, even mountains, in its awful embrace like death, and swallows everything whole without remorse or a single human feeling?

A biker flew by her, giving her about two feet of leeway, cutting the fog as if it were not even there. She knew he was male for she could hear his deep panting breath - the deep breath of a man with a low voice - as he passed, but she couldn’t see him: even two feet was enough to keep him completely concealed in the fog. She imagined it was him. She imagined his ghost, or even his body itself – she couldn’t imagine him as a ghost, he’d always had too much substance to ever be reduced to something as subtle as a ghost – passing by without a helmet on, laughing as he went, burning forward across the bridge, into the future: to some place he wouldn’t tell her about, he wouldn’t invite her to, he would only describe, years later, in a story that sounded like paragraphs of it had been lifted from the 1001 Arabian Nights, or else from ancient didactic fairy tales in which each character is actually a metaphor for some deeper human condition, and she wouldn’t believe him – it was impossible to believe him because he was always saying how he didn’t think any story in the history of the world was remotely true, or else how everything, no matter how absurd, and the absurd were always his favorites, was more than true because only real life could inspire somebody to say anything, anything at all – but she couldn’t not believe him either, so she just listened and dreamed and thought about all the possibilities there are in the world and she loved him because he either lived some of those possibilities, or he didn’t live them, but knew enough about them to talk about them and to bring them to life through storytelling, and if she wasn’t going to be with him while he was out doing all that living, then listening to him telling stories had to be the next best thing, the closest thing she was ever going to get, unless...

The sound of the bike faded off across the north side of the bridge, towards Sausalito. Ellen still stood still, unable to try for either end. She thought briefly of feeling her way to the railing and following it back to land, but she couldn’t. She was getting terribly cold and she was scared, too scared to even feel her way along. So she stayed put. So she stayed exactly where she was.

Maybe the fog would clear. Maybe? Of course the fog would clear; it was just a matter of how long it would take before the fog would clear.

What would she do in the meantime?

Wait?

Touch her body.

Touch her body, for it was the only thing reliable at the moment, and the only thing that made it reliable was the sensation it gave her as she felt the touch of her own fingers caressing over her clothes and then under her clothes along the bare skin of her chest and stomach: some confirmation mixed with a muted pleasure, like a quietly religious joy coming at the recognition that she was of the flesh, that she could touch her flesh, that her flesh could be touched, that she could be touched, that she was concrete and on the surface of the Earth and that she could be touched, and while being touched, she could feel it. She felt her touch. She felt it.

Ear Muffin; Functional Requirements - April 11

2011-04-12T01:40:00.002-04:00

Ear Muffin - April 11

Will conform to non-deformed headspace
when green need is in the air.
Whilst somewhiles means 'formerly,' otherwhiles means 'at times'.

Functional Requirements

The system must allow the user to create a profile
The system must allow the user to enter name
The system must allow the user to enter demographic information (incl. age, gender, ethnic identification, etc.)
The system must allow the user to enter geographic information (incl. place of birth, current residence)
The system must allow the user to enter religious identification
The system must allow the user to enter education information (incl. level of education, schools attended, majors, etc.)
The system must allow the user to enter vocational information (incl. name of job, description, location, dates, etc.)
The system must allow the user to enter activities he or she would like to be associated with
The system must allow the user to enter political preferences
The system must allow the user to enter descriptions of literature identified with The system must allow the user to enter list of music engaged with
The system must allow the user to enter sexual orientation
The system must allow the user to enter relationship status
The system must allow the user to enter status of desire with regards to a future relationship
The system must allow the user to enter quotes he or she has found inspiring
The system must allow the user to display a list of people, places, things, ideas, activities, events, etc. that he or she ‘likes’
The system must allow the user to display photos that he or she finds flattering
The system must allow the user to remove all displayed photos that he or she does not find flattering
The system must allow the user to link his or her profile to those of other users by ‘friending’ them
The system must allow the user to view a complete list of all of his or her friends
The system must allow the user easy access to all friends and send them words in real time
The system must allow the user to edit his or her words in real time
The system must allow the user to escape the flaws and inconsistencies of real life
The system must allow the user to create a new identity by whatever standards he or she chooses
The system must allow the user to edit his or her identity in real time
The system must allow the user to access this identity at will
The system must allow the user spend as much time as is needed with this identity
The system must allow the user to access this identity from any remote location (incl. desktops, laptops, smartphones, etc.)
The system must not allow the user to deactivate an identity once created

Recipe; The I of the Hurricane - April 10

2011-04-11T00:28:00.002-04:00

Recipe:
Bourbon Sweet Tea:
4 fingers of bourbon
half a lemon
shot of maple syrup
hot water, fill to taste

Poem:
The I of the Hurricane

Pink moon rising over line-etched woods,
rickets and antiques,
new paint, new carpet, new season.

This future to hold to your hopes,
the heart of your manners;
thick dreams of becoming, broken by
stints of insomnia.

I don’t care if any story you’ve ever told me is true,
I don’t care about what you studied or why,
I don’t care who you voted for,
I don’t care what mythology you tie your birthday to to take comfort in an inevitable future,
I don’t care about where you’ve been or what you did there,
I don’t care about how many anything you own or what you did to get it,
I don’t care about your ambitions,
I don’t care about your credentials,
I don’t care about who said what to who in order to make you feel like what,
I don’t care if you own a cat, or if you consider yourself its ‘caretaker with opposable thumbs,’
I don’t care how old you are,
I don’t care about your five year plan,
All I care about is whether you can look me in the eye and hold my gaze, and keep holding it well after your discomfort has come and gone, and if you can nod your head slowly, and without saying a single vocalized word, be real.

Come on baby, light my fire.

The Gardener - April 9

2011-04-09T14:56:00.002-04:00

The thornbit fingertip of an old and ending gardener
catches a sliver, pushes forth a bulb of blood,
which catches the morning lavender light
flowing in the window.

I’ve got a bottle of Benchmark bourbon
I’ve been pouring into everything lately:
Old lucky number 8.
Coffee and whiskey for breakfast.

I keep trying to remind myself that this is just an exercise, there’s nothing particularly tragic about it when the words don’t come out right, when my dayold ramblings read back a waste of time, just to remind myself that This is just an exercise.

Do you catch my drift like blood catches light, comin in the window?
She told me she hates to see me like this: passionless.

Perhaps the only thing that made me what was worth me being was passion:
the flintstock catchafire, lightafire, burnin’ down the rye.
Now the rye is burnin down my throat and I feel lofty:
Eastern scribbleture, saints and sages, noninvolvement
–Oh, Sri Krishna, come gimme one a dem Arjunas, and make ‘er shnappy!

And one day, when her father wins, and Miami quiets down for the season, and the call comes in wild, ‘Doctah! Doctah!’ and she steps up to the platter of her responsibilities and the flame is finally, irrevocably extinguished…then will you know, then will the Word echo out across the plains:
The gardener has retired.

(Time Passes)

Here’s your eulogy (see you at the Crossroads):
He was a warm man, the best of men, always remembering your name and asking how your surgery went. He was a warm man, the kindest of men, always making sure you had a beer in your hand and asking if you were having a good time. She was a warm woman, the best of women, maybe the nicest of all the nice.
And there was talent there, oh yes! so much talent, entire worlds conveyed through the banality of translation. And there was strength there, oh yes! so much strength, turning what was broke into what was wholeagain, by the books, better than the books. And there was mastery there, oh yes! was there mastery: of the Word that was the deal - that was to bring back returns for everyone with something invested in success.

Oh there was family there, warm blood and cohesion, hand holding hand marching red into the foggy dawn, the ambiguous dawn, the ambidextrous dawn: there was love! An ongoing project of creation, the gentle caress of a gardener’s callous finger, the downy quiver of a freshripe nettleleaf, for, as you know-
some prefer nettles.

A heartstorm bucked akimbo with tears falling for someone I’ve never met:
a son/brother breaking down:
a son I’ve also never met.
The scene fades to Folsom Prison Blues, where each note is emphasized according to the specifics of the story being told. It’s a story Johnny Cash never heard in all his life: the story of a man who was born about the time the author died. A story of continuity, a story of self-awareness, aching expression born through an awareness of the feeling of being one’s Self, within the self, distant (and caught!) observing the self, through a mirror:
blueprinted through the palegrey eyes of another.

...

Stop! You’re not telling it right! You don’t have the right feeling! Who the fuck are you to tell the story of who she was, you didn’t even fucking know her! Is it possible to be less relevant while trying to be more universal?!
Pssst,..Mr. G, you had a story to tell me. You tried to tell it to me. You didn’t like my reaction, though. You didn’t like my process, my response, and you sure as fuck didn’t like my laughter. Truth be told, there was failure in all of the telling, and that my friend, is very telling.
An audience is only so good as it matches the ideal of the messenger.

When they die, whose aesthetic will paint the service? Does it even matter? Or is it the last, most essential loyalty? Faith that it’s about who they truly were, a test to see who was actually listening, who saw when everyone else looked into their eyes and saw only a mirror.
But then again, they’re dead now, right? So…fuck it.

Was hisself/herself ever really good enough or was it all somehow functional? Was it somehow the role of the teller, the hearer, the holder, and the encourager? When those walls of untranslatable miscommunication threaten to Trojan horse those feelings of love, kinship, heart-to-hard-hearted companionship, then under what do we…standing tall for what do we…moving forward towards ambitions of the…how do we…?

The gardener washes off his finger with a chuckle,
then returns to his plants.
He looks briefly out his window to the setting sun,
thankful, loving.
If not for the warmth and light,
how could his garden grow?

Rest in Peace - April 8

2011-04-09T04:39:00.002-04:00

to Molly (happy birthday), to Regula (rest in peace)

Double double, two full rooms
With voices, goals and shifting plumes,
And in between, all dressed in black,
some things in life just wont come back.

But maybe we don’t need them to,
and lately songs sung come back new.
So blooming trees now herald Spring:
a solid root to everything.

Broken Flowers, Dying, Hallelujah – April 7

2011-04-07T15:19:00.001-04:00

For John (happy birthday)

“if youre going to china to write, dont.

go to china to die,

and die so that you can live.”

when april showers break may flowers, and a lonely eye looks in tired frustration out the window where it’s grey and grey it comes in heavy like starting over from out the ash and refuse of the scorched and burned forests of where we once were, she turns her head down.

a little blood seeped out from under the cling wrap and into the sheets in the nighttime, which I guess can only have been expected.

meanwhile, her mother’s passed, another day and lifetime past, a piece of you taken, laughing, keeping your mind off it, or God knows what else, thinking of singing, travelling, burning bridges, making more smoke to shroud the things once seen but no longer wanting to be seen.

it was like an over-ride, in the act, through the haze of whiskey, where all transgressions are allowed, forcing what was not wanted, the head to the heart, saying look out below, and in the morning, broken, hungover.

and the missus misses when the aching surges, but mostly there’s plenty else in store to buy your time, to buy you time, to remind you of nothing but time that will either take your life or take pieces of you away, but maybe your load is lighter, glory be to God.

maybe your photos and your poems and your little stuffed toy lost, taken, like flowers broken in a lost haze when you were too strung out after days after days of train travel, like a benchmark, washed down dancing and wanting, aching, the head and the heart, the head and the heart, but maybe, pieces falling, peoples falling, fading like warning signs of expectations on crumbled notes from years ago, it’s no longer real.

when i still love you is only just a phrase and I could love you is only just a phrase and I once loved you is only just a phrase.

Now. Here.

when I wrote her on her birthday and she never wrote me back. when I wrote him on his birthday and he never wrote me back. when I wrote her on her birthday and hallelujah! she wrote me back and I wrote her back and I wrote her back and I wrote her back and she never wrote me back.

broken flowers, in bed for days recovering from surgery, drinking something to sustain something but maybe ‘some’ is enough, maybe nothing further is needed.

love once loved, replaced by absence, is the true definition of dying.

but still I stand skeptical of definitions.

so look again, to the definition of living. so maybe, this is just to say:

hallelujah.

for the first time, it sounds like Hallelujah, for the first time.

Nostophobia - April 6

2011-04-07T01:47:00.000-04:00

I was afraid that it would be different,
or maybe that it would be the same.
If it was the same, then I would feel that terrible feeling I felt before I left,
but if it was different…

If it was different, then what would I have left?
What Penelope, now woven, would hold me in her womb?
Some colden stranger, some stretched and mutant view
like a tattoo on some fat man’s gut,
who once was a trimcut athlete.

But if it was the same?
Oh, fear of failure:
Older, emptier, still scraping around
telling stories of wilting cocoons,
and the dreams of last year have come and have gone,
clouding over like waning moons.

Forgive me
all those steps were soft as velvet inside of my belly
so sweet
and so cold

The Programmer: A Sonnet (Almost) - April 5

2011-04-05T21:39:00.001-04:00

The programmer had requirements to fulfill
and codes to apprehend,
he had miles of functions he had to distill
with a view to a finite end.

So he filled out a lexicon leaving no space
for a word his world didn’t know,
and he fleshed out a software, each stroke in its place
with pointed executions to show.

And soon enough, his world was filled,
each concept and image in place,
and everything else summarily killed,
for even the slightest queer taste.

The programmer reminds me of God in a way,
or Adam and Eve in their garden,
determining all it’s possible to say,
leaving no further room for a pardon.

[Please] Don’t Fence Me In – April 4

2011-04-04T19:14:00.002-04:00

When he came back, they were going. Leaving? Yes, but mostly just going.

It was go time.

I put sweetener in my hot chocolate. Not because it wasn’t sweet enough, but because I like the taste of sweetener. Plus I like to add things to other things, whether they need them or not.

And she was coming to see me and I was going to see her and I was going to see her and I was going to see her and she was coming to see me and I needed to talk to her and to respond to her and watch a film with her and we needed to make ourselves uncomfortable together.
We were muddled by a tender’s hand: mashed and mixed and stirred and served…and consumed.

It was some sort of sign of human endurance, some proof of the spirit of needy-yet-needless, stepped-on-yet-happy, polluted-yet-autonomous, the fair breath that is everything that everything else is…with no space for the eccentric, they were centered in the middle of the world. They had nothing to say but still they breathed. We had something to do, so we started doing it and one day we stopped, looked to the sky, breathing, and asked ‘what was that again?’ We looked around for the answer, shrugged, took another bite, and got back to work.

And why not? We know we don’t believe in legends or in heroes anymore. And we know we don’t believe in becoming anymore. So just go and stand where a gentle hand holds your back upstanding and breathe the fresh, cool air of Spring again.

(I don’t trust an unambiguous sentence)

Maybe it’s just relief. Maybe the thought that it doesn’t matter anyway brings me an incredibly calm sense of relief. Maybe life isn’t so pressing after all…she just walked by with Ray Ban sunglasses and a rat tail. She was grinning. There is nothing to be judged, nothing to not be loved, the cool collect of a cork on a pond. Spring is here; now the buds will slowly swell.

Hear, I am. - April 3

2011-04-04T01:19:00.000-04:00

Hear, I am. Describe the richest person you’ve ever known. How you tell them is how you tell me who you are. What are you looking for? What are you looking for in me? What do you want from me? I want you to be the mud my feet get stuck in to accidentally germinate into something real You see for the longest time I thought that life was a matter of becoming. It was in the pursuit of something greater, more awe inspiring, fuller. So I ran after that…that sense of what I could be if I just put enough strength and courage into it. But now…now it seems like that great adventure of becoming is getting my feet stuck in your mud and having no choice but to actually make things, to actually do things, to actually be things, by the simple fact of living and doing and working consistently, and not wasting all that time on those words, all that time running or walking or moving only in the mind, only in fantasy. And meanwhile, somehow, things do get done. A personality becomes itself, and a life has been lived, and not in vain.

Twosome Twiminded - April 2

2011-04-03T00:56:00.000-04:00

Keep it all together, keep it all togather, for your dreams, your destiny, your dynasty, for the hopes that you’ve invested and the pride that pulls the palate…or let it all go, let it all grow, let the waves and currents keep you current to your function, what will be will be right for the physics of the situation…are convenient lies for failures, are the ties that excuse the real strength in a slowly withering back, for we are not quitters, we are not losers, we will not stand by while this world tosses us aside…but aside we will fly when aside we are assigned, for the world is so much larger than us, for the world is so much wiser than us, for the world has much more substance than us, and the world is so much fuller than us…no the world has no compassion for us, the world is so indifferent to us, yes the world does not give a shit about us, and therefore it can only be up to us to pull our weight, straighten our backs, rise to challenge…only to break our pride along with our bones, to be broken by forces that were never meant to be, to be crushed and be crumbled, to be touched and then tumbled, to be reminded that all of our successes, just like all of our failures were all determined…by our own hard work, by our own quality as human beings, as men…no no no no, by circumstance and by factors so far out of our…control? Control is the only thing we have so long as we have a…soul? a soul is the only thing we have so long as we are…whole? wholeness comes from self creation…wholeness comes from procreation…wholeness is a test of gumption…wholeness is our essential function…We are only as good as we choose…We are always as good as is real…There is nothing but what we create…What we create is nothing but a shift of light in the eyes of the world…which is all only a stage for our grand and epic tragedy…or else we stage our childish comedy on a stage surrounded by the real…the real is only in the sweat that comes from suffering…the real was there before and after we ever learned to dream…the real is a test of courage…the real is a test of compassion…an excuse for the weak…the definition of strength…is personal power…renunciation…growth for a greater purpose…relinquishing everything to be in…control…the moment…where we choose…how we relate…what we see…what we feel…for that is what…for that is what…makes us human…makes us human.

Transition: An Introduction

2011-04-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

April is National Poetry Month, which means that I, along with a smattering of friends, will be writing and publishing one poem a day for every day of April. Today is April 1^st.

Transition: An Introduction

In the last moments of his life, Sharif Maripol, felt - with an intensity he could not quite recall having ever felt - the shifts between gravities of his body as the bow of the little wooden motorboat rose and fell over crests of waves. He felt his own imbalance and the tiny altercations his body made (starting in his ear, he remembered with an ironic smile) to try and right himself as the crests kept coming in a perfectly unpredictable rhythm. Through that same organ that determined his sense of balance, he heard the muted sound of heavy wood as it rubbed softly against the water’s top. Beyond that, all he heard was the silence of sunshine, for they had motored far too far from the shore for any seabirds to be coughing around and for the moment at least, no fish, dolphins, or whales, were bouncing around, distracting the thunder from these, the last few moments of Sharif Maripol’s life. He felt the burning tropical sun burying waves of heat into the cracks of his beaten and chapped face. He felt a slight breeze passing through the muddy tatters of what once was a respectable French-tailored suit. He was calm and happy.

He heard a rusty, aggressive click immediately behind his right ear, and just as the calm and happy world erupted in a deafening blast, time ceased to have any real relevance and Sharif’s mind was loosed free at last:

The rising foil of fortune foretold as only the forsaken can

in dreams and fugues and battled tunes, the patterns through the end,

while time and mind form broken lines with craters in the heart

the hopeful raise a rusted sword and rush to play their parts

But I swim in hopelessness, and without fear

I hope for nothing, for nothing is dear

Except the things I cannot hold, except the things I feel

except the things indifferent to me: the source of what is real,

and by the by, and by the way, that awful roar is singing

and by myself, and what the hell, now heaven’s gate is ringing

The body of Sharif Maripol was never found, but neither he, nor anyone else had any particular interest in it having been found, for that which was most important was now free, and in freedom was it terribly beautiful.

Salinger

2011-03-29T21:10:00.003-04:00

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next." -Salinger

Passions No Less

2011-03-26T15:38:00.000-04:00

It’s the morning of Saturday, March 26, 2011 and I am awake. This is unusual. For me to wake up early on a Saturday (particularly after a late night of drinking), naturally no less, with no excuses, no explanations – I even tried to go back to sleep because I wasn’t in the mood to get up yet – is very strange. So I walked across town. I started at my apartment and walked downtown. I always end up downtown.

Now I’m drinking coffee feeling terribly disturbed, and I have no choice but to write on my blog as though it were a diary and expose to everyone who’s ever felt the need to read my thoughts, my disturbing thoughts of Saturday, March 26, 2011.

Like usual with my writing style, I’ll cite my sources. Various words and phrases are resonating with me today and they will all naturally affect the words that are about to come out of my fingers:

The path to actualization is narrower than a razor’s edge.
-Vedas

People say friends don’t destroy one another. What do they know about friends?
-Mountain Goats

(Something a friend said to me last night, but I’m sure he would not appreciate it if I repeated it, even anonymously)

you come to comfort me / but I don't need your sympathy / and the way you look at me, well it's condescending / I feel my stomach churn / and didn't you ever learn / not to tell someone something / if you don't mean it / I gave you my heart and I tried to make you happy / you gave me nothing in return
-Every bitter love song you’ve ever heard

People spend so much time looking for the right words, but somehow fail to notice that the only thing that actually matters is the tone of your voice when you say ‘hi.’
-James

Warm, intentionally awkward silences.

My copy of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is 16 years older than I am.

Down in South America, the writers have an imagination you’ve never seen in the pen of a European and a sense of detached irony as well.

Bob Marley is playing and the barista is having yet another conversation about the process of roasting the coffee beans and the subtleties of a pour over - that is to say, his passion is clear, he very much loves and deserves his job...and I have zero interest in what he has to say. In fact, I have zero interest in a life spent in pursuit of a mastery of something I couldn't care less about.

All of a sudden, I love this man. All of a sudden, his life is so much stronger and richer than mine because he can focus on something like the subtleties of roasting coffee and it doesn't break his heart.

This is where I am. All around me I feel poses and languages and passions and pursuits and dreams and I appreciate the desperate force with which these mouths bite after them, but I'm lost in the eye of the storm. Too much coffee and I can feel my heart beating extra hard in my chest. The rest of the world melts away to tedium and I can only focus on whether or not I am about to enter cardiac arrest. The funny thing is that I'm indifferent to the answer to this question, only curious about it. I feel overwhelmingly fatalistic with no emotions engaged in what that inevitable fate has in store.

As Henry Miller once told me, I saw the whole world laid out before me and I had this aching sensation that anything I could possibly do I could just as easily not do and not only would nothing be lost, but a whole world gained, for to renounce my oh so soft La-Z Boy in order to actually step down to Earth and fight the current seems at the moment to be the greatest loss, the only loss, I could possible suffer.

But what the fuck, ask me again in a half hour and I'd have an entirely different story to tell.

I guess what it comes down to is I'm bored with my life and my work right now, but I somehow lack the traction to begin cultivating something else that feels more worthwhile. It’s always so easy to look to other people for some kind of gratification, but I can kill years and years going out and chatting with friends then finding myself alone again wrestling with the same feeling. I'm writing, which traditionally has always been my outlet and my aspiration, but like any life I could live, any words I could write, I could just as easily not write them and feel as though nothing has been lost, nothing is changed.

Change of pace…I’m going to participate in National Poetry Month in April. That means a poem a day for 30 days. My dear dear friend Rachel Bernstein is going to participate too. This is the venue I will be posting all 30 of those poems on, so feel free to tune in throughout April. I would also like to invite any reader out there to participate as well and send me a link to the poems you’re writing as you publish them.

With love,
T

Rain

2011-03-23T13:21:00.000-04:00

It was raining to beat the band...so we banded to beat the rain.

To victory, soldiers.

Seattle

2011-03-20T17:25:00.000-04:00

Call it a ritual. Call it whatever you like.

How phrases come back to us in recycled yet reinvented contexts. How the changing weather and phases of heat and light bring out the most vegetal thoughts and movements from our muscles and our organs. How we said we didn’t mind, but deeper than those words was a longing that had no outlet except in anxiety, as we shook and sweated, and put on grinning faces, thinking that idyllic, pastoral settings would be enough to do it for us…for the time being at least.
Put on the suit to fit your fears, tie it at the top. Financial woes betide the shifting movements of the moon: some kind of menstruation of the Earth as she spins her yarns ambivalently…lost in space.

Somewhere across a sea, Ori knows me, and a hometown with streets and rotten old stone edifices so long sitting convulescently holds my ghost as the streets are walked to waking. Meanwhile frozen dead guys continue to instruct cigarette soaked bodies sweating bones and bracken.

I write because I have nothing to write. Anything I have to say, I’ll just say and so I ramble and wind, little artifacts that may or may not speak to people who may or may not give a shit about who I am. While away the time, feel productive, feel like produce, touch a little knob of history, wipe the slate clean, clean the slate black, talk back and immediately after, apologize. Like some macabre baroque polka, the ballad writhes back and forth, seasick and melting, letting words work their magic in the back of an uninspired mind. The moment of balance comes at 5:12 pm, I’ve heard, but beyond that, I’m at a loss.

Tell me tell me tell me elm. What does an elm tree look like? I don’t know, but I do know that those are clearly aspens and you should know that because you’re from here. We made peace, but I was too drunk to remember how. I can’t remember any of our chat, only that I walked away feeling good. But then again, he was always a great rhetoritician, a sophist, and completely full of shit. I’ve probably fallen for it again, but I know I no longer care. Bullshit is preferable to angry silence. I own that anger and it’s up to me to discard. I guess I’m afraid its loss will leave me with very little to hold up to the light, so I hold onto it in lieu of something more worthwhile. Meanwhile, we walk along a razor’s edge to happiness and lightheartedness. We may or may not be wasting our time.

Music

2011-03-11T18:50:00.002-05:00

Why he sat down to hear her play and in his poise, in his silence, he said the only thing worth saying and she heard it while she was playing but later it wasn’t silence that she wanted but noise and style and that just goes to show that desires are different at different times and they are all just a narrative. Manana.

So much noise and so much knowing and so much let me tell you whatting and so many fashions to display an inner state that tells so much but looked at through a telescope is just another Halloween costume.

Thick passions dictating clubs and social poses washed solid in the face of flagrant exercise run by in the heavy handed hold of a plastic cup of coffee and a few hand rolled cigarettes but you might as well just buy them.

Wait til a soul has passed beyond before you take a jab that might offend off hand and lower the quality of his day for afterall what the fuck business is it of yours?

Do you sell gluten free beer, cowboy?

Cut down the worlds around our own to own a little island of monotonous flora while the waves lap slowly in and out and the sun gives us melanoma.

Procreate the world you want to live in through imagination and storytelling and make yourself into so much [different] from what you clearly are to everyone who’s never heard you open your mouth.

Through bloody miracles we yawn and cite their sources.

He hasn’t seen a soul or sent a word to a world that wont remotely care without the breath that issued it but that’s ok because it wouldn’t matter to anyone until he cut them down in such a way that revealed how tall he was anyway.

Again against the wind let me tell you something.

And shape our beards to tell a story and keep our lips sealed for they’re no longer useful.

There is a day waiting in the future – I’ve seen it – when they will dig through this ravenous and pull on their spectacles and quote that what they don’t understand to show others who don’t understand that they understand for it will color a world otherwise too dry too bland too blind to notice that they were just words spat for the sake of spittin something and the true story had already begun and ended before the pen was picked from the table.

I am what I say. Therefore, I remain silent.

My stories are to amuse and to write an other me into existence but somewhere completely detached from its source. Birthed and bred in the heads of those around this me who is the other me is not real but ten thousand times are powerful and as present as the real me will ever be.

Check out my poise and dream of my favor.

Words spoken through different mouths but never recognized by different ears.

This is a story. This is a narrative. This is a fiction. This is everything I’ve ever been, the only thing I’ve ever been, the best I can ever hope for, and a quiet pile of cardboard for breakfast.

Keep drinking in the world of changed body. I hope I never get sober.

And now we stretch for history. We drink too much in hope of epiphanic oblivion. But we just get tired: total bust.

Last time it worked but last time there wasn’t time to take advantage of the situation so it came and went leaving achy shaky legs and a small pile of money with no records to show for it.

These are the dreams of caffeinated sophomores who one day shift to a thesis and then a source of income and lose their stream of output with some regret but not enough regret to have it any other way.

Poems from Africa

2011-01-27T18:38:00.003-05:00

I wrote the following poem on my 23rd birthday, May 21, 2010, sitting in a pile of sweat on a dirty floor of a mud hut in the Gambia, surrounded by ants, cockroaches, spiders, and Nutella:

Birthday Poem, 2010

I am my former’s only one.

This I know.

I hold my head up as I run.

I draw sharp figures on the wall.

My mind was present at the Fall.

In lawful news, the thinking’s done,

conclusions left to careful sum.

When words are lost and then rebuilt,

a thoughtful ear replaces guilt.

And views of pain act to remind,

a stomach is the bottom line.

And the following poem, I must have written a couple days earlier:

The Wind in the Hollows

O wicked incense, candled out

in burned wafting floats about,

a sputtered sigh before the black,

in smuggled footsteps through the cracks,

my walls have skittered, my breath holds salt,

the night's grip held in concrete faults.

It comes, it goes and leaves its tracks,

in smuggled footsteps through the cracks,

the door is barred by chairs within

to ban the noises and the sin,

the smell's now distant, and yet remains,

like faded thoughts of past terrains.

A pick-axe to his head: he writhes-

only stories of war survive,

a haunted preacher, a pack of hounds

a madman blind, groping his rounds,

excavation reveals lost tacks,

like smuggled footsteps through the cracks

He

2011-01-23T00:03:00.002-05:00

He held a pen like a pickaxe, he attacked the paper violently with it, and that is why the paper had a number of holes in it and was covered with blots.

Pierrot le Fou

2011-01-22T23:06:00.002-05:00

You have to choose one or the other: revenge or reconciliation

If you were to rediscover one another, you have to take it slow again. A hug…a long hug…a kiss…a backrub…sleeping side by side in pajamas…

To die without dying, world without end. Wake to heal to play to be the magician.

Enlightenment is only to wake to nondesire and powers guided by indifference.

She was the only thing he ever found that was worth living for. And he shot her to prevent her from escaping. All he had left was his mind and his terrible terrible thoughts. So he strapped a string of dynamite around his head and lit the wick. Then he realized there just might be something more. He was free of her and all that she helped him escape. There was nothing but world left. He tried to catch the wick but he could not…

My Great Great GodFather

2011-01-16T18:02:00.000-05:00

God is my grandfather, sitting soft and sillysilent on an old pile of clouds, holding a hot wet towel for wiping your fingers after eatin chicken wings or ribs.

And that poor little pussy, all snuggled up alone, without a fine young pile of skin to cling to through the coldest hours of the day, days of the year. That poor little pussy.

Take your wet towel, grandpapa, and wipe away my missteps, then open the door to Paradise, shaking your head slowly with a warm smirk on your face: youthful folly. Unless…unless I failed to keep that poor pussy warm. Unless I left her to cry and shiver herself to sleep.

There is no greater sin than to leave a body out in the cold. The trauma of the human condition is abandonment issues. We all have our daddy complexes, but daddy is deeper in our bloodstream than any child psychologist will ever dream. Daddy is our dreams. Daddy is the look of the collective eye as you walk softly into school on the first day of the new year. Daddy is the pitch and volume of laughter that receives our humble hits at hilarity. Daddy is Goddy, and Goddy thinks we’re so fucking cute…so scared, so innocent, so naked, so small and weak. We shiver and Goddy wraps us in a hot towel, then send us to the collective orgy where we rub our spirits against one another without discrimination, so happy to just be home.

And Hell. Hell is for he who did not go to she. And for she who did not go to she. And for he who did not go to he. And for she who did not go to he.

A Song about Everything Being Fine in the Near Future, Distant Past, or Another Way of Looking at It

2011-01-15T14:37:00.002-05:00

All the bitter memories hidden in the depths of your mind come to the surface: separations from friends, women’s smiles which have faded, hopes which have lost their wings like moths and of which only a grub remains – and that grub had crawled on to the leaf of my heart and was eating it away.

-Kazantzakis

For the longest time, it seemed too much to swallow: it was bound to choke a body.

But now it seems it’s caught that body, it is that body, coming through the rye.

And in the glowing atmospheric writhe of it all, there is something so flippant, something lost like a loosed wagon careening down a hillside, lost to propriety, barreling towards an aspen grove, or perhaps an icy snowbank, where the precious cargo – precious insofar as it is only personal – will be retrieved no more, but maybe…maybe it doesn’t need to be retrieved.

I am drowning/there is no sign of land/you are coming down with me/hand in unlovable hand/and I hope you die/I hope we both die…

-The Mountain Goats, “No Children”

And if I never see You again, or never hear a word, or you ship off to Russia where you’re killed in the next revolution, or if we all evolve and sit on pyramids, drinking wine and blood to the dawning of Aquarius (or even Sagittarius) and skin our bellies with knives with handles made of bone, until our inner organs become outer and we watch as the life drips crystalline out the old sack, indifferently – or we sing and get drunk and take showers in popcorn, knowing full well that somebody else will have to clean up our messes…

It is a Landmark moment, when we all fall in, melting to part with something, some one, and they hold us in with desperately clenched muscles while we smile warmly and kiss them on the nose. We cut through the noise and cease to suffer because it was all upon a stage all along and now, we’re just tired: the show is over, we’ve changed out of our costumes (though our make-up is still on because either you take it all off or you appreciate the spectacle and go out with the eyeshadow still darkening your complexion) and now with a fur shawl and a cigarette in hand, we go out for a bottle of red wine and drink it slowly together, in two separate glasses without really saying much.

It’s not a question of dreaming. It’s not a question of trying, or even a question of living for anything. It was a dream before we even died. It tried us and we were just there to digest the bruises. And living is an intransitive verb.

After six months, when I came home one evening, I couldn’t find her anywhere. She’d gone. A handsome soldier had just arrived in the village and she’d run off with him.

-Zorba

And now I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

I sat out on the cobbled beach watching the waves crack dark and chilly. I felt that somewhere on the other side of the clouds, the sun was preparing to set, though I could not see it and the light had taken on a neutrality that robs it of any further suggestion. Then I thought of how the sun doesn’t prepare for anything; in fact, it doesn’t even move, really.
Somewhere over my shoulder, in a little copse of trees, there were some fireflies, jumping the gun a little in their own impatient way, looking to light up a world that for the time being, had plenty of existent grey light to go round. I looked out into the water, which was a mirror at a different time but now was too rough to convey anything but empty static. It surrounded our little island, uniformly, indifferently; and from a distance, I could just barely make myself out, a tiny tiny insect, attempting to light-up an already greylit world with a little light on my anus: straining and flailing, gasping for breath, and then suddenly, finally, letting it slip away, awash in the smells of the forest, away, alone as a cedar, wreathed in salt, cold and damp…but peaceful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRP6egIEABk

End of the Year Poem

2010-12-30T23:31:00.001-05:00

The grainy distance between what is light and what is solid, opaque: an obstacle to a dead end. If thine hand offends thee, than thou shalt cut it off. Remove all impedances to the kingdom of heaven.
*But not that…no no, not that, for that is the key to paradise!

God damn god damn gad doom, these tiny little ticks that tell a turning fancy tune but never nod to more than anything we conceptualize by noon. Ha Ha Ha!

I can’t say it. It’s bursting through my legs, shuddering my muscles, shake shake shake and baking me eyewise, but I can’t say it! I feel it quivering through my veins and can screen it through ten thousand contrasts and tiny petty turns that are dwarfed to tiny daffodils as eyes rise up to an atmosphere with too much oxygen to passably breathe.

Inspiration this snowy night, glowing with the hoary host. Not words but a glimmer in the eye, a jump through conclusions, a leap of faithless faith – telling you the whole story conformed by yr worst fears. Fear not, my love, fear not…there’s more to the story than that. There’s more than I could ever begin to tell you so please just wait until we meet again and you can read it all for yrself in the post of my eyes. Why let ourselves be burdened by these details which float down and away with every bank of the wake. Rise up, my lovely little child, rise up and let the strings carry you through branches across the wind. Let the sun remind you about a hotly beating heart. Let the catastrophe of rain wash yr sins from you, yr worries, yr self-abdication and remember that the last man has no place on this earth because we have not yet reached the last page.

Grow! Grow! Tell me yr fears and fear for the telling because it’s…how small it’s all. Rise to the occasion – sling me with mud and vipers, sling the poison of the pits of the earth and still I will grin (and you know I’m not talking about me – as in the author me - but as in me), still I will ride the crest of the waves and float through it, through lashing glass and folded steel. Still I float and feel and fall and crack like an egg and jump to my feet dancing to the tune of the santuri and as the astrological wind chimes whisper prophesies and destinies, I turn my head and plug my ears because today is not yet the last day.

I may sit here incubated, cloaked in from the cold and desperation of a winter’s night, but I feel it all. I feel it running animation of my veins and I have so much to tell you, so much to scream through the bricks of yr eyes, so much to howl to my angel-headed hipsters and remind them of what was once forgot but reimagined one Brooklyn night with a back massage from two gentle lovers that made you come to yr senses before we caught you on the roof like a tiny tiny flake of snow.

This is to you, secret hero of these poems, and soft and lonely lover of my dreams. This is to you you vain and fickle son of a bitch that must come crawling out of the despicable mire with an apology and a flask of whiskey and you choken-eyed whore with too much you on yr mind. This is to all of you. This is to the future of the world echoed in every mummified moan croaked of days long laid to rest. This is to the ocean and to the stars, to the feelings that only one observation, one condescension, one re-enactment, one solitary memento will re-invigor, re-ignite. But not in the way you imagine. All of our imaginations are too small for that. Too small for to wake and stretch, to take a breath…and let the severed finger that dost offend the entry to heaven tell its tale…to let it all speak for itself.

This is not a cautionary tale. This is not a chiding or a sermon. This is an ejaculation, brought forth from the only lonely mode I’ve ever known. This is from the feeling of the real and the reel shine that projects me forward to the only focus worth fighting for. This is to the battle of life and death and if that strikes you as a little too grandiose, it is the epic battle between smiles and frowns upon a furrowed face, lost in thought.

As all forsaken say someday I’ll find you I would pray, but in this case that remains unknown, unneeded, unnecessary, and most of all, unwise. Unwind yr way from the slings and arrows of self-induced martyrdom and the aggrandizing impulse to conversion and remember the touch of an honest hand: the hand that held so much love as the smoke rippled outward and it remembered where yr family was. Remember and dream and open yr eyes to see sickness.

You want to change the world? Change yrself.

You want to heal the world? Heal yrself.

Remember where the herald sings, remember where the heart is. Remember all those fiery things, remember why we started this.

We have not yet reached the last page, but layers and layers of skins have been and will continue to be shed. Remember yr ablutions and multiplication tables, and never lose faith in the heart.

Heart and Lungs and Water

2010-12-08T16:57:00.002-05:00

I’m thinking in colors, movements, shapes. I’m lost in a feeling that I don’t feel but it holds me heavy, wrapped. I stand even on the balls of my feet and I feel my heart beating so hard my whole body is vibrating. A swirl of astounding love, obliterating indifference, fierce pain, shuddering empathy, and physical heat. My grandfather is about to die. I am in love. I am as lost as a rat stowed away a ship across an ocean. The fear is so fierce I can barely breathe, but it’s hanging on the tonguetip of ecstasy. My hoodie sweatshirt is Franny and my black Navy beanie is Zooey. The ring around my finger is a promise to a world detached from me in the voimen, but which I love and promise to die for. Around my waist is a blessing from God, Allah, and I have never let it leave my sight since it was wrapped into me. I’m all-powerful and invincible. I can’t be touched with a look nor brought into disgrace with a blow from four steady knuckles. I can’t be swayed from my determination as I am a child wrapped up in velvet covers held beneath a womb. I am everything and so very local. My heart is swelling like I can’t describe and yet it’s swelling through dimensions that analysts, dry bland and blind, still debate the existence of. I can end a sentence with a proposition and can propose my own laws of grammar while I am at it. I am inspired. The Holy Ghost whispers through me but I can only feel it organ deep. Meanwhile, the water rises. Meanwhile, they shuffle and make plans for the future and worry about getting to work on time. I haven’t slept in a week, my hands and eyes shake, my innards are working overtime, I’m not sure what I have or have not eaten. I can’t think of her for the life of me and that brings me the slightest tinge of sadness that all the misplaced guilt and illfired hopes were all just dust in a decaying studio. My heart goes out…It goes out and it does not come back, except the next morning, hungover, and covered in lipstick. My heart is larger than the world I inhabit, but I can’t touch it. It holds a sway more real and more terrifying than any I’ve ever accredited God with. But I know that they are synonymous and that makes me just sick enough to be totally confident.

I will fall. I will fall and there will be no one to catch me but my own toldyouso expectations. I will climb up, broken and reach out in the dark. I will feel nothing but the steady hiccups of my own growing laughter. I will let it all go. I will torpedo my ark and stand atop a column for 8 years, 8 months, and 8 days. And I will hang my head. I will moan in a Parisienne bed, while light streams in ivory through the windows, and she will whisper to me, ‘le petite mort’ and I will slowly shake my head and say, ‘le grande mort.’

a una rosa, con rizos

2010-10-31T21:09:00.001-04:00

Because you said what you didn’t say or else I heard it with my eyes.
Because your head was cocked away and I meant it in my mind.
Because the words are held on strings and it couldn’t matter anyway.
But mostly because you never said anything, you never said anything, you never said any thing.

Water: An Ode to 3 Loves

2010-10-25T18:09:00.003-04:00

When you were once so here and here is lost to imagery.
Water drops let the taste of your...smile, lips closed, vanilla cinnamon, and a chocolate croissant in the morning.

While you spoke and were pointed, sharp, and the trail tuppers out, imarginary, brown and red, soft blonde, tripled and die-torn. A skirmish netted to a time or a place when I couldn’t kiss you because I held back with excuses after you kissed me or your neck with fingers through knots and a shower, a shower was a wand awarded, for the snow was falling in the valley and across the way…across the way, the peaks were shrouded in fog.

But candles lit a black room rose and smoke lost in other words, entering other rooms caused course carved orange to smash and to smash and to remember the chords that never held another sway. Letters received and letters resent, remembered once broken and I, I, I, I, I can’t remember who uttered those words first.

Desolate streets in a car with muddy snow around, or lagunita, adobe rebuilt in courtyards like old Italian lovers in the season when flowers fall red and you read my fingers again. Night after night with no strong remembrances, a song, unsung, like tunneled eyes unstrung a mind, did you mind? Did you mind? Did I mind? I can’t remember once again. Can’t even begin to again.
But it was all right, all of it, so long as I was welcome, I was there, I was allowed in, I was permitted to stay, but you? Where were you in all of it? Was that where I was for her with the sheepbled eyes? Episode after repetisode, differing skins. Who was present for that formal exchange of hearts?

Is it wanting? Was there ever any time? Were there rules overlooked, like broken meters:
A bruised orange across a wall
A harried gasp before the fall
A soft catch against a post
A world at large, a missing host
A chance imbibe to meet a match
A brick back cracking to chicken scratch
So once again the motor moans
And fires blank to repay loans
And distance breeds a love unknown
Constricted throats replete to groan

Here, too late, I whisper yes. Yes to you and yes to us but who then is this writing for? Writing written like a score. Break. You who smiled on the water, you who bent back through the water, you who held me in like water, you who knew me so well as to never pay a blink back to rotten days of snowboard punk and childish ways, who could not be shown but on film when times were changing and Woody Allen was too much for him so we changed gears like bloody sheets, and you looked up twice apocalypse through redding sheets and you never took a moment to read a single page of heart and time and no wonder you fucking walked away, no wonder the wonder was lost - when you don’t look any deeper, the surface always stays the same and no wonder you lost the feel because distance is everything for a heart a hole a missing flake of snow lost somewhere beyond the blizzard and no wonder you never remember to check in on a promise of a time that could never have been real. I would have come found you, I would have come stayed, I would have come married our ti-

Shall we now begin again, a hollowed mind enclasped in sin. To just have tried. To have tried. To have tried and to have failed, but to have tried.

I look up for a moment. Profit and loss. A naval burned through, for if looks could kill…it could not be more real. A way to lone, to snuff the flickering fire of a canticle, circlescribed. Written around a loop. Was it ever worth a consideration as such? Failure, uncoded. Aerialwritten again with thou mayest and Shem, or was it Shaun? Who knew the nomenclatures all too well. Who knew? Colt 45 is the name of a gun. It is also the name of a 40 ounce bottle of malt liquor. Darwin was right. Ha ha he he and ho ho ho. Merry Christ mass.

Ars Poetica

2010-10-20T13:24:00.001-04:00

An aesthetic best described as collagist, reconstructivist: a stream of conscious meandering of highly cryptic personal references and glowing glaring universalist imagery and sermonizing. A prime focus on word play and reinvention, but a primer focus on harmony within the meandering

The object is twofold:

1. Inspire through beautiful imagery and coherent statemental declarations

2. Inspire through entirely incomprehensive word constructions. When the words themselves don’t make sense, it pushes the reader to invent sense for them.

Storytelling through train of thought – focus on an unsettled element of the heart or vulnerable mind + connect the disparate feelings it causes to rise through free association and stream of consciousness.

The intention is not to reinscribe the gospels or even to tell a good story – that will be left to those who are naturally (actually) talented at that kind of thing.

The goal is to provoke through a new kind of word assertion.

Influences include Walt Whitman, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, James Collector, Nikolas Hanks, and Carlee Joyce Ryan.

10-14-2010 pome - “Millionaires dying in Trailers”

2010-10-14T16:17:00.001-04:00

How quickly we resign

Our selves, our souls

Inward to the gravity

That tarry us truly to see

The reality of what it once was

That was destined to create us

Overcast Sunday

2010-10-10T17:23:00.002-04:00

A chryssaline visage of a rusted over typrewriter, broken, burntwrite.
The air creeps chilled as winter approaches.

I

You heard I'd had a hard life and I didn't know where you'd got that from:
A collection of understanding from the outside -
The sad rage it inspires to make me break down the rafters of the atmosphere.

Go to Patagonia, keep your spacious silence and let the trees sway with the boredom that begs-what am I doing here? Read a prophecy in the stars, quit your job because work is only life is only love if it's found in the for-rest.

Who is I and what is most real? To hide one's sadness because it doesn't make for the life of a party. It doesn't make for life.

But why so critical? Why so exclusionary? Right now, I feel perfect and alone - they are not mutually exclusive, they only work together under chemical conditions.

"Would you love me if I was no fun?"

What would it take? There are so many factors of benevolence and a world full of critics. Let us walk the knifeline, hand in hand, but don't look me in the eyes. Hand in hand, back to back.

So tell me what you've heard and why you care - Tell me what is frustrating and why it's a bare trap in the middle of the woulds. You let me on inswimmingly and semen stains the mountaintops. Before that, we were out of our elements but here, here where the coats we wear incubate our limited, specialized hearts, we hope to hell the heat is enough.

II

Advertisements and condensation.

The local forum, a spread apart. Shoestained maelstrom. To further an inhibition with the curve of a flatting tire.

The empty flow of a war, calm. Take me in, the licking wag of a blood's lust. Touch your pulse, Thomas, in fearful that the grandiosity of your chosen words don't flit away.

The view from alove: here I am, canvas and coarse. Timedrunk, timeless, Laestrygonians.

You try to put things back but they wont go back. Aeneas is Odysseus...I think that was the point all along. And he is I is Arthur Rimbaud, whose words I've never skimmed. Milkless and dry.

Trials and slings, outrageous fortune. A burning world of barbarousness. Nine times here out of done. Disquietude. It crumbles like skyscrapers, because even you, Mr Roark, don't exist, and you Ms Rand, are dead now.

Timshel

2010-09-29T13:08:00.001-04:00

I’ve recently been introduced to a band that I’ve fallen in love with called Mumford and Sons. I realized that their most famous song, Little Lion Man, is actually really well known and I’ve heard it plenty of times without knowing it was them. But their other songs, Winter Winds, Sigh No More, After the Storm, Thistles and Weeds, and Timshel, I like even more. Timshel in particular because it makes reference to one of my favorite books, East of Eden by Steinbeck:

Samuel said, “It’s a fantastic story. And I’ve tried to follow and maybe I’ve missed somewhere. Why is this word so important?”

Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see. I do see. But you do not believe this is divine law. Why do you feel its importance?”

“Ah!” said Lee. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph.

Adam said, “Do you believe that, Lee?”

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do. It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?”

Adam said, “Do you mean these Chinese men believe the Old Testament?”

Lee said, “These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.” Lee’s eyes shone. “You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.”

Adam said, “I don’t see how you could cook and raise the boys and take care of me and still do all this.”

“Neither do I,” said Lee. “But I take my two pipes in the afternoon, no more and no less, like the elders. And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because ‘Thou mayest.’”

Here’s the song:

On Burning the Qur'an in Gainesville, Florida

2010-09-08T14:53:00.003-04:00

In the courtyard of a university in Berlin, there is a glass floor. If you look through it, you see a tiny room of empty bookshelves. In 1938, there was a mass demonstration of book burning in this courtyard. Next to the window is an inscription quoting the 19th Century poet Heinrich Heine, which can be translated as "Wherever you begin by burning books, you will end by burning people." This is perhaps the most moving Holocaust memorial I ever saw due to its simplicity. As I read about a tiny group of fundamentalists in Florida, I can't help but remember those words.

They say that God wants them to do it. I can't help but think how common it is in human nature to conflate one's own desires and egocentrism with the voice of God, for it was that same "voice" that thought blowing up the Twin Towers in the first place was a good idea. We fight fire with fire, we defend ourselves against bombs with bombs, we levee hatred on the hatefilled and thus provide them justifications. We do.

The human race is populated with book burners and people burners alike, and we're all so godly, so pious, earning our tickets to heaven through pleasing the deity. Never has so much fire left me feeling so completely chilled to the bone.

I think of Christ's words, "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do." By burning a holy book (or any book, for that matter), they are killing in the name of...

It breaks my heart. But what is there to say about it? Who am I to say who is right and wrong? Let it be, I suppose. Only God, or Reality, will determine the truth in the end. Life itself as the greatest/only teacher, the future in dialogue with the present. What will be will be.

The Bottom and the Top

2010-08-20T18:23:00.002-04:00

(found in a journal from Alaska - July or August 2009 - under the title "Kissing the Apocalypse)

I hold my breath, waiting for a convenient rise in her speech, taking her pitch high enough to mask the sound of my exhale. I know it will come out jerky, tight, and frustratingly loud, so I wait for an opportune moment. Meanwhile, she asks me a question and I am far too out of breath to respond. My answer, too, is jerky, but also unsubstantiated. I wasn't engaged in her speech because I was too focused on getting enough oxygen into my lungs. I only vaguely know what she's talking about and my eventual answer reflects that. It's crass and thoughtless. I'm losing the battle. Each missed opportunity to shine like this lowers me lower and lower in her esteem. This is probably the last time we will spend time together. She will never call me again and if I call her, she'll either muster an excuse, or make time down the road, make a date that will either never come, or will come with less than no enthusiasm or encouragement. It becomes a lost cause. An uphill battle turned to the storming of a fortified castle with my bare hands. I must forget about her. If I try the next date, I will walk in defenseless to a stony face that offers no benefits of the doubt. I will be more nervous and more determined, make more mistakes, say more turgid and cliche things, fail to think of questions to ask her or fail to pick up on her hints about her heart. The game is up. I have lost.

I stare into her green eyes, rapt, and I'm yelling reverberations through my own head, slipping out rasped and skewed like through Bob Dylan's clinched jaw. The epitome of cool. She hangs on my words even as I'm not very clear on what they are. The substance is of no substance. It's the inspiration that's coming out, not the designs - by product - waste materials. Nothing to be held or collected and years down the road when she reminds me of those beautiful poems I once mumbled in an apocalyptic haze to her with little recognition of her presence, I will have no idea what she's talking about. Those words that were like meteors cracking fireholes in the ice of her self-conscious demeanor and were everything, the cataclysmic shift, to me will only be vague memories of having know someone by that name and at the moment of having loved her so deeply, not as a person with a history and a soul, but as an arbitrary figurehead, a representative of an entire culture of aching heads and hearts, gaping to be caressed with the right perspective and the flyest demeanor. It is her moment of preparation that draws these words that I don't care about out of me, and has little to nothing to do with me as a human being. All I do is yell and the sound is as Om, the totality of everything melting and massaging my nervous system. But to her, each word is the dogma and exactly what she needed to hear at the time.

Phase two - by the end, there can only be one of two thoughts in her head: I want to fuck him or I want to kill him. Cut his head ragged off and watch the plants drink up his blood, blooming with relief in the face of his void.

Weather 8/3 (found in notebook)

2010-08-20T17:39:00.002-04:00

The smells in the air of forgotten weathers.
A cool shock before this summer's first cold rain
Calm, comforting, an enwombing cradle held bated in health
To slow and open to see the spectral passage of lights and skies
pressures and heats at their conjoined lack
Makes the work world fade to a pretty circus
Who knows whose life is dependent?
To say more than intended
By way of a thought of a smell of a history of a presence

On Writing as Love

2010-07-29T18:57:00.002-04:00

We write in order to fall in love. Someone I once knew was always talking about moving around, falling in love with everything, everywhere, writing poems with the body. He said the only real poems he ever wrote were the ones he screamed in the faces of confused passers-by and instantly forgot for the rest of his life.

We write always to recognize ourselves and to fall in love with the creative self capable of that kind of beauty in production. We secondarily write to convince an Other, an ideal lover, to fall in love with us, for it is only the creations of a Being that we may actually love. We claim it is they they themselves, but it is actually the words or actions their soul gives birth to or the feelings they inspire in us that we love.

Now for some people, the self and the Other is not enough (from one comes two, from two comes infinite) and they write to please a whole world, to be accepted and loved by the world at large, the zeitgeist that has supplanted a once omniscient diety in ability to judge, love and condemn. We sometimes write to make money, but if money is ego, then I can only suspect the aim of this sort of production is self-aggrandizement, ego-boost: the back door of love.

building Rome again

2010-06-27T00:29:00.003-04:00

Baited breath in a whitewashed wish for willful acts - I came, I saw, I concubined her.

With _______ comes loss, building Rome again, day after day….as the Romans do.

On a day, in the light, as the clouds pass us by
It is a knowing, knowing its just beyond tongues, so excuses coin our talents + strings carry buzzwords born once in simple sincerity but not lost through repetition, doomed to repetition reclaimed in partition but slow and viscous…to heal.

Everybody should just write lovesongs.
Each stroke an act of creation
To die having created one thing more than I've consumed-
that is success
Listlessly lost listening to ambience, a weight, a lone wife, a pot to stew, brew, wait for the morning air, enveloping in mouthfuls plum poetry - needled for/by the masses (who equals force divided by acceleration)
Mea culpcha'
Again against the rain
Words to worry the time away - But flow, montage fabrication, faucet spurts and similes - Lost lost in the rain
Madwinds grins gouged through grizzles and grime, the abacus of heartbeats, bumping through nonknown nomenclatures within our languages, personal sin, falling once again, this time, feeling the wind in our armhair, to poese a question, in peony.

II

Something full and open too with hearts expanse considered through
The mind infers from hurried ends then staggers back to make amends
The dreams I dream are second hand + work to circumscribe this man
But that's OK, we've just to live this, and clear our minds to spark forgiveness

Africa

2010-05-04T18:32:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow I fly to Africa. Tonight, I sleep in Lisbon. I've been here a week after 6 weeks (or more?) in Ireland. Everything feels very strange right now. I promised many people I would keep this blog updated and I haven't done that. It's been strange, too strange to blog about. A journey, yes, but very personal and...well...boring for everyone who isn't me. In Ireland I hitchhiked through the ancient part, where old rural traditions are still alive and found that they aren't alive in the way I expected. Mostly learned a valuable lesson about expectations. But I wrote a piece of journalism, 14 pages long about what strikes me as one of the most interesting stories that seems to sum up the relationship between the rural man and the multinational corporation and all the economics involved perfectly. The piece needs editing but my plan is to try and whip it into something crisp and do what I can to get it published. I flew to the south coast of Portugal and stayed in a beach house with two gents named Filipe. Class guys. Went partying and kayaking much, swam in reckless waves, spent two nights with Joao and Co, more partying, me drunk and lost, allegies catching up, reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, two nights in Lisbon, not nearly enough, thinking what a wonderful city this would be to settle down in for a stretch and now...in the morning I fly to Africa, Senegal, Dakar. I aim to go with eyes wide open and cup fully empty. Let that new world tell me what is what, because I feel I have so few claims to truth or ideas at all. Running and looking and rejecting time and again, every spot has some excuse for not being up to snuff. No more. It is what it is. Good night.

Worstward, Ho!

2010-04-11T10:46:00.000-04:00

I went to a bonfire on the beach last night. Bunch of groovy hippies playing fiddles and beating old ancient drums. I sat barefoot under the stars and roasted my skin after all this dampness and all these grey skies. It's been piercingly sunny the last 5 days and though I've been ungodly ill, there's been something extraordinary about it all. I shipped my Joyce and my Beckett and my Irish tweed hat back to my mom's house on Friday and so, 2.5 pounds lighter, and the entire weight of one aspect of history broken from my back, I'm moving forward to Galway. I'm going to start hitching in the morning. Tonight I think we will listen to trad music in the pubs. I met a Cuban woman working on her PhD about US Cuban relations and she invited me to sleep on her couch in County Clare in exchange for help editing her grammar which apparently isn't very good. I think I'll use the time to do a lot of writing. I feel like I'm surfacing from a deep deep swim to some sort of lighted purpose. Nothing pointed, only a general thrust, but it's filling me again and again. I've almost read through Tropic of Capricorn and I'm feeling the kind of inspiration I used to talk about with my old friends in vermont. Challenge is that they are here this time, but I guess that was supposed to be the challenge all along. No supposeds anymore. Only turf and peat bogs, only ice cream trucks singing off of crumbling stone houses with shutters drawn and airy winds coughing over baking days and I remembered, briefly, what it means to sweat. Everything seems a whisper, a cleared throat at the back of an empty auditorium. Every night there are chills and fever dreams and inch by inch everything said or sayable is melting away in a waxen glue of constipated stupid, a loss for what to hold and dearly so. Maybe it takes a life. Maybe it talks a limelightlost, but whatever the current, it shores up the mind and pingpongs it from swerve to swerve. I'm getting lost in a tumbler of babble, and the sprayed out notes of alcoholic oblivion are speaking in tones muffled down beneath the quiet echoes of St Patrick and his poor, banished snakes...off to America, in search of potatoes.