Happy Holocaust Remembrance Day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IvPIWzQcUY

Attempt #36 at a Zen Circle

As Durer or Blake
I would release the line
engraving cedar
with a gryphon's vicious, noble truth
or like Michelangelo
unfurl a spine from stone
giving warmth to the cold.
Achieving no-mind
with conscious intent
I would naturalize my brushstroke
& the immigrant's family---
two girls
chartreuse & robin's egg blue bows in their hair,
Neruda in their future.
My hand wouldn't waver.

Post Tomorrow

I'm writing this promisory note so that I will follow through with blogging on the morrow.

Epistle to Tacoma

Tacoma
in your sorry streets
I gave up
on my few remaining scraps
of the commercialized
American Dream.
Tacoma
demonic metal hurdles high
& chemical smell rises
suffusing grey stink.
Asthmatics worsen & eyes puff.
The wheeze of children &
greed of unpolished men.
If only our statesmen read Marcus Aurelius.
Tacoma
how I cried my eyes out
in your basements.
My grief bottomed out
in the folds of your wasted hem.
Your men said I looked
like Christopher Walken.
Your women said I looked
like James Spader.
Some of your women cried at me
telling me 'everything.'
Said how approachable I was.
Stories of former drug addiction,
weight problems, eating disorders,
bad ex's, prostitution,
faulty parenting,
& how they felt about me.
I didn't take advantage of them.
Some glint-stared & giggled.
Tacoma
I didn't have a dime.
It bothered me at the time.
Tacoma
your women are battered then fried.
They improve to despair.
They use sexiness
to invite you to boring churches.
Only one of them I loved
in a special way.
We sat talking in the park
near the greenhouse which boils
& the manuscript museum.
Her fine feet in thong sandles
released to enjoy clovered grass
in the moist shade.
We talked about how we felt.
I was so stilted & philosophical
in the defensive unable to speak.
Tacoma!
The way she moved her hand
to tuck her dress
when she sat down.
We walked to our cafe.
Our bodies close.
Birds & cherry blossoms
played befour our feet.
The sway of her hip,
moles on her arms & light wisps of hair,
the presence of those eyes & lips
that spoke.
Tacoma
it's easy to miss what you never had.
Tacoma
what is the world doing?
When is the capitalist nightmare
going to end?
Tacoma
I moved with a job lined up
that quickly fell through.
The kitchen crew
with their poor English, polite mannerisms,
& mischievous grins were friends
but the owner thought five bucks
was a night's worth of tips.
I fell to questioning nooses on your streets
to find my laugh.
This wasn't what Jefferson had in mind.
The minority in opinion
came here to start a new world.
Peasants & Puritans,
the enslaved & indentured.
Chinese pilgrims track-tied to washing.
Africans turned slave chained to cotton.
Women alotted sufferage.
We had forefathers
that broke the first 398 treaties
with the native peoples.
What sap flowed through their veins?
What a trail of tears.
This wasn't what Jefferson had in mind.
Tacoma
I threw freight in your port.
Thanks for noticing.
What putrid water.
The rusty rail cars pulled scraping up.
Gas fumes & dust hit us.
Our gloved hands jammed fingers
but still we flew in a sweat-haze.
Tacoma
I became a man in your brutal grasp.
Tacoma
I the laborer for minimum wage.
Tacoma
I the basement dweller trying to sleep
three inches above concrete
part dormant, quasi-admiring sorority girls.
Tacoma
standing long in front of each piece
I the art-viewer
spouting mine on streetcorners & stages.
Mayfield riffs delicate & sultry
behind my soul-bothered fountains.
Cigarette butts enshrine your alleyways.
Sad homeless men that can't tend themselves
pick your chipped paint grimy dumpsters
by the highrises of empty agendas.
Yours the chemical plant profusion.
Yours the pulp-rife collusion.
Your antique clocktower can't measure
the drudgery in your districts.
Fine houses rot, sink porches in your destitude.
No historical society unearths much humanity
that's what present moments are for.
Where is art in your malcontent?
Does poverty ever escape the crushing vice?
How much of America is like you?
Tacoma, I loved & despaired in you.
I escaped. I am a better man than that.
I am a better man than I thought I was, then in that place.
Tacoma, the women I loved altared you.
Sacrifice glints on your beers.
Tacoma, the multitude has a potentate heart.
We can reach beyond your machinery.
How your scar lives on is up to us.

Today's Fresh Ink Very Raw/Rough Marcus Fragment

In case you haven't been paying razor-sharp attention I've been devoting much of my writing time to a play, a very ambitious project with a protagonist named Marcus. The plot is a bit much to rehash here & I hesitate to give away many, if any, of my tricks in a public forum. Nevertheless here is a fragment:

cut due to roughness

Winding Threads

Who knows where the first thread came from?

Some said a word came forth from the void.

Some say the eveything was balled up in the nothing & boomed forth.

Some says awareness arose in a grassy grove, flowers & nakedness.

Still more claim that all is just an illusion, & that this immaterial is ours to exploit in the temporal.

That a thread emerged is hard to deny. One became many but joined. Awarenesses cropped up & receded. Beauties & ugliness shaded by perception, merging, joining in triumphant dances. Angles bursting, burgeoning. Throats joining & stems twining to bud forth subtle blossoms in canopy.

Many feet padded many ways & hands clutched embracing, archaic & eternal forms with the joyful reverence of childhood first experience & the wisdom of old age which is with us from the start. How to balance the ironies? Juggle & struggle & smile in acceptance. Persevere, plough your land with a reverence that borders on love as religion. Standing, sitting, laying down, feel the threads that bind you from this to this. The names are a reference, the heart of things an enigma that forever spools forth.

Looking down this ravine the creek cuts through with moss & fern draping rock with the dalliance of rich mineral days. Moist air billows & there are the loping flights of insects, dragonflies & horseflies, which many claim are not dragons or horses. Definitive claims are so humorous.

A great psychologist is not just one who is open but one who opens. Analyzing this we do not come to paralysis but to the emerging universe. Healthy through neuroses, alive with dying, full of the resonance of love whispered through the tree limbs of loss.

Taking one side obscure another. Thinking one thing think again. Thinking many things think more. Puncturing with characterless story, reconsider your vulgarity. Lift the mine from the field so that the animal dance of the tribe is not dressed with unnecessary tattoos.

Crossing this line, tripping the wire, so much more is possible. The window falls to open air. Smells of fresh dalliance infiltrate your nostrils as if your mistress was all about you. Busting the busts of heads, representation asks to be represented in the flesh, in the connections we make with the living. Water travels show the wanderer her elusive snaking. As each skin sheds the moon grows brighter in scope. Fluoresence transforms into essence past flora. Essence of dirt in the palm, finger in the petal-center. As the lines prolifigate one shifting line emerges: the ever elusive what-is. The name that is never spoken before what-is changes. We can only keep it in mind for a fragment of a second but the lines play out brilliantly in the one line until the possible lines of what can be begin to dominate our hope: a world of giving that we give back to in harmony that is a tension of song rife with melody of melodious undertakings that don't pound the life from the ground in the name of abstract moneymakers who usurp the world by writ of law. Life is nothing if not the continuance of hope for more, for a better world, for an existence that marries its virtues to greater contexts & actualities.

The book is closed to reach contexts in the hands on the rocks. The heel eases into toes intent on discovering the eagle's perch. Eyes with the water of oceans spill into sightlines reverberating songs span centuries. Ask me this, "What threads have you found that are most worth following?" Injustice rots the links & the understory is too often a hideous subtext of wisdom discarded.

Fellow mendicant let your connections reach you, don't set up barriers, trapdoors & brutal tests in your cooridooring a maze dam the flow of nutrients to the core of song. The ease that sets the sun to joyful work is one thread within your grasp, twinkling a quiver. Grab this lifeline with more than fingers. Reach out for the paradigm that, setting the warheads on edge, sees the forest for the fall which is the inner flight of growth neverending, a waterfall that is more tears than tears. Never ending the instruction of right action. Adapting this end of putting food in the mouths of the hungry, compassionate enough to dodge the destruction of that voice with the facial expression of a saint residing somewhere in the folds. Reasoning without too much hard empiricism, reasoning with the will of a tempest for sheltering the wilted flower clusters of this island in the space sea.

When the threads seek from every pore fill them with light intentions whose weight is peerless, sight beyond sight. As you make grander realities in the name of a higher ground question from the depths & sing a word which forever changes. Winding fingers spreading the earth for a sapling to carry on the legacy of living.

A Festival of Language

Been readin about Shakespeare. Shakespeare: Invention of the Human and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare both rereads. Kinda moody with a nasal infection. Once I get paid on Friday I'm gonna get homeopathic nasal spray. Big circles under the eyes. Had strange fever dream the night before last about Coachella out of nowhere. Haven't even thought about going, last year I briefly considered it because Jim James and crew were going to rock but why I dreamt about it in such startling gravity-hurtling psychologically unsettling detail is beyond me.

If I learned anything about the Alicia ordeal it is that there is untapped potential in the human soul. As if I activated the switch that brings about evolutionary adaptations my overwhelming desire in love seemed to catapult me into the stratosphere of consciousness. The leap was a bit much to take and got the backlash of my tarnished imperfection. Every day I answer the question, "Why should I go on a date with you?" The question in my mind past language is more like "Who are you capable of being? Who are you really? What are you doing to change?" Before Rachael I had only known disappointment & frustration. Her coldness & cruelty put me abruptly face to face with anger. In a flood the implications of war, genocide, bystander apathy, & everyday contribution to the socioeconomic nightmare took on a new strata of detail that was impossibly hard to trudge through. Every newspaper headline & girl that I could possibly fall for was like a knife entering, twisting, & pulling out slowly. Time, dedication to achieving at least a semblance of wisdom, & the fire to honor what I can of the childhood dream of heroism has at least patched the wound with an ardour that appreciates the magic all around us, strong in the midst of so much tragedy. I still remember Ahniwa scoffing at Theo who remarked that I could never be a cynic. I am bound by cynicism because I want to believe so much.

Growing older, the specter of responsibilities comes to bear. The only way I'll ever own a car again is if I find the right lady, we marry, and have a child. Every day I long for a job where I help people more, a little more financial return so I can someday have a piece of land where I build a green lifestyle, and I daydream constantly of owning a dog. Funny. This unsettling sadness that has pervaded the last few days is intertwined with my sneaky unconscious finally getting around to accepting that Amy & I are done. That knowledge has been there for a long time but has taken a while to seep in & integrate. Knowing something & knowing are quite different animals. Best not to get trapped in the maze loops of fruitless speculation. Still, my intuition opens up special awareness that I am not allowed to deny. One remove is a thin dividing line that separates the bird in the shell from flight. To develop some awareness of the connections we share with each other & how we damage with, our disconsolate indifference, the import of our actions is a terrible beauty. Righty-O, a right cheerfest this be.

Methinks the sun in the trees deserves a good look-at. Hips that would hover in some hard to decipher level of intentional courting ritual dance. Ah the grace of woman. The dream of love. The dream & the reality. Off the computer back to the page. I'll post a poem soon. Kisses.