Monday, December 19, 2011

Root Canal On The Moon

Strange morning.

First root canal. Since I had my wisdom teeth pulled last week I decided to take a percoset before I went in. I also asked for Nitrous Oxide. The combination made me sick and I had to ask for them to stop it half way through the root canal. It was a hellish feeling. The Christmas music sounded terrible to my ears, nauseating. I also had flashbacks of the horrifying movie I saw last night, Wit, about a woman dying painfully of cancer. Fears were unlocked and drowning me. I needed oxygen.

Then when I got home I crawled in bed and for comfort turned on a movie. The movie I found on Netflix was Castaway On The Moon, a highly rated Korean movie. I watched the movie with Sofia on my lap. The movie was so beautiful, enchanting, one of the best movies I've ever seen.

So I went from a deep low to a beautiful ecstasy in the space of an hour.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Time Suck

Alright, so I'm writing a book, right?
And this book is pure joy, fun, first and foremost,
for myself, which is, by my logic, yourself.
I would ask you what your logic is, but

this is a poem, of a sort, and what
would be the point of asking you anything
unless I wanted to answer it for myself?
and so that's what I'll do, illogically, sing

a question, instead of answering
a question yet unsung, which is a question
of mechanics. You want to know about this
no? Like for instance, see that "sing"

at the end of stanza two? It is there
to rhyme with "thing", as another word
might do if the rhythm had not lead
to a better verb, to sing.

That's what I'm doing
and see how the "sing" at the end of stanza two
leaps out into the blank space between
stanzas? That space is called the caesura

because that is what it is, the pregnant
seizure in which the song can breathe
in silence before she is sung again, the bated pause
just before the full throttle song in which the lark

will leave her "forever" mark upon Keats,
the master in all things counter. Opposites
attract, silence and song, which is why
Shakespeare will say "Truth and beauty buried be."

That is why, though I am dead, seriously,
the joke is on me, and I laugh at me,
a jester hung out to dry, a foolish son
who will try in vain to defeat the ruinous fall.

That's a sly reference to Dante in hell,
where all is judged and recorded and fair-
thee-well. I'm more li'ble to inhale the draw
and take it for a long preamble.

I mean near forever, drawing the pleasle
out until it is a sinuous release of worklessness
and disuse, the disease of the most horrible drivel
to ever reprimand itself for early predisposal.

I'm getting ahead of myself, and therefore maybe
you too? Or maybe you are light years ahead of I,
comprehension-wise. I hope not though, because
then why read another line? Why not pause

at that last caesura and pop yourself, Pip?
We've got Mrs. Haversham for debacle and we
have miles to slow before we wake. Oh yeah,
the work. I have so much work to do. I keep

forgetting, and postponing the difficult yet
very real work! So I will do that now, having to beg
your indulgence, sir madam. It has been a pleasure
to know you, if only in the biblical sense.

On a lark's wing, that "sing" way back there flung off into
that pause and then landed in the third stanza as "a question".
That is part of the answer to your riddle, Sun,
the answer to the question of what is being sung.

So why ruin it with any dark? Because ruin is our redemption,
said the great critic, the booming Herold of the Bloom.
And so what if that critic hates it! Bring on the truth
soon, because soon, in truth, I lose my youth.

Oh my bod, in that last pauwth I got wet.
I'm such a queen bee in the buzz of my own mind,
and therefore have fallen way behind on the thing
of it, the weight of it, the thing that weighs the most.

There goes the ghost. After a long break to refresh
my brink of dismissal, my dismal failure will be made dead,
brought to you by the letter D, which we shall see
has purpose in repose heretofore unleashed.

Donne be damned for his wit,
we sing for the hell of it.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Epic Night

read poetry at cafe near frcc. just happened to be during my literature class, so i required the class be there. i read EPIC PORTAL POEM and sang paeon, pumpkin seeds, i feel tractor, bay of poets, wildwood holler and the halloween song.

preceding me, as a surprise, was my prize student from last semester. he told the audience that the poetry he was reading was inspired by my class. It was his first reading ever. He dressed hippie chic, all in white, hippie sheik. he was great.

then afterward offered a job at frcc for real money. yes!

finally listening to great bands at D Note, Antiquia, from S.F. and dancing late night.

finally finally listening to epic halloween practice from night before last while writing this. so good. life is richer than i generally feel comfortable talking about.

poem for 100k poets for change

A Vision For My Daughter

"I have seen it. What? Eternity.
It is the sun matched by the sea."
--Arthur Rimbaud


Somewhere under the rainbow, meant Rimbaud,
the rainbow itself; the spectrum
of color caused by the sun matching
the sea, physics that you can trace.
The mathematics are lost in the lattice work,
in the infinite order upon chaos,
where every opposite is a compliment.

Think of the way the sea water evaporates
in the sun and recycles itself in the atmosphere,
and conversely, the way the heat of the sun
is cooled by the sea and sprouts life,
the endless showdown where the two meet,
here, where life begins, where any two meet,
where all difference becomes one,
the paradoxes never ending, always begun
again where the out breath meets the in.

The sun matched by the sea. I imagine
myself there, where the two meet,
where the cool meets the heat,
the wet and dry coming together,
the feeling of that frisson
starting from a singular point of thought
and then spread instantly out over the wide sea.

It reminds me of the feeling I get
when a cool breeze caresses my skin
on a hot day, that perfect synergy,
except spread out wide
over the massive surface of the sea. All that
push and pull of drying up
and wetting down
is where the magic happens,
the perpetual motion machine out of which life
comes, a factory of life made of nothing but sun
and sea, the life, the living, all desire for living,
comes out of Thee, This, That, comes out of It,
the Mother and Father, this back and forth,
eternally, from external to internal, in to out.

To spin out the metaphor a little further, from despair
to delight and back to despair. Moods swing like sun and water
and find themselves becoming steam in the center
where the two polar endpoints meet. Here.
Between me and you.

2.

Then there's where the sun matches the sea
in the evening, via the moon, the sun reflected
in the moon reflecting on the water, the moon glade,
the shine of day upon night, reflected obliquely,
just as, inversely, the shadow makes a little bit
of night in day, just as, likewise, good always comes from bad,
bad from good, up from down,
etcetera, this and that chasing each other around.

We rolled around and had a ball.

"It's kept together moving all around."

3.

So shoot for the ball of clay,
roam time and space
with your mega-zoom telescope,
until you have known the woman
on the moon, golden,
her mouth
half open
in ecstacy
like Teresa of Avalon,
or Marilyn Monroe,
a moon crater for a mole,
caught halfway between
the sun and shadow,
in the crepusculer joy of union.
(Say it in Spanish and crepuscular sounds
more like herself; crepusculario. No?)
The dusk chasing his sister dawn,
like the two lovers on Keat's Urn.
Then magic hour turns into the witching hour;
the phantom light is caught in a photograph
on a southern Missouri night;
underwater light,
wavery and wet,
flickering like candlelight,
in the glow of which everyone becomes
suddenly themselves, and everything else
becomes a blend of everything else.

The music here is bewitching,
the rhythm takes you with it,
the rhythm is all of you, all of it.

4

Until we arrive at a future star,
a dream, around which all of the planets
dance. The music of the spheres
entrance the occupants there
like the relief of gravity does here,
so that there is no choice but to dance.

Already in language there is music,
but what if language was pure music?
the music of becoming, as if communication
were eradicated except for inside the choir, become
a gem-like flame of communion, on fire.
That is what I want for you, a place where every word
is sung, every step a dance, everyone both with
and alone, until, as a poet once predicted,
you can no longer tell the dancer from the dance,
the singer from the song.


It would sound like this...


5.

What Jonah said,

"Please lift my withered friend."

What Max said,

"Here is you."

What Piper said,

"Don't throw away the good luck of being human."

What Miranda said,

"also a superhero."

What Diane said,

"See to business."

What Kate said,

"I'm moving in spirals to dust off the world."

What Kate said,

"Love is supposed to be something sacred."

What Peter said,

"The true art museum of the hip hop nation" is not true.

The true art museum of the hip hop nation is the side of a train.

But who also said, truly, "For those willing to listen, this one is for you."

What Mary said,

"Never open bottles of love potion with your teeth."

What I didn't say.

Do you reject satan? I wouldn't answer.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

meditation w/ awesome iconography

I died for beauty
a small death--eternally--
until the next breath--
eternal leap across breaths
an abyss-- a string of abysses--
the heart stops-- then leaps across
to the next beat-- echoes
endlessly in the bottomlessness.

f\\\

You've learned to fill the holes
with lead, the pencil rain
did-- with Emily D--
in the grave--
until the grass runs out
and we run out of things
to talk about.

She did too,
died, as in lived--
lived weller--better
for beauty-- which
astounds--as truth--
and abets a life
of carefulness.

Holy Dream

-- 4 am. The holy hour. I just woke from a "Mother Of The Universe" dream. To work backwards, from the end of the dream to the beginning. The wonderful phrase I awoke upon was "You must expoo to expand" or "To expand you must expoo". Expoo was a"made up" verb from my dream which meant "to stretch". This was referring back to these very strange and beautiful black metallic trees that were elongated in beautiful fluidly moving shapes, with pointed cat-like fingernail tips at the end. There were a grove of these trees at the entrance to my step-father's mansion. (In the dream I had a step-father.) One of the elongated tips cleverly pulled away from the door of the ancient mansion as you entered. The interior of the mansion was very modern and sleek. I walked upstairs to the kitchen area and the door to the kitchen was pushed shut from inside just as I reached the top of the stairs. My step-father must be busy I thought and he doesn't want to be disturbed. So I went downstairs. Earlier I had been trying to think of a second part to a lesson that I wanted to "teach" my friends who were devotees of Amma (mother of the universe.) This was downstairs. I was "reaching" for a way to tell it and I stepped into a net-like womb in the closet and began to push against the netting with my hands and feet frantically. I said something to the effect that this was one way to stretch, but that it should be relaxed, on purpose, fun. And I began to do a kind of dance inside the net, an exercise of sorts. I slowed it down to slow-motion so that was easier and then I sped it up again. This is what led to the idea of "expoo to expand" and then the elongated trees. This was the second part of the lesson. I don't remember the first part of the lesson I was trying to "reach", the first part of the dream. But it was the thing you become by "expooing". It feels as if it were a kind of round lake, with the warm water reaching all the contours of its own roundness perfectly, like a womb.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

First day Fall Semester, FRCC

Intro to Lit, Fall Semester. First class tonight, 10 week session. Some interesting students. Jessica from Canada who legally had her last name changed to Sideways. Her desert-island book is ISO (IN Search Of): The art of Dating, Relationships & Sex For The Discerning Lesbian. This lead to a conversation about dating services, and then opposites attracting. Jessica said she wouldn't date her opposite... a self-hating Republican. I asked her if she would date an other-loving Republican and she said no.

Then there was Butch, the bus-driver. His desert-island book is any Stars Wars fan fiction. He also doesn't watch movies, only ballets. He likes how ballets have no words and therefore the interpretation is up to you. We briefly discussed the idea of a ballet based on Star Wars and he said he would never leave the theater.

Other memorable desert-sland books were Flowers In the Attic, Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club", Anne Rice's Jesus books, "any redemption book", Mahabarata and Lord Of The Flies.

At the end of the class I handed out their first assigment, translating a Mallarme poem. I told them it was a notoriously difficult poem to translate and we were diving in the deep end. But I let them know I had faith they could do it. Jessica Sideways says "Then you don't think we can do it, because faith is a lack of logical evidence." She had me there. I could only reply with, "then I have to say I don't think you will be able to logically do this." That effectively stumped her up for long enough to move the conversation to the next topic, which was goodnight.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

today

Yoga this morning at D Note with Jeremy and I playing bhajans. Good to look out and see Monica, Maryn and Marley in Sivasana.

Then Harvest Fest w/ Maryn and the big slide.

Next Costco. I love the food samples. This morning a full lunch, clam chowder, Indian lentils, strawberry yogurt, Tang, Smoothie, Mahi Mahi, Honey crusted chicken, Veggie sausage on a roll, peanut butter chocolate.

I love that Cosco employs so many older ladies to give out samples.

I love the dance of the heavy carts in a busy Cosco. You have to think physics so you can keep the cart going through crowd without losing momentum. It is a tricky game.

Then home and lunch and The U.S. Open. Serena Williams versus Siosur. Serena lost a point because of a late grunt rule. She was so angry that she came back and began to dominate Siosur. She took her anger and used it as fuel. Gotta wonder about the healthiness of that. Wouldn't it encourage more anger?

I find myself getting emotional during sports, especially women's sports. Strange.

Friday, September 2, 2011

points

New Life As Video Game Strategy

you spend points when you power up (get high)
you save points when you power down (refrain)
trick is to make them work for each other,
spend points on worthy occasions, for best bang,
like a friend coming over, a dance, a poem.
Save points (refrain) for extra bang when you spend.
As an added bonus you get a new clarity of mind
when you save. Plus beautiful dreams.

Yesterday I saved and though it cost me
a flashing moment of frustration, it gained
me the following dream: I was teaching HS,
taking over for a fellow teacher who was leaving.

The teacher had assigned a massive project
to brilliant hardworking students. They handed
into me their gargantuan piles of work and I knew
it would take me weeks to get through. But I
didn't care. I was excited. The kids had obviously
put the best of themselves in the projects. One
kid even had bloody cuts on his back. Several

were in bands. That was a dream worth saving
for. The saving also gave me extra points to spend
this morning, which I traded in to hang out with
Alejandro. For this extra saving I got several rewards:

I thought of an opera that I want to write with Alejandro,
called "Space Warriors" about a future in which robots and
men have colonized separate planets to keep the peace between
them. A robot invades the human planet to spy,
casing the planet. Meanwhile he falls in love with a woman.
This interrupts the peace between the two planets, escalating
into an all out space war between robots and humans.

I was also rewarded with this post. Next I will clean
and pack for our trip to L.A. which will be extra fun.
Finally I will dance and work up a sweat. Then I will
go back to saving!
--

it might even be possible to save for your entire life and spend it all on death.

lies

better start looking at the truth

cause there's a bigger bang a comin

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Today

This morning woke up at 5:30am to meditate. Back to sleep. Hung out with Sofia. Read article on Dickens in New Yorker. Watched part of Documentary "Century of The Self". Watched episode 5 of season 1 of Wilfred. Watched Episode 5 from season 9 of Project Runway. Went to work and had a decent night with alt country band called Canyon Creek. Went to see the movie "Our Idiot Brother" with Matthew. We both knew Paul Rudd so it was fun. For some reason it was the most I've felt connected to him after "I Love You, Man". Odd to get to re-know him through movies. Went back to D note to pay band and get Bachata/salsa started. Went to Jeremy's and watched documentary about New Orleans in 3-D (as Jeremy has new 3-D TV), then a documentary about parkour w/ Dante. Dante went to sleep and Jeremy and I talked about the problem of apathy, and about the problem of falling in love, and about dopamines. 1am now, going to bed.

Friday, August 12, 2011

song of day

I Vice Squad

I laid down and fell asleep and fell asleep forever
and in my sleep I dreamed a life up very close to clever.
The life I dreamed was as it seemed and it seemed the very clover
beneath the hooves of a stampede of riders charging over.

I swore then and there that fate was having a conniption.
They waved it off, I'd had enough, I called the big connection
who sacrificed a thousand ships and called it euthanasia.

Far be it for me to canopy below the jungle trees,
so tall they come up to my knees when I've grown to full stature.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Burns!



The poem Green Grow The Rushes by The Scottish poet Robert Burns came into my head this morning. I added it to the Extra Credit portion of the D-mail. Then I was dancing to John Schaefer's Afternoon Sound Alternative on KGNU. There was a pause and I did a sun salutation. While I was in cobra pose a Celtic song came on the radio. It was a famous bagpipe tune. I was in a deep stretch and I realized Robert Burns would have known this tune. The celtic bagpipe tune turned into ska. It was a song by the Celtic Ska band The Trojans. I yelled out spontaneously "Burns!" I was screaming for Robbie Burns. I was saying that the stretch I was in burns! I was saying that all of existence, in a moment like this, burns!

Saturday, August 6, 2011

boxing match w/ joseph

dream of fight with joseph snowhawk for charity. fight kept getting postponed. This was both a relief and a frustration. I didn't really want to fight Joseph because he could probably take me. On the other hand I didn't want to postpone the inevitable. But turns out I woke up and the inevitable was made evitable.

then return to watch second episode of Wilfred on Hulu. It is always a thill to find yourself suddenly in the midst of greatness.

Friday, August 5, 2011

It is 2011 already and I brother just shared some trainwreck in the basement talking about how to make a movie work. Now dusk is settling and Flamenco Maestro Rene Heredia is playing a blinding song full of duende, no dancers required. The dancers will emerge in new dresses at the denouement of this song, stamping into the next. Maya is studying how to make an origami flamenco dancer. I am writing a sonnet to the dancers. The duende gets inside and raises the blood, from the ground up, makes the heart beat faster, brings on the wild opposite of all repression and death. Lorca is her name. Lorca Silencia Oro de Selville Square in downtown Kansas City. Well, this is the center of the universe, Arvada, CO, who would have guessed. At least who needs to be anywhere else when you are sharing a show with a few hundred friends, all transfixed by the dancers, the dancers transfixed to the music, in rhythm with the one guitar.