Fast Day 196: March 5 2011 {Woodcut}

Woodcut

People are yelling woodcut words,
gouged into beech blocks, the background
chiseled out and black, sticky ink
spread out over the block's surface:
and fourteen weighty stones are placed
to coerce the ink and paper;
the black and white of simple life,
with red ochrous ink for the blood
ever drying, ever needing
fresh supply from my madder veins!

Fast Day 192 February 5 2011 {City of the North}

City of the North

All the places in my dreams

are still down on the back lot:

the dark iron ore cities at night,

the flooding summer cottages,

hills of Donegall and Gdansk;

the reeds that flourish yet

where the city built a park

twenty years ago, or more,

I see them still bow and bend.

I see rows and rows of fam’ly,

and those malignant holidays

when my parents would give to

almost-strangers gifts I held

dearer than any gold ever

beheld by my staring eyes!

That ancient familial house where

the sunroom plantation blinds

were sunlight mandolin, slicing

the spectrum into discrete

stripes, which fell upon my juvie

skin and made it all tattooed

like heart of darkness Kongo

or Maori – and when I was

alone, I would nakedly

hunt the fox-stole of desire!

Nothing ever goes away,

save in my memory for a

rainy day, when the tocsin tolls

and we erupt from our dreary

routines, and rush like volunteer

firemen to a neighbor’s blaze…

some of us never hear the call.

North is the city with roads twain,,

somewhere in America,

somewhere oppression vanishes…

the  dark city finds its morning.

----

The winter is depressing at times. My golden city is in the  north, not down south. North of Lake Superior, I think, feed by two major roads, sheltered from the worst of winter's fury like a Shangri-La. I dream about it, I see the road maps at night.

juvie    -    juvenile

It is about the persistence of memory, the child's growing awareness of a split between parent and child - they are no longer one symbiote!, sexuality's growth, long sleep of life until we awake and going north to find my el dorado.

Dedicated to the actor, Mark Winkworth   (Adams Chronicles-type)

Fast Day 188 January 8 2010 {Old Man Meets American Century}

 Lee and Grant Chromo on a Cigar Box

Old Man Meets the American Century

Winter’s army comes on with bluster and with brass

advancing now as it did when I was young like you,

fighting with broad lath swords and beating drums of tin;

following on the harvest parliament of wheat fields:

where hand-picked and hand-raked barley-bearded quorum

of serious representatives  - who do not

hold with mythic summer’s hoop snake, gold bear, and snipe -

meet to palaver about seeding times to come…

usurped by winter’s coasting time, a sledding time

down long slopes, past stands of pine, and over rivers

frozen as they were when struck by the crystal spear!

We used to play and then go in to warm up by

the stove beneath two chromos of Grant and Sherman.

I went to meet the American Century

as it came downstream on January third, for

it carried coal to the Edison plant and was

not a metaphor for the future anymore,

not Manifest Destiny, but a working boat

that needed customs work done which I would do-

January as well as June, cold or hot nights

under the umbrella of Homeland Security.

The Great Lakes freighters stoked the arsenals

of democracy in the world war; the mate

was John and he said that it had been a slow year

this year, but not as bad as oh-nine and then laughed

‘cause everyone knew oh-nine was the year without…

just without… like it never was, and then we laughed

and drove at four o’clock in the morning to the

Customs at the Bridge, where we had our pick of

agents, for there was no truck traffic on the third…

We talked on the way back down through all the little

towns: he had been married once before while I 

was looking at forty years, and he asked if I was now

planning something special. I said if I were not

then forty-one would never see the light of day!

John invited me aboard, but security

was much tighter now than when I was a boy

and clearance had to be issued ahead of time…

One more trip up to Two Harbors before they lay

her up for the winter season. It was time;

ice hung like arctic bunting up and down the bow

from the trip down from Duluth. She used to be the

Star, the Columbia Star, until a couple

years ago when Columbia went out and sold

the boats, and American Steam bought her and

she was the Century! My grandpa, he did see

the Columbian Exposition in Chi-town

and the Pan-American in Buffalo, New York…

I was born in the American Century...
the twentieth, after we took the Philippines...

and I stood right close enough to spit that night,

but I had no clearance, and I thought of when

Joe Nutt used to take me right up to the stack base

at the Edison and the wind blew me dizzy

and I saw so far that I believed that I

could see the curvature of the globe beneath me!

American Century as the Columbia Star

-- 


Meeting the freighter American Century at 4 in the morning just seemed like going to meet a metaphor "The American Century" in my dreams. It is a very quiet time of day.
The monumental has lost no bulk, but it has lost its grandeur. 

Fast Day 177 October 21 2010 {Windy Days}

 Windy Days

A windy day is archaeology,
a day of vertebrae and fish...
lethal bones, thin and white;
hair combs from Persephone's
make-up bags that lie on tables
in the Women's Room of memory!

Fossil dinosaur fingers grasp the road
like broken twigs and scattered,
from a landscaper's dump-
truck that placed them here against the law;
where the small black birds reconcile
their grievances, and chase the hawk!

Tree branches lay enormous like femurs
of the quercal lizard race...
legs and arms of giants!
Dispossessed by war's alarm and tossed
in protesting disarray here:
our Cabinet of Steampunk Wonders!

Take three horns of the triceratops,
and oak leaves like dragons' teeth:
the flesh is gone from the bone,
blown about here and there by wand'ring death:
a pale groundskeeper who holds
the wailing leaf-blower of our tears.

----
notes

written when someone illegally dumped yard waste and fish bones in the turn-around at the end of my favorite cul-de-sac: first exploit the world, then trash it! seems to be an acceptable cycle of life around here, and the trash and pruned tree branches became a history.

Persephone -  wife of Hades, lord of the underworld

like broken twigs and scattered -  like scattered and broken twigs

quercal - pertaining to the oak tree; the oak branches look like dino femurs.

Fast Day 176 Ocober 14 2010 {Sunny Days At Home}

 Concrete Front Door Steps

 Sunny Days At Home

When you have to work,
a sunny day is a Yellow Pages day,
a day when the phone company rep comes
for a meeting you've forgotten, and asks you
what do you think about what you never think about
and how does that work for you, anyway?
and what'll it  be for the next year?
and the threat of future meetings
while I sit there in my underwear and bathrobe
why'd I let this guy in? wondering
if the lord of the flies was salesmens' chatter.

Returning home on a sunny day
is like the fifteen wide and high,
the concrete steps leading to beitenu;
never an easy walk up,
while the upstairsike looks out her
window at me, the drapes covering
her beet red rouge-
a Russian immigrant face
with a tsar's ermine stole resting
on her upper lip! -
and she looks with empty eyes
and her lips move like conspirators
whispering to her cell phone...
when I was young, a youth,
I'd hang around stairs like this
hanging on warm nights
filled with the liquid mishnah
of life's ancient laws.
Now it's just a horse-race vasculitis,
and varicose veins bulge
like the grocery bags I hold.

Eating inside the house...
on a sunny day...
dust like whole wheat flour
from the mills of sunlit
barred, mortared, and flimsy curtain windows;
I want to eat, but even treif feel pain:
lobsters shriek in an incomprehensible
language of the lost when thrust into
the boiling pot on Salem's stove,
and I am so used to slaughter now,
that I sit at the omnivore table
and care not kosher nor halal
if God can not save the sunny days
from the onset of this darkness...
give back the steps where children played,
where the iron railing's legs
resist the rust of time
and do not loosen at their base
to swing crazily at the grasp
and let me fall
-heavily -
into the cheap shrubs in
their dusty dirty beds!

----
beitenu   = our home  = baituna (arabic)   It has a taste of Israeli politics: Mr. Avigdor Liebermann.

upstairsike = yiddish-english for the people living upstairs in a apartment building.

mishnah   =   commentary on the Law

treif    =   not kosher under jewish dietary regs.


kosher = jewish dietary regulations.
halal   =  muslim dietary regulations

Fast Day 174 September 29 2010 {On MY Brother's Suicide}

On My Brother's Suicide

Autumn approaches like a maddened hag,
shaking her bony branches like a sing-song curse
against the sky, against the faithless fallen leaves.
She comes loud and keening,
a banshee with a necklace of curcurbits,
dressed in widow's weeds for the mourning of the trees
and the eve of all hallows and the dia de los muertos.
She bids me return north
to the lake to visit the memory of family beasts
and pray at the tolling of loose screen doors that
fan remains of the gunpowder residue dawn,
...and my brother's life.
His vertebrae are asbestos covered bones,
his hepatitis blood laced with PBB,
he offers brandy, cigarettes, beer:
kongo for a tongue-less god.
Quicklike, my brother's life that could-have-been sits,
drinking a bottle filled with smoking herbs - he smiles,
at me with misty legba that has more life than life!
seeking the heroin of Ezili,
and the love that fights for life until the death.

notes:
This promises to be a powerful autumn, and the season itself impels me to speak of it. I saw something odd on September 23... at the river... and we'll see what comes of it. My brother is not well and does nothing but drink now. I saw his life as it could have been, and it had more warm aura than most people... it was more real than being with people one cares little about. He/It was sitting in the chair by me, about 4 feet away.
Ezili has been mentioned, Ezili Danto - the mother who fights for us.
Legba is a metaphor for male beings.

gun-powder residue dawn - left-overs from suicide (sorry - a heavy downer)
kongo - a kongo packet, or paket kongo.

La vieille porte automne qui nous dirige a la maison de Baron Samedi.

Fast Day 169 August 28 2010 {Voyageurs}

Voyageurs

I dreamed bees made a hive in our canoe;
came there flying daily, nectar laden;
buzzing heroic hexameters
of epic poetry ultra-marine.
Launch the ship into the wind, bearing north!
with sandwiches and tea.

Oars that deeply drink of argent liquid
of morning, carrier of the hopes of men,
deeply into a cartoon jungle,
to fabled shores chryselephantine.
Cruise among the Atlantean condos-
outspread like Trojan lunch!

We ate upon the Island of Tall Reeds,
drank martinis mixed well with sweet words,
and napped within papyrus' golden house.
Our sorrows drop away like clothes
strewn around the delight place of new lovers:
the light winds gossiping.



notes

argent liquid  :  the morning sun drips like silver from the oars.

chryselephantine : a Greek word referring to an object make of gold (chrysos) and ivory (elephantine). I use it to make me feel the northern Mediterannean - Greece - and the south - Africa, where the elephants live.

papyrus :  commonly paper reed,  image of late summer tawny shafts, sunlit and tall.
goldren house  :  sun on the tawny papyrus and Nero's Domus Aurea.

bees :  there is this business of bees and the hive and honey... and fermented mead , eventually in the ancient, ancient myths of Dionysos, and the notion of resurrection.

Atlantean condos : houses on the water front, and beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the western end of the Mediterranean.

Trojan  : refers to Troy at the eastern end of the Mediterranean

Canoeing on the St. Clair River. In the delta of the river, there is Dickinson Island, Harsen Island and Russel Island, with many small islands scattered. In the northern part of Russel, there is a cut from the South Channel to the Middle Channel with another canal heading to the northernmost  part of the island which has various signs and icons of jungle animals here and there among the reeds.

I like the notion of our sorrows being like lovers' clothes: a hindrance, yet there is the possibility to cast them aside and transcend their limits.

Fast Day 162 July 8 2010 {Future Shock}

dreaming

Future Shock

we eat apples and we spit them out,
we paint our bodies with saliva,
we chew blueberries,
and the haws;
I forget why I'm in this part of town.

we see old friends from the empty past,
and dash to re-ignite our love;
shake hand uncles,
bow to aunts
I think we have never seen before.

we smell the hollow wooden doors
with dark-light sunburn-picked veneer;
I left the car
with top down
and motor running on bright shoulder.

waiting for my daughter - don't know why:
I leave the soundstage filled with friends -
find her crying
by the car,
wondering where her daddy's gone!


pix: Samy Charnine

notes:

The story:
I left the convertible running as I waited for my daughter.
I saw old friends I hadn't seen in 20 years or more., and
ran like a handicap to get their attention. We talked, but
I wanted to get the heck out of there. Maybe that's why we hadn't
seen each other in so long.  When I returned to my car,
she was waiting with her suitcase.

hollow wooden doors

with dark-light sunburn-picked veneer;
Hollow wooden doors are the miserably cheap doors one finds in houses, new and old.
When the wretched things are old, they become dark and grimey, and in some places, the top veneer
wood comes loose; the dark-light is the grime (dark) and the newly exposed veneer base (light)...
it shows up when we pick away the veneer like sunburned skin from the back of someone we do not really
like with a fascination and sense of squeamish disgust.

The meaning?
I and my generation cannot let down my daughter and my daughter's daughters and sons.

Fast Day 157 June 5 2010 {Empty Seats at a Reception}

Empty Seats at a Reception

So ill my brother grew,
he could not attend the wedding feast
and so I sent Hakeem to search
the hungry, thirsty, and the poor.

Hakeem, whom I had met
last night, who'd journeyed from afar,
went into the early rain to search
for poverty to feed in Grosse Pointe.

Tradition says we share
the wealth and blessings on us bestowed,
parceling out in our finer detail
the general bulky benefits of grace.

All the prophets as one
in opinion and in holy writ
could not conceive the modern day:
in Grosse Pointe no poor were found!

We gave it to Solanus,
good father to himself hand out
to all the poor in all Detroit;
we all need loaves and fishes.

----
notes
I couldn't get near my computer to post this until now.
The wedding was history relived:  great pageantry and warfare with weapons of silk and lace, with a great number of distinguished generals and their ladies posing for daguerreotypes. Pomegranate grenades lit the night sky.

Fast Day 152 April 29 2010 {The Calligraph Invite}

The Story of the Calligraph Invite

Received a response today;
they will attend the wedding,
and the reception,
and the party thereafter.
It says they and their family accept
she said.

Their family?
Who? A son, a daughter?
Immediate or extended family?
he asked.

They shook their heads
and stood looking at the coloured
inks of the calligraph invite;
the envelope ripped open, and it
a sad courier dangling from a hand,
it prayed: O, please do not kill
this poor messenger, O parents good!
Parents of the bride! Maybe God grant
her joyful increase!
Place me with my brothers
and sisters in the place of honor!

Perhaps that is how it's done
in Syria, she said. We shall make do.
But how, he said, but how to afford...
gently she touched his lips with
her finger tip, the key of silence
that locks the door of wrath.
It is all for the best.
We are between the hands of Allah,
who blesses man and woman,
and wants this blessing
to be shared by more.

Syrians, he thought.
No Saudi prince am I.
He paused a while.
But I am mubarak...blessed...
by this event much more than I
can bless...or sate with food and drink.
Let them come! he said,
smiling, and took the calligraph invite
and placed it with RSVPs
next to his wife's computer.

Fast Day 150 April 14 2010 {Lost Things}

Lost Things

I had a poem
and I lost it.

was it the spring grass green within the sleeves
of the river's bank?
was it emergent stones swimming
heavy in the flow?

was it geese, or was it swans? or was it leaves
homeless from last fall,
when we disturb their cardboard homes
as we clean their soily beds?

was it me? was it God? was it family?
was it Mary, theotokos,
mother of the holy child with broken arm
reaching for my heart's delight?

was it the small ones buried far away
'neath stones with restful lambs?
was I supposed to give them my love,
alive they never had?


----
notes

I am early with this, but I am busy, so up it goes. It is terribly crude.
I could have scheduled it, but then I would have to check it, and I do not wish
to return to this...for a while, at least.

Fast Day 143 February 26 2010 {Morning at the Cenotaph}

Morning at the Cenotaph


Come, Morphine, give me joy
until dark morning dawns!

Leave the morose conclave
of deathly cenotaph

whose dry marble sucks me
of my tears and humors

into its dessicate
rete granitic veins -

old-age home with staircase
carved with eery faces!

I'll go out in the world
to find a mortal mate;

and sacrament our love
with my body's hidden resin;

I'll use my plectrum hand
to braid her hirsute lyre,

and when we cry in pain,
our tears will form a sea.


---------
notes

I have to get a week ahead, for I shall be busy next week. I intend to perform the fast on the indicated day.

cenotaph - a memorial which is empty of any body or bodies.
rete - a network, and
dessicate rete granitic is a dried up network of granite-like stone within the veins of marble.
staircase - is sort of like a vein of a rete growing within the old-age home, joining parts togther.
plectrum  - in Greek it's a small piece of metal to play upon the lyre, but in Latin it reminds me of "plectere" meaning "to braid, to twist" such as hair.
So I combined them...and the instrument called a "hirsute lyre" is anyone's guess.

The essence of this to me is a new life to be lived. If you have read stuff here or in the other blog, you are aware that 2008 spelled the end of one old life for me, and I can never seen the world that way again.
The old world was a world of greatness, of power, of compulsion, of arrogance and persuasion, of myths and tales of heroes...all of which was discovered to have ended a long time since - yet still we take our uncouth illiterate ravings to be Wordsworth and Whitman, and our politics to be Burke, Pitt, Jefferson, and Washington.


The old world is the world where greedy children never grew up...and it is the old-age home where we extend unnaturally empty lives.


Old long since...

inspired by Pushkin
February 20, 2010 copyright.

Fast Day 132 December 12 2009 {Reading Dead Men's Blogs}

Reading Dead Men's Blogs

He was a hiker.
He climbed mountains...
this I see,
speaking in the tongue of Grand Canyons
with just a hint of Denali;
bathed in Sangre de Christo;
traveller

married man...

like eating dead man's curry!...

yet I cannot stop:

and floods in Karachi,
visiting Mr. Jinnah's tomb...
dissolution in Calcutta
when Mumbai was yet Bombeeee...
yet nothing changes...now;

eternal Hindu Kush.

Walter Cronkite's gone
along with peace of mind
and no one's around to answer his questions
about his cancer...
tv set of unending despair
Mesa Verde of his adopted
home country, the USA,
no Yosemite of regret.
His blog does not increase now...

fallow, unchanging fields...
he climbs the same heights...
visits the same lands...and always
he asks his electric question...

Why me, God? Why a Colorado
of desire, dammed up in that enormous lake
that sediments your blessings in endless strata
and shall I die before the flood?
- this I know - oh, God!
before the freedom flood...
Or shall I fly away?

pic: richalyn marquez

----------

notes

A blog of a trevller from India. He died, yet his blog remains.

Fast 130 November 27 2009 {Cinnamon Girl}

Cinnamon Girl

I had some toast with cinnamon girl,
with a butt tatooed on her rose,
a back tatooed on her owl,
and a gem on the side of her nose.

We had a chat in pumpkin spice
and I met with Bill, her brother,
an artist of the ink himself,
putting "bicep" on his mother.

Who herself was high and dry,
and kept money in her sock;
she lived within an old age home
she called this "dern dry dock"!

Her granny was grafitti
of cul-de-sacking lips;
she carried rum within her purse
and had a monkey on her hips.

We did not toast for pleasure,
we did not toast for joy;
she had a butt upon her rose,
and I was butter boy.

-----
notes
I dunno. where does one begin with this?

I guess everything is pretty straight forward...a lot about "butts".
cul-de-sac, the French for "a dead end" road or whatever, literally means "the butt of a sack", only "cul" can be a bit more vulgar if one wishes referring to the human anatomy.

monkey on her hips     monkey on her back

toast     it's what you think it is....maybe french toast, too.

butter boy      originally, just "but her boy", but it makes an image that can go wild.

...grafitti of cul-de-sacking lips...  

If you know French, you have some idea how appropriate and inappropriate this is!

Fast Day 129 November 18 2009 {The Straw Hat}

The Straw Hat

The wind blew your gramma's hat
and it landed where you are;
you put it on and smiled.
It will rain your mother's ring
which will fall in grass nearby;
admire it unbroken.
It will flood your father's boots
and sweep them in the general flood;
dork-like boats of leather!
It will dawn your childrens' smiles
when you garden, and they see
that funny straw hat,
that unbroken ring,
and hear you laugh at waterfalls
and rivers of your artifice!

pic: micmac
--------
notes

a little early this week.

Fast Day 123 October 9 2009 {My Own Private Falluja}

My Own Private Falluja

Cleave the Sea with a sword!
or pierce the Mountain's black basalt heart
with a lance that's stoutly thrown!
Spit and douse the fiery Sun
and light the passion of the eunuch Moon!-
with tender lies uniquely told!
The lies of love, unnumbered,
rise from my body's parts like steam and fog! -
burning like Falluja furnace! -
Like a cigarette whose smoke
I gulp down like Ramadan-starved men
who break the fast
with food...
with drink...
with sweets and more.

Bodily forms from afar!
I sense the Boundaries of my affection! -
their circumference I invite.
Yet my eyes are empty;
your face has set into the West, and has
not yet arisen in the East!
Scatter the treasures of
Byzantium with phosphorous white delight!
Count the gold as sand! -
without value...
without hope...
without your jewelled arm!

note
written with more passion than clarity.
it is filled with desire and anxiety.
any meaning expressable in words escapes me.

Fast Day 117 August 29 2009 {Happy Anniversary}

Happy Anniversary

do not tarry long in your lofty house,
trust in the fleetness of your love:
glory in your splendor of union,
hold high your heads - exult!

Fast Day 116 August 22 2009 {Tough Guy Poetry}

Tough Guy Poetry


I didn't get to sleep,
reading Ferlinghetti
and Bukowski, feeling that my love
was like two-buck chuck:
a dog from hell
that pissed upon the silks!

Silks! especially the moiré!
or watered silks and wall hangings...
watered! - or damask for grander things...
before the common and mundane
availibility of cotton
spelled silken doom...and washable chintz!

I forgot the dog
and dreamed of Brighton Pavilion,
ladies in silk, French and Egyptian;
the smell of silk against
skin that salivates an odor
of erotic chinoiserie!

My mind is not Frisco Bay,
nor the poet's urban garrett;
it's absinthe in my body's pockets,
the sphinx's head and clawed feet
like mahogany and rosewood
for the Prince Regent !


notes:

trying to write like Bukowski - or Ferlinghetti -
I end up dreaming of Regency furniture...
silks, carved sphinxes, tables with lions' feet.

"absinthe in my body's pockets" may be
a sweat from love's exertion...maybe not.

Fast Day 115 August 14 2009 {Da}

Da

My grandfather came from his grave
sweat dripping from his hairy chest
taking great gulps of air as if
the air was Guiness on tap;
he stood in the rain and smiled
at me a smile so fair
and faery of enchantment - light
from amethyst eyes
and onyx finger joints
I gave
to him
my grandsire.

So it was ye who came a-singing
like a great powerful piper, Orpheus
and Cuchulain - give me but another
toke of whiskey's air
and find me one of Erin's fair
daughters - red headed with delirium
with green eyes
and ruby red finger nails
that I
will love
again, grandson!

Fast Day 109 July 3 2009 {Birthday: Going 60}

Birthday: Going 60

When you're going sixty, I go shotgun.
Sixty is a parcel of years.
It's no time
for training wheels...
you drop those off
just like you drop
the sexy lies,
the videotapes,
of God
of country
of what is good and

what is bad.
I'll go shotgun if there ain't no potholes.
Going sixty once
Jack Wilson hit
a pothole big as a canyon:
when Stan look
he sees an empty hole;
when I look
I see king sun, queen moon -
so,
maybe going sixty ain't so bad -
if you see the potholes comin' !
I'll ride shotgun, but
I'm no hood ornament!
no streamline, quicksilver babe!
no indian chief,
no german runes!
naked as a motorcycle,
streaking as the wind,
going sixty ain't so bad
when you litter the road

with your past sins:
I drop 'em like dead cigarette butts
and watch 'em tumble in the
rear view mirror !
Going sixty ain't so bad
Did I say I'll ride shotgun?