to effectively deal with work Tuesday.
Good thing it’s a light day.
I need to focus more on love, spirituality, and poetry right now.
I’ve been asked by two dear friends to be a part of their wedding at the end of May (barring any tragic and foolish moves by the Mass Governor on same sex marriage, grrr…) and am writing a poem as part of the ceremony…it’s making me think about this stuff in a new light.
More in the AM.
Then again, when has that ever stopped us?
http://www.thestreet.com/markets/meredithderby/10154677.html
I skipped Joe Fusco at the Asylum tonight because I was just not feeling up to it. Feeling very medicated, very sedated.
I hate my absence from things.
I have ideas about what to say about a lot of stuff in my life, but I can’t seem to put words around it. Sad excuse for a poet, eh?
It’s like the whole world seems suffused with a sweet pain these days — a feeling of the last days, so live them well.
More tomorrow, when I’m coherent. Sorry for this.
Three things I am wearing right now
1 – t shirt
2 – shorts
3 – silver earring
Three things on my desk
1 – WWII Navy fighting knife (I was researching its value)
2 – Nunzilla
3 – wireless router
Three things I want to do before I die
1 – Go back to Europe
2 – move to NYC
3 – get off medications (fat chance)
Three ways to describe my personality
1 – scattered
2 – reclusive
3 – arrogant
Three bad things about my personality
1 – easily angered
2 – I keep anger bottled up
3 – don’t deal well with conflict
Three good things about my personality
1 – creative
2 – funny
3 – down deep, caring
Parts of my heritage
1 – Mescalero Apache
2 – Italian
3 – Massachusetts
Three places I want to go to
1 – West Africa
2 – Russia
3 – San Francisco
Three nicknames I had/have
1 – Tony
2 – Orbit
3 – Downtown
Three screen names I had/have
1 – chyslerpoet
2 – chrysler77
3 – penitente
Three people I miss
1 – Julie
2 – Terry
3 – Tara
gotpoetry.com is finally back up, if not entirely without hiccups.
Have a good night, y’all.
imsonshyne mentioned in a recent post the practice of cobbling several poems together into one. “Amalgamated Poetry” — sounds like a multinational concern, eh? But I digress.
We’ve all done this from time to time, but I decided to try something different.
I thought it was an interesting idea to attack my two latest pieces from a fresh angle by simply staggering the stanzas into each other to make a single new “poem”, then editing them into a true new poem with an independent meaning.
I like what I got better than the original versions of either of the other two poems…
Still a draft, but thoughts are welcome.
Braid
The red flat braid
in the pale dust around her head
shakes me whenever
I look at her picture.
She lies on the white road.
She could be asleep, but I know
she isn’t asleep, and I teeter
between the end
of the backward rock of a chair
and the start of the arc of its backward fall
whenever I look
at the picture.
Monday morning
before the light wakes up,
when my sense is bridging the space between
nothing and something – that’s
the only time now I can imagine her smile.
(I know she isn’t asleep. I know I’m
not asleep.) I spin
whenever I look
at the picture where she lies on the
white road, not sleeping,
eyes closed and dusted white, with
the bloodbraids around her head resting
snaky in the dust.
She could have been any young girl anywhere. (But
young girls don’t sleep in the road. ) This is the picture of her
unique, unnamed,
unavoidable, sleeping in the white road’s dust
because
that’s where the mine
bullet bomb RPG caught
her.
It takes a not-inconsiderable patience I do not have
to live in a wholly incomplete way
in this place where we can wake up on a Monday
and have coffee and arguments while
she lies in her bloodbraids there.
I’m spinning around her picture —
the long streaks on my cheeks
writing vapor trails on my skin. I’m safe enough, I guess;
the jets above me
drop nothing on their way into Logan,
and the roads here are black and wet.
imsonshyne mentioned in a recent post the practice of cobbling several poems together into one. “Amalgamated Poetry” — sounds like a multinational concern, eh? But I digress.
We’ve all done this from time to time, but I decided to try something different.
I thought it was an interesting idea to attack my two latest pieces from a fresh angle by simply staggering the stanzas into each other to make a single new “poem”, then editing them into a true new poem with an independent meaning.
I like what I got better than the original versions of either of the other two poems…
Still a draft, but thoughts are welcome.
Braid
The red flat braid
in the pale dust around her head
shakes me whenever
I look at her picture.
She lies on the white road.
She could be asleep, but I know
she isn’t asleep, and I teeter
between the end
of the backward rock of a chair
and the start of the arc of its backward fall
whenever I look
at the picture.
Monday morning
before the light wakes up,
when my sense is bridging the space between
nothing and something – that’s
the only time now I can imagine her smile.
(I know she isn’t asleep. I know I’m
not asleep.) I spin
whenever I look
at the picture where she lies on the
white road, not sleeping,
eyes closed and dusted white, with
the bloodbraids around her head resting
snaky in the dust.
She could have been any young girl anywhere. (But
young girls don’t sleep in the road. ) This is the picture of her
unique, unnamed,
unavoidable, sleeping in the white road’s dust
because
that’s where the mine
bullet bomb RPG caught
her.
It takes a not-inconsiderable patience I do not have
to live in a wholly incomplete way
in this place where we can wake up on a Monday
and have coffee and arguments while
she lies in her bloodbraids there.
I’m spinning around her picture —
the long streaks on my cheeks
writing vapor trails on my skin. I’m safe enough, I guess;
the jets above me
drop nothing on their way into Logan,
and the roads here are black and wet.
when all you can do is disappoint yourself, and hope to recover.
Six months ago, I never would have added the four words after the comma to that sentence.
I guess that’s progress.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SPEAK (on sacred foolery) was smallish but very cool. One new participant who read good stuff (thanks, Heather); story of the evening for me was Tom’s bizzarro yet somehow completely logical piece about the Gulf war, God, and male tampons.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If gotpoetry isn’t up by tomorrow, I’ll post the Zero.Zero column here.
UPDATE: Six days later, gotpoetry.com is back on the air…
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Looking forward to the weekend, if only because I won’t be working.
when all you can do is disappoint yourself, and hope to recover.
Six months ago, I never would have added the four words after the comma to that sentence.
I guess that’s progress.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SPEAK (on sacred foolery) was smallish but very cool. One new participant who read good stuff (thanks, Heather); story of the evening for me was Tom’s bizzarro yet somehow completely logical piece about the Gulf war, God, and male tampons.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If gotpoetry isn’t up by tomorrow, I’ll post the Zero.Zero column here.
UPDATE: Six days later, gotpoetry.com is back on the air…
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Looking forward to the weekend, if only because I won’t be working.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4827891§ion=news
So the question, George, isn’t about whether anyone had considered the possibility. Someone had obviously considered it at some point, and not all that long before it happened.
The question is, I think, how you explain the fact that when we were given the chance to consider it, it was dismissed out of hand.
Richard Clarke’s looking more and more credible all the time, George.
Publicize this one as much as you can, folks.
BETWEEN
between flirt and affair
between laughter and terror
between the end of the backward rock of the chair
and the start of the backward fall
lies the land you live in
on a Monday morning
before the light wakes up
when your sense is bridging the space between
nothing and something – that’s
the only time
it takes a not-inconsiderable patience
to live this wholly incomplete way
to hang on the day’s pendulum without falling
off into
what?
what some call a great unknown
is just a marigold’s prayer
an antelope’s last thought before hitting
the wall
it is only
the way things are in
this vast continent between the poles
of being and not being
of static and
alive
if you are alive
you cannot win
you are dying in the moment
as fast as you can and
though the wind sleeps
in the blue trance before dawn
something is always moving
at once toward and away
back and forth and up and down
it only appears to be something other than you
Since gotpoetry.com is down at the moment and I’ve heard here and elsewhere from folks who wanted to read the column, it’s right here.
nucking futz. Grrrr…
Anyway: recent furor over on the slam list leaves me so bored that I think I’ve finally realized how distant I am from any care about “the future of slam”.
I just simply don’t care. I didn’t think I’d ever get there completely, but I think I’m there.
What I care about is poetry, and about more specifically about the art of “poetry, performed” as Guy would have it — and slam, and esp. NPS, is such a minuscule and increasingly self-referential and redundant part of the whole that I can’t waste my time on it.
Poetry is my religion. The search for myself in the pursuit of a poem through the twin disciplines of writing and performance/audience connection are the solitary and communal aspects of this religion.
To my eyes, slam and PSI/NPS are becoming increasingly focused on poetry in performance for its entertainment value, along with its corollary assumption that when it comes to entertainment, bigger is always better.
It’s not.
The fact that the 3×5 format allows 80 teams into the game is seen by so many as so important…I think it’s secondary.
What PSI/NPS SHOULD be focusing on is: how do you create a better experience for the audience?
It ain’t by increasing the number of poets, but by raising the bar. And anyone who’s watched the NPS over the last few years would be pardoned for thinking that the bar has not just not been raised, but has actually been lowered by the growth of a slam poet culture, where the slammers have grown up entirely within slam and only know poetry as it is practiced within slam.
At any rate…no more. Not for me.
Dark Matter 