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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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…

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Looking forward to the weekend, if only because I won’t be working.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=4827891&section=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.

ZERO POINT ZERO: SMALL TOWN POETRY

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.

Mendon gig of SPEAK on the road…

Brilliant.

Great crowd, great reading, too much fun.

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Column will be late tomorrow because I’m rewriting a section.

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Rest easy, y’all.

Do you know how much I appreciate your feedback?

SPIN

The braids around her head
make me spin whenever
I look at her picture.

She lies on the white road.
She could be asleep. (I know
she isn’t asleep.) I spin

whenever I look
at the picture. She lies on the
white road, not sleeping,

eyes closed and dusted white.
The braids around her head rest
snaky in the dust, where she could be

any young girl anywhere
who doesn’t sleep in the road unless
it’s unavoidable, because

that’s where the mine
bullet bomb RPG caught
her. She lies in her braids there,

and I’m spinning around her picture —
a fragment, a white fragment in
dusty tears, the long streaks on my cheeks

vapor trails on my skin. The jets above me
drop nothing on their way into Logan.
The roads here are black and wet.

We have no dust here, no white dust here.
I pull my own hair out of its braid
and spin slowly down onto the couch to read

more news. She lies on the front page
of the local daily and the picture
is black and white and she is not sleeping,

though I know I am.

Gronked from ocvictor. All very Discordian.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“The three siblings had agreed to get the same tattoo, but he was the only one to choose to have it burned into his face.”

From “Shopping For Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity”
by Marilyn Halter.

Dawn Gabriel (mom_star) was great at the Hut tonight…on a night which I thought was over all pretty staid and frankly, a bit lackluster. Only a handful of poems struck me as remotely interesting.

News about the 3×5 bout structure at the NPS this year makes me VERY glad I’m done. Can’t imagine how this will play out; shocked that they didn’t wait a year to implement it, what with everyone’s slams being structured to pick a four person team and almost all the slam season done. But, hey…who cares, right? The more teams, the merrier. Of course, we’ll see if that holds true as rumors seem to be predicting more than a few teams will be not going to St. Louis.

The fact that the quality of the poetry has been declining for years is all beside the point, I guess.

Which leads me to another point: as of midnight, my PSI membership expired, and for the first time in years, I’m not renewing it.

Kiss today goodbye…

OK…a larger revision, focusing the poem more sharply, I hope.

DIALOGUE

I tell her, the time between

late winter and early spring
really takes a toll on my
optimism about sweat equity: you survive
the dark months expecting you’ll find relief
in the growing light, and then
nothing changes.

that’s the problem with you, she says. all I
ever hope for is that I’ll
still be breathing
when the wind turns
lukewarm. I respond that

days like this
hurt worse than february’s worst
knife. just as the crocus
starts to crack the frost and pierce through,
you give up on hope and admit to a longing for bloodshed,
drunken fights in dive bars or a sudden burst of deadly lust
that carries you into a strange bed through a broken
window and from there into oblivion; every bad impulse
to self-immolation breaks out in you as if you were
a ruptured pod.

you think it’s wrong to feel that way,
she says. but it’s not wrong to
describe a heart as broken
if it is broken, or a fallen hope as
fallen even if it has yet to hit the
ground.

what you don’t get to do, she says,
is marinate
in the description until
you’re tender.

I don’t fully understand but I think we are
not so far apart. all this bloodlust in me
is just a way of acting the same thing she is saying.

I want to reach for her
and explain this but
there are shadows among my fingers
that leave me cold. there are bones
hidden in my flesh that I’ve never noticed.
I’m afraid the sun
won’t ever break through to warm them.
I’m afraid that
if I try to touch her,
one of us may shatter.

how pleased I am that I was able to get the damn PC up and running.

Although I’m a pretty experienced computer user, the thought of actually diving into the bowels of DOS usually makes me shiver.

Nonetheless, that’s what I did to deal with a conflict that was making the whole thing lock up on start up.

Using Annie’s laptop, I got some info from a bulletin board and tried a number of things, working from safe mode to start and then getting into actual DOS stuff…and it worked!

I feel accomplished…it also makes me really, REALLY want to go back to my Mac, which never had these problems.

Maybe I’ll look around for a cheap older iBook for myself as a back-up — got too much invested in the desktop to totally dump it, and Anne prefers Windows (although she initially got me hooked on Macs, go figure) so we’ll always have at least one around.

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Starting to book features again — got to get back to DC/Baltimore in the next day or two to get that settled; there’s a NYC thing floating around out there to nail down, need to finalize a Cantab date, and I’ve got to settle the Catskills Folk/Poetry Festival details.

I do have a Westfield MA gig coming up in May as well.

Ought to book myself a few around Worcester, eh?

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Off to meetings — more later. (I’m busy as hell lately.)

on the most recent poem. I made a few edits, but I’m gonna wait on more significant changes until after I do it this Sunday at the Hut. Need to taste it.

My PC at home is screwed, so I won’t be on much for the next few days until I get it taken care of…ditto if you’ve sent me e-mail; I only have limited access here at work.

Back soon, I hope — off to meetings.

on the most recent poem. I made a few edits, but I’m gonna wait on more significant changes until after I do it this Sunday at the Hut. Need to taste it.

My PC at home is screwed, so I won’t be on much for the next few days until I get it taken care of…ditto if you’ve sent me e-mail; I only have limited access here at work.

Back soon, I hope — off to meetings.