I’m sick. Really. Throat is on fire, achy…grrr.
I’m sure it’s airplane related.
As much as I would like to go see Amy Steinberg tonight at the Q, I doubt I’ll make it.
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I’m still in the lead over at the Laureate election, but only by four votes.
Right now I’m too ill to care much, so blah blah vote, blah blah haiku, blah blah thanks.
That’s probably as coherent as anything else I’ve said lately.
Time to start cracking down on rehearsals for the May 6 “Americanized” show at the BPC. I’ve also got to send flyers down to them. Will print some later.
The Laureate election is close — damn close: I still lead Rob McClennan by ten votes at the moment. If you’ve got time and inclination and haven’t voted yet, it would be great if you could go do that here:
http://bloggingpoet.squarespace.com/bloggingpoetcom/category/poet-laureate-of-the-blogosphere
The margin is slim, and the election only goes through Tuesday. I don’t want to start having to court superdelegates, especially when I don’t have a clue as to who they might be.
I’ve posted this whole very silly campaign to the Yahoogroups slamlist, and I need to get it onto the regular slam forums today too…gonna go do that now. I have to be honest here: I certainly started treating this as a joke and it still basically is one, but now that I’m in the lead, it would seem that the joke must now be carried to its natural conclusion, which is to go all out to win. Destiny is hard.
So go — spread the word. Get people to vote, and let’s make this a surge that will actually be over at a clearly defined time.
One Last Poem About Prejudice, Class Warfare, Privilege, and the Like
You are kidding me —
all this breath expended and
it’s not clear? Shee-it.
So as of right now, I’m ahead of Rob McClennan by 3 votes in this thing. Still five days to go.
I think it’s ironic that I’m in Canada while this is going on….him being a Canadian poet and all.
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I just want to say — seriously — that the number of you who have made a point of “campaigning” for me on your own LJs is really, really touching and I appreciate it. I want to be clear that I started this whole campaigning for the title thing as a lark…and I’m a little surprised by the resulting tumult.
Thank you.
Now let’s get out there and kick some butt….
cast your vote at:
http://bloggingpoet.squarespace.com/bloggingpoetcom/category/poet-laureate-of-the-blogosphere
Remember: Vote Brown and get the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done something. I’m not really sure what, of course, but it’s something fer sure.
I’m still out in front with the voting for this, but Rob McClennan is moving up FAST.
If you haven’t voted, haven’t cajoled your friends and neighbors into voting, or haven’t yet convinced everyone you know who really could care less about who the Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere is that it’s totally worth their time to cast a meaningless vote for someone they don’t really know or care about, this is the time to do it.
The election ends on April 29. Join me in making this happen, and I promise that nothing of interest will happen as a result.
Go here to vote:
http://bloggingpoet.squarespace.com/bloggingpoetcom/category/poet-laureate-of-the-blogosphere
Remember: a vote for me is a vote that isn’t for someone else.
i can’t help it.
my ability to overhear
and then to recombine what i’ve heard
into something else is at once a curse
and a mechanical puzzle.
my ear and mind
just bend to the task
not quite at hand.
i hear what i hear and make of it
what there is to be made.
take the case of a man i know
with a flame tattoo on his head
who lives, apparently, on his friends’ couches. take the way
he comes to me for a cigarette. when I ask how he is feeling
he tells me that he is unspeakably angry.
he walks over to the curb
in front of the corner store, sits down, and talks.
you must believe me when i say
i am not trying to hear him speaking to —
who? not me. someone inside, perhaps to himself, who knows.
but i hear him anyway. he tells that listener
that he hasn’t had sex in years.
he tells that listener,
you can’t play god with me because i’m already dead.
they broke in and stole my balls.
a few days later in a foreign airport
i hear a woman on the phone
telling the listener that she IS a woman
and he IS a man goddamn it
and she is sick of it not being clear.
i am certain that somehow i have found
the source of the voice in flame guy’s head. if i had never
overheard the first conversation i would not know
how to interpret this second one but
it rings true: the man is impotent, on fire,
unspeakably angry, especially at them, but at least he can speak to her.
she is tired of how unclear he has become, and sick of trying
to make him clear from her side of the border. all the while,
some crazy man is listening to them both
and stealing from them for his own needs.
yes. i am the thief they know is there but never see.
i steal from them and everyone, conspirator,
poisoned ears openly looting even as i wonder
how much of what is beyond them is really mine.
is anything i say anything more than what i’ve overheard?
i won’t answer that, but you can whisper your own opinion
on the matter if you want. i’ll know in a second
what you think of me, what i should think of me. and if two of you
should disagree, i’ll take that argument too and make it my own.
you wonder why i eavesdrop. i wonder why you think of me at all.
Please remember to vote for me ( and send your friends, too!!!) for Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere starting Monday! You can do it here:
http://bloggingpoet.squarespace.com/bloggingpoetcom/category/poet-laureate-of-the-blogosphere
If elected, I promise:
— a vastly expanded Poetic Cabinet, including new Departments of the Pantoum and Sestina;
— a spending cap limiting all political poems to seventeen syllables or fewer;
— new regulations allowing slammers to take containers of more than two ounces of alcohol on flights, or anywhere else for that matter;
— support for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the death penalty for lost protests at Nationals.
My slogan: “Tony Brown. My phone is off at 3 AM…what the hell could be so important at 3 AM anyway? I’m a fucking poet, dammit. I can’t save the fucking world. Call me after noon.”
Screw it. I’m in the mood to be totally selfish.
I want to be nominated for and then win the title of 2008 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. It’s an essentially meaningless award and as I maintain an essentially meaningless blog, I think I deserve this.
Besides, I ain’t pretty enough for Famecast and since I’ve never actually shamelessly shilled for myself to win something before, this seems to be about my speed. I NEED to do that at least once in my life in order to share in that experience with the rest of the slam world, don’t you think?
So someone go here and nominate me (just once is all that’s needed):
and then send everyone you know to vote for me.
If elected, I promise to change something or other with my vast experience on day one and then keep doing it for a hundred years. (See?? I’m topical yet oblique. What more could you ask for?)
I’m glad I got to see him one last time.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/04/17/obit.federici.ap/index.html
So let’s see:
–Two assemblies at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School this AM with a host of student writers as well as Harlem125, Christopher Johnson, and Bobby Gibbs. Enthusiastic crowds that totaled about 1200 kids over two assemblies. Cool.
–Spent a long but fun evening at the Captain of the Ship Invitational Slam at the Vernon, hosted by Bobby in his usual genial drunk style. Christopher Johnson won and got to wear the Captain’s hat for the rest of the night.
I sacrificed before the final round and scored a thirty — high score of the night. Nice to know I can still pull one off once in a while.
Off to bed. No poems today…I’m poemed out.
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in the photo
he’s looking a tad drunk
his beard is full and dark
and he’s smiling
as if he could die tomorrow
feeling like he was perfectly entitled
to say he’d led a full life
when i knew him
he didn’t care and if he did something
dangerous
he would laugh it off
saying no one lives forever
so you might as well live
if i die tomorrow
i know the truth about full lives
and living is that every life ends
fully lived with its share
of heartache right alongside
the rush of not caring about it
he was mostly an idiot
which is why he looks so happy
i have forgotten how to fake that
and i envy him his incompleteness
but that smile’s still inside me
waiting to be plastered back on by someone else
on that day
when i do something dumbass
and pass on, life full and complete
penguingod made a comment the other day about how it’s incredibly hard to describe bipolar illness to anyone; much like describing a psychedelic experience, you never quite capture it.
I won’t try, but I recalled this story the other day that can explain one part of it — how when you’re dealing with the condition, you end up analyzing and parsing all your reactions to decide what’s a legitimate concern and what is the disorder talking; is your good feeling a symptom of mania, are you stressing and depressing over something unimportant? You end up distrusting a lot of your own perceptions…
It’s something like this:
You go for a walk in a swamp. There’s a lot of thick brush, and you know there’s also lots of quicksand that has killed a lot of people. You take a cane with you to help test the ground.
It gets foggy, and you get lost, and it’s night time with no moon. You move along very cautiously, trying to find your way out.
You get through a particularly thick patch of thorns and branches, stumbling through, the wood breaking around you as you trip over things.
You place your cane on the ground to test your footing…and it doesn’t resist. There’s no pushback. You try to interpret that, and you think to yourself: it’s quicksand, there’s no resistance back because the cane is sinking in.
You touch the ground all around you, with a steadily increasing sense of panic, and realize that you’re standing in the middle of a patch of the stuff on the only available solid ground. A step in any direction will be fatal.
So you stand still. You spend the night terrified to move at all, and though you’re exhausted and are ready to fall over from hunger and cold, you just…stand there.
In the morning, the light comes up and the fog burns off. You look at the ground in order to see if there’s a way out and realize that in the struggle to get through that thicket…you broke your cane off about a foot above the ground, and the lack of resistance you were feeling had nothing to to do with quicksand. The cane just wasn’t giving you accurate information, because it wasn’t touching anything at all.
The road home is just ahead of you, but you’re so exhausted and stressed and disgusted with yourself and your stupidity that you just can’t move toward it…
Something like that.
Yeah.
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In the middle of the darkest night ever,
I am trying to decide:
if you are asleep and you tell yourself
you are not, or if you are awake and say
you are asleep, and you believe either or both are true —
is there any truth that is worth its salt?
If you are not
sure of anything anymore,
is it worth trying
to be sure?
I know one thing only:
I will only fully open my eyes
to a solid answer.
burned, all burned.
dragged from their homes, pilloried,
made to stand trial in rooms
where the air did not bend toward their truths,
no matter how honest they were.
taken from places of power
once they had been judged. burned,
and though the smoke lifted away from their bubbling torment
and settled onto the skin of those who had judged them,
it took them just moments
to wipe the obvious stains away.
and after that,
the burning again, and again,
for it is heat that makes the engines go.
what fuel is used is unimportant.
it will change every time a source is exhausted.
it will not matter to the tenders what new shape it takes,
or how the burning happens…through wood
or atom or zyklon-b, through poverty’s slow
coal seam smolder or in the death by tiny sparks
that comes from daily denial.
all fuel burns the same.
look into any ashes
and you will see yourself there.
do not pretend that if you were fuel once,
you are not now.
do not pretend that if you were a fire tender,
you can never burn.
do not pretend that they see a difference among you.
to them there is drought
and kindling
enough to keep this world
on fire forever,
as long as one man
with one match
can be made
to strike it.
so come.
come to the place of burning.
come as water this time.
come in the name of everyone once burned.
come up
from the unjust ashes
and drown that match. come up
from the wet of soaked old pyres
and drown it. come up
from the freezing graves of the middle passage
and drown it. come up
from sand creek’s shoals
and drown it. come up
from memory’s camps,
from the chimneys of horror,
from the alleys of walled remainder,
from the forests of hidden famine,
from the conflagrations of invasion,
colony, assimilation, genocide,
and every other firestarter,
come together to drown it…
but do not come with lightning
when you come.
bring no fire of your own.
come as rain only,
joining with stream and spring,
come a little at a time
until we build,
long and soaking,
to a steady downpour
swollen
with a billion times
a billion drops.
no end can come to this blaze
until we believe in our watery hearts
that every scrap of fuel
tastes the same to the tongue of a flame,
and that nothing left dry
will ever be proof
against it.
Dark Matter 