my first hallelujah

a few sundays ago i read a review of a new book called The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" by Alan Light which reminded me of the first time i heard the song. i remember back in the mid-nineties when jeff buckley's grace came out and went to pioneer mall downtown to listen to some new cds and put his version on. it was so beautiful i had to listen to it over & over, i must have been there an hour, maybe two, and for the rest of the day i walked around in the state of hallelujah with that angelic croon of his looping continuously in my head. later that evening i went to the tuesday open mic at the now legendary cafe lena's. it was normally crowded but there happened to be a local tv crew there to do a piece about the poetry boom happening in portland. there's something about a camera, especially the possibility of getting on tv that does strange things to people and how they behave. suddenly, all these people who didn't usually read wanted to get on the already full list, which in those days could be thirty deep, and were walking around posing & trying really hard to look & sound interesting & cool, which made for a very weird & competitive atmosphere. i went to the back of the cafe and crouched in between the tables along the wall, crooning hallelujah under my breath in an attempt to preserve within that corrosive "me-me-me" atmosphere. when my name was called i walked up to the microphone at the front of the room and started crooning "ooh" for a full minute. the room fell silent and i did a passionate reading of a poem i wrote & lost about sitting in the pied cow coffeehouse and watching a romantic young couple across the room. the woman reached slowly across the table with her index finger and with extravagant gentleness stroked her smiling lover's nose. the room exploded and the tv crew ended up using footage of my reading on the news.

pigeon strings

all the birds gathered on the telephone wires just before the burnside bridge as i rode the bus to work this morning after writing at the coffeehouse remind me of those candy wristlets i used to get at the cornerstore after school.

bus beneath
the not so Grand
pigeon strings

 

this city is no womb

 

 

walked over to the mister taco food cart during my lunch break for the chile relleno dinner. passed someone lying on a bench curled in the fetal position beneath a blanket. cold rain falling hard, i could only see their calves. waiting for my lunch, i notice on the cart's fridge two two dollar bills held by a jesus immaculate heart magnet. smile. i watch the form, looking for signs of breathing. can't tell. the cook tells me the person's been lying there for a few hours. does not move. i tell him to call 911 and he does. as i start walking back to work i lean over the still form to ask a ridiculuous question in the increasing rain. are you okay?

fragile weather

this morning leapt immediately from bed & then quickly reconsidered & crept back in as if i knew what was coming, as if i could feel the day ahead. last night the weatherman promised me snow but the window showed otherwise. i took my time getting out the door & found fat feathers gliding down the hill. i tried to shoot some with my camera but i couldn't catch a single one. as i stood waiting for the delinquent bus beneath its demure shelter, i kept holding out my wool jacketed arm, letting flakes land on its dark blue sleeve like the ghosts of butterflies poisoned by pollution. across the street two young guys smoked at a sidewalk table beneath a cafe's awning. i so much wanted to skip work & join them, sipping tea until the butterflies died again.

reality is broken

as i was sitting in the cafe this morning i started thinking about the possibilities embedded in any situation. even though it did not appear that there was a gun present in a cafe, there could have been one concealed or someone could have walked in carrying a gun. most of the time that is probably unlikely and yet it is possible. and then i thought, what if someone set a loaded gun on a table? it is still probable that it wouldn't be fired and yet it's mere presence does increase the odds of a gun being fired and someone being shot. so in a sense, introducing a loaded gun changes the equation, changes the nature of the game and also the player of that game. and then i started thinking about how much his mother loved guns, talked about guns, nobody knew how many guns she had but she had a bunch of guns and loved them and took her kids to the range to shoot them and how people who lived near the school said that they didn't think anything of hearing shots fired at the school because people are always shooting their guns so shooting guns in the neighborhood is normal. shooting guns outside is normal. shooting guns outside near a school is normal. and then i thought, what if living in that place felt like being stuck with a lousy character in a boring depressing game where good things only seem to happen to other people and you can't score any points and it looks like there is no hope of ever winning that game or even enjoying playing that game and it looked unlikely that leaving would solve anything because you were so dependent on being taken care of by your mother, you had always been taken care of by your mother who was being taken care of by your father who got a divorce and what if you had no idea how you could ever change your character and play a different, more fun game? UNLESS YOU GET A GUN. gun changes the game, gun changes your character, gun rewrites the rules. and all your life, all you have ever seen on every tv show, in every movie, even on the news, local, national, international, gun changes everything. and then i started thinking about how a small community can be a like a net, a web, and how stuck you feel by the weight of everything that was already decided long before you ever arrived and how attached everyone is to the shape of how things have settled. after thinking this i felt kind of excited but then i thought wow that's pretty crazy. but shooting twenty-something kids & teachers, etc. that's pretty crazy too. i remember reading in the paper someone saying that she had no answer for this as if there existed a simple equation A + B = C. but i don't think such an equation exists for this. i think the pattern that gets you to such a place is ridiculously convoluted & harsh & absurd. and yet, there is something very simple that is probably going to be found at the center, and that is hurt, a deep deep hurt, stored in a container that couldn't possibly keep it. 

poem is a semicolon

this is what ezra pound learned from ernest fenollosa: some languages are so constructed—english among them—that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. that sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. or, if you are blessed, they are heard by someone who knows you & loves you & will be sorry to hear the sentence end. when i told mr. angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: "that's a lot of semicolons!" he is absolutely right; the sentence would be unwieldy & awkward & resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop & be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being—an italian as a matter of fact—that allows us to go on and keep on connnecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated.

you might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart.

—from mary ruefle's book, "Madness, Rack, and Honey"

Link to the short movie: The Worriers A documentary on the hermeneutics of Poetry in Portland

The Worriers: Bad gangs, Bad girls, Bad poetry

In 1979 the Warriors fought their way home, facing New York City's most notorious gangs. In 2014 the Warriors will be battling across Los Angeles, facing LA's worst gangs and the curse of the Hollywood remake. But in 2010, an intrepid gang of poets attempted to pass through the dark woods of the poetic underbelly of the third largest city of the Pacific Northwest, Portland Oregon. The Worriers. This is their story.


Directed by: James Honzik
Screenplay: Patrick Bocarde, Ceylon Anderson



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0fwawwmiSo


here's a preview:

sam menashe poems

Downpour

Windowed I observe
The waning snow

As rain unearths

That raw clay—

Adam's afterbirth—

No one escapes
I lie down, immerse

Myself in sleep

The windows weep

Self Employed

Piling up the years
I awake in one place
And find the same face
Or counting the time
Since my parents died-
Certain less is left
Than was spent—
I am employed
Every morning
Whose ore I coin
Without knowing
How to join
Lid to coffer
Pillar to groin—
Each day hinges
On the same offer







more pictures by this photographer can be found here:

http://myephemerality.com/?p=4024



Moving by Darrell Gray

Moving by Darrell Gray

There comes the time

        moving its house,

the yard and cat

        that can't come back.

The dark was big. The car

        went through,

And what they thought

        they thought they knew-

the yard, the house,

       the car, the cat.

Goodbye, goodbye. It

       seemed so real.

here's a sweet blog post about darrell gray & his poetry:

http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2011/07/darrell-gray-rip.html

& here's a review of this anthology:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5691

camped on the doorstep of panic

the barista is young and scarred, scared too, her glasses slip down toward the end of her nose like a twenty year old pigtailed granny. a stray lock dangles down her cheek like a curtain that did not complete its fling, flung unfinished, face partially eclipsed. a flock of tiny birds swarm the bell shaped tree across the street from where i sit by the wide window, sipping my notebook on a fudge brown plank of wood, studying the puddles, how light rain lands like an invisible ballerina on the hood of a pine green toyota truck, each drop a cold gentle tap that releases a faint steam from the still warm hood. i watch the barista plead with each customer who orders, tiptoeing along her edge like those old black & white pictures of people building the early skyscrapers, but she's new and not at home in the sky. i think of how many times in my life i've had to survive on that ledge, to live in perpetual trembling, needing to always be that vigilant, tight as a piano string and exhausted by the constant failure of my instrument to stay in tune. never feeling secure enough, afraid to not be afraid is like being homeless with a home, camped on the doorstep of panic. i notice how often she calls for help, raising her already raised voice until it climbs into the thin atmosphere of its peak, where it begins to collapse from the lack of oxygen needed to sustain its summit. i do not want to be kept. i do not wish to be tracked. i am an open secret. the mailman enters wearing a plastic white mushroom cap to protect him from the rain. i walk over to the counter and ask the barista for more hot water to replenish my story. i sit back down and a fashionable young blond woman, straight out of a french movie, perhaps the "umbrellas of cherbourg," saunters past, her lunar face slashed with cherry red lipstick. she pauses furtively on the corner, holding a lemon yellow umbrella, wrapped in a beige shawl, her poultry thin legs stockinged & high heeled. the last leaves on the young, recently transplanted tree across the street are that yellow. a crow alights on the thick black sharpied telephone wire just above me, a half dozen others striping the overcast. i cannot hear the crow's caw above the groovy cafe music played by the owner who is wearing a wonder woman tshirt and spotted white tights, who lingers nearby, arranging cut limbs in a vase. when the barista reaches for my teapot, i can see numerous finger sized bruises spotting her arm in a leopard print of pain, all up and down her milky skin. she is nervous. she is always nervous and very nice.

lunar eclipse

a woman came into the store this afternoon which technically was after noon but the day never felt like anything other than morning, until it was evening, like when you don't lift the blinds after you get out of bed as if you could milk the morning by refusing to open your eyes. i was sitting across the room studying a lunar atlas when she apparently began to swoon and behave irrationally but not the usual irrational behavior that we're accustomed to. i thought nothing of it at first as they, the cashier & the customer, or perhaps in another way, the man behind the counter and the woman in front of him, not touching, yet seeming to wrangle somehow, without force, lugubrious, as if he were trying to stand a deflated doll that refused to stand firm in his grasp. i saw him get on the phone, and then he mouthed to me from across the room M-O-D (manager on duty) who i immediately paged, not knowing what was happening. they immediately called back and the cashier said, paramedic, i'm calling a paramedic, which i reported to the MOD, who said he'd be right over. the woman sat down at a table to wait, muttering that she didn't want to die again, over and over, as if death could be repeated like a grade. i feel so weird when this sort of thing happens, heightened yet passive, powerless to respond and yet ready to respond. the MOD came and knelt with one knee on the smooth textured gray floor beside her, assessing what was happening and assuring her that everything would be fine. he normally has a deep bulldog bark of a voice but he almost seemed to purr when he spoke to her, though she was resolute about dying again. the paramedics came, serious burly men. i wanted them to be less clinical than they were, more tender, but a litany of emergencies probably insists on them being pragmatic, i guess. this is the second time i've watched a customer being wheeled out the door. she waved like a football player being carted off the field after a vicious hit. it's hard to be heroic when you're strapped into a gurney. the MOD walked over and stood beside me for a moment, clearly disturbed. for some reason i had a strange line from a frustrating movie stuck in my head. sometimes i say things without considering how they might be taken or even what the deeper meaning might be but just take a leap and hope it's right. and sometimes it's not. i told him it's better to be a live dog than a dead lion. he just looked at me like what the f*ck is that supposed to mean and left. i've been pondering it all evening, worried i put my foot in my mouth again. but you know, it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion. dead means end of story, no matter how beautiful, how powerful you are, and as ugly, as messed up as your life might be, you are still alive, which means the story continues, and at the very least, something could change, maybe not better, but at least it could be different.

tragic hero

Theaterfotografie van Albert Greiner sr. & jr. 

"now it is true that tragedy is the consequence of

a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly."

arthur miller's definition of a tragic hero

10/22/12 Caffeinated Art #158: rick j, Judith Fay Pulman & Natalia K Burgess

here is a link to the show i did with judith pulman & natalia k burgess.

http://showandtellgallery.org/?p=6263

autumn caught

Ink, oil and Industrial Enamel on cut velum Matthew Dennison

the fisherman leaves
home to return to the leaf house
stolen tears do not repair the wind
nor mend the scream torn
nets of other
world pain globed
autumn world 
unshaken but captured
sculpted to state
what is still
unsettled in the settled
useful to a tree
in the house of
unrelenting leaf taking
mute dogs of muscle lay
quietly about his bones
waiting to serve, drifting
toward a beach inside
becalmed the maniacal surge
swiped from cradle, stolen from grave
the wave broken boxer
rests on a stool in his corner
placating the swell
with a spoon of cool metal
sewing the skin shut, coached
by grief and loss, by leaf and
tree, repaired by moist wet
silence around him all
the yield is decreasing around him
all is leaf mutiny that you do not see
them scurry in pink shells leafed in
tinny tinted caves inside him all
is leaf tunnel maze, carpeted
land of ears and mitts to catch
what was too golden to be heard all
around him is too tear-shaped is bled
brown and abandoned by sun all
around him is the shape he could not hold
cold fish hooked from an infinite pool of
sorrow is the son sunk beneath the horizon
who could not grope his way into father
who could not leave his mother even after
he landed still wearing the red boots
he stood for days in puddles of
blood, in blood wave sloshed in blood spray
the killing he has made is killing what's still
wriggling alive inside his slick suit
a yellow hearse kept the corpse warm enough
to approximate a human on land, but at sea,
everything swims in a direct line from
eye to tear to wave, whichever breaks him
first can salt the bones for the bowl of
what you do not have is full of
lack and loss what the greedy
swiped clean leaves an unusual
hollow carved pause in the chest where
a line extends clear through
him into world into sea the reckoning
between each trip is a fight 
victory defined only as escape
vaguely familiar the face that smirks 
sleepless in his dreams

erasure of a found christian biography

westering II by wade hoefer

let me say
to finish what we have
service the loved form
round top of the little hill
where we gathered
the grave offered prayer
and the loved form that was laid
shall be no more

hoped that the lord would
king one evening towards grass
summer landscape spread
westering sun he said
to be here when
christ was not gratified
during the voice...

some of them only
not far away while
the last chapel
and the beautiful
started some streams
in the midst of them-

a constant work

LULU AND JACK by Deborah Woodard, from the book "Plato's Bad Horse"

LULU AND JACK
after G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box


Things are dear on the eve of departure.
You sit in my lap and we watch
the candle you lit, keeping vigil
over the remains of the stale bread.

We left our shadows in the stairwell
like great overcoats, fit for giants.
They were clumsy loiterers,
out of breath by the first landing
where I slid my knife over the banister
because I didn’t want to hurt you—
half-seal in your black dress,
half-hummingbird.

Here, another woman gave me a gift
for you. A twig of mistletoe grey as her eyes.
She was an odd sort of thief,
paying back for the look she stole,
and I was like a river, unable to refuse,
fearing the skipped stone of each glance.

It rode light as a feather in my waistcoat,
but it has a burr’s cling, the smell
of outdoors. We could kiss beneath it,
and wake up in the middle of the woods.




http://www.bearstarpress.com/books/platosbadhorse.htm
http://www.deborahwoodard.com/bio.shtml

writer's block

sweet blue eyes straddles a chair in a coffeeshop bent over an application for the other coffeeshop across the street i can't stop thinking since early this morning is finally overcast enough like me the sky is rhyming with pavement again furtive scribbling but my pen is still still as i watch the young woman tilt her mahogany away from the long blonde tongue of table loosens a cascade of tawny curls striped sherbert shirt lifting lifting like a curtain too early exposing an astonished flank of pure sudden vanilla skin saddles of flesh riding downhill noon in the daylight toward the oasis hidden in her jeans

distinctions

sitting in the new warm world, drinking tea in the wooden womb, watching a trio of booted gazelles, huddled just outside, negotiate their plans for an unlaborious day. the sky is clear and just past pastel, the dusty morning sunlight attempting lemonade. a masked man swathed in charcoal sweater & sweats bombs twelfth avenue the opposite way while the twin of a not sold friend sings in the background, i think, i am singed in the black ground, divorced from home. i look over to the angular woman behind the counter, across the room, to ask the name of the song that's been playing. she points to the old woman wearing a yellow, duck billed cap, collapsed in the blood burgundy easy chair, eyes shut, head tilted back, mouth open as if in awe, her german shepherd, harnessed & leashed for service, dozing lightly on the scuffed floor beside her. the angular woman behind the counter points at them and makes the sleepy steeple sign with her hands, pressed against her cheek and says, "precious." i get up from my table and ask, "is that the name of the song, precious?" no, the angular woman says. the old woman sleeping with her dog, that's precious. the song's called "she's so sweet."



http://www.andistarr.com/Bio_Andi.php

Stalemate by Joanie Mackowski

What are you thinking?

Of phonemes or fire,

my feet in your lap,
the trembling lip

of the coffee cup,

or aren't you sure?

Perhaps you're not who

I thought you were;

perhaps my body here,

pressing down on you: horizon

for flying. I wonder

if your brain's a bird,

an oily crow

that flaps to the tops

of the poplar trees,

its storm eye condensing me

(or just what remains

then, glint and shadow)
to a strand of tinsel.
And through those binoculars
where the saddest colors
in the veins of my wrist
twist a gnarled oak,
your brain with its blue veer,
a leaf in its beak,
builds a nest in my hand
(an uncertain ledge
in an unsteady land).

from the book, "View From A Temporary Window" by Joanie Mackowski

Sunset by John Clare

Welcome sweet eve thy gently sloping sky
And softly whispering wind that breathes of rest
And clouds unlike what daylight galloped bye
Now stopt as weary huddling in the West
Each by the farewell of day's closing eye
Left with the smiles of heaven on its breast
Meek nurse of wearing how sweet to meet
Thy soothing tenderness to none denied
To hear thy whispering voice—ah heavenly sweet
Musing and listening by thy gentle side
Lost to life's cares thy coloured skies to view
Picturing of pleasant worlds unknown to care
And when our bark the rough sea flounders through
Warming in hopes its end shall harbour there



http://johnclaresociety.blogspot.com/

Empty Summer Twilight by Patrick Bocarde

Shaded blondes, torn jean shorts

and loose t-shirt wait on dirtbikes

for me to pass the bike path

crossing Linden Street, Massapequa Park.

Frilled leafy trees snap

at my car windows like a mad Expressionist painter.

A squirrel starts across the streets,

pausing before darting off asphalt.
Telephone lines—black whipcords—slash

the sky into acres

as full of grazing buffalo

as any American plain.

A bird feeder, clear

cylinder offering only air,

sways to a stop
inside an evergreen.

A bluejay squawks for his free lunch.
I crash into a '72 Buick.



—from the chapbook "Suburban Fuck Farm Anonymous" by Patrick Bocarde

Carousel by Kori Sayer from the chapbook Dr. Turpentine

picture by richard schemmerer

I dreamt my life in terms of science


last night I threw a cigarette into the black blue
and you caught it 25 miles away
I'm grinning like a maniac into hair and rain
as you bring your arm back down and strike a match
We're talking through seemingly occupied space
seemingly... right?
wrong
this is one of those hard to perceive angles
where you are bigger and more dimensional
than your surroundings
that perfectly deceptive angle
i pose to one side
like so
and you do the same
when we do this
everything else is flexible
the stars will spin in circles
and the trees will go flat
you could be in China
and that ciggerette would still make it
to your mouth
because when you and I move
the earth stays right there
gravity doesnt know we're meaning
to let it win the race
we like it fast
we like sitting on that bench
and having the world mold for us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ4Xa_6B9to&feature=plcp

poetry found a living room



Ross William Hamilton, The Oregonian



sharpening knives with no reservations, the teacher anoints the teacher's fountain with righteous words as the painter tapes the plastic down. a couple ascend the stone stairway to the parking lot’s rooftop performance of dusk in july is an egg broken high above a concrete bowl and we are it's audience, dazzled by fading shine. the past arrives without a past, passing like a train that won't slow down as the dusty old salesman with his too translated book scurries by in his pinstriped suit, carrying the world on his back. isn't everything done and said, instead? the singer never asks. cartoons of diversity panel the plywood covered walkway downtown, the unaffordable and undesirable never sit & sip, together or still. out of the corner of my lazy eye, a handsome japanese couple tag team their toddler's pants off, replaced with swim trunks for the wading pool, where the unfortunate city slurps it's colors scraped on black square plates, giving the music color he says, the various feeling of the poets dictates to the painter, who declares all reasonable offers will be refused. i see we are stalked by fingerprinted skin like predator reconsidering our boundaries. the plastic chain stand collapses from the force of the painter's brute sincerity, slash & gash, he dabs the waiting mouths of distinct color as the wind stripes ripples across the moist eye of the reclining cyclops, and pigeons swoop the bowl where we sit pondering all that you, all that you scraped across your life, just to tease the eye with texture. he confesses his fandom with borrowed lines as hysterical preteen girls scream in swimsuits re-enacting the horror films they shouldn't have stayed up for the man who hasn't been able to sleep on anything soft in years does not really know the woman he sleeps with. the painter conjures with a swipe of his hand, and just like that, an emerald comet appears as the train wheezes past again with its icecream cone sigh, like an elderly star too tired to shoot, dragging itself in shame beneath its sky. an adolescent girl in denim shorts, worn over black lace stockings, florid with roses,  drags a chair into the center of the pool where sits, posing like a star jealous of our moon. delicacies or dry mouth delirium is no choice at all, cornered shadows saturated in shiny silences, slipping like spaghetti straps off a shoulder of sheer brick and we have been discovered by wind as they, the children run again into the pool to discuss the rules of their improvised play. no singer has ever been fired for moaning too many baby's he thinks, these towers of stone interrupted with predictable blinks of glass have all gotten jesus turned the other cheek. wind ripped what it could from the backs of our kneeling skeletons, assembled to expose like warm bellies giving themselves to the sherbet sun. waving goodbye, i feel the evening creeping with its delicate cool, menacing the small game of our affection. time to leave; i have a job to do, stapling the neighborhood with posters of regret.

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/index.cfm?c=52454

The Wild Flower Man by Lu Yu (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

Do you know the old man who

Sells flowers by the South Gate?

He lives on flowers like a bee.

In the morning he sells mallows,

In the evening he has poppies.
His shanty roof lets in the
Blue sky. His rice bin is
Always empty. When he has
Made enough money from his
Flowers, he heads for a teahouse.
When his money is gone, he
Gathers some more flowers.
All the spring weather, while the
Flowers are in bloom, he is
In bloom, too. Every day he
Is drunk all day long. What does
He care if new laws are posted
At the Emperor's palace?
What does it matter to him
If the goverment is built
On sand? If you try to talk
To him, he won't answer but
Only give you a drunken
Smile from under his tousled hair.



-from the book "The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry"
edited by Eliot Weinberger
http://ndbooks.com/book/the-new-directions-anthology-of-classical-chinese-poetry

Change by Vern Rutsala from The Moment's Equation

In agate type the sports page lists

Transactions—so and so traded,

someone put on injured reserve,

another waived out of the league.

Such lists uncover the sadness

of change and separation—our
own lives dwindling into fine print

with the aging bonus baby

sent down to double A, his great

hopes and ours a faint blur

on page four. We think of such players

gone to a kind of limbo, bat

and ball denied them, carrying

only their scuffed shoes down some road

of sore arms and bad knees. We eke

out our days among the injured

reserves—like us they may be fit

some day—but feel ourselves sliding

toward the saddest of all,

that invisible leavening of all
trades during the hot stove league,
players who don't even have names,
the players to be named later.

from the book, "The Moment's Equation" by Vern Rutsala

http://www.ashlandpoetrypress.com/online-catalog/snyder-series/the-moments-equation