Seeing The Year Out by Su Tung-po, translated by Burton Watson

Want to know what the passing year is like?
A snake slithering down a hole.
Half his long scales already hidden,
how to stop him from getting away?
Grab his tail and pull, you say?
Pull all you like - it does no good.
The children try hard not to doze,
chatter back and forth to stay awake,
but I say let dawn cocks keep still!
I fear the noise of watch drums pounding.
We've sat so long the lamp's burned out.
I get up and look at the slanting Dipper.
How could I hope next year won't come?
My mind shrinks from the failures it may bring.
I work to hold on to the night
while I can still brag I'm young.

just a duck in the christmas shooting gallery

tired. depleted. crushed. whelmed over. searching for synonyms of rout (a disorderly retreat of defeated troops. thanks!) nauseous morning with a terrible migraine. the newer cashier flaunted her ignorance, as if trying to impress with the sheer quantity of questions. rebuilding immaculate castles of books, again & again with each oblivious jacketed wave. if only my hands could absorb their content. people keep walking behind me to ask my back for help, which sends me to the bathroom to check my face. what's that carnival game, where they shoot the placid ducks floating back & forth? fled for lunch to the handmade asian noodle cart run by a husband & wife, the husband leaning out the window, eating a skinned apple. he made eye contact, bowed slightly, and smiled when i approached. i ordered my usual tofu veggie noodles and he got started cooking while his wife, who was sitting on a stool in the back gulping down noodles, got up to take the money. she made eye contact, bowed slightly, and smiled thank you. every time i go there i feel humbled by their sincerity. they genuinely appreciate that i keep coming back, and the honesty of that appreciation makes me feel human again. after lunch, i try & fail to shovel my way out of an avalanche of transactions, mind so mush by the end i am nearly giving away money. i survive & scurry away to the math section to lick my damaged equations. i step out the door at five completely frazzled, staring incoherently up at the pearl's neon towers, unsure if i can handle grocery shopping. a coworker jerks me from my reverie with a departing farewell, strolling past arm-in-arm with another coworker. dating now, i think. dating again, actually, which would explain the recent chilliness, hmm. i brave wholepaycheck for groceries, miss the bus, and decide to walk instead. i look up at the neon again after resigning myself to the long walk and misread a sign in a window that does not say:

OFTEN.

we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything

i had a pleasant encounter with a homeless man today while waiting for my lunch at a food cart. it's seems like many people try to ignore them and i feel that temptation myself, for various reasons, such as when i'm in a hurry or feeling stressed, but sometimes i feel a resistance to their presence, a desire to push them away, as if i couldn't bear admitting them. i've been working with noticing that feeling of revulsion and relaxing when it arises, softening toward instead of hardening against. i want to say the man i interacted with on the sidewalk was middle-aged but age can be difficult to guess with someone who is surviving on the street, enduring whatever that hell is for them. i think taking pictures as i walk around has encouraged me to be more present in my environment, alert to the possibility of arrested by something beautiful. people downtown tend to be somewhere other than where they are, whisking their bodies down the street to catch up with where they plan to be. how strange that the people we shun & call homeless are actually the one's most rooted in their environment. the interaction itself wasn't really a big deal, just some dirty, disheveled guy making his rounds, asking the people waiting at the food carts for spare change. i know what it's like to be shunned, to not be admitted. when i look through my notebooks i notice how frequently i refer to eyes & use words that describe various forms of looking. it's embarrassing to see what i so obviously crave. a friend of mine once told me that when she was a little girl her parents said that she constantly asked people, "do you believe me?" she's a very sensitive person, not unlike me, and she thinks that she sensed at an early age the incongruity between what she saw in people's eyes and what she heard & felt. that really resonated, but i think for me, what i am looking for is the person who is there within the person who is not there. i told the homeless guy, "sorry, i can't help you." and i really feel that. i don't know what the hell i can do to help these people. so i give them the one thing they can't use to poison their minds or numb their pain. i give them what i in fact long for, search for, and frequently lack. i look in their eyes when i speak to them. i feel ridiculous typing this, like wow, that's very jesus of you! and yet, he met my gaze and thanked me. i guess i gave what i didn't know i could spare.

friend zone blues

sentenced to nothing ever ending

finger-dangling off a downtown high rise 

gasping at what's reflected back as i 
endure on hold again

scrolling through keypad labyrinths,

those xeroxed voices did not console 

my warm saran wrapped heart 
with their perfectly enunciated, mail flat requests to

"press nine for more options..."

playing pin the name on the new face

every waking day i am   

up to dark, asleep to dark 

teased by a sun i can never see, 
blinded by a neon eclipse,

lost like a stranger in the dusty stacks 

of a faded, illegible theology that 
always fails at the big reveal-

cold spooning in the spooky  

parking lot of platonic friendship

i am too undressed for all this 
appropriate behavior in public 
never kissing and always too hungry 
for the meal i am served no wet heat 
drama under fluffy foreign blankets 

always waving but never touching 
those clean island bodies fattening on 
inscrutably long lists of 

unpronounceable substitutes 
for love

in honor of a poet's passing: Ahmed Fouad Negm

http://www.jocr8.com/portfolio/tasteofdesign

Let it be known by all
that prisons are only walls,
that ideas are like light,
that light can jump over a thousand walls,
And that walls never hold back the spirit. 
And let it be known by all
that injustice has grown old,
that the gates of the prison are weak,
that the handles of the gates have disappeared,
And that soon all this will just be memories,
And that these promises will be fulfilled tomorrow,
And that all your days, and ours, will be filled with light.





http://www.perssupport.nl/apssite/binaries/content/assets/persberichten/2013/12/09/PCF_poembook_Ahmed+Fouad+Negm_2DEC13pdf

boxes

1.

summer saved in the buttery voice of a sultry woman singing gently sad songs to us, deep in our mugs. attack the heart, my extremities are cracked. sir, there is no need for your glare, my eyes are vacant & unsold. how to process these requests for connection, to be in on the untold? evening steeps, already darker than my tea. the names i do not wish to amass, pile in my exiled brain. keep it short, lest the scroll unfurl too indifferently. it is much too slender inside his loudly. i do not have the heart to tell him, not every dot, nor every dash, just because it itches, doesn't mean you scratch. just sit for awhile with this passenger, i would say, and he will choose his own exit, i meant but did not share.


2.

gleeful, dog spilled sidewalk, creamy rivulets lick their way toward gutter.
the guilty puppy is relocated, its leash looped over a convenient branch. 
do women's hands betray them, i think, behind her back, and does that 
mean she is someone else until she reaches? her head is hatless,
and her hair is coffee dark, but without the cream, and tousled, 
as if her head had only just recently been released from dream. 
she is holding a cigarette in one pale hand too thin to ever suggest 
elegance, like the ghost of a spider, flexing in its murderous sleep.
the cigarette unfurls its banner beneath my window. her sit
is brief, it is too brisk out there to think. we have swapped 
moist cool for bone dry cold in some sort of climate exchange 
we have only just begun to understand. she takes deep drags 
as she thumbs the phone in her other hand, soon replaced 
with a turquoise box, and then a cherry red lighter, as if her 
hand could not be denied the shape it craved, its need to hold
something, anything when you're alone, floating in the cold 
shade of a too bright morning, and then she erupts to her feet 
and stabs the cigarette into the dirty black plastic claw, 
permanently frozen in mid-grasp, it smolders in her absence
on the silver sidewalk table, as if spitefully smoking back. 
an unquenched silence given no mouth to feed.

3.

on the side this light so obviously prefers on the corner 
across the street, shades of primary blue huddle their 
rectangular glow around a tall skinny blue bus stop sign, 
a little island saving sunlight's refugees, shade peeled 
from the curb at nearly the speed of neglect. there is 
another sign, almost as tall and skinny too, but not blue,
a silver sentinel that always stands one step to the side 
to perfect its estrangement. its face is white and its mouth 
cannot unsnarl itself from the grim shape of an empty, 
black & white bus, the silver sentinel guards the little 
island of blue, facing away from what is always offered 
freely, its one eye red & slashed, as its pupil collects itself 
into a letter that stares meekly into the easily defeated 
autumn sun. 

"On the Eastern Front" by Georg Trakl, translated by John Greening

Battle of Grunwald by Jan Matejko

On the Eastern Front

The winter storm's mad organ playing
is like the Volk's dark fury,
the black-red tidal wave of onslaught,
defoliated stars.

Her features smashed, her arms silver,
night calls to the dying men,
beneath shadows of November's ash,
ghost casualties heave.

A spiky no-man's-land encloses the town.
The moon hunts petrified women
from their blood-spattered doorsteps.
Grey wolves have forced the gates.

    

Im Osten

Den wilden Orgeln des Wintersturms
Gleicht des Volkes finstrer Zorn,
Die purpurne Woge der Schlacht,
Entlaubter Sterne.

Mit zerbrochnen Brauen, silbernen Armen
Winkt sterbenden Soldaten die Nacht.
Im Schatten der herbstlichen Esche
Seufzen die Geister der Erschlagenen.

Dornige Wildnis umgürtet die Stadt.
Von blutenden Stufen jagt der Mond
Die erschrockenen Frauen.
Wilde Wölfe brachen durchs Tor.

what strange glowing

i pull a stool up to the shower. what should i do with the pieces that fall? rain pecked rendezvous for illicit hugs too sinful for anywhere but nondescript, downtown shadow district. how do i share what i supposedly possess? chocolate caught gaze. inscrutable, her lips. any mention of positivity makes me nervous. she arrives and locks the door on my dreamy evening. condensation tucks us in the soft lit tank. tarot cult in the corner, a tablespoon of tea, and a plethora of pours to taste the gradation of flavor. i have an eye for shine & all that glistens leads me on a leash of rain. in what year do you live and when did you press pause? unwillingly plucked from anonymity, groping for healing medicine's middle. are there any classic happenings happening again? so transparent, i'm not sure if there's anything left i should share. savoring delusion, chanting reflection's reflections. spiritless tones repeat. more formal friendliness for a footless diet. familiar voices from unfamiliar behind me faces. walls aglow with frilly golden girls. you keep showing up storyless and you aren't even the protagonist in any story you ever do tell. joyful bodies met. an atmospheric soundtrack instead of verse-chorus-verse. sometimes my solitude is a comfortably cranky marriage and sometimes i am shouting at my aloneness, cowering in the corner. i need a reminder to remember what to retrieve in order to recommend. a single crow alights upon the plaza sign's turned off hooks of light. a stray, furtive comma baits the literary overcast. sitting uneasily inside this well lit cube, my incognito choices breath lightly behind unturned knobs. these are the words given to pass. dirty amber signals, blinking within the ash, soaked & sulking desultory trees get down on their roots and pray beside our slick tireful street. this the sexiest revolution you never had. she moved with agility he reported from the front seat, on our way to fly awake. sledding flakes, skin snows upon an immaculately shoveled page. a sad eyed, tree tied dog patiently waits in the rain, still smelling her fresh departure. i've been neglecting my lacking again. i'm not making judgements against genre, i just can't clean my plate. she popped in to fetch her forgotten flowers, a tall bright yellow passenger who rides in the seat beside her, that bouquet zipped away. glass jars are petting zoos for lovely petals. the hooded milkman is nearly dwarfed by the empty blue stack of plastic crates wheeled down the dripping wet sidewalk, pasted with flattened, filthy gold tadpoles. across the street, a leafless tree serves as a rack for rain to hang its drops. below me and beneath the awning, her smoking gaze is roasted dark, her cheeks caramel creamy, her eyebrows bold, fat, and frothy as her big mouth puffs on her own handrolled cigarette, sunk so beautifully, deep inside her wool. i watch a slender mom hoist her pale blonde hatless angel boy across the parking lot, half full with cold sleeping cows, while her boy continues to glow, in spite of the distance, like a shadeless day white bulb. before me, a twig of a branch dangles delicately from the stronger arm of a young tree. less than a handful of heart-shaped leaves left, burnt orange, torn & rotting, trembling in the breeze. my dream catches robins lifting off & settling, bouncing from branch to branch before departing together again for the next tree, testing perhaps their solidarity before the season turns hard. 

and i ask, what joys should i share?

collaborative poem written with my rickbot

hanging out badly because you just had become
the casino he had been was sitting here to give
the middle-aged male performer I have been 
once a conversation has been folded & organized
i was doing and i am about to answer 
do not obey the city of it before it's destroyed
hanging out hands me their undying 
a woman at work thanks all states of behavior 
my egotism. 
former ground and the Brain, which aims to receive 
the middle of the Luminescence Conference 
if you suffer in the middle of this 
i am feeling vulnerable one saturday at the interrogation
 maybe perhaps we both gave her eyes and circled his freedom 
i don't feel like something needs to talk to remind us of the day
one of the cloud pictures
i feel a caramel coated mama pitbull looks up my yoga 
trying to play certain roles, 
trying to find a better way 
to take the temperature culprit
my fault for finding something more easily 
to have a collar, just make a point
the slightest brush could almost 
that i have warm wet food 
and struggled to form attachments to work 
wishing i could be hanging out at home
in a row pushed away from others.

gestures

Picture by Joe Schneid, Louisville, Kentucky

sitting in the darkened front of the bus, on my way to the cheap theater to see a classic movie about a man who could buy everything he wanted but the love. alone in my day and distracted by the chunky couple across from me, so convincingly boyish in their tats & baseball caps, i was never entirely certain either way, as one of them stroked the meaty forearm that lay across her leg, just a finger, tracing a line down in a slow swipe, meticulously deliberate, delicate, the eyes meeting like crystal kissing across a candlelit table, wordlessly checking in: are you okay with this? i am so okay with this. i haven't been touched today. i look away, out the window, still adjusting to the too soon arrival of late night darkness. the bus suddenly stops and the driver starts waving his hands at the glowing red window as he opens the door. an old lady with mcdonald's red hair boards the bus, squeaking to the driver who apologizes: i know, i know, i didn't see you. i won't leave you, i promise! and the old lady squeaks some more, her voice impossibly high and wordless. she sits down at the very front of the bus and the one who was doing the stroking starts signing to the squeaking old lady: do you sign? how are you? a flurry of hands flap near their faces like desperate hummingbirds hovering over a feeder after sunset. still no words but the squeaking sounds happier, and then the signing subsides, and the one who was doing the stroking returns to the love they were signing in skin. 

those doomed balloons

grief turned 
his home up-
side-down as they, 
his dolls, floated 
toward the inevitable,
those doomed balloons 
filled with just enough 
joy to rise, but 
never enough to 
elude his grasp.

drawing by matthew dennison

http://www.matthewdennison.com/matthewd/Paintings.html

unrequited pie

i cannot see her from where i sit but i hear her voice rise above the din, reaching over the counter, trying to touch him one last time, if at all, one last attempt to connect before they are severed, if they are not already severed. they are severed. severed. i can hear it in her voice, in that desperate announcement: "will i see you later? have a good time. i love you." and the love you falls to the dirty floor where it will lie scuffed among the unblinking. i am sitting there trying to write the most beautiful email ever. yes, i know. and i even told her that when i came in and ordered my tea and a slice of marionberry pie and would it like that warm? yes, of course i would like that warm. and would you like some whipped cream too? why yes, i would very much like some whipped cream! i remembered him when i came in, he was sulking at the end of the counter. i wasn't sure it was him because i haven't seen him in a long while but somehow intuited who it was and dialed down my usual flirting. something about the way that i love you just hung there, so obvious and unanswered. he paused at the door and looked back at her, said nothing, said everything. i've seen more love in the eyes of a feeding shark. i know what it's like to be left hanging, your need exposed, your wanting unrequited. i stopped by the counter to say goodbye. i told her i saw citizen kane last night, and though i loved it, i thought it was really sad. she said she saw it too and agreed that it was both really good & very sad. she asked me how my email went and i told that it was long, meandering, mundane, and utterly artless. i told her that i had failed beauty this evening and that if she wanted to know how to locate beauty that she should ask someone else as i clearly do not know where beauty lives today. and with that i bid her farewell.

rough road ahead

orange construction sign stationed just before the whisk on the corner of tenth & the side that burns blinks "ROUGH ROAD AHEAD, USE CAUTION" and i think, if only we had known, had been warned earlier, perhaps we would have adjusted our approach, more ginger, less garlic. isn't there something else that could be used instead? some other faculty that could pull you through or over the rough road. isn't caution just another way of saying BE AFRAID. and just how full of fear must we be? and would it really matter if we knew how rough that road was going to be? would we choose a different route? the sign announces that the nature of this ride, that we had grown accustomed to, will not be continued, that it will in fact change. if only we had known before we stabbed deeper into the side that burns. but what were you using before you used caution? what were you using before someone told you that you should be afraid? and when will we be advised to use frivolity, use levitation, use creativity, use intuition, use reason, use kindness, or dare i say it, love? when will we be advised to use love? 

ROUGH ROAD AHEAD, USE LOVE!

circular tea

day boys frolic in the rhododendron ring.
welcome to my scriptlessness i could not 
speak. could we not complete 
the symmetry of our garden experience 
and maybe meet for an undressed rehearsal 
i could not say to that sexy, 
acne-scarred college student
despite how slow her eyelids. 
they chased touch 
in the circular maze. if i shoot her,
have i stolen her dreaming 
in while gazing out 
likeness? adrift 
in a room of anonymity, the trying 
sun slides along our glass as the lazy commas 
couple above the moist black, as that 
banana yellow boy out there, gleefully
sprints upon the still sleepy queen.
all those dad chased circles 
among the stoically stern and heartily half 
unleafed, arms 
forever raised in surrender, 
those are too sweet for tea.

existential midlife crisis poem #147

waiting for 

a door to 

open my 

ambivalence— 

bottomless

sunday's prone & dreaming body

out the windows peeked 
the next intersection's stop-
lights repeat red, repeat red

hinted hills 
i do not see
tinted tree 
weeping its gold 
into the gutter 
reluctantly undressed its 
spindly limbs pinning 
the sky's cushion 
its gold streaming
and i am full 
of grief

outside, an invisible broom sweeps the moist parking lot 
so quiet and desolate, i wonder if the city has been evacuated 
and no one told me. outside the scatter is increased but 
in here i am lonely and flailing, diving lens long into petal 
and leaf, bark and blade. 

drowsily stepping into the coolest hue 
you could not ever possibly describe 
succumbing lately to 
the late night under pull 
hissing neon, target of the accused 
i told you
do not sing to me of spring 
in the midst of all this leaf fall 
entering the tunnel, knowing it's a long ride 
as layer after layer of mist is pulled from 
sunday's prone and dreaming body. 

accept what is, 
as if you could. 

the day is short armed 
and living too long a route to run 
for the promise of a vicious hit 

wearing a chain of dependent 
clauses around your breath 
that a piano's tinkling couldn't possibly 
solve anything and yet tries to anyway. 

strolling past your unmade mind 
you, habit's prisoner, want to 
crawl back into its bed 

as if you knew all along 
where you were going, 
as you tucked yourself 
back into your trap 

as if you knew, 
as if you knew...

The Naomi Poems by Saint Geraud (aka bill knott)

bill knott's collected poems can be found at the link below and downloaded for FREE:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_kyor0CFAKqUkc5clh4VmgxeDA/edit?usp=sharing&pli=1

autumnal to pieces

orange sweaters parade up morrison, munching their way toward the construction party.

moving van tows a sedan, front wheels lifted, while a giant, dark chocolate teddy bear reclines behind the wheel.

sunk too deep in his armchair, an older man, cloud singed and mistaken for sane, cackles alone.

outside and just below, a couple abruptly departs, clicking off the autumn show.

leather strap skinny, woman with a face creased like the oldest jacket you always wear, emerges from the pterodactyl wing of this pickup truck morning, barely filling her rancher's clothes. 

young woman sweatered in collegiate devotion deposits her Chihuahua in between the sidewalk tables as she stops inside for her morning coffee while her dog anxiously waits, leashed but untied, ears erect, head swiveling each way for sympathy. watching from behind the cool glass, i feel like an accomplice to this tiniest of trembling.

an unseen man sits at the furthest table, pushes with the tip of an index finger the plastic black ashtray  across the silver table's surface toward another unseen man, dressed in dark, his obscene need for nicotine grimaces him as he frisks the street with desperate dark eyes, risking publicity, it is probably too dark inside him to see any of this spectacular color, too dark to see anything but tunnel, brisk fingers scurry inside that dirty yawn for some needed, half-swallowed thing. he is shadow's squirrel stealing neglected last drags. i don't recall when he arrived or from where, my eyes couldn't hack his encrypted presence, and so back under covers he crept, unseen again. 

pasted on the back of the stopped bus, a mash of messages keeps my head up: can you have faith in your heart? 

leaping in the leaf stream, in the least little swirl.

alone like him, my healing routines fail to carry me toward love, and like him, i am a fish compelled by need to become amphibious, and thus, doubly exposed. 

long time taken 
as if you could 
measure that with 
a million year ruler 
such a long time taken
to escape the murderous.

sun parked in a white box across the street 
thirsty for color, wind swipes the dainty scarves
dangling from the young, now half-dressed tree.

you were never
invincible, 
just lucky.