i chose the dream tea

i caught the bus back to walk my gaze. i discover a room with an island of petals & flames & i walked its maze. i knelt down to speak to the herbal goddess & she offered me a choice. i chose the dream tea and what do ya know, now i'm dreamy. lifting the city's hidden paintings, my eye is tired & heavy with scenes. landscape cradling the instrument, music echoing still. net caught torso, flesh fished. i cannot see by the light in your temple. crowd cracks the night & spills its cheer. have you ever met a well rested wind? cheap end, this. sleep in, my friend, sleep in. side by side we stand, studied, distinct, & apart. i took the next bus back when the light dangerously dimmed. i could just barely feel her thigh beside me, gift wrapped in floral dress, pressed like a rose between pages. and that was enough to get me home.



flyawakepdx.com/‎

my weekly appointment with earth

a single bee, scavenging a brown blade in the circular green. dragonflies flyby. birdsong jam from the surrounding treetops. early sunday afternoon and i am a circle to myself, buzzing. can your life be perfect as it is? is it ever perfect, your life? lifting windows, letting yes. red lashes flutter. if you're not, you're not, and you know that. just because you open the door... this is my twice a week appointment with the earth. the soup of the day was still nope. the owner says he cannot yet estimate the survival of his last decade, but he may have time. who knows?

clear cut heart

http://laura-sliva.blogspot.com/2009/11/objectwords-part-2.html

he sings his freedom on the day i'm supposed to rest but have instead come in because i cannot rest or play inside. free falling he sings above the din. free falling in the corner of the room and i'm free because if you are you better sing. because if you are free you have time to sing about it instead of just being, and only the recently emancipated can sing this loud. the i sounds like a cross between ah and um as if meeting the ah and the um somewhere between the idea of freedom and the hesitation before he jumps. and i'm free he sings, falling as he slides down the vowel, where do you land after you have jumped in? is there any landing in freedom or is it all falling, a monotonous plunge, never landing? can you ever be free on solid ground? am i too old to even ask? free falling as the guitar jangles like a massive ring of keys, someone fumbles for the one that unlocks the door between free and falling. he is a man with too many keys, a man with too many doors that have to be kept closed and locked, like that man outside, running inside his black. as the man seated too close behind me where i sit bent over ruled paper with the sunlight beautiful above my head and i think, a day given up for money is a shovel full of dirt tossed beside the hole. the man seated behind me, who i do not see, accelerates into his laughter like a turn his throat throttles through until its louder & louder, while another man up ahead arrives at pavement by way of rope, where he pauses to untether, casually gathering his life into his arms and then marches up the street, straight into the sun. today is a parade of convertibles, as if they had been waiting all year for the sky's cloudless blessing. free falling, so free he lost the g on the way down. what a gorgeous day to drive your pride & joy around! who are you in this city, do you know? and if so, why are you so sure? feeling for a string we could hold together, to keep us from falling, but why this string? don't tell me it was just dangling there. awakened too early by the morning engine's rev. the rpm's of the houseless pressed into the red beneath my window. an old woman wearing an old man's clothes, brown trousers & a boring striped brown shirt, paces the downtown corner, shock of gray hair, wild like the glass removed from a bulb of burnt filaments, still thirsty to burn, gesticulating at both people and demons alike and what's the difference anyway? for her or for us? someday you may be mad on a corner like that. someday you will have stepped too far from the story and you won't want to come back or maybe you won't be able to feel its thread in the dark. pacing the palace of lesser desire, injured by every stray glance, thoughtlessness flung like an absence you thought couldn't hurt, thumbing the waistband of your too large for you pants while the other does its business in the golden afternoon light. free falling. but what if you're free, and want nothing, and everyone asks what do you want and you realize that desire is a fuel and life goes nowhere without it, that your life is not alive without the fire you put out. and then you come to, sitting among the wreckage of all you severed, cleared, and burnt, a plain of stumps where a forest once hummed, scabbed and scarred, resting uneasily in the nothing that's always & only arising.

www.johnbmuellerphotography.com

silence of the heart

attention customers, if you are looking for the silence of the heart, please come to the red room. i repeat, if you were the customer looking for silence of the heart, please come to the red room. when i heard "silence of the heart" i immediately thought of being sucked out of a spaceship's airlock and into the cold airless blackness of deep space, which is a little scary unless you are a hardcore buddhist who has stared a fathomless hole into your mind from years & years of sitting in front of blank walls, but wouldn't you prefer the heart to be a warm, candlelit room with lots of throw rugs & shaggy carpeting & fluffy pillows where you can read or watch movies with friends & eat pizza? why not pizza of the heart? so then i decided to google silence of the heart & discovered an 80's afterschool special by that name starring charlie sheen as the best friend of a high school student who drove his car off a cliff because he was doing poorly in school and which ends with his mother standing on the cliff's edge telling the viewers that "it's better to live," which is usually true. it is better to live, most of the time.

refugees of the word

back in nineties i used to hang out at the telecafe with a poet friend who called himself "Sea Forrest." i think they even had an open mic there once. a cheap hang, both the cafe & my friend, who was a virtuoso of waiting, would wait for hours even, and like me, would walk anywhere & everywhere, and then sit at simple metal tables, a telephone on each one, as impossible notes played at industrial sound levels above our opened notebooks, spiral bound like the telephones, daring us to write freely below the noise.

convenience of perception

we who do not perceive, cold as if we could mail you a passing chill. air that is cool & conditional, an unsealed chamber knows when to coffin its lid. only those allowed to breathe. too warm, too loud, their need too audible. failed to activate. and we will not wait for them who do not to catch up, and thus, remain where they stand, sit, or illegally lie, catching down again. catching down too loud to breathe where its cool. unrecognized their moments, receiptless, phantom limbs waving in front of our dull blinking sensors. blurred them, blobbed, they must bob as we pass as if they could not purchase solid ground as we carefully steer past distinguishing, in a hurry to avoid empathy, testing wells with a glance, marching masks untempted by the maskless eyes that fill, that drill, people as objects that fail to be useful, who fail to participate in our story, who fail to fulfill our narrative demands. our bias confirmed, yet again. not recognized as human to humans. if we do not recognize the humanity in other humans, are we really human? isn't that a failure of our own humanity? aren't we less at home then? haven't we failed to activate our humanity? failing among the fallen, adjacent to the living. encountered as need, encountered as mouth. hypothesized howevers. around them our brains remain dimmed, lost in a neural dark. more like objects, such as tables, the scientists said. a place to place our indifference. hastily scrawled signs that can not possibly describe the cost of asking. faces beaten by fists of no. what it costs to accost you there. fishing for empathy in a sea of sharks who must keep moving or else feel. need siphons warmth, drains them as they stand there, dehumanized at a basic neural level. brains that refuse to congress. how the brain chases the human out of its soft shell. apparently, misery does not love company, or perhaps, misery loves company too much to be shared.

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/phb/article/451470

aftermath of a failed coffee date

painting by fred tomaselli

i sat down in the park and opened my orange notebook to see what words would arrive but was blinded by the bright white page tilting the sunlight back, making it nearly impossible to gaze at its emptiness. tree top tendrils tickle the blue belly above the clustered green clumps while a plane's soaring roar scrapes across my only sky. a young couple lopes through the green pie, shoulder to shoulder, their casual hands almost touching, but don't have to. a huge, metallic blue dragonfly patrols the periphery. the rhododendrons stash a day's worth of darkness beneath their dress. pollen floats through like angelic miniature sheep chased from an insomniac's dream. a young man in a green tshirt wheels his bike past my bench, turns and glares at me through the narrow slits of his grimacing dark eyes, continues, yet turns again and glares once more before he exits out the side of the circle like a martian arrow pushing toward chaos. my feet rest on cobblestones, moated by dirt. a yellow trash can yawns beside me. a six pack of bottled beer sits quietly on the dirt beside the can, a diminutive dog patiently waiting for its owner to decide, its mahogany glass glinting back. i look up at the black trench coated woman with curly red hair, toting a red handbag, and exquisite crimson lips, marching through, her downcast eyes dissecting the circle, muttering in the shadow of her breath. on the bench opposite mine there is a young man in a white polo shirt, lounging with a book in the shade while i sit across from him spotlit by noonday sun. another young man enters the circle, pulls off his primary blue tshirt, wraps it around his face, and lays down to broil on the browning grass. aftermath of a failed coffee date. i am the rant receptacle leaking oily hate as i cross the street, darkening the already dark. a pair of dragonflies play tag in the center of the circle, ringed with tufts of pubic trees. a butterfly tumbles just over my head. caressed by the breeze, my shirt is red. the wheeze of a bus as it turns into the circle, like a clock that finds its lost hand every half hour. i hear one crow caw repeatedly, bereft of his murder, but like me, he is not answered.

the case of the perry mason mysteries found poem

Velvet Claws

Sulky Girl 

Lucky Legs 

Howling Dog 

Curious Bride 

Counterfeit Eye

Caretaker's Cat 

Sleepwalker's Niece 

Stuttering Bishop 

Dangerous Dowager 

Lame Canary 

Substitute Face 

Shoplifter's Shoe 

Perjured Parrot 

Rolling Bones 

Baited Hook 

Silent Partner 

Haunted Husband 

Empty Tin 

Drowning Duck 

Careless Kitten

Buried Clock 

Drowsy Mosquito 

Crooked Candle 

Black-Eyed Blonde

Gold-Digger's Purse 

Half-Wakened Wife 

Borrowed Brunette 

Fan Dancer's Horse 

Crying Swallow

Lazy Lover

Lonely Heiress

Crimson Kiss 

Vagabond Virgin 

Dubious Bridegroom

Cautious Coquette 

Negligent Nymph 

One-Eyed Witness 

Fiery Fingers 

Angry Mourner 

Moth-Eaten Mink 

Grinning Gorilla 

Hesitant Hostess 

Green-Eyed Sister 

Fugitive Nurse 

Runaway Corpse 

Restless Redhead 

Sun Bather's Diary 

Nervous Accomplice

Terrified Typist 

Demure Defendant 

Gilded Lily 

Lucky Loser 

Screaming Woman

Daring Decoy 

Long-Legged Models 

Foot-Loose Doll 

Calendar Girl 

Deadly Toy 

Mythical Monkeys 

Singing Skirt 

Waylaid Wolf 

Duplicate Daughter 

Shapely Shadow 

Spurious Spinster 

Bigamous Spouse 

Reluctant Model 

Blonde Bonanza 

Ice-Cold Hands 

Mischievous Doll 

Stepdaughter's Secret 

Amorous Aunt 

Daring Divorcee 

Phantom Fortune 

Horrified Heirs 

Troubled Trustee 

Beautiful Beggar 

Worried Waitress 

Queenly Contestant 

Careless Cupid 

Fabulous Fake 

Burning Bequest 

Fenced in Woman 

Postponed Murder

Quote from the novel "Austerlitz" by W. G. Sebald

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27896920@N04/

"When we took leave of each other outside the railway station, Austerlitz gave me an envelope which he had with him and which contained [a] photograph from the theatrical archives in Prague, as a memento, he said, for he told me that he was now about to go to Paris to search for traces of his father’s last movements, and to transport himself back to the time when he too had lived there, in one way feeling liberated from the false pretenses of his English life, but in another oppressed by the vague sense that he did not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world."


-from the novel "Austerlitz" by W. G. Sebald

quotes from rick rubin interview with daily beast

What do you remember most vividly about working with Cash?

On our first album, there was a song he wrote, I can’t remember which one it was, but I listened to it and said, “Do you think you could take some of the ‘I’s and ‘me’s out of it?” And he thought about it and he was like, “Yeah, I think I can do that.” And he did. So 10 years later, I’m visiting him in Nashville. He’s in a wheelchair. He’s blind, pretty much. It felt so awkward. So I said, “What have you been working on lately?” And he said, “I’ve been working on using ‘I’ and ‘me’ less.” And I said, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah. Remember? You gave me that comment on the song? That’s what I’ve been working on.” Incredible. He didn’t mean it in the context of songs. He meant it in the context of life.

I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we’re carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what’s happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better. But it’s not the voice in your head. It’s a different voice. It’s not intellect. It’s not a brain function. It’s a body function, like running from a tiger.

Instinct.

Yes. But being open to using your instincts instead of going, “Oh, that’s not going to work.” Or listening to the part of your brain that goes, “Oh, that’s out of tune.” Or the part of your brain that says, “That’s too loud.” You have to shut off all of those voices and look for these special moments—these moments that you accept you have no control over. So much of my job is to not think—to be open to what’s there, and then use my intuition to see where it takes me.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/06/26/rick-rubin-on-crashing-kanye-s-album-in-15-days.html

the invisible war, a documentary about rape in the military

last night i watched a documentary about rape in the military called invisible war. i remember a friend of mine who was raped. he had received a letter from his girlfriend back home announcing the end of their relationship. he was devastated, and spent the day declaring his intention to get fucked up that night. he went to the enlisted club got shit-face drunk. i don't remember if he went alone or with different friend or if he found some people to drink with at club. i stayed in, i think it was a weeknight. in the middle of the night, i heard a dull pounding on my room's wooden door, like a fist that wanted to pound but couldn't summon the force, flesh attempting to hammer a nail through the fluid of his grief, which dulled the impact but not the intention. i think it took awhile to wake me up, his pounding too slow and regular, his voice moaning my name, weirdly deep and low, like the sound you make when you imitate a ghost for children, pretending to be scary in an obviously fake way. he fell into my arms when i opened the door, like a lover dying on your doorstep. his head was smeared with blood and he couldn't stand up, the door probably supporting his weight. it was like trying to hold 160 pounds of jello in your arms, his arms flopping, the moans punctuated with "fucker, i'm gonna get that fucker!" i am trying to remember something i don't really remember much of. i haven't seen him since i left the military and i'm not in touch with anyone i served with. i called for help, the guy next door, other guys on the floor in our barracks, but as more people came he grew angrier, his blood smeared face reddening, the profanity more profuse. we couldn't calm him down and then blister popped. he struggled free and ran outside, where a bunch of us wrestled him to the ground, barely holding him down as he wriggled beneath us. he said he wanted to kill him. i remember laying in the grass in my underwear, holding an arm. eventually, our sergeants came, and we drove him to the hospital. he told the doctor that some guy followed him as he staggered home after the club closed, bludgeoned him on the head and raped him in his room. i was ordered to guard his room and make sure he didn't close the door as they were concerned that he might try to commit suicide or drown in his puke. and so i sat outside his door for the rest of the night, as he alternately begged me to let him close his door and cursed me for refusing. i wanted to let him to close the door, to let him suffer in private, but i had no choice, i was given a direct order. and so i sat there, betraying him even as i protected him, while he screamed in anguish, weeping in his pillow until he eventually passed out. our friendship was never the same after that, and we gradually drifted apart. his name was garry. he was a small town kid from indiana. he was a good guy.

http://www.notinvisible.org/blog

THAT BIRD’S GOT MY WINGS (excerpt from Practicing Peace in a Time of War by Pema Chodron)

One of my favorite stories about Jarvis Masters [a prison inmate currently sentenced to death row, who took vows as a Buddhist from behind bars] was when he unintentionally helped some other inmates connect with the absolute, vast quality of their own minds. There is a teaching that says that behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there’s always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased, that which can support and awaken us at any time. And somehow Jarvis, in this story of trying to avert harm, conveyed this fundamental openness to the other inmates.

One day there was a seagull out on the yard in San Quentin. It had been raining and the seagull was there paddling around in a puddle. One of the inmates picked up something in the yard and was about to throw it at the bird. Jarvis didn’t even think about it—he automatically put out his hand to stop the man. Of course this escalated the man’s aggression and he started yelling. Who the hell did Jarvis think he was? And why did Jarvis care so much about some blankety-blank bird?

Everyone started circling around, just waiting for the fight. The other inmate was screaming at Jarvis, “Why’d you do that?” And out of Jarvis’s mouth came the words, “I did that because that bird’s got my wings.”

Everyone got it. It simply stopped their minds, softened their hearts, and then there was silence. 

http://bit.ly/15FLaV0

street fightin' couple

overheard at the bus stop after dropping off my dvd at movie madness, a couple walking down the nearly dark street:

so you can dish it, but you can't take it out, huh? a woman in the dark says.

what the hell are you talkin' about? the man replies, neither of them visible.

isn't that how it goes? you can dish it, but you can't take it out?

no! it's, you can dish it OUT, but you can't TAKE IT!

well, that doesn't sound right, she says.

that's because it's correct!

quote about ken jacobs

 a still from the experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs’s “Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World.”

As a student, I once asked why anybody should even bother making art in the face of certain destruction. He shook my shoulders, stared into my face and said, “Because there has to be something there to be destroyed!”   

-j. hoberman, writing about the filmmaker ken jacobs


http://www.starspangledtodeath.com/mainfiles/main.html