rube goldberg romance

http://www.leonardoulian.it/

evening an

elaborate 

contraption

designed to

deliver

a tender 

embrace.

demonic morning march

tall gaunt older man marches down morrison street, gray sandpaper skin, sagging toward skull, spits obscene syllables between puffs, ears black budded. i cannot hear inside here where i sit but i can see the music throb him in his downy black jacket, soaked shiny, capped & hooded but umbrellaless, as he continues on, puffing downhill, giving not a single fuck to the morning rain. 

timeful

two men waiting at the streetcar stop. cool cloudy morning suggests but does not state rain, not yet. there is time, they have time, and i am sitting inside nothing happening, wrapped in a blanket of glassy silence, a lake just beyond the counter, waits, placid before the toss. i guess i have time too. perhaps that unites us? the younger man is wearing loose sweats that pool at the joints, crimson florescent sneakers dam the fabric into reservoirs of black & gray. red baseball cap, bill pulled low, forming a singular brow above the ice blue eyes, glowing in the feral shade. bouncing on his balls, feet shifting as he throws imaginary knockout combinations at the fat cheeks of his pudgy older friend, swathed in a banana yellow sweater like some kind of mutant fruit dumped on a downtown corner. inside there is stillness as i watch the young guy grab a sign's steel pole, sneakered feet scurrying for no apparent reason up except that he has the time & the vitality to spend, put to no worthy purpose, at least not yet. i watch him track an attractive young woman with a huge wavy mane of dark brown hair all the way across & down the street as if his gaze had hooks that could reel her in, nodding & grinning to his companion. i tell my fellow, middle-aged coworker that i remember when i had too much energy that wanted to grab & grapple & climb. the military took most of it and i'll be surprised if it doesn't take his. a young man like that, climbing out of skin... 

the streetcar arrives, opens its doors, and departs with a sigh, sweeping them from the corner. inside, i have plenty of minutes before i move on to the next thing. i am older now and have to be wise with my energy. sitting in stillness, in a room full of signs with nothing to climb, but i do have time.

to member again

i don't usually wish for stories but some are so rarely told. i see so many street people everyday, some are even regulars, like the horribly stooped woman on the corner who sells her paintings or the pig-tailed, girlish little goth woman who stands at the front entrance, grimly posing with her cardboard sign as i stand inside at the cash register, watching her during the lulls. struck by how our roles nearly rhyme, making ourselves available to conduct transactions, both of us acting as representatives: me for a business & her for poverty, only hers is a much smaller sign. i often assume they are homeless but maybe street people, people who scratch out their survival on the street, might be more accurate. were you always like this? of course not. i wasn't always like this either. was it a life long descent that landed you here or a sudden precipitous drop? was it the economy? addiction? health crisis? abusive partner or family? all of the above? i want to know where they come from, both literally & psychically. i want them to be people, they are people, but admitted people. when we use the word "remember" to talk about something that happened in the past that is pulled into the present by the story we tell that approximates the experience had, i like to think "member again," that something or someone had once been a member and were buried in an avalanche of time, neglect, or collectively willed blindness. buried in blindness:  to be present in public & yet unseen. i also want to know what will happen to them, where does the story go from here? are they imprisoned or hospitalized, do they find treatment, do they ever recover? there is the wound that got them there & then there's the wound or wounds they receive on the street, its cost. why is it so hard to admit them? if someone is seriously injured & walks into your store, bleeding, do we tell them "sorry, you need to bleed somewhere else?" or do we recognize that some wounds are so severe that they need to be treated immediately, that some beings are recognized as a part of us, a member, and need immediate help. but who do you call when you are psychologically injured? why isn't there a psychic ambulance?

catching up to rest

we didn't know summer had ended when it had, conclusively instead of the usual fade. abandoned basketball hoop swishes only clouds on an unnamed side street. i have pictures that prove this. shriveled grapes dangle on the garage beside. the chestnuts have landed, their funky, lime quilled escape pods, split open & empty as useless evidence, rot among the crushed who garnish my neighborhood's tar cake. i do not own this. i am tempted but i have already chosen the chestnut i will keep pocketed for tactile company during my cool, moist, mid-winter walks. second thoughts about the nut, is it smooth enough? i love the feel of a fresh chestnut, caressing the polish of its soft mahogany, seed clasped as  mind plays its movie, feet programmed for shelter. sunday means strings, and so we begin with violins, as the owner complains about the too vigorous bowing, he who longs for just the right attack. the strings need to be plaintive, but not too passionate for our middle-class morning. richard wright said: "the truth of the power of the wish" but the dream dies in the early pages. so says the times. green limbs feather the girl with long brown hair, who skateboards in the rain. i look up to the remorseless ruby eye, there all along, bulging from the glassy ornate frame. they will never be together like this again. calculating the swirl i must enter to exit, hoping its nature is episodic. presence mitigates the loss, an affordable lawyer magnetizing direction. red haired young woman in a red dress stands at the counter, facing the day with fake eyelashes that pull me into her sweetened, coffee bean gaze. and when her hands lift i notice the nails are hot chocolate brown and chipped. now it's cello, probably bach, all surging dark waves, thick & rubbing, like the feeling of something that won't go away, like the loved ones you lost who somehow elude you even as they have permanently moved in. outside, bouts of wind, i suppose there could be wind inside if we wanted to get poetic, and we probably shouldn't. brown leaves stream horizontally from trees to the circle of green they surround, curb as leaf bump, braking their speed, here where children play. everything standing has begun to be traced with damp shadow & photosynthetic flakes of rust. thirst quenched and flung. this morning i slept in, and like a rancher searching the hills for his spooked lamb, i have finally retrieved all my lost & scattered dreams. 

images from the documentary "Sweetgrass"
http://www.pbs.org/pov/sweetgrass/

resist the urge

masked meditation

past plantation roses. climbing petal steps. color escalated into dismal clouds, tandemless circling below. through a window, which is itself a mask, i see him marching to the door and wonder if he dons his owner's mask as he exits or does he wait until he arrives at the other door, the work door? in other words, which door cues the mask? or does he even take it off at all and does he ever fall asleep and drift into dream still wearing his mask and does the mask flavor those dreams with scenes of counting money, repairing nearly antique appliances & the activation partially engaged & possibly drugged employees? this room's warmth hugs with its whole body, purrs like an enormous electric kitten dozing above your head. outside, the grumpy grandpa sky growls with rare thunder. free knowledge for the asking he spits contemptuously from behind his mask.  fat drops splotch the sidewalk's canvas as an elderly asian man wearing black sweatpants pulled up to his tshirted nipples continues to trace his dash drawn circles, each gentle step planting a transparent stroke, repeated as if he could pace that zero into existence like a ghost pulled back into form from abstraction's bodiless abyss. fevered beliefs hunt for the faintest  glow. stand still long enough and you become a home for everything you never expect. held gaze holds. looking a trickier consent, both to receive & to give, unavailable except through joyful presence. i stand under my weakness for earth mamas but aren't there star mamas too & atmospheric mamas & deep ocean mamas & molten lava mamas & negation mamas, voidful & twirling zeros around the very idea of hips? tell me, how candlelit could we be?

erasure of caption by national snow & ice data center describing antarctica's inexpressible island

Antarctica’s Inexpressible 
Island illuminated by glimmer 
The seaward slopes gleaming 
white, cast long shadows inland 

Terra Nova Bay appears in shadow. 
persistent & fierce katabatic winds—
blow downslope from the interior 

One is windswept
ground in the mountainous
bare rock pattern
snow drifts suggest
the winds have scoured 

The second sign of the strong
appears in the open
Terra Nova Bay.
Parallel white streamers
newly formed,
continually pushed out to sea
leaving a pocket of open.

careful where you waken

single middle-aged man seeks cool quiet cafe after hardly sleeping at all & alone last night. the bus pauses at a stop to catch up to its schedule & my head begins to nod. if only the bus served tea. i lift my head when the engine shifts into gear & my eyes find a poem in the convenience store window: 

old gold, 
a rich tradition
love without the
native american 
spirit

apollinaire quote

"often tough to find a listening ear" by jo willems

ear, door of my voice that persuaded you, i love you, 
you who gave a meaning to the image by way of the idea.

-apollinaire, the nine doors of the body

the calculus of attendance

attending poetry readings. to attend or not attend, that is always the question it seems. i dove into the local poetry scene when i moved back to portland six years ago. there was a period of four or five years where i estimate that i attended on average about fifty readings a year, and that's not including open mics. i deliberately went to as many different readings as i could. basically, if i heard about it, i would try to go. that turned into a a very fascinating & uncomfortable sociological experiment. i wanted to hear what was being written & read. i had the belief, and i would still like to believe, that my own writing might benefit from being exposed to all sorts of different styles of poetry, both writing poetry & reading it. i am often aware of & frustrated with the habits & patterns with the way i write. i always long to expand my limited ideas about what could be a poem. unfortunately, i burned out, again. i did the same thing back in the nineties (rick j, ubiquitous in at least TWO DECADES!) and i'm annoyed with myself for doing it again. there's a u2 song about trying to wrap your arms around the world, i was trying to wrap my arms around portland poetry. so for the past year i've been attending fewer & fewer events and trying to focus on my own writing. the entire time i've been here i have struggled with the calculus of deciding whether to attend a reading or not, which is especially challenging because there are so many readings and i am open to attending quite a few of them. there were readings i wanted to attend because someone from out of town was reading that i was curious about and some i was curious about the reading series itself. sometimes i felt like i needed to show up because a friend was reading. sometimes other people believed i was obligated to attend because of their perception about my relationship with that person or their belief that i was a member of tribe i didn't feel a part of, which felt really weird. i felt hurt that most people never came to any of my readings or events and i realized that i presumed that because i went to their reading or attended the events they hosted, that i expected them to come to mine, or at least check me out once. instead, i found that most people didn't even respond to my invitations, never mind come to the reading. i think that was presumptuous of me and so i decided to retire the quid pro quo attitude. i decided that if i would only attend events if i had the time & energy & really wanted to attend. i've had all sorts of weirdnesses around this. someone i had never met with got upset about me not attending a reading they were doing even though i said i had to work that day & the reading was in another city and i don't have a car. they had posted a note on my fb wall demanding to know where i was. i've also had the lovely experience of being invited to attend a reading and actually going and sitting alone at a table in the middle of a crowded and not a single person saying hello a few people even glaring at me like "what the f*ck are you doing here?" the irony is that it's always been people who don't come to my readings or events who complain or get weird about me not going to their event. i can kind of sympathize on an emotional level because i have felt hurt when i would do a reading and notice how many people didn't come and how many people didn't even bother to respond to the fb invitation. i know what it feels like stand up there and survey the audience and realize not a single person was there to hear me. i stopped doing readings because i realized that no one is interested in what i have to share and i don't have enough actual friends, as opposed to virtual friends, for it to be worthwhile. but i don't feel like it's fair for people who don't ever come to anything i do to demand my attendance or complain if i don't come to their event. i am only going to what i feel like going to. ironically, attending an event is for me impersonal, it's not about friendship, it's about art (and also insomnia, stress, & depression). i know for many people it's probably the opposite. i get that & that's just not how i roll.

the mysterious questions we never ask

Adoration of the Golden Calf - Nicolas Poussin, 1629

waiting for hot water,
for tea not drama,
misheard the barista
ask the older man in front of me:
do you dabble in idolatry?
instead of
do you want a doggie treat?