posture of calling

AP Photo/Roberto Candia

standing on the lip of the curb as if poised to dive into that carless curve of tar, darker, darker, darker into dark like a crow landing upon a fading bruise, his short sleeved shirt is black, hunched in front of the backwards stenciled letters are cursive behind his back, what the feminine fails to spell he cannot face and what he cannot face has curved him toward a question as he stands there clasping a silver phone to his ear as if listening might fail, the bees, the bees. bent there on the sidewalk where few answers are found like a homeless man hoping a stray dollar could change his world, wearing flipflops & shorts like a diver with second thoughts, receiving last minute instruction from god, the most useless coach. beside him there is an elm tree whose ancient rivulets of bark flow like the slowest, most inexorable mudslide. he could be saved along that curve, lined with trees heavy with green,  listening for what light escapes those greedy fists clenched above them, leaning all together toward the hard bruise, the evidence of abuse they are circled around, choking on the accumulated ash of an overcast morning, the death of all fathers passing into the throbbing blue while the empty brackets await their appointed wheels. the road is empty for entire passages of sobbing solo violin. your eyes accept what silence the city offers as you wonder what news a man could receive on sunday morning that would make him consider such a dive?

kim wallows

"when things go wrong, i mean, that sometimes can work out really well if you just really wallow in it going really wrong." 

-kim gordon, sonic youth

from lush to lush

woke up remembering when i visited the intentional community called twin oaks after moving away from portland the last time i left. wonder if i will keep repeating this until i die: move to portland to start a new life, or at least experience a different version of myself, write hundreds of poems that almost no one hears or reads, grow frustrated & disenchanted (but how & when did i ever get so enchanted in the first place & when will i learn my lesson?) i spent a week at there learning about the community. one of the founders picked me up at the greyhound terminal. people were surprised as didn't normally do that. i had read her book "is it utopia yet?" and liked her. she was very real & salty, which reminded me of my mom. i was 28. i remember being aware that it was my saturn return, that the planet saturn returning to the position in the sky it was located at the time of my birth, which it does every seven years or so. the 28th year being an especially momentous phase. i remember the lush virginia woods. i remember going for a canoe ride down the james river which flowed nearby, followed by a gregarious irish setter who swam & swam alongside, worrying us. i remember them telling us you could only be naked around the community after nine o'clock. i remember hitting it off with a wizardly, gypsy looking guy from new york, drumming beside a fire in the dark. we were gonna do a spoken word & percussion collaboration for the visitor's talent show at the end of our stay, but his girlfriend broke up with him and he was too despondent to play. i remember waking up everyone in the visitor's cabin with claustrophobic nightmares. i remember applying to become a member of the community, which required each applicant to tell their life story for an hour to a visitor's committee, which was daunting for me because it doesn't take too long before my story enters terrible pain. i woke up wishing i had a recording of that story. 

http://www.twinoaks.org/

yiddish poetry

Between Two Wars by Kenneth Rexroth

Between Two Wars by Kenneth Rexroth

Remember that breakfast one November —
Cold black grapes smelling faintly
Of the cork they were packed in,
Hard rolls with hot, white flesh,
And thick, honey sweetened chocolate?
And the parties at night; the gin and the tangos?
The torn hair nets, the lost cuff links?
Where have they all gone to,
The beautiful girls, the abandoned hours?
They said we were lost, mad and immoral,
And interfered with the plans of management.
And today, millions and millions, shut alive
In the coffins of circumstance,
Beat on the buried lids,
Huddle in the cellars of ruins, and quarrel
Over their own fragmented flesh.

filaments

hanging lamp's wire, 

blackened to camouflage

its dangle, collects 

dust as the drunken 

dusk staggers through 

dirty windows, meekly 

peeking from behind 

sober rhododendron's 

purple freckled shoulders 

my blues proxy

some skinny kid slumped on a sidewalk's weathered bench, gray to match the sky's usual mood but not today. shaggy inside his baggy black sweatpants & billowing white tshirt cradling a black bagged guitar between his knees as one pale slender arm lazily hoists a harmonica to his pursed lips. i hear him before i see him as i approach the bus stop beside the school of rock. i am tired today & have been all week, but it's not the harmonica that startles me, it's the pang in the moan of his bluesy belting, the tang in his hurtful shout, punctuated by perfunctory hoots of harmonica. i sit down on the gray bench inside the transparent shelter, my posture perfected from sitting on a cushion all afternoon, daylight stolen to search inside my cave. i feel his defiantly poisonous glare on my shoulder and refuse to meet its dark eyed dare as i look past him for a bus that refuses to arrive. trapped inside his practiced howl, i sit there and watch all the people who pass, swiveling their twice startled heads: first by the sound of someone singing & singing really well and then again when they finally locate that source of song and realize it's just some skinny little kid who has perfected the soul of misery.