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.