Obscura

sitting back in the blackness, pupils wide as pennies, the spring breeze blows the trees. and the classroom shudders.

Beat

Scientific Poetry

"I began with physical anthropology. I was taught how to measure the size of the brain of a human being who had been dead a long time, who was all dried out. I bored a hole in his skull, and I filled with grains of polished rice. Then I emptied the rice into a graduated cylinder. I found this tedious.

"I switched to archaeology, and I learned something I already knew: that man had been a maker and smasher of crockery since the dawn of time. And I went to my faculty advisor, and I confessed that science did not charm me, that I longed for poetry instead. I was depressed. I knew my wife and father would want to kill me if I went into poetry.

"My advisor smiled. 'How would you like to study poetry which pretends to be scientific?' he asked me.

"'Is such a thing possible?' I said.

"He shook my hand. 'Welcome to the field of social anthropology,' he said. He told me that Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were already in it- and some sensitive gentlemen as well."

Kurt Vonnegut recounting anthropology at the University of Chicago

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

Musings on Trains

And the people come out of the small towns,

and the cows come out of the cow towns,

and the ghosts come out of the ghost towns,

to wave at the trains

speeding by their backyards

and barnyards

and ghost-yards.

Hi train. Bye train. Predictable as the sun and the moon,

the Empire Builder barrels down.

-------

Howard talks a lot;

It's hard to get a word in edgewise.

But who needs words and points?

When the green is growing as the mountains rise up.

And the valleys open-up revealing rivers flowing.

Scene-scapes flying past the panoramic glass,

And Howard knows it all.

-------

A Native American smuggled hooch on board at Havre.

North Dakota.

He shared and was generous,

but he got somewhat mad rather quickly.

He just wanted to meet people, here and in the towns.

To Glacier west he was headed.

He wanted to meet me.

He'd never see any of us again,

not me nor Harvey.

"Please, do this for me," he said,

brandishing the pint of cheap whisky.

The 4 P.M. sun shone through the bottle.

Just a little bit more.

I declined. Drunkenness in transit,

whilst in the midst of Montana

seems a perilous business.

He would do it, he says.

I had to go.

-------

I sat next to a little boy,

in blue pajama pants,

who liked to kiss his mom.

All the while she stared off into the distance.

She was looking for signs of life.

-------

I met an old man

whose son

had a daughter

who met the president.

Obama, that is.

He told me of the changing landscape in Ann Arbor.

And of playing the flute,

In the Army band,

In Germany,

For John F. Kennedy.

He told me of a man,

Who tore down a silo,

An old, old silo,

And used the wood,

Polished by years of falling grain,

To build floors.

He was on his way

to see his old college roommates

in 'Frisco.

--------

The sun lays down a silvery glaze o'er the ponds.

It is morning in North Dakota.

-------

When the lights go dim,

the noises come out.

Creeks and rattles and clicks.

And clacks.

Listen: there's an eerie horn,

sounding as a ghost in the distance.

-------

Standing in my bare feet,

on a train platform,

in St. Paul.

I stretch my legs.

Spontaneity in The Lounge Car

I spent this evening singing softly. With newfound friends. On a ukulele a she-hippie did strum and I tapped a drum, homemade, sometimes brushing.

And our song rose and fell and reached its climax through meows and yelps and rolling tongues.

And there were no words, but the words were sung and some words were barely words at all.

And the melody drifted up and down a single arpeggio, inspired by a single string. With harmonies and rounds and reiterations bursting through spontaneity.

And Spontaneity. Randomly joining and listening and laughing. Feeling goosebumps as madness drifts to order and back again.

And its all music. Bringing us together in all that we have to share. Without names or stories or destinations we share. Music. Spontaneity. Travel and the Train.

And we've only been rolling a few hours. On this Iron Horse, the Empire Builder, crossing this majesty which is crumbling.

And we share our humanity. Whatever that is. Hard to define, but nonetheless lived out in our clamorous music. A strum, a chord, a rattle and a word coming together by chance on the train traveling through time and space, and the moon rocks with our song in the sky. And Ani keeps ringing in my head.

And we all crane our necks as la luna, she rises and casts here silver carpet upon the Columbia at twilight. And it falls to our feet. And we can step off this Empire Builder, through the empire and into worlds that have yet to be built and that are haphazardly built to some wild perfection and pass fluidly into some shared oblivion, like water into steam, which permeates the air and thickens the air and the community and condenses on the walls and runs down the walls and pools upon the mighty hooves of our iron horse. To fertilize and bring new life come the morrow.

And this is the train. And this is travel. And this is why I left and had to go back and will soon leave again.

And I write:

"Spokane. Take me as I am.

On this nostalgic car

Hurtling through a dark abyssive void,

going and coming and roaming and going

And moving, with no way of knowing.

And a girl strums softly on a ukulele.

And outside, in the window,

beyond my reflection,

there is only blackness.

And a line separating the lighter from the darker,

separating rolling hills from tree tufts.

And I watch the moon wandering in the window.

Back and forth, as right and left

its lunar wandering, meandering.

Whilst witness to this celestial dance,

soft conversation ebbs and peaks and murmers.

We fly back in time,

the moon following.

On this nostalgic car,

the train at night."

And I dream of a life on these tracks. In my own private car, living on the rails. Passing through city after city, meeting these travelers, munching nuts from foreign lands and digging it. Playing music and sharing. And sharing.

The Journey.

Sunset in Suburbia

Listen: See those rosy reddish wisps,

wafting shapelessly in some summer's swansong.

Asea as aimless

Rem'nants of exhalation.

See familiar figures.

Silhouetted steel streetlights seem strangely sad.

Forlorn e'en ghosts bowing heavy heads.

Carrying some human shame manifest.

Casting an artificial, lifeless, pale gaze,

as we commute below.

Such contrast

Here in suburbia.

This dismal sprawl of marching urbanity.

Here horizons become more concrete;

Squarish sedimentary frames.

The wisps are gone.

We the Godless

We the Godless, often struck wordless: God bless you, God willing, God speed, Thank God, God damn it, Good God, I swear to God, For the love of God, My God, God forbid.

We the Godless, Expressionless.

We the Godless, Without morality. Apparently. For God created all that is good and all that turned evil, and to be Godless is to be liminal. Betwixt and between all. Here we hunt alone, for things and people and goodness that is unattainable to us.

Here we hunt, liminal.

We the Godless, Stateless. In senses figurative and literal, for these United States under God have no room for us. And as the Babe was born in squalor of yore, so do we find our Godless, harmless, intellects shunned into settings poor.

We are evil. Immoral. Cysts on society sound. Or so we are told.

We are sick and derranged. Sinners doomed to eternal sufferings. Or so we are told.

We are naive and cowards. Fearful of His wrath. We deny Him outright, blind to his outreach. Fools. Or so we are told.

We are corrupt and profane. Rapists, murderers, scourges. We are atheists. Or so we are told.

Ad nauseum, mind you, we are told.

In person, in words blunt and brutal. Or hints passive and aggressive. Or by means of subtle looks. Through billboards and by exclusion from religious expectations.

We the Godless, Unimagineable to some.

We are poor, helpless, foolish, lost little lambs. Baah. We the sheep, sans sheperd. We need saving. We need to see some grace, just a trip to mass, just a book of the bible, sometimes just a verse. Or so we are told.

These things we are told. These things are cast upon us. And only in irony does one accept these accusations. If there is a true collective godless identity it is a tolerant one. A thought full one.

We the godless, Inherently contemplative.

Nevermind the crimes committed in His name. Crusades and murders and rapes to the Holy Land and back to Rome. Bombs dropped by godful presidents of now and then.

Nevermind the deliberate outcasting by the righteous godful who refuse to look or recognize possibility.

Nevermind that we are meant to live in fear, silence and in perpetual moments awkward.

Friendless, Unrespected, Untrusted. Hated.

We the godless, Hated.

For what? For nothing. For actions neither passive nor aggressive. For seeing. For sight neither righter nor wronger. For appreciating people and those things that are good and beautiful and bad and ugly. For experiencing human life.

We the godless. Guilty for seeing, appreciating and experiencing.

We the godless. Human. And guilty of it.

On the airborne exploits of my dreams

I spend my nights dreaming

of things really real.

Fuck the fantastical.

I don't fly, I fall.

(If I'm mid-air at all.)

An Ode to TV News

You can slam a door, a book, a fist,

when you're frust'rated with fed-uppery,

you can make unsightly gestures.

But you daren't expect to press a button,

or mute or surf

with similar satisfaction,

whilst those glowing boxes,

and their talking heads

spew forth nonsensical, babbling bull.

And befoul the ears of Common Sense.

click.

Summer is Almost Over

I sat outside tonight

Reading, by moonlight,

Carl Sandberg.

And smoking a cee-gar.

My dog and I,

Indulging in poetic splendor

In the dewy, decaying summer.

And smoking a cee-gar.

O to escape those worlds of prose,

With fog and smoke and verse.

The scene backlit, with dim glows

Casting shadows of waning summer bliss.

While smoking a cee-gar.

6 August 2009

Hello! Atomic Age.

O Age of anihilation!

Goodbye to Peace.

Hello! Days of Death.

What devotion to devastation!

Goodbye to Peace.

Hello, War.

Hello, Fear.

Nice to meet you.

Stay a while,

Won't you?

Goodbye to Peace.

And safety,

And security,

Ease, innocence, living,

And the like.

So long.

Hello! Mass Murder.

Marauding and malevolent.

Malicious malfeasance.

And so on.

Goodbye to Peace.

Send us a postcard.

Celebrity Death

Listen:

To the story of a creature,

of the skulking un-dead variety.

How horrid!

His heinous countenance,

Crumbling and decaying,

At once drying out and oozing.

Hideous!

But to peace not

will this pitiful post-person go.

Sweet death is distant.

Fantasy.

And not some heavenly death, mind you.

No wings, no halos.

No non-sense, only non-ness.

A black void, lacking shade and space.

Such simple nothingness,

Will not greet this creature.

No, our heinous friend,

Maggot ridden,

Is paraded about, as a puppet on strings.

By some unholy master

tweaking and pulling,

And proding.

Poke, poke.

Still dead.

Irreverent and profitable spectacle,

Is this distraction from death, sweet and simple.

Our deceasing dummy dances,

Effortlessly through the air.

Crumblings streaking through the sky.

Bits and pieces.

What would chicken little cry?

For this is not sky!

As chunks of those ceasing to be,

Spiral through the sky,

From that towering death pedestal.

Here below, as our once-was flails,

Effortlessly through the skies,

His pieces enter our lives.

A heaping hunk of rump,

Rends the morning newspaper.

Oodles of nervous noodles,

Bespeckle our tee vees.

Muscular matter stratifies,

As mud,

Atop our magazines.

The news, now befouled,

Buried and unrecognized,

'Neath flesh and sinews.

No peace, until the last piece

Of dismal, dank, decaying death,

Has descended to our delight,

And is devoured.

Some capitalist cannibalism,

Eating what once was our own.

Yum!

Once in pain, they passed into death,

But they perpetuate un-dead,

Their rotting remains, ransacked,

And ever remaining,

As stains on the age of information.

Peace-less as piece-less.

At the foot of the pedestal standing strong,

Ever nourished by rich soil,

Fed by fecund futureless fanaticism,

And the crumbling of civility,

All round.

Untitled, 11 July 2009

the Desolate in suburbia.

our bear Welcomes you.

The Wealth Human

Take the grocery store. Ultra Foods. Chicago Heights IL on a nameless, hot and sunny July afternoon.

A bustling place with all sorts wandering through for any number of reasons. One item or hundreds. Myself, I can only be overwhelmed and philosophically sickened by the preponderance of shelves, those stuffed with stuffs.

But checkout. The exit is where the magic happens. The culmination driven by impatience. An impatience bred by line-making and standing. O the queue! Bitterness from inactivity and monetary transaction. Or the screaming children. This perhaps explains the bitterness and stoicism and frowns I witness. A testimony I make while sitting idly with my beloved grandmother near the exit.

I think. Cart after cart, followed by face after frowning face. All downtrodden as if immune to that odd contortion we call a smile.

I feel like they are all simply bodies moving.

People watching in the international terminal at an airport, for example, is simply bodies moving. But with seeming purpose. Destination and origin envelop their movement. Baggage trails. I see context, if liminal.

But watching these bleak bodies pass at the grocery store is somewhat disturbing. These bodies, unwitting Proles perhaps, pass through liminality only within their economical purpose. Their baggage, only product. Consumption in the raw.

A capitalist nightmare, a perversion of the human in motion.

Distraught, weary and detesting faces which epitomize robotic forms being led by their vessels of consumption. Pulled along through an incomprehensible plethora of things to have. Unable to find what they need or want. Only to buy what was come across.

Choice, thus, becomes an illusion. For choice is beside the point in this case. So long as a body takes and transacts.

Then, passing through to another side, the out-side, a body is led onto the black asphalt lot. Treeless, void and bleak. Naught but intense sun and rows of reflection. Shiny machines which transport and consume only further. From the black of pavement to that black non-solid torn from the depths.

No wonder they seem bitter. No wonder I see bitterness?

But is it wrong to consider them a "them?" What makes me so different? Having passed myself through the same bulk hell. Was it, perhaps the quaint moment? Sitting beside my cherished mother's mother? Waiting silently on a bench, as through at a bus stop of yore? A moment of pause in a matrix of motion? There I was, something apart, no cart. Existing, if briefly, idly in a place of rapid transition.

And sure, these passing bodies are soon to gain some purposeful, non-economic purpose. Home, family, work or wherever their place has belonging and is needed. To once again live and not simply give and take. Live thriving in the moments, pauses and ease of less hectic places.

But why, as the organism demands sustenance, leave that for such a state? When once, subsisting was full of pride. Full of value and need.

Not of supply and demand.

Shame. That the other way, the quaint way, is poverty these days. That those who make and take only what they need, that they are foolish for taking and making so little. Silly poor!

Yet, poor in wealth material is not to be poor in the wealth human. A wealth in which the contorting lips become smiles, beaming and reassuring in their simplicity.

The wealth human. Seen through its absence, trailing wire vessels, in the sagging faces of the passing persons in the exit hallways, at a giant grocery store. On the southside of Chicago. Illinois, USA. Earth, solar system, Milky Way.

Ode to Short Pants

Listen:

My shorts,

Mottled brown and well-worn,

Attempt escape.

Quite often indeed,

They flee,

My curvaceous rear.

But, they sag not due to a withering waistline.

Hoo ha!

Seems to me,

They rebut my butt.

Creating distance,

Each comfort laden day.

Flexing, forming and flawing,

As none foresaw for fabric.

Yet every stain and rend,

Each befoulment,

Bring them closer to me.

O cut-off garment!

The scourge of denim,

Racing hastily to a hem.

O short pants!

For me,

To declare to thee,

That I am endebtted,

To thee.

Might be,

A lofty decree.

And as that may be,

I nevertheless submit

My heartfelt and sincere gratitude,

For being all that you may be.

Untitled, 2 July 2009

I have visions of my past, my childhood. Underneath the porch where our things were. I see colors and shapes and textures, bright and brilliant but impossible to commit to sober memory. I see shapes like clovers and flowers. Pedals of colored plastic. Rough and shiny smooth. I've seen patterns. Strings of these colored plastic visions.

I see the brown of the house across the street. The black and browns of the decaying siding. Its old, something so familiar which barely exists any longer, unleashed only in stupor.

I see green, a sick, pale, fluffy green of Henrietta's carpet. The mottled browns of cheap furniture. I feel home, young, innocent curious and safe.

I see orange and yellow. Weathered plastic punctuated by cold rusted steel.

These are toys. Memories of childhood. They are remembrances of feelings of home and warmth. Nostalgia. Nostalgia of a time long since forgotten. Memories of memories I never had. Memories that remain but wisps afloat in my head. Smokey and intangible but nonetheless haunting. Not haunting but enduring.

Thing, place and feel.

My eyes blank, the world slips away for an instant. Then, flash. Light and nostalgia swirling. At once diffuse and intense. Any sudden movement of mind sends it running. Sends it diminishing into the black. Where the world appears again. The now. My world of short memory occasionally accosted by visions of that un-remembered.

Now form begins again. My mind from darkness to fleshy form. From memory, from nostalgia to thing. Now it is pink and wrapped and moist and any other manner of physical, medical description which is recognized by all.

A short trip. It ends but it doesn't. Just a cover for reality. Or a peek behind the veil of "reality."

Indecipherable. I can agree on that. An un-understood understanding.

A literal blow of the mind. Nevertheless, I live in reconstitution.

The Decay of the American Dream

I saw a woodpecker today, pecking.
Peck, peck pecking,
On a wooden fence.

Peck, peck, pecking on a white wooden fence.

I said, to the woodpecker,
Why, you are mis-taken,
You, pecking on that white wooden fence.

There are no grubs within,
No homely hollow to harbor your heavy head,
Tired, from pecking that white wooden fence.

There is no inside,
Only the otherside,
A woody illusion, deluding your birdy brain.

I pleaded with the woodpecker, as he pecked,
Peck, peck, pecked that white wooden fence.
Move on! Make haste!

The woodpecker paused,
He fluttered off.
I do not think he heard.

My plea, drowned out by that futile peck, peck, pecking,
On that white wooden fence.

Hand in Hand

In an introduction to photography class I had to make a total of 20 images of a mundane object over two weeks. I chose a fork. Of all the images, the one here was my favorite.

When I look at these forks I see them reaching out as two bodies almost yearning for each other. The lighting is not terribly dramatic in contrast but is nonetheless intense. There are few shades of gray here, this scene takes place in a world of dualism; nears and fars, goods and bads, illumination and shadow, what we can have and what we can't have.

Breaking through the constraints of the black and white appear the spears of the forks. They shine reflecting and bending the light. And though they are so identical, reaching and reaching in the same direction, stretching and longing for each other, so much comes between them. They reach into an infinity that will never meet.

When I look at it I feel the drama flowing, the anticipation and aching of reaching out and grasping for something inanimate, dependent totally on external forces and situations outside of their control. Its a dynamic stasis, perpetually retreating and advancing in their cemented state.

And then, in the middle of all this waiting and tension, the two spears touch. Just barely to their points touch and overlap, finally coming together. Its an electric moment as the emotions and sameness meet and flow through each other. Its an explosion constantly reoccurring every time the eye passes over the center.

From the simple black and white comes aching and anticipation and the evocative meeting and touching. These forks live through this dualism and pre-destined separation hand in hand; A simple touch, an interlocking and tantalizing grasp.

With Regards to the Vegetables

There's a carrot growing inside our house, you see,
We think it ties the room together.
In a cup, in our kitchen,
There it sprouts the greeny green.
It should feel rather honored,
Having avoided a delicious demise.
For, in our home, there is but one rule,
That nonsense is the only sense,
That discontinuity must breed with the eclectic.
Thus was born a friend for our cast of oddities,
On Reginald, on Dennis, on Joesph and Gopher.
There's a carrot growing inside our house, you see,
We think it ties the room together.

Sought and Found

I sought,
Long and far I sought.
From my own backyard to a high mountain of Kenya,
I sought.
And I found,
Suddenly blinded by a blazing white light.
Near and far, high and low, I found.
I found the glowing brilliance within,
The might thread of human community,
At once majestic and strong,
Yet as simple as thread.
I found Humanity.