ReadingWords

Autumn Episode of Reading Words: Sunday, Nov. 25th

2007-11-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

Sarchasm (n):
The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit
and the person who doesn't get it.

Hello Friends of Words,

The autumn episode of READING WORDS is coming soon, on Sunday, November 25th. That's the last Sunday of this month, at the regular time of 7:30 to 10pm at Vade Mecvm cafe.

Well, temperatures are kind of falling. And, colors are kind of changing. So, I guess autumn is kind of here. Come out, wander the streets of Osaka in this very walkable weather and bring some words to share. We're looking forward to seeing you transform the printed page from a visual to a sonic entity.

Oh, my darling, literacy

We hope everyone, both new and familiar, will be able to join us for the fall session of Reading Words.
Please come and feel free to mix, mingle and add your voice to the whole.

All are welcome
Come and feast your ears!!

And, this month there is a choice of Two Challenges:

1) Ghost Train
Instructions: You're on the train and you notice a famous or interesting dead person gets on. Tell us what happens after that. Does Virginia Wolfe sit down next to you and strike up a conversation? Does a trench-coated Napoleon squeeze into a crowded Midosuji train and proceed to grope school girls before trying to hit you up for English practice? You get the idea. Put on your imagination and join it with commuter culture.
(concept suggested by Charlotte Hamilton. Thanks, Charlotte.)

2) Refinition
Instructions: Take any word from the dictionary, alter it by
adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
(suggested by Ralph Famularo)

Thanks also to Ralph for turning me on to the Washington Post's Mensa Invitational which runs a contest asking readers to submit Refinitions.

Some of their winners are:

1) Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time. 2) Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole. 4) Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly. 5) Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future. 6) Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid. 7) Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high. 9) Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late. 10) Hipatitis: Terminal coolness. 11) Osteopornosis: A degenerate diseases. (This one got extra credit.) 12) Karmegeddon: It's when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, and then the Earth explodes, and it's a serious bummer. 13) Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you. 15) Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. 18) Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

And, for our dearly departed folks beyond the Kansai shores, you're welcome to send in challenge submissions which we'll read if time permits.

As well, The Book Swap will be happening this month. Bring books you've read and loved or hated, and pick up books that tickle your ticklish spots...all for free! Also, CDs, DVDs and other swap-worthy medias are welcome, so bring out those tired tunes, etc. for others to enjoy.

Also, remember you can read stuff and see pictures of very previous events on the Reading Words blog at: http://readingwordskansai.blogspot.com/
(Sorry, this remains almost terminally un-updated.)

And, please spread the word by forwarding this message to any and all. For more info, contact us here at this address readingwords(at)gmail(dot)com

Below are the event's details.

Hear you on Sunday November 25th!

Jerry Gordon
Reading Words

ps: If you don't want to be notified of such events, write us and we won't.

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WHEN: The last Sunday of August, November and February from 7:30 pm to 10ish.
Entry will begin at 7:30 and the reading will start shortly thereafter.

WHERE: The next event will be held on November 25th at cafe Vade Mecvm near Hommachi (see directions below)

WHAT: An Open Reading and a Book Swap
- The Reading itself will start just after 7:30 pm and run to roughly 10pm (with two short intermissions). Readers will get 7-10 minutes to read. People can read anything they like--poetry, short stories, excerpts of an original longer work or someone else's (please give credit accordingly). A sign-up sheet will be circulating for anyone interested in reading so come early to make sure you get on it if you want to read! If you are interested in using music as part of your reading, please email us as there are some special sound requirements.

- The Book Swap is a chance for people to bring books they would like to exchange for some new ones. You can try out new authors or genres risk free! The Book Swap will take place before, during and after the Readings so come early to get the books you want. We ask that any books you bring which are not taken return home with you as our groaning bookshelves are, well, groaning and can not take much more.

COST: 200 yen + one drink (no BYO, sorry). Cafe Vade Mecvm is graciously opening its doors after closing time so that Reading Words does not have to compete with bar noise or overhead music. The 200 yen will go to Vade Mecvm for these wonderful after-hour services.

Vade Mecvm offers wonderful coffees, teas, beer and wine and scrumptious western vegetarian, meaty and "something else" sandwiches on wholemeal bread as well as other foods to snack and munch on for Readers and Listeners alike!

www.vademecvm.com

Note: Vade Mecvm is non-smoking, but smoking outside is fine.

DIRECTIONS:
- Go to Hommachi Station on the Yotsubashi Subway Line (the blue line) and leave through exit 28. Walk in the direction of the IBM sign. You should be on the left side of the street and pass the IBM sign (if you are driving, you are on Yotsubashi-suji).
- Go past China Southern Airlines (left side). Go past Eneos Gas station and McDonalds (on the right side of the street). Go past the Utsubo Park entrance on your left. Go past OSTEC exhibition hall (look for the robot sculpture).
- Turn left at the intersection where the Century Building with the ground floor Family Mart is at (They're across the street diagonally)
- Walk up this street and stay on the left side. Go past the cross-street where the Kaneshige Stationary is on the far corner. Vade Mecvm is getting closer, just a half a block more on the left.
- Look for the black on white Vade Mecvm sign on the front of the building. It is next to a hallway that you enter to access the cafe. (There should also be a Reading Words sign out front) Go down the hallway to the back.

- It takes about 8 minutes to walk from the station to the cafe although it sounds like longer here!
- Vade Mecvm backs onto Utsubo park so if you are walking in the park you can come in the back way--sorry, don't have directions or landmarks for access from the park!

Please forward this email to anyone you think may be interested and if you need more info just send us a message!

Hear you on Sunday November 25th!

Jerry Gordon

Patrick Widdess (5.20.07)

2007-08-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

From The Back Row

I'm a bad one,
sitting in the back row
tapping my feet, never pay attention.
I look a mess, empty head, mouth full of gum,
big cock scrawled across my face squirting Tippex cum.

I wasn't always bad.
I started with a good finish,
sturdy legs and noiseless joints.
But they beat me every day
thumped my head, kicked my butt,
threw rubbish in my gut.

I've got lines all over, not from age
but compass points, biros and magic maarker pens.
A roll call of lovers and losers,
doodles and dirty words.

I do know Pythagoras' law
and the dates of two world wars,
etched near my feet
by some hapless exam cheat.
With a chance I'd do better
but I'm stuck back here ignored.

Forever in the first grade,
I'll never graduate.
Always in detention
at least I'm never late.

I'm a bad one,
sitting in the back row
tapping my feet, never pay attention.
I look a mess, empty head, mouth full of gum,
big cock scrawled across my face squirting Tippex cum.

Charlotte Hamilton (5.20.07)

2007-06-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

Furniture Monologue

When I was a young child there existed in my grandfather’s house a pair of chairs. These were placed either side of the long low sideboard and but for one small detail were identical. Even at an early age I recognised their uniqueness. I knew instinctively that there was something special about them, but without being able to say just what. I have an early memory of sitting, or rather wriggling and fidgeting as I tried to settle, my feet did not touch the floor and whatever else they were they were not comfortable for reasons that will be revealed.

These chairs are now in my parent’s home, separated from each other, due to lack of sufficient space to place them together, which I think is a great pity.

A few years ago, they made an appearance on the BBC Antique’s Road show, and for the first time my parents and I learnt a little of their origins. It is perhaps a failing on my part, that though they have been a source of fascination for more than half a century, I am unable to recall with a hundred percent accuracy all the minute details and intricacies of their design, just sufficient for you to conjure up, I hope, a picture in your minds eye.

I have altered the era, but the location remains the same.

Ghent 1540

Once I was a tree. Tall and straight, rooted in the soil of Ghent, part of the landscape, each year growIng stronger, reaching for the sky.

Breughalesque villagers made merry in my shade, bonnets and skirts swirling, ale flowing, dancing and feasting and young lovers made love beneath my spreading summer branches.

So I stood year upon year witness to the passing seasons.

My branches shook – a searing pain ripped through my very being, another, and another. My strength ebbing with every blow.

Felled….stripped…abandoned. Seasons changed.

Summer breezes fluttered over my nakedness. Winter snow chilled me to the core. Seasons changed. The essence of my being, my chi, my life force fading with each setting of the sun.

Though old and wizened, I sensed the strength in his hands. A powerful energy, tangible, stirred something from deep within my core. A slow resinous tear oozed and trickled, as if in gratitude, coursing down my nakedness, halted by his outstretched finger. Tenderly he wiped it away. My saviour.

The fire crackled, filling the room with warmth and the fragrance of distant pine forests. Between the firelight and the meagre light from the candle, he poured over his drawings, spread across the table. ‘Morgen wij begin.’ He murmured, his voice thick and low.

The days lengthened, but as the shape of his days remained unchanged so my shape began to change. From early morning till the setting of the sun he worked diligently, barely stopping to eat a hunk of bread and cheese and drink a tankard of ale.

My arms grew thick and strong, the grain, like veins, long and straight.

My legs bowed and bent, my back, broad , my seat, vacant, empty.

My rudimentary skeletal form, rude and rustic, plain and unpolished.

As the days turned into weeks and the weeks became months, my metamorphosis continued. I was planed and sanded, carved and gouged, smoothed and polished. I belonged to no ‘school’, for my saviour, my creator was rich in original ideas that conformed to no particular aesthetic. Out of my plainness emerged an abundance of fantasy. I was both monstrous and delicate, conflicting contradictory elements, a vision of brooding Gothic horror.

As if in anticipation of the ample weight of the Burgers of Ghent that I would bear, my legs thrust squarely outward. I am multi talonted. Feet that are large and heavy end in wretched talons that curve like scimitars with malicious intent, they sink into the soft roundness of the orbs they clasp. I am a Renaissance prototype for the ball and claw designs of the future.

My staves writhe with an entanglement of leaves and vines, demonic faces, caught in the tracery, peer out, ears like bat wings, eyes, narrow, suspicious. I hear the soft hissing of their words as they whisper to each other. Malice crawls from between their evil lips.

The curve of my seat is wide and deep, an appropriate shape for the wide posteriors that will sit thereon in my future. Rich brown leather, cut and shaped is held in place with a row of bright, shiny domed tacks. The leather creaks and gives a little as it receives the weight of his rotund rump. He’s not a very big man, but heavy, like me short and squat. He plants his feet firmly apart and leans back, placing his arms over mine.

His arms are pale, never seeing much of the pale northern sun, yet powerful, ending with large hands and dexterous fingers. By contrast my arms are a rich brown, smooth where his are sinewy, but strong and solid. In place of hands, my arms end in large knobbly arthritic stumps – ugly – bony, they curl back on themselves, like some poor leper, or unfortunate amputee. I am stumped.

My arms flow into my back, with an upward curve ending in finely turned finials – dainty – delicate. A row or spindles like a horizontal spine dainty –delicate, spans across my back, in sharp contrast to my overall pedantic frame.

I am almost complete.

Above this row of spindles, into the centre of the uppermost part of my back, My creator has carved, maybe as a final act of vanity ,his likeness into an egg sized oval. It is him, but it’s the him of bygone years, before he became fat and rubicund. This face is thin, the face of an aesthete, intelligent eyes, long straight nose, smiling lips framed in a small pointed beard, no resemblance to the man of the moment. As a bas relief stands proud from its surround so does his mini portrait. It is so artfully placed as to be a reminder to whoever sits ensconced, regardless of age or build. There is an unreachable spot inaccessible to all but those with the most flexible of arms, midway between the shoulder blades. Lean back in me, and the beard of a young Meinheer Nicolaes van Zegherscappel of Ghent will hit the spot - the G spot.

Down the years I have been well cared for by a series of rich owners, as my patina, now honed to that of a shiny brown conker, straight from its prickly casing shows. At first I stood in the palace of Emperor Charles V of Habsburg, he carted me off to his villa next to the monastery in Yuste, in Spain after he abdicated. The warm Spanish sun filled me with a new contentment, even the whispering demons stayed quiet. He spent his last years there worshipping God, eating heavily, listening to music and dismantling and assembling old clocks. Monks from the monastery would visit, quaff wine, yet never unbend sufficiently to sit in me in anything but straight backed, as though I was a test of their monastic discipline.

To mention all my illustrious owners would be a tedious catalogue of name dropping, suffice to say I can number painters and musicians among those whose bottoms I have housed. My likeness has been captured by the great master himself (Rubens (1577 – 1640) I am an ideal subject, I have an infinite capacity for stillness, I do not fidget, like the sitters he paints.

Centuries past, the rhythm of my days unchanged, yet boredom was something I seldom experienced. Astonishing then as it might seem one fine day I was polished and packed, stowed and shipped, arriving unscathed, having found my sea legs a day out of port. I did not care for the rough hands of the men who handled me. Course, insensitive ruffians. I do not want to remember the details of what happened next. Instead I will recall a pleasanter memory. The day I was brought to the home of he who was to be my penultimate owner. Far removed from the low country, I was now in a land that I heard called the Black Country, though why or how this was so called I was never able to comprehend. Certainly the people who came to the house, were not black, they were as white and pale as my creator. There was plenty to amuse and interest. It appeared that my new owner was a man of some wealth who had a taste for the unusual. I soon adjusted to my new surroundings and soon fell into conversation with the sideboard, a construction of truly monumental proportions, its back, ornately carved with wild life flying and resting amidst an abundance of flora and fauna, surpassed the plate rail, laden with pewter plates and flagons, ended within inches of the ceiling. I recognized his uniqueness, never in all my existence and travels had I ever looked upon something so extraordinary.

Into this normally quiet and calm home, there bounced one day, a small girl, plaits flying. Her fingers tickled as they lightly moved over me, seeking out all the intricacies of my ornament. There was not an inch of me left untouched. This was no mere childish inquisitiveness; she examined me with a thoroughness I had never previously experienced save perhaps from my creator, but that was long ago. Finally satisfied that her examination was complete, she climbed in, wriggled, to left and right, then lent back. Mineheer’s beard did the trick and she was out of the chair in a flash. I heard her complaint as she sought refuge in the sideboard cupboard. She never failed to come to me whenever she visited.

More than half a century has passed since then. If the woman who was that little girl gets her wish, then my future is secure, but if the tide of decision is against her wish, then my future may be precarious, for he who may become my next owner, cares nothing for me. I never held the same fascination for him. He will sell me and spend the proceeds.

Until my next home is determined I stand four square on my robust feet, warmth from the radiator at my back seeps into my being bringing comfort in my old age. It is good to be warm. I have intermittent converse with the hall table opposite, a reproduction of the Jacobean period, (from the same home as myself- an aberration of taste I believe) nice, but lacks true breeding. I was born in the Age of the Carpenter, when furniture making bore the characteristics of the craftsman. I lived through the Ages of the Cabinet maker and much later the Age of the Designer. Now is the Age of the Flat Pack, I shiver to my very timbers when I consider what this might be, for I have had no experience of this , but have overheard things I would rather not contemplate.

I’ve lost count of the bottoms that have sat in me, none of them ever sat for long, declaring me to be uncomfortable, yet I held, still hold, a curious fascination for anyone who looks upon me.

By turns ugly, and refined

I am an enigma - an existentialist conundrum on legs.

Amanda Hare (5.20.07)

2007-06-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

THANK YOU!

As this was my last Reading Words event before moving back to the wilds of Canada, I would like to say THANK YOU! to everyone who came out and made it a wonderful event to behold.

I would also like to thank the venues who have hosted us and especially Vade Mecvm for providing a permanent home to our willing and willful words!

Most of all, I would like to thank Jerry who I could not have done Reading Words without. His support has made this event a success and I thank him deeply for it.

Applause to you all!

NIHON
By Amanda Hare

Last blossoms floating
Amid scurrying people
Beauty Unnoticed

IDENTICAL TWINS
By Amanda Hare

Written for Reading Words challenge May 20/07: Write from the perspective of a piece of furniture

It’s been weeks-no, I think months since you came to me. You always go to my sister although I can’t see why. I mean, look at her, her skirt is so frayed and dirty it’s an embarrassment to be in the same room. Her left cheek has become so soiled that I wonder if she is trying to look like a street urchin.

And you. You cuddle up to that dirty cheek like a child to its disgusting blanket that it has dragged around through all kinds of filth and slime. Can’t you see how disgustingly dirty she’s become?

Look at her left arm too. Ugh! How can you stand to sit there like that, draped with your book over that arm which isn’t so much green anymore as it is gray. Doesn’t it smell? Doesn’t she smell? I think I can smell her even way over here on the other side of the room. That horrible spray you put on her only covers up the underlying stench of sweat and perfume and, and, food that you have ground into her fabric and foam. There’s something else though I can’t figure out. Her seat has become so warped to one side. It looks so – unsymmetrical! How can you stand it???

Oh heavens!

Don’t turn your face into her like that! No! Don’t! She’s probably infested with mites that are crawling all over your skin right now!

Ugh! Don’t wipe your tears on that wretched left cheek of hers! Why are you crying anyway? It’s that stupid book you are always looking at, isn’t it? I don’t understand why you insist on making yourself cry with those stupid things.

Why don’t you turn on that television thing in the corner? You always seem to find something to laugh about when you watch it. However, if I may suggest, you should come over and sit in me to watch it. I mean, my sister is in the sun over there and it gets into your eyes and makes it difficult to see the television.

Speaking of sun, look how faded my sister has become, sitting there in the sun—That’s it! That’s the other smell! Sunlight! She stinks of sunlight!

Hey! Where are you going? Come and sit in the corner over here, in the nice dark shade! Hey! Listen to me!

Wha-? Who’s laughing? Who is that giggling? Are you laughing at me? How dare you! I am the queen of this room!

Look at me – I am lovely and erect. The nap on my fabric is perfect and my colours are still rich and vibrant even after all these years.

I am not hard and crusty! My cushion is firm—not hard! I am still desirable, damn you!

READING WORDS - MAY 20TH, 2007

2007-06-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks, I have felt terribly wobbley. I think it's because of my leg. I'm sure it's coming loose again. I get that way, you know? It wasn't like I was that expensive to begin with. But I don't think I was assembled shoddily. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that. Pete followed the directions, step by step and I think he even bought a real screw driver just to put me together. He didn't just try to use his keys for me, which I saw him do with the towel holder. And, I appreciate that. I'm not complaining, but my leg is loose again, and so I'm wobbley. The cat doesn't help. When Pete is gone to work, the cat claws my loose leg. He thinks it's his or something. Varmit! And, the more he claws, the more it loosens. Pete doesn't see it. I mean he pays attention and sees the scratches, but he doesn't see how much leverage a cat the size of Gangsta Bangbang exerts when clawing. I mean, my joints aren't expensive joints, and that's why Pete doesn't put his feet up on me even when I sense he's tired or drunk. He's careful like that. I think he has good manners. But, I've heard him blame me for wobbling and I know he been thumbing through the Ikea catalogue. It feels heavy when he leaves it on me, and that's not because it so thick with decorating options for every lifestyle.

Hello Friends of Literacy,

The next READING WORDS is coming soon soon soon. Actually, sooner than usual. The next Reading Words will be on Sunday, May 20th. That's right. Not the last Sunday as usual. This month it's the third Sunday, but at the regular time of 7:30 to 10pm at Vade Mecvm cafe.

Also, Vade Mecvm has a new interior set-up, so you will be able to experience its cushy minimalism while enjoying their foods, drinks and greening view of spring as people of various accents stand and let the written word flow from their lips.

Oh, my darling, literacy

We hope everyone, both new and familiar, will be able to join us for the spring session of Reading Words.
Please come and add your voices, eyes and ideas to the mix.

All are welcome
Come and feast your ears!!

And, This Month's Challenge is: Furniture Monologue

Instructions: This month's challenge was inspired by Kent English and is basically to let a piece of furniture have its say. Look at the chair you're sitting on right now. What kind of tales does it have to tell? What are the complaints of that little round table at the Starbucks? What is the secret poetry your futon whispers when it's left out in the sun for airing? Imagine the rant of a deckchair on the Titanic, or of Paul Wolfowitz's throne of Golden Skulls, and write it down.

You get the idea.

And, for our dearly departed folks beyond the Kansai shores, you're welcome to send in challenge submissions which we'll read if time permits.

As well, The Book Swap will be happening. Bring books you've read and loved or hated, and pick up books that tickle your ticklish spots...all for free! Also, CDs, DVDs and other swap-worthy medias are welcome, so bring out those tired tunes, etc. for others to enjoy.

Also, remember you can read stuff and see pictures of very previous events on the Reading Words blog at: http://readingwordskansai.blogspot.com/
(Sorry we have been lazy in keeping it up. We'll try try try to do better.)

And, please spread the word by forwarding this message to any and all. For more info, contact us here at this address readingwords@gmail.com

Below are the event's details.

Hear you on Sunday May 20th!

Jerry Gordon and Amanda Hare
Reading Words

Kevin Keane (2.25.07)

2007-03-01T15:46:00.000-08:00

Precipitation

I

shattered eyes weeping

under the fractured sky

shower of blood on

tanks lying askew

II

silence after the battle

no leaves to rustle

swallows deserted the elms

10,000 bodies embraced

by black rain

— by Kevin Keane

Consequences

next to the Nagoya

love hotel “The Hotel Stork”

a maternity clinic

— by Kevin Keane

Daniel Arrieta (2.25.07)

2007-03-01T15:39:00.000-08:00

For the lips of an adulteress drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;

but in the end she is bitter as gall,
sharp as a double-edged sword.

Proverbs 4

Cuando lo trasladaban en camilla hacia la sala de operaciones, Anselmo no podía dejar de recordar los versículos del libro de los Proverbios que tanto gustaban a su padre y que éste recitaba a sus hijos con frecuencia: “No hagas caso de la mujer perversa, pues miel destilan los labios de la extraña, su paladar es más suave que el aceite; pero al fin es amarga como el ajenjo, mordaz como espada de dos filos”.

Dos enfermeras lo escoltaban por el pasillo: una era vieja, arrugada y fea, con el rictus serio de la intransigencia; la otra, joven y guapa, lo trataba con una delicadeza de madre; ahora le estaba sonriendo y sus brillantes ojos negros eran como los de Penélope, grandes, líquidos, intensos.

La primera vez que vio a Penélope fue en mayo, hacía apenas un par de meses. Paseando por el Retiro, junto al estanque, Anselmo se paró a mirar a los patos, dejando que su imaginación volara a otros mundos, como solía hacer en sus solitarios momentos libres, cuando una chica joven se le acercó. No era especialmente bonita, pero había en sus ojos y en su forma de mirar algo que invitaba a enamorarse de ella al momento. Le contó que acababa de llegar a Madrid de Granada y que pasaría en la ciudad un tiempo indefinido, pero que todavía no conocía a nadie. Al principio Anselmo estuvo un poco a la defensiva, pues no era el tipo de hombre al que se acercaran las mujeres porque sí, pero la naturalidad de la chica y su acento granadino tan simpático y sensual al mismo tiempo, le hicieron olvidarse de sus inseguridades. Caminaron juntos, charlaron y acabaron compartiendo café con leche y bollos en una cafetería de la calle Mayor. Cuando llegó el momento de despedirse, Anselmo sintió que aquella tarde con la desconocida había sido la mejor en mucho tiempo, y le pidió que volvieran a encontrarse al día siguiente; ella pareció un poco confusa, pero enseguida accedió al nuevo encuentro. En aquella segunda cita, le habló de su marido, un salvaje marroquí con el que se había casado muy joven y que le daba palizas un día sí y otro también hasta que decidió escapar de él hacía ya dos años. Desde entonces él la buscaba de ciudad en ciudad para vengarse por haberlo abandonado, y ella vivía asustada cambiando constantemente de domicilio. Cuando Anselmo escuchó esto, su inicial reacción de sorpresa y miedo se convirtió en masculina y agresiva rabia, sintiendo algo dentro sí mismo que hacía mucho tiempo él ya creía muerto. Se propuso ayudar a su nueva dama desvalida, como en las literarias historias de caballeros andantes que tanto le gustaban, y así se lo hizo saber. Penélope, entonces, lo abrazó y le besó. Aquella noche hicieron el amor y durmieron abrazados hasta el mediodía. Inmediatamente, Penélope abandonó la pensión barata donde dormía y se trasladó a casa de Anselmo, un bonito apartamento en el barrio de Salamanca que había heredado de su madre. Durante dos semanas hicieron vida de casados, como cualquier pareja de enamorados y Anselmo no recordaba haber tenido un tiempo tan feliz en su vida.

Un día, a la vuelta de Anselmo del trabajo, encontró a Penélope temblando, acurrucada en un rincón del baño. La tranquilizó, la metió en la cama y le pidió que le contara qué ocurría. Penélope había recibido la llamada de una amiga. Su marido había sabido a través de un familiar dónde se encontraba y había jurado ir a buscarla y llevarla de vuelta consigo. Anselmo decidió actuar y le pidió el teléfono de esa amiga. No pensaba poner en peligro su vida o la de Penélope con nada arriesgado, pero tampoco podía permitir dejar escapar una felicidad que estaba tocando por momentos por primera vez en su vida. Tal vez haría uso de su poder económico para zanjar el asunto. Sí, puede que todo se arreglase con dinero. En definitiva, así funcionaba el mundo, ¿no? Y a nadie le amarga un dulce.

Habló con Amelia, la amiga común de Penélope y el marroquí, y le dijo que le comunicara al violento marido su propuesta: le daría 100.000 euros si desaparecía de la vida de Penélope para siempre. Anselmo entonces se sintió bien, un hombre de verdad, que asumía los problemas y las dificultades afrontándolos con seguridad. Ya no eran los tiempos del uso de la fuerza física del Capitán Alatriste ni del Madrid de capa y espada de las novelas que leía continuamente. Ahora estábamos en pleno siglo XXI, en una sociedad más o menos civilizada, y los problemas requerían problemas civilizados también.

Tan sólo una hora más tarde, Anselmo obtuvo una respuesta de Amelia: el marido había aceptado la oferta del dinero y prometía no volver a molestar a Penélope en su vida.

Anselmo se sintió tan exaltado que creía que se le saldría el corazón del pecho de lo fuerte que palpitaba. Fue a ver a Penélope, que dormía como un niño pequeño en posición fetal en la cama, le dio un beso en la frente y salió de casa en dirección al banco. En la sucursal se extrañaron un poco de la alta cantidad requerida sin aviso previo, pero al ser un banco de una zona rica, siempre tenían efectivo para esas ocasiones.

El marroquí lo había citado en la otra punta de Madrid a las cinco de la tarde y Anselmo hizo tiempo hasta esa hora paseando con su coche por el barrio obrero donde iban a encontrarse. Cuando llegó el momento, Anselmo se bajó de su coche y se dirigió con el maletín hacia el punto de encuentro. Allí había un hombre alto, de unos treinta años, bien vestido, de rasgos magrebíes, y semblante serio.

* Hola.
* ¿Anselmo?
* Sí. Soy yo –los dos hombres se quedaron mirándose fijamente a la cara durantes unos instantes-. Quiero que una cosa quede bien clara entre nosotros. No va a haber una segunda vez. Ésta es la última vez que Penélope o yo vamos a saber de ti. ¿Está claro?
* Sí –los ojos del marroquí seguían mirando desafiantes a Anselmo, pero el dinero parecía ejercer un poder inmenso.

Finalmente, Anselmo le pasó el maletín sin dejar de mirar al hombre que había destrozado la vida de la mujer que amaba. Sin despedirse, se giró y volvió a su coche. De vuelta a casa pensó en lo rápido que había sucedido todo: conocer a Penélope, enamorarse, vivir juntos, la aparición del marido, su intervención exitosa. La vida era así: las cosas pasaban de golpe, en muy poco tiempo, igual que las oportunidades, y había que agarrase a ellas como a un clavo ardiendo, a la felicidad.

Una hora más tarde Anselmo llegaba a casa. Estaba contento y se sentía satisfecho. Iba a despertar a Penélope y contarle que todo había terminado, que aquel hombre había desaparecido de su vida para siempre. Al principio ella reaccionaría incrédula pero acabaría tirándosele al cuello y llorando de alegría. Harían el amor como nunca y vivirían felices por mucho tiempo.

Cuando abrió la puerta de la casa con su llave, le pareció extraño que el cerrojo no estuviera echado, como siempre hacía Penélope cuando estaba dentro de casa. Él mismo había cerrado la puerta con llave, estaba seguro de ello, pero no le dio demasiada importancia: se sentía demasiado feliz.

Avanzó por el pasillo y cuando llegó al salón lo que vio le dejó sin respiración: estaba vacío. Se dirigió rápidamente a la habitación donde dormía Penélope. No había nada, absolutamente nada. La cocina, los otros cuartos, los armarios. La casa estaba completamente vacía: vacía de personas, de muebles, de cuadros, de ropa. No habían dejado nada, ni siquiera la comida. Anselmo tardó un rato en procesar la información y entenderlo todo. Se sentó en el suelo y se echó las manos a la cara. Lloró y lloró como un niño durante minutos.

Días más tarde, cuando comenzaba a superar psicológicamente lo ocurrido y los muebles nuevos le ayudaban a olvidar de vez en cuando lo sucedido, comenzó a sentir un fuerte dolor en los genitales. Era una sensación como si pequeñas cuchillas afiladas dentro de su cuerpo subieran desde los testículos hacia el abdomen y volvieran a bajar rítmicamente. El dolor se hizo insoportable y llamó a un taxi como pudo.

En la sala de urgencias del hospital, tras un doloroso análisis urológico le diagnosticaron sífilis americana complicada con un bloqueo de uretra. Debían operarle enseguida si no quería que la infección se extendiese a todo el aparato digestivo.

Ya en la sala de operaciones, el anestesista le había colocado una vía en el brazo para dormirlo y Anselmo notaba cómo iba gradualmente perdiendo la conciencia. Las últimas imágenes que vio con nitidez fueron unos ojos negros, intensos, líquidos, y volvió a recordar las palabras de su padre: “No hagas caso de la mujer perversa, puesssss miel dessssstiiiiiilaaaaa…”.

Colin Doyle (2.25.07)

2007-03-01T15:37:00.000-08:00

Please navigate to this link to read the full version of Colin's short story on his blog at http://nagaijin.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/short-back-and-sides/

Patrick Widdess (2.25.07)

2007-03-01T15:34:00.000-08:00

A blind man won't thank you for a looking glass.

Christmas brings a desktop diary,
personal organiser and a pocket diary in my stocking.
All for a gap year with too many gaps.

An old lady carries a phone with fifty kitsch
danglies.
I comment on the proliferation
and she presses a beady blue panther on me
to dress my own naked cell.

Two birthdays, a Christmas and Valentine's day
have each brought me a new wallet.
But I still have a pocketful of loose change and an
overdraft.

A kindly woman fills a cafe table with plaster
figurines
and bestows them on unwitting patrons.
After she's gone one remains in front of me.
A pale girl with a sweet smile, twirling an umbrella.

Ashok Saraf (2.25.07)

2007-03-01T15:32:00.000-08:00

Inner Space

I try to enter

Your inner space

I read my words and

You listen

I sketch my visions that

You see

I cast music in notes

That you sing

I play rhythm and

You dance

But still , I do not get to

The inner space

All of that is still just an

Outer shell of your inner space

But then when I enter

Finally your inner space,

I find that,

It is not just similar to

My inner space..

But it is the Same inner space ,

That we share ,

Perhaps it is the same outer space where

There are no words and notes and visions and dance

That we are …

Ashok Saraf

Osaka 25 Feb 2007

Reading Words, Feb 25th, Sunday from 7:30pm

2007-02-16T18:21:00.000-08:00

"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket."
Chinese Proverb
"Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom."
English Proverb
"A proverb is a mountain pounded into an arrowhead."
Monkiefeet

Hello Friends of Literacy,

The next READING WORDS is coming soon. We'll be gathering on Sunday, February 25th, from 7:30 to 10pm at Vade Mecvm cafe.

This month's reading will mark RW's one year anniversary. Last year RW functioned as a monthly (mostly) event, but in 2007 we are going to change into a seasonal happening, so this year Reading Words will be gathering on the last Sundays of February, May, August and November.

Also, Vade Mecvm has kindly agreed to serve as our welcoming home for this whole year, so you will be able to continue to taste their delicious foods, drinks and atmospheres while witnessing the magical act of people transforming words from paper into sound.

Oh, my darling, literacy

We hope everyone, both new and familiar, will be able to join us this month. Please come and add your voices, eyes and ideas to the mix.

All are welcome
Come and feast your ears!!

And, this Month's Challenge is: Proverb

Instruction: Find a proverb and write something inspired from it. Any form is fine: poetry, fiction, satire, dialogue, instruction manual, valentine, recipe, whatever. You can:

Reinforce the proverb
Explode the proverb
Mock the proverb
Morph the proverb
Dress the proverb up in rubber and interrogate it.

You get the idea.

Some proverb resources are:
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Chinese_Proverb/
http://www.worldofquotes.com/index.php
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/English_proverbs

As well, The Book Swap will being happening. Bring books you've read and loved or hated, and pick up books that tickle your ticklish spots...all for free! Also, CDs, DVDs and other swap-worthy medias are welcome, so bring out those tired tunes, etc. for others to enjoy.

Also, remember you can read stuff and see pictures of previous events on the Reading Words blog at: http://readingwordskansai.blogspot.com/

And, please spread the word by forwarding this message to any and all. For more info, contact us here at this address ( readingwords[at-mark]gmail.com).

Below are the event's details.

Thanks again,

Jerry Gordon and Amanda Hare
Reading Words

ps: If you don't want to be notified of these events, write us and we won't.
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Vade Mecvm offers wonderful coffees, teas, beer and wine and scrumptious western vegetarian, meaty and "something else" sandwiches on wholemeal bread as well as other foods to snack and munch on for Readers and Listeners alike!

www.vademecvm.com

Note: Vade Mecvm is non-smoking, but smoking outside is fine.

DIRECTIONS:
- Go to Hommachi Station on the Yotsubashi Subway Line (the blue line) and leave through exit 28. Walk in the direction of the IBM sign. You should be on the left side of the street and pass the IBM sign (if you are driving, you are on Yotsubashi-suji).
- Go past China Southern Airlines (left side). Go past Eneos Gas station and McDonalds (on the right side of the street). Go past the Utsubo Park entrance on your left. Go past OSTEC exhibition hall (look for the robot sculpture).
- Turn left at the intersection where the Century Building with the ground floor Family Mart is at (They're across the street diagonally)
- Walk up this street and stay on the left side. Go past the cross-street where the Kaneshige Stationary is on the far corner. Vade Mecvm is getting closer, just a half a block more on the left.
- Look for the black on white Vade Mecvm sign on the front of the building. It is next to a hallway that you enter to access the cafe. (There should also be a Reading Words sign out front) Go down the hallway to the back.

- It takes about 8 minutes to walk from the station to the cafe although it sounds like longer here!
- Vade Mecvm backs onto Utsubo park so if you are walking in the park you can come in the back way--sorry, don't have directions or landmarks for access from the park!

Please forward this email to anyone you think may be interested and if you need more info just send us a message!

Hear you on Sunday February 25th!

Jerry Gordon and Amanda Hare
Reading Words

Finding Vade Mecvm

2007-02-16T18:15:00.000-08:00

Map to Vade Mecvm cafe

Entrance to Vade Mecvm

Kevin Keane (11.26.06)

2006-11-28T20:35:00.000-08:00

How to Control Time

first teach orchids to shrink to

their roots and petrified trees

to softly bow in the wind—

then calendars will ignite

and clocks ticking melt

hit absolute zero

on a moonless night

tape eyes and ears shut—

coffins will turn to cribs

and waterfalls cascade up hills

— by Kevin Keane

On Stage

old woman in a faded flower-print

dress jumps on the train yelling

singing with primal screaming

velocity─schizoid music of the

spheres

I wanted to clap or ask why she

sang her atonal chant of rage

but I quietly changed cars instead

─by Kevin Keane

Charity

standing in line on Broadway

strafed by sleet and cold

the patrons of the play silent and

stiff like icicles on eaves

I’m hoping Mother Courage

will rally us to face

the wind shear again

a man in a painter’s cap

and an old torn tux with tails,

his long beard down to his waist,

cries out “hey man, you got a quarter?”

“huh? oh sure─here”

he pockets it with a smile and

asks the short square man next to me─

“hey, get a job!” bounces back like hail

the one in the tux drags the man

by the collar down the street

and bashes him in the face

illustrating with a swift left hook

that it’s better to give than to

receive

─by Kevin Keane

The Art (9.24.06): Gareth Jones

2006-09-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Fade

forgetting sycamore
on grassy plains
names and numbers
snatched by the wind
forgetting popcorn & Clark Gable
laughter on tricycles.
belting out “School Days” on pianos
and driving miles to nowhere
quacking at strangers--
faces sinking into the brain
but the smiles remain

Finale

turn the knob, enter--
last time to learn how fast
clouds sail across the sky
look at this hoax of a life--
waiting in a white room
for the end of the end
take a final drag
the phone rings “you're up”
on stage the applause rings out for
that last cakewalk to the stars

The Venue: Vade Mecvm (9.24.06)

2006-09-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Jerry Gordon (9.24.06)

2006-09-24T17:28:00.000-07:00

The Bazaar

As a scholar who travels through foreign lands, I am always suspicious. I find it is physically healthier to be so. I don't listen to proclamations about miracle cures or celestial orgasms anymore. It is also just a good idea, in order to keep an appropriate distance on events, in order to observe and see them as they should be witnessed: in the third person. But, I can recall one occasion when I cast off my rule and let myself be drawn in by the local color, when I was intrigued and captured by exotic and secret beauty.

The country was a small one, which I shall keep anonymous as it no longer exists by the name it did and because the faction currently in power may read threat in the most benign of my observations. (I enjoy plane travel far too much to go into hiding.)

I was wandering, pulled by my sense of sound and smell through the market in a town on the northern outskirts of the capital. It was crowded with people, some in simple or religious dress, and others in black leather sport jackets with elaborate gold embroidery down the sleeves and across the backs. At first, from the violent images of birds tearing at tigers, and bulls goring snakes, I thought the jackets were the uniform for the then growing political faction that later took over power and now rules. But, I later learned that they were rooters' jackets for the country's five-team soccer league.

An international constant: the fanaticisms of political power will never match those of professional sports.

The busy market was a labyrinth of corners. On a daily basis, the makeshift shops--which had been erected in temporary fashion for the past two thousand years--transformed the stone-paved square into a tight crosshatch of foot-worn pathways. Some stands sold polyester shirts or belts or items to make the daily chores of living easier. (Whatever the chore, in whatever the country, a shopkeeper has a thing that will make effort vanish. Market capitalism's perpetual motion machine.) But these types of use-items never interest me. As a traveler--a man abroad--I buy only for the moment. Waste is the fuel that drives me. I don't come to the market to purchase anything. I observe and feel. I come to watch the culture in rhythm, to sense the pace and beat. I measure and thumb the weight of the cloth, but never to buy. I am there to note the rituals in a small book.

As I turned from one row onto the next, the market was a blanket of heavy murmurs. People moved and I moved. As a mass, we stroked the tattered strips of rough, grayed fabric that hung as walls for the shops. From the outside, each stand was a duplicate of the colorless next. But when the wind blew a heavy canvas doorway aside, I could see the colors and clear sounds of life glowing within . Each had a different hue and pitch. The laughter of fruits and vegetables was common. It was a familiar tone and had brilliance. A pear here was as a pear there and at home. Carrots were piled in balanced clumps on their stems and seemed to lick like orange flames igniting and churning from the ground.

It was visually exciting and, to its favor, produce is usually secure. You can most often trust vegetables. They make few assertions or promises.

But, as I continued my stroll, I entered the area where I am always most leery. This is where men shout in a song-like chant while waving a sample of something in their hand that you must buy in a taped box. This is the zone of trust and persuasion.

The first stand to catch my interest was no more than a small Formica table. Upon it, a man had twenty four household glass jars lined up from one edge to the other. They ran in rows of eight. And, in each jar, supposedly, the breath of the devil was contained.

The man--the seller--was dressed in dirty polyester slacks and a leather jacket with a large gold dog licking its paws over a pile of 12 bird carcasses. He told his story as a convincing narrative of fear. His voice had a style that seemed particularly fitting considering the nature of his product.

"The devil is not dead, as we are told to believe. I have spoken with it, face to face, and know that it's very much alive and real. Its breath smells of sulfur and garlic. It is an awful smell. This I swear to you."

As he spoke, sitting behind his layers of glass, he gripped the edges of the table and rocked from side to side with his eyes closed. He went on to tell of how he had been ill for a long period of time and that his family would routinely put him in a small room while they ate dinner. He said this was understandable because his illness was, "the kind that ruins people's appetites." He didn't name his illness in any more detail than that, except to say that it was very serious and that his doctor had given up hope of his survival.

He went on. One night while in isolation with his family eating on the opposite side of the door, he said he called at the ceiling to whatever power “either of good or not of good” (his exact phrasing) that could cure him. Soon after his plea, he said he heard a scratching of hooves on the concrete floor of his room and could feel the sulfur and garlic breath of the devil moving across his face in the accelerated pants of a heavy smoker. The man said:

“The devil spoke very softly, very different than the devil in the movies"

But, he said that the devil did not ask for his soul or for the souls of anyone.

"The devil does not want more souls. It wants space. It wants to buy cheap land. That is why I am selling these jars of breath. I must sell breath for the devil because it saved my life. But, you only have to pay for the breath and can then enjoy its benefits. There are no other obligations for you. I promise you this is the truth. No obligations.”

As I was intrigued by the notion of the devil giving up his traditional role as the tormentor of souls for the chance to own property, I stayed and listened to the questions that always follow such a hawker's pitch.

"Did the devil show himself to you?" said a man whose pants were tightened around his waist by a chain of rubberbands. "How can we be sure this is really the devil's breath and not your own?"

"If it were my own, wouldn't I be able to make more than 24 jars?" responded the man.

This seemed to still the crowd in a moment of reason-weighing. I could hear the scales of logic balancing level in about half the onlookers. The others left. The questioner nodded and heeled closer to the table. And, when he bent forward to stare into the breath-filled jars, I noticed the beautiful head of a woman tilt intently around the corner of a ragged stand which sold mirrors cracked by the king in a fit of vanity-anger.

But she was not interested in the devil's breath; she was looking at me.

At first I was spooked. I do not cut through space in the shape of a man who such women lust for. I have long accepted this about myself. But such a look from such eyes from such a face has the power to disfigure even my long held mental self-image of a comfortable grotesque. Her eyes reflected possibilities I am still incapable of imagining on my own. She inspired the irrational. And she was what caused me to set down my scepticism, for a moment, and trust in beauty. To pursue a thought unquestioned. To desire.

I moved to meet her, but she bolted behind the canvas corner. I followed. I did not wish to appear in chase, but I feared the distance her flight could lay. I picked up the pace of my walking. I moved as though I was trying to reach an empty seat on a train. Not exerting myself, but gliding towards an immediate fixation. But she was gone, dissolved within the current of moving fabric which flowed as a dynamic surface of nape and weave. Lost. Into the blur of texture and ache of shadowed folds.

I knew she could not have gotten too far. It was too crowded to cover a large distance in such little time. Besides, I trusted her interest. I hoped.

As I worked my way around the area, spying corners without turning my head, absorbing the scene with peripheral sight rather than focused vision, I overheard a man trying to guilt his wife out of buying a book at a nearby stand.

"You always say you will read them, but they sit in a pile next to your chair with only the first twenty pages rustled. But, if we buy the lucky spell we don't have to do anything. It works on its own."

"But this one is important for both of us. You will want to read it. I know you will appreci. . ."

They sensed that I was eavesdropping and moved to a more private corner, out of my hearing. But, from their movements and hand gestures I could tell that they were striking a deal. They were promising to change bad habits for each other in order to get what they wanted. Perhaps their wishes did come true. Before they paid their coins, perhaps they created their own magic.

They moved away from the frayed grey wall and I followed them with my eyes. The wife led the way to a small stall where the canvas flap door was tied up to accommodate the almost constant flow of customers.

"Moses was a juggler!" the man in the entrance way chanted, "I can teach you to beat him at his own game!"

I wanted to stay and over hear more, but I knew he would not divulge any secret. He would only make claims and cite examples. I strolled on without direction. I tried to pick up the beat of love in the air and unconsciously move in that way.

It worked in under five minutes.

As I widened my hearing, listened larger to the music of the bazaar, I lost track of the thing I was pursuing. I let myself go and then she came. I was rounding the edge of a young child's begging basket when the woman whispered to me from my left. I turned. There was her beautiful face smiling at me from the alleyway between the only two permanent buildings in the square--the national bank and the brothel.

I moved without hesitation. I smiled and kept her eyes locked with mine. She waited, but then bolted down the alleyway. This seemed odd, but I was out of the pale of scepticism. I was breathing on trust. I lunged for the corner as to not lose sight of her. And then, I saw her all. I saw her contorted, monster-like shape fleeing.

She limped and moved in a rhythmic bowing motion away from me. I ran to catch her. She was deformed, but could still outrun me. She could lure me. Willingly.

She stopped in a small sun-hidden alcove formed by where the bank and brothel come together. There she halted, panting her false exhaustion. That was where her trail ran out, where I caught her. Or, where she caught me. I came to the spot soon after her, out of breath and damping my shirt with exercise. And, then I was able to see her clearly.

Her beautiful head was perched atop her wind pumping throat at an awkward angle, fixed like someone looking for something they’ve dropped to their left. Her features were delicate and clear, a shining edge smoothly defining each bend and transition. A cleanly worked softness and surface, hopeful evidence of some aesthetic tooler forming corners of the world as a way to make we who read deeply in Darwin leave room in our thesis for the irrational. A head of grace.

But, her body was bent and twisted as though at some age a force peeled her skin down off her skeleton, tied her spine in a knot, and then redressed her bones in a haphazard impatience.

She stared at me. She worked to calm her breathing. I, with my skin chilled by the shade and my soaked waist-band, hoped she would keep up her pumping; I selfishly wanted to hear her speak in a pant. It would have been stimulating.

And then, suddenly, I felt my heart heave in a strange skipping rhythm. I wondered if it was a sort of love-effect or a by-pass surgery anecdote. I leaned against the dusty sandstone wall. I began to kneel and to move my hand to my chest when she started towards me. I stood up, for unexplainable reasons. She motioned for me to come to her. I did. She motioned me towards her mouth. I moved, looking and imagining futures which I as quickly forgot. Her lips were thin and unchapped. "A dreamer's paradise," I kept thinking, but I don't know why.

Then, with her lips filling my vision, she peeled them back, like a set of odd stage curtains, to show me a mouth of perfect teeth. White and straight and cap-less.

I thought for a moment, in a brief clutching back at the sensible blankets of reason, "Is this what this is all about? She's proud of her teeth?"

But then The Event occurred. The event which was only possible to witness in a state of semi-imagination. She opened her mouth, spread her teeth apart like a pair of gates set to hide the sublime. And there, in her throat, were spoons.

Five chrome spoons were lodged in her throat, placed in a row of descending size from left to right. I stared, lost for a reason. Lost for thought. Lost in the repetition of my own convex reflection in the dim light of her mouth. I couldn't move. I froze with the heels of my hands wedged against my knees and stared. Amazed and marveled.

But, then I noticed that her mouth and lips were drying out and I returned to my senses. I straightened back up and said, "Hmmm."

I felt odd and awkward, not knowing what to do next. Should I ask her questions about the spoons? Should I pity her or act like they don't change her beauty in any way? Should I run away or pay her something?

But then she started. The spoons were not just some kind of cultural punishment or tribal beauty accessory. They were an instrument. She began to exhale in a smoothly controlled and practiced manner. A thin line of air exited her mouth and with it came a tune.

She played on, and as I listened I caught the melody. It had power and passion. Much more than I can still even imagine could be possible from stainless-steel cutlery in a woman's throat. It was a warming rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. The acoustics of the alcove seemed perfect. It would have brought me to my feet if I weren't already standing. I listened, and when she finished I applauded, alone, the percussive cracks of my hands echoing in the alleyway.

I tried to pay her, as I would a musician with an open case on the street, but she would have none of it. She wanted action rather than my cash. She hadn’t simply picked me out of some bazaar crowd; she had chosen and stalked me and she wanted my help because of the access I had and that she was denied of--her being a native in a country where only foreigners can use the hotels.

In a very rehearsed speech she laid her case bare to me. She wanted me to smuggle a spoon out of the hotel restaurant for her. A tiny demitasse spoon. Chrome finished and industrial was best. She explained the entire thievery in relation to it being able to expand her range and repertoire. She said she would then be able to play more show tunes and classical pieces. Perhaps even compose. I felt rather like a patron, and I agreed.

When I gave the young woman the demitasse spoon, she examined it closely as we stood beside a brown metal dumpster behind the hotel. At this same time, I gave her my address at the university and told her to please send a recording if her career ever came to that. She shook her head without looking up and said that music must be lived, not held on to. I nodded, although I did not really agree, and have not heard from her since.

Charade of Destiny

I live between my work and worry,
and learn of worlds released from windows
at each turn I take within these rooms of bruising dreams,
these abandoned factories where my muses loom
up near the sooty ceilings, squealing
in their paper cages like lightless lanterns
swinging high as bitter chariots of cries
guiding me on into darkness and one more lost home.
The ringing ringing ringing of the phone
going on beyond the wall I call my own and the lung-rung
echo that chokes me in my nervous sleep, smokes
out the humming hive of my heart--vacant of all bees--
the bleepity-bleep beat that pulses of another pleasing hoax.
Swing low, swing low, swing low sweet charade of destiny.
Remind me of that look you loosed into my eyes,
that crooked face of history you used to hide
the mystery you took with you,
back into the far side of the mirror.

Waking Ourselves from Death

The sky is torn from mountain tops
and we sit here and hold each other's eyes.
The lies we keep to keep ourselves
asleep and tempered with this tenderness.
"God bless. God bless." I've seen you
when at rest and I believe the knowledge
of your lips. Believe the multi-layered glimpse
we live. Believe this brutal brevity. Believe
the width of every dream,
and the doubt it textures. Conjecture. Conjecture.
I paint the city walls with all the whispered names
for no one, let the bluish-black acrylic
flash across the night, peel the screen of heaven down
to blanket all our beds, the quiet of the house of lead.
The dread. The dread. The river of what's said.
The storm clouds on the morning of the light
that bathed your head. The bird song in the warning
of the city where we met. I said you said it's said,
our hands are always open, open to what's left,
open to receiving every drop of word that's read.
Believing each deception, because we're fictional at best,
but leaning out to kiss you, kiss you on the head, kiss you
on the neck, kiss you in this moment
when we wake ourselves from death
as a way to not forget.

What’s this?

"There is more on heaven and earth, Horatio,
than is dreamt of in your philosophy."
--Hamlet

I name people pedestrians for walking,
and lazy for sitting, and you
beautiful for your rigor in organizing yourself
in black and white.
And the boy, he’s rude
for stinking up the train
with McDonalds’ smell and noisy wrappers.

But this is only helping me
to see what is merely human.
This is not bringing birdsong to my ear
with all its secrets on silence.

From the air
I pick a part and say, “Skylark.”
“Crow” or “Jay.”

Limiting things to what I think they are,
I comb my hair
like the picture in the mirror.

Mirror

Each time I face this dusty pane
it feels like I must
take up the tools of memory
and carve my portrait
from this rectangular ocean of chrome.

The duty to make a me
along some semblance of self
and in that cut and file the world
to make sense as what I see.

I imagine the ease of one day
freeing the dust of form,
of simply meeting the beast
without name, arriving unrecognizable
amidst the evaporating droplets
of chromium rain.

Edges

At the edge of here is there and at the edge of far is near and at the edge of lost is found and at the edge of free is bound and at the edge of day is night and at the edge of wrong begins the predictable edge of right and the edge of left which is at the edge of get and get is clearly on the edge of coming, which is on the edge of impotent which is at the edge of strong but also on the minor edge of simply going on and on and on and at the edge of that is this and at the edge of strife is bliss and at the edge of land is sea and at the edge of all is me, or at least that's what it seems to be when I rub up against this everything that I can see and sniff and fondle with these numby nubs I get for life to use to sense the edges that all seem to stretch out from each seam into the far off edge of my periphery. And attheedgeofwordsis space and at the edge of Osaka is another kind of place and at the edge of hope is doubt and at the edge of smile is pout and at the edge of love is pride and at the edge of hell resides acceptance of all things, a little garden from which springs no manner of distinctions so the edges vanish too and you are you but also the whole zoo of odd rectangles in the mangled angles of the all in one not under and not over any edge of any sun. I'm done, but just begun.

Patrick Widdess (9.24.06)

2006-09-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

The Sound of One Leg Walking

I am woken every morning
by the purposeful stride of a well-made shoe
swiftly passing my window.
Each step sounds a click,
sharp and steady as a metronome.
The alternate step is as pronounced and punctual in
its absence,
a silent echo to its heavy soled counterpart.
One time I woke early and wheeled myself to the window
but dozed off,
waking just in time to see a leather clad heel vanish
round the corner.

Chinwags

Chinwags perch on the rose bush,
their nattering song rises with the morning sun.
Watch them hop amongst the long grass,
looking for gossip to feed their young.

Michael Crowe's blog http://www.figcrumbs.blogspot.com/

The Challenge (9.24.06)

2006-09-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

And, the September Challenge is: Rhyme Schemes

Below are six pairs of rhyming words. The challenge this month is to use these words in a poem. You can rearrange the rhyme pattern however you like. You are free to write a poem using the words as rhymes at the ends of lines, or get more creative and surprising.

Rhyming pairs:

turn last look
learn fast took

hoax rooms phone
smokes looms own

Patrick Widdess (8.27.06)

2006-09-23T01:22:00.000-07:00

Improbable

Against odds of more than 99 trillion to one
a man fell against a wall whilst drunk
and passed straight through.
He awoke hours later unable to remember how he got
there.

These things happen all the time.
Fish rise from the sea bed to quote chapter and verse,
Corpses re-awake briefly in the morgue when no one's
looking,
The car keys you thought you lost turned into a clump
of moss
you never noticed wasn't there before.

These things happen.
So why marvel when a prophet's face appears in a fish
finger
or long lost relatives are seated together on a plane?

In Russia scientists have dummies propped against
walls,
and furniture sealed in rooms under surveillance,
waiting for it to move, change shape or combust,
waiting for that moment of improbability.

And when it comes they will know no more
than that man who went home to nurse his head
and never found his phone,
which fell from his pocket on the other side.

Kevin Keane 8.27.06

2006-09-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

Advent

June day: glimpse the moon
in pine shadows.
wait—and the white orb
will roll up the stairs
of the sky

Invitation

after a pas de deux
with the wind, the lavender
beckons to me with its
delicate perfume

The End of the Baileys

Jack and Jill went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water
I journeyed to the many
countries of your breath
slept in the verdant
cities of your eyes
but your hands a desert
have buried me in sand
our distance an inland sea
“it’s not that I don’t love you”
(how do I hate thee?
let me count the ways)
“then why don’t you stay?”
(but to stay is to ossify—
a volcano, extinct)
Jack fell down and broke his crown
after the mountains
the road to the forest
of your heart is tangled up
with vines here in the
lowlands of our fear
and Jill came tumbling after

Kent English 8.27.06

2006-09-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

Why I want my money back

These shoes are, in fact, too comfortable.
They fit me too well and give too much support.

I have worn them in overly air-conditioned office settings
and the frightful heat of Death Valley.

They were on my feet when I traversed
the full length of the Great Wall,
and when I sat through a marathon performance
of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Not once have I had a blister
or even so much as an itch.
No pebbles or grass seeds have found
their way inside, and I have so far failed
to step anywhere near sticky wads of pink bubblegum
or malodorous piles of dog shit.

In short, my feet have never been happier,
and I can stand it no longer.

They are missing out on all that I am experiencing,
locked away, as they are, in their well-crafted euphoria:
they have been cheated of the discomfort that
makes a Good Shoe Day so rewarding.

I think that in view of what my feet have not been through,
I am entitled to a full refund or at least an exchange
for a pair less pleasing to the instep, one that chafes
my little toes or causes cramping after six hours of wear.

Surely it is not too much to ask; after all,
I have but one set of feet, and I would like to feel
that we are walking along the same bumpy road.

GALATEA

Chapter 2

The moment of Galatea's conception took place months earlier, when I came across a rack of red silk shirts in a second-hand clothing store downtown.

Red is not usually my colour: I'm more of a blue or green kind of person (I'd estimate a good 87% of my wardrobe could be classified under those two trusty headings). But there was something alive about those shirts, an immediacy and vitality that demanded my attention. As I examined the multitude of shades, the colour bled from everything else in the room, and it was as if I had suddenly been transported into a Chagall painting: just like his bouquets, the hues were not confined to the shirts themselves, but like scents could drift up into the surrounding air, creating a soft aura that grazed my fingers with its warmth.

I'm not sure how long I stood enthralled, but the enchantment came to an abrupt end when a feral and apparently myopic five-year-old ran headfirst into my ass, knocking me into the rack, which, mercifully, did not topple. Once I had recovered my balance and what remained of my dignity, I took out my wallet to see how many shirts I could immediately afford. It turned out that I had enough for seven of them (actually I only had enough for six—they were each three dollars and I only had two tens in my wallet—but the cashier kindly took pity on me and my poor arithmetic skills), so I selected a range of shades: terracotta, cerise, cardinal, crimson, alizarin, carmine, and burgundy. At home I laid them out on the sofa—four along the back, three on the seat—and for a long time just sat staring at them, hoping to discern some meaning or feel the cattle prod of inspiration. None was forthcoming, though, and ultimately I had to fold them and find a space for them in the warm-colours drawer of my dresser.

Following that night of seemingly vain contemplation, the wisp of something beguiling began floating through the back corridors of my mind, growing in persistence by the day, but refusing to take on the weight of an idea or image. When I closed my eyes this nascent form would tease me with its presence, allowing itself to be sensed without ever coming into focus. It remained veiled behind curtains of gossamer, and each curtain I managed to pull back only established the existence of more curtains. A week went by and I was becoming agitated by its undue modesty when without warning or the travails of labour, its gestation abruptly ended and out popped Galatea in her larval stage.

What induced this birth was the sad sight of a squirrel that had met its end under someone's unswerving tires. I normally try to avoid looking at such things—they engender a nauseatingly strong compulsion to wash my hands—but the colours spilling from the poor creature's torn belly gave sudden substance to the wisp that had been eluding me: entrails—that's what lay behind those curtains, that's what was drifting ghostlike through my thoughts—a shimmering pile of red entrails. I must have said entrails aloud and with some volume because the pair of women approaching me and my muse, the squirrel, gave little gasps of disgust and quickly moved to the opposite side of the street, looking at me as if I were poking the thing with a stick instead of standing a respectable five feet from it, with my hands clasped tightly behind my back. I admit I was likely displaying a madman's grin that even their reaction couldn't diminish. I felt like I had just found a Rosetta stone for the intractable hieroglyphics in my head. So where normally I would have had embarrassment descend on me like a five-hundred pound hawk, my glee was such that the hawk passed me over, and I was all the more elated as a result.

Any free time I had during the next few days was spent with a notebook on whose cover I had carefully inscribed Entrails in my best approximation of calligraphic script. On its vellum pages (I am rather particular about the notebooks I use) I sketched, brainstormed, theorized, speculated, doodled and entered anything that I thought relevant to the project I had suddenly found myself undertaking. (At the time it did not occur to me to ponder why I was suddenly so obsessed with red silk shirts and entrails. I was too preoccupied with the temporary freedom it afforded me from the anxious thoughts that normally paraded through my skull—distracting and paining me with their apocalyptic fanfare—to bring my motives into question. Good thing, too, for had I given the germ of suspicion the chance to sprout, it would undoubtedly have ensnared me in its vines and kept me from accomplishing as much as I did in that week of scribbling. I have an unnaturally strong inclination towards procrastination that it is generally triggered by precisely that kind of self-doubt.)

What eventually emerged from those pages was a rough plan for a patchwork coil of silken entrails, the seams of which would be sewn with long strands of dried grass. Dried grass would also serve as stuffing to give girth to the intestinal loops—I could hardly have allowed my entrails (for they were not yet her entrails) to appear deflated. Looking back I cannot say with certainty what gave rise to the grass idea. However, in the margin on the third page of my notebook there is a rather out-of-place drawing of the wishful trio from The Wizard of Oz, and I suspect the Scarecrow may have had something to do with it. All scarecrows are creatures of pretence: feigned humanity in a farmer's field, feigned harmlessness in B-grade horror movies, feigned Hippocratic integrity in the Batman series, feigned ignorance—or so I believe—on Dorothy's adventures. It would not be too much of a stretch to add feigned irrelevance in a discreet corner of my Entrails notebook. I of course cannot be sure that he served as the inspiration, but I think it's a fair assumption.

It was late summer when all of this took place, so there was long grass to be found if one looked in the right places. I began gathering a few stalks here and there—next to a phone booth in the A&P parking lot, hiding in a churchyard hedge, poking up through the cracked cement at around the side of my building—and hung my paltry sheaves to dry the way I had seen others dry roses (in retrospect there was no need for me to have hung them upside down, it's not as if there were delicate petals to be preserved). It was a slow process as so much of the grass I found was coated in a film of filth too thick to be acceptable, so it seemed like I would have to go out of the city if I wanted to collect enough grass before winter set in. Fate decided to intervene on my behalf, though, and plant in my head the unorthodox idea of taking a different route home from work. (At that point I had a part-time job in a specialty food store, stocking shelves and operating the cash register. I quit after a few months because a) the carrying of large boxes of lentils and fair-trade coffee beans was giving me unbearable lumbago, and b) the building was old enough that I feared its thick walls contained asbestos, which, with my suspected lung condition, I obviously did not need to be inhaling.) After about a week at a new job I have usually determined the optimal way to get there and back, choosing of course the shortest path which avoids any potential hazards (overly busy intersections, areas under construction, old trees that appear ready to fall, et cetera) and keeps me in the shade as much as possible, as I am quite fair and have a number of suspicious moles. In the first week of September, on a particularly beautiful evening—perfect windbreaker weather: slight breeze, the sky a deepening cerulean—I felt an urge for adventure and decided to go home by a circuitous and previously untravelled route, in spite of the risks involved in entering unknown residential areas. After a pleasant but not overly exciting journey, I ended up a few blocks south of my apartment building. I had been to that part of the street before, just not recently. As I strode home, I happened upon a construction site that didn't look any different than it had months earlier, as if the project had been put on hold or perhaps abandoned completely. A two-meter high chain-link fence surrounded a roughly gravelled area the size of three standard lots. There was nothing to indicate for what manner of building the site was intended; apart from two piles of gravel and a pile of what looked like clay, there was nothing behind the fence but weeds—weeds and long grass. The grass had sprouted up in patches where the layer of gravel was thin or negligible and also grew all along the length of the fence. I was so excited I believe I may have clapped my hands or clicked my heels: I certainly did something that drew strange looks from yet another pair of passers-by. (Am I really the only person whose thoughts occasionally exceed the mind's escape velocity and manifest themselves outwardly?).

At the time I had no way of knowing how much use I would ultimately make of that abandoned construction site, all I knew was that I had inadvertently discovered the mother lode of urban long grass. I hesitated, unsure whether I should take an armful home with me right away or come back when I was more properly attired for the task at hand: I was still in my work clothes and carrying a bag of groceries. It seemed fitting, however, that I should take a token of my discovery with me, so I walked along one side of the fence to select a few of the choicest strands—tall, straight, unblemished by disease or excessive grime—and found that choosing the best would be far from easy: it was all marvellously well suited to what I had in mind, or at least thought I had in mind (if such as distinction is possible). Again I likely let out a yip of glee. Almost at random I picked ten plants, taking care not to damage them in any way; I had not yet determined how I was going to sew with grass, so I wanted to keep my supply in the best shape possible. I had begun carrying around a small pair of scissors for just that reason; trying to pull it out by hand resulted in a) a damaged specimen, b) my hands being cut, or c) both, which was by far the most likely outcome. I snipped them off just above the root, low enough to keep all of the slender leaves, but not so low as to get any of the root structure and its entourage of top soil.

With my little bundle I began walking home, pleased with myself for what I chose to view as my resourcefulness (although that one nagging part of me of course found it necessary to point out that I was just damn lucky). I checked my sprightly step, though, as I came within a block of my building: ahead of me, dressed in his habitual bomber jacket and formless cap, I recognized the shuffling form of Jesse. Jesse was a well-meaning but rather slow reformed junky who lived on the first floor of my building and was inordinately proud of the needle scars on his arms and his hot-plate cuisine. He was utterly harmless, but I did my best to avoid getting into conversation with him—it was too much like having déjà vu.

I slowed almost to a standstill, hoping to give him enough time to get to his apartment before reaching the front door myself. It seemed as though my ploy had worked: he went through the door and shut it behind him without turning around, and I heard a second door open and close inside before I slipped my key into the lock. However, whoever it was that had closed a door, it had not been Jesse. He stood by the mailboxes, where he had been intently reading a Wal-Mart flyer. He was now gaping at me as if I had materialized out of nowhere clad in nothing more than a pair of Mickey Mouse ears and a hot pink Speedo. I smiled and made a poorly disguised dash for the stairs, but recognition dawned on him before I could get there.

"Hey, third-floor guy!" he exclaimed with a wide grin that emphasized his missing incisors. He had not yet figured out my name and I was disinclined to enlighten him.

I stopped and turned to face him, trying to smile pleasantly (I could not bring myself to be rude to him). "That's me, all right. How are you?"

"Good! Hey, you still living on the third floor?"

"That I am," I responded, nodding and looking around for a means of escape. Our conversations always followed the same pattern and this one had so far been like the twenty or so others we had already had.

"Why're you carrying that grass?" he asked. I was about to provide my usual response ("Yeah, actually, you did.") to his usual third question ("Hey, did I ever show you the scars on my arms?") when he reached out to touch my acquisition, jarring me from my search for excuses to leave. As I deftly moved the grass just out of his reach, I realized that we had entered new conversational territory, and I was unsure how best to traverse it.

"Um, this? Why am I carrying this? It's, uh—it's, um—it's for decoration! Yeah, I'm—making a wreath! For Christmas. I mean—for Thanksgiving." I beamed in relief, proud of my clever response (which, in hindsight, no longer seems quite so clever).

Jesse nodded, chewing this over. "Huh. A wreath. That's cool—I guess." He stared at me blankly for a moment before his eyes lit up again. "Hey, you know I got a hot plate in my room there. If you come over some time I'll cook some burgers and we can have some beers."

Ah, back on familiar ground. Attempting to place my voice in the no-man's-land between hesitancy and enthusiasm, I replied, "Wow. That sounds pretty good. Tell you what. Why don't I let you know when I've got some free time?" I actually had a great deal of free time—I was only working three days a week—but there was no way I was going to risk exposure to the salmonella-coated utensils and carcinogenic char that I imagined were part and parcel of dining on Jesse's hot-plate burgers. "I've been pretty busy recently with work and stuff."

"Yeah, sure, whatever, you know. I'm usually around, so, you know, whenever's fine." He pondered this for a moment, and then, glancing to the side, asked in a conspiratorial whisper, "Hey, did I ever show you my arms?"

I couldn't help but smile as I assured him that he had: his consistency was not without a certain ingenuous charm. We took leave of each other, and I checked my mailbox, which contained only a Wal-Mart flyer, and then began my slow trudge up the stairs.

Shamisen Gerry Letting It Rip

2006-09-13T02:41:00.000-07:00

Jerry Gordon (8.27.06)

2006-08-31T19:16:00.000-07:00

IF and OF

Little Billy IF
is a little stiff
because he worries just to much
about it that were this,
or if those were them
what would he be then?
"Perhaps a Spanish soccer star
or a boy named Ben?"

But, little Bobbi OF
wonders just enough
to see that all the this and that
and them and those and thus
are changing all together
while dancing with each other,
and this make Bobbi as she is
and Billy IF her brother.

--
Hommachi

3 shades of gray build a Hommachi sky
and concrete stairways lead pathes
up the daisy
to all happy heavens,
where the honking songs of cranes bleat
with car horns and the black top back beat
of all the heels running for health from the heat
in this city summer business
eek-ahh-no-me.

The men in the suits of their suits--
the slouch sack pant legs color
of construction workers off their job site at 5:30
with a heft canvas bag of tools and what-not
poking sharp bulges along a gravity seam.
The last labor of their day,
getting their bodies home or drunk.
And the salsalsalsalary man's-a-kin with all
the TV spots for weekends sports
who seem to die a day each day
like all the resting rest of us
but with a stress that teems from their leaning lines
on the subway lines
and the bottom lines
and the receeding reason hairlines.

A truck driver
parked in the shade of the gray sky
is screaming a tonefilling tune to the black wires
in his ears and clutching at all his quirks
of jumping back and forth in and out of this cab-high chair
in the truck he's delivering nothing from
but songs and dance
and late Friday-on-the-job-fucking-off
like every good man of culture knows how.

And I, like a self-imaged Jack,
Kerowacked to watch and crook my neck
from left to right to zenith to nadir
to catch glances in my net for trapping wind,
charging my eyes with a po-faced plastic cappicino
(you know the shit I'm talkin' 'bout)
while the muse-axed jazz
plays copy right moods of ambiance
which still sound good to my romantic ear.

And I see myself cast in glass
each time I look
past the 30 foor window-wall I face
to reach the outside through.

And I see you, too.

--
Strangers

I walk the city
tonight as quiet
as the Van Gogh shade
that touches your face
with its almost violet smoke.

If this sky were in mountains
dark enough to be
your blue-black coat of night,
we would not be
spelled out in chemical sums for emotions.

We would feel
with all that romantic hegemony.

From this far, I can see
your eyes looking through
the words you were never named,
through the danger of your parents
never meeting--
never weaving your Celtic nest of hair.

This is where we know
one another
as strangers passing
on opposite sides of a building.

How much of our belongings
are in each others' pockets?

If you listen at a granite wall,
the echo in all its grey
will be my whispering song.

12.3.5
for a Chika Yoshii painting titled: Melissa

--
21 Words for Your Left Breast

Everybody says the eskimos
have 20 words for snow
as though that example
best captures the truth of
each thing's subtle complexity.

Well, I have 21 words
for just your left breast
this morning,
and each is untranslatable
and by noon expired from currency.

Four words described your left breast's shape
in the minutes before you woke
as you shifted against the mysteries in a dream.

Seven more conveyed your left breast as
qualities of weight when in my hand and mouth
and when against me and the sheet
at different angles.

Five words generalized it as stages of arrousal
with special nuances on its density against my tongue
and the nipple's degrees of eraser-like gumminess.

One was for it when I suddenly closed my eyes
and it echoed as a retinal ghost.

Three were for it as tastes.

Two were it as poetic inspirations
that, as yet, have no meaning
in the world of mental awareness.
(Thus they have been excluded from my sum of 21.)

And the last word was for your left breast as
it hung above me like a sky heavy with rain
and I completely lost track of what it even was.

So, the eskimos can keep their 20 words for snow
and can teach them to philosophy students.
I'll just try to pay attention
as the dictionary of your body writes itself in my eyes
and then vanishes before anyone can nod in understanding.

--
Barbie's Been Arrested

Well, finally, Barbie's been arrested
on charges of terrorism
and as a threat to Homeland Security.

I could see it coming years ago, like
when she let me undress her
and rub my body against her tiny nudity.

The bait of passivity.

So human in her hardness
and the excessive concentration of big hair
restricted to her scalp.

She said she didn't shave,
but come on!

And so, I cheered when they led her away
in shackles and the orange jumpsuit of guilt,
as ill-fitting as all her clothes always were.

It's nice to know
one more agent of subversion
is off the streets of the suburbs.
Nice to know
that one more thing I fear
is hidden away.

--
This End of Night

I have no pet.
I only have my ignorance
so I chain it to a leash
and walk it proudly
through this end of night,
dressed up
in elaborate fashions
that never hide the fact
that it is really my ignorance.
People smile as it barks and bays
and yips and yaps
and tries to hump their shoes.
"Oh, so cute." "Look, look at it. It's
just like you," they say
as their dog squats, delicately shitting
polite memories on the sidewalk.

My ignorance sniffs itself
in such delight. It would be happy
to do it all night long, but I drag it on,
against its will. We have our loop to make
and a schedule to keep. We have to get back
to see the man made of light
and nod when our cue is flashed.

I have no pet.
I only have my ignorance.
I walk it proudly
through this end of night.

--
Portrait

From what appears to be
the pocket of your vagina,
you pull out a chair--
from nowhere--and take a seat.

All of us over here
on this side of the train
work our eyes back and forth
beneath our boldly knitted brows
as thought we've finally understood
the words that have always been
written halfway up the sky.

Our first urge is to want
to share this shining confusion.

But how can witnesses converse
in the words of the world they left?

When two small children meet
their first act is to reach
through all the sky that falls
between them.
They grab hold
with nothing in their eyes.

Lost
over here on this side of the train,
I pull out this blank
sheet of paper from my pocket
and draw this self-portrait:
a tree growing
from a howling table-saw.

--
An Old Man Bathing in the Hosoegawa

I have come around the world
to see this,
an old man bathing
in a 6 inch stream
between Osaka apartment buildings.

The dance is the same
as at Banares
as the exposed anatomies
of the bony old
enter the Ganges
in a ritual of river
and soap
and a yellow terry-towel.

He sits on the stone edge,
scrubbing the streets
off his legs,
and then he enters the stream
and works his white suds way up
across the odd rectangle of this back
with its knot-dotted spine
and the wing-severed stumps of this shoulder blades.

A skeleton working away
beneath a thin gauze of skin--
a man
washing the suit of himself.

And I can see how much
he's enjoying it,
how good clean feels.

And I don't mind staring
like a tourist to the sooty gats
who can't back away
from the awe-filled link
of where we all come from
and where we will return.

The body draws itself
to water,
and we dip our hands
as a primordial cup
to pour the baptism's trickle
and remake ourself
clean.

--
When I die
steal my bones
and give some to Ophelia,
so she can weave them
through her hands
like ashy fragile pansies.

And give my clicking
clacking black-
smoked finger joints
and knuckles
to the children 'round my house
who pick all things up
transfixed
and know their bones inside
by feel,
so nothing's fearful
in those cracking facts.
Just drop my brittle digits
in the play-pails by their doors;
mix them in
with plastic toys
and other broken pink parts.

And take my pelvis,
that butterfly-bulbous set of wings,
and perch it on a wall somewhere--
balanced
and Humpty Dumpty frightened.
Or, wedge it up
with rocks you'll find
in someone's weedy garden,
set in amidst the hum of dandelions
and yellow jackets--
all the color that hides just for surprising.

And pour the nonsense sand of me--
my dust and dried white chips--
out in your travels,
forgetting where I am all spread.

But save my femur from the scatter
and stand it in an alcove.
Prop it up
in a place only noticed with desire.
And in the top-notch tiny bowl
float a leaf
you find in passing--
as scrap made beautiful
in realizing something else.

--
As Fallen Flowers Do

Ophelia floats within
her world of fluid blues.
Watching the past grow faint upstream,
she dreams of gravity
and our only moment.

Her shoulders fall.
Her hair looks full of wind.
A bubble escapes from her lips,
rising past paper flowers folded for emotions:

Irises of papyrus for guessing.
Roses of vellum for rememberance.
A hyacinth of cigarette foil for doubt.

They float around her breasts
as fallen flowers do; obscuring
what is too beautiful.
They will never get to burn
and leave their lines of smoke in our eyes.
For that, we must imagine
beyond what is and isn't
possible.

for a Chika Yoshi painting at Panarama 9.10.05

--
*** More of Jerry's poetry can be found at: http://moontriangle.blogspot.com/

Amanda Hare (27.8.06)

2006-08-29T22:42:00.000-07:00

Exist

Twisted, crumpled, broken
Lying beneath ceilings
Running beneath floorboards
Running, hiding, darting
Ceiling above
Ceiling below
Waiting upon hangman's verdict
Stamping piston crashing
Avoid being trampled
Scramble away
Scurry! Scurry!
Poison spraycan waiting
Poison gases waiting
Looking, watching, always ready
Quickly dying-
-Living!
Morsels being scav'nged
Morsels eaten
Stamping pistons finding toughened outer layer
Crushing, smashing, smearing
Living, dying
Inside cockroach domains.

->Amanda used 2 syllables for this poem as her entry to the August Challenge.

Thank you for another literal Literary success! (27.8.06)

2006-08-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

Hello Word Folks!

Reading Words would like to thank everyone who came out to the event this past Sunday, August 27th at Vade Mecvm to read and listen. The event was another smashing success and we look forward to seeing you all at
the next Reading Words, Sunday September 24th.

A special thanks goes to Chika Yoshii who kindly displayed her beautiful paintings.

We would also like to thank the following people for reading at the August event: Hamish Withers, Amanda Hare, Patrick Widdess, Jerry Gordon, Michael Salovaara, Kent English, Gerry McGoldrick (for playing the shamisen!) and Kevin Keane.

We would also like to thank all of the listeners for hearing our proverbial tree fall in the forest
and Vade Mecvm for allowing us to use their beautiful space and partake of their delicious menu.

Check out the blog at http://readingwordskansai.blogspot.com/ to enjoy the words you heard again.

Keep an eye out for next month's challenge--to be delivered soon!

O Literacy!

~Reading Words
Jerry Gordon and Amanda Hare

The Challenge - August 27th, 2006

2006-08-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

This Month's Challenge is:
Syllabic Segregation

The rule is: Write something using only words with the same number of syllables. You read that correctly, every word must contain the same amount of syllables. One syllable words. Two syllable words. Three syllable words. Etc. You get the idea!

Write a sonnet, a haiku, a tongue twister
Write a short or long story, a cliffhanger, a mystery
Write a jumbled gumbo soundscape of gibberish
Write for the PURE unhinged FUN of nonsense

Show us what the English language in your brain sometimes sounds like.

Patrick Widdess (30.7.06)

2006-08-29T20:41:00.000-07:00

Janken

It had always been a sport the nation had excelled at and now they had brought it home. The finals of the international janken championship were being held in Japan and janken fever had swept the country. It was not only school kids who played energetically at every opportunity. Salarymen could also be seen competing with one another enthusiastically, commuters played electronically on their phones and elderly citizens whiled away the afternoons playing in parks and cafes.
Nobody decided anything without a round or two of janken. Companies employed graduates based more on their janken scores than their acadamic acheivements or interview performances, juries would deliberate for hours then reach a verdict after a single round. Even the prime minister was said to have reshuffled his cabinet after a four hour janken session.
Many variations of the sport evolved. Players who were tired of the three standard formations created new ones. There was the machete which required long finger nails, the land mine which was quickly banned in most circles and the atom bomb - a gauranteed winner but it required supple joints which took months of training to attain. A more dangerous variation was extreme janken in which players would hurl a brick, sheet of plywood or chainsaw at their opponents.
Over the last ten days it had been an exciting tournament. Nigeria had unexpectedly defeated Germany and Korea to reach the quarter finals, two Dutch competitors had been disqualified after failing drug tests, and debates continued as to whether a curved hand played by the Argentenian side was a rock as the referee had called it or paper as the English fans furiously maintained. For the last two decades the game had been dominated by the Chinese but now the Japanese team seemed unstoppable. Captained by veteran player Ryou Hashimoto it also included martial arts expert Takeshi Honda and the first female competitor in the finals Mei Inoue. They had played each match flawlessly and stormed through the tournament until as everyone had anticipated it was Japan versus China in the final.
The match was held at Tokyo Stadium. It was a sunny day and by three o'clock the stadium was packed and the heat was blistering. In the centre was a large stage with a big hand at either side. One was in scissors formation and the other was paper. As the start time grew near rock music blared out of the PA, banners waved and a giant fist rose up from the centre of the stage in a cloud of smoke. The crowd went wild as the fist opened and the referee stepped out followed by the two teams. The players all shook hands then stood in line while the two national anthems were played. Then it was time for the final showdown.
Ryou was first to face the Chinese captain Rock (his English stage name.) They took their positions either side of a screen which came up to their chests. Gazing intently they raised and lowered their arms as three lights went out. The stadium resounded with a deafening chant of 'saisho wa gu janken hoi!' The two hands fell in unison and a giant screen showed Ryou's hand in its famous scissors formation. Rock's hand was not a rock, it was paper. The spectators rose to their feet with an almighty roar as Takeshi and Paper took to the stage. Takeshi played rock but Paper pulled a double bluff and his flat palm sent the Chinese supporters into a frenzy. The whole stadium grew tense as Mei and Scissor prepared to do battle. The lights went out, the crowd chanted and a moment after the hands fell for the final time the screen displayed two clenched fists. The crowd murmured as the footage was played back in slow motion. As a replay was called a pained expression fell across Mei's face and she clutched her right arm. The Japanese supporters fell uneasy as a physio rushed towards her. Everyone trembled with anitcipation. The whole Earth seemed to tremble. The Earth was trembling. 'Jishin' said a voice nervously. 'Jishin' came another and another until the ground shook so violently that there was no room for words as some people started running and others remained still or curled up on the ground. The stage was suddenly empty; the competitors all whisked off to safety. As announcements on the PA urged everyone to remain calm the sky blackened and seemed to close in. The heat became stifling and people started to pass out. Others tried to run but the air was like treacle slowing their movements and crushing their bones .... .
'My black hole beats your planet' laughed Zeus.
'Yes' said Mars. 'I should have cut it with my comet. Come on then. Best of three.'

Kevin Keane (30.7.06)

2006-08-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

Monsoon

bird crap splashed on windshields
you hope the rain will wash it
off but the heat after
the downpour makes you wilt
more than the gladiolas,
which glare at you defiantly:
“go back to your own garden─
the house─intruder”
another day of apathy
and itching, malaise sinking
into a sea of sweat
beneath the valley of
fatigue, until the twilight
brings the feeble promise
of cooler nights or cocktails

April Dream

the sun pales before
a burst of yellow freesias
in the shade of cedars
at the park
the iridescent faces
of children jumping rope
blooming --
clouds of blossoms float
on cherry trees
petals rain down
in the hands of the wind
to kiss the newborn earth

Forecast

eerie brilliance of stars --
the blinking of the universe
throwing out the tongues of
tomorrow in black nets
flowing down to earth.
a million mouths murmur
prophecies of the morning.
at dawn only a shivering wind
and a shudder of leaves
remain before the promise
of night

Jerry Gordon (30.7.06)

2006-08-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

Mom's got a new thing
in her lung.
On the phone, she says,
"It's probably lymphoma."
But given her history of surprises,
it could be anything.

So we laugh
across the satellites
that it might be flowers sprouting:
"Marigolds? Daffodils?
Or, maybe a blood red
hybiscus?"

"Nope, it's a rose," she says,
"I can smell it in the chemo."

We hang up and I recall her promise
that her garden would out last her.

--
Mom's Dead

There was a woman
at the end of the mind
in the bronze decor
with assorted bullets
in her teeth.

Silver
Lead
Gold and Steel
forged in Death's little
smelter.

She caught so many
from so many angles
we thought she might never miss,
she might just smile again
with that glitter of circus talent
flashing the spotlight's reflection.

But, there is always one slug
left in the gun
to make all the previous
preparatory.

Bang

And the crowd's faces follow
the imagined trajectory
of what no eye can see
from the distant puff of smoke
at the dim end of the bronze decor
to the woman over there
smiling metallic
but dead.

--
Your Funeral on the Platform

A wild old woman chants some violent magic
at the edge of the platform in Osaka,
her urban hermit hand ticking off invisible boxes
as she shouts into her folded paper--
some racing form or schedule of times
or other tiny-columned text.

I imagine she is conducting a funeral
for you and other ghosts that ride the Loop Line.
She's plucking the pains and hatreds from your flesh
like so many bee-stings in a soul,
extracting the poisons you're to leave here
with us. The stuff we'll grind our teeth to nubs on.
The stuff we'll mix with your ashes
to mold you as our mud-man and prance around
like you are worthy of such dumb reverence.

But you are no longer you.

And, so, in Tennoji, this visitation
by a white-striped moth flapping and flopping
its way to the heel of my left shoe, makes me
love you all anew. To meet you
in these million frazzled edges worth protecting.
I lift my heel off the floor and give you
the chance to climb beneath, giving me the chance
to grind your fragile thorax back to ash
and dusty wings. If I so choose.

I don't.

And all of us here on the train smile
as you flash and crash off towards the light bulb
but lose your way
back out onto the platform.

6.21.06

--
We meet again,
this time on opposite sides of a drum skin,
communicating through the vellum
in the languages of dance and rhythm;
you talk in the ancient tongue
of man moving and becoming bird--
the tradition of transforming
feathers and flight from a business suit--
and I speak in beats,
touching the tensions of flesh
just enough to call you out
of limbo.

7.16.06

--
Dad’s Dance

I start the drum and you appear
standing to my left, dressed
in a grey plaid suit--like all those years
at Sears I have memorized--
black horn-rimmed glasses
and your noble Cherokee nose.
You stand, just listening to the drum
like you have never listened to anything:
with your flesh alive in the blood-loved pulse of rhythm.

And then, slowly, you raise your arms,
stretched out with elbows up.
Your back bends and across your sleeves
a subtle color flashes, a tint of blue
that every set of wings requires.
A scrap of sky so slight it could
put a concrete wall in flight.

And, before a thought can weave a logic,
you dream and your coat of strings
begins its slow transform to feathers.

I keep the beat and build belief with speed
and you ride my release into each finger's tap
and thumping thumb, trusting
mistakes to come from the desert
like the clouds that build behind my eyes
arise of rain-wrought condensation.

You tilt and turn, each pitch and angle
pointed with each touch to skin. Your suit and self
melt inside this choreography of flight.
The 10,000 blue feathers hang,
draping as the lightest gravity.

Turn. Turn bird, man. Turn within your
chalky blues and patterned stripes of black.

I play on, my hands becoming a stronger song.
You dance, becoming bird enough to make me worry
I must somehow sustain you;
worry what I'll fail when I must stop.

Because it's almost time for me to leave.
And, in this glance I take to think that
there's still so far to go, I slow at a mistake.

Looking back to my left, I find you've left.

Needing no time, you've entered the western clouds.
No longer in the feathered blue suit used for dancing.
No longer turning to cues shared with the drum.
You've become a speck on the sky,
moving amidst the outlines of light that ride the clouds.

Now,
each quieting touch merely marks your distances
into the setting sun.

7.15.06

--
Just Dust

To hate, I place my heart up to the mirror
and press it against its depthless double--
flattening one and flattering the other.
The pain is self-inflicted.
The only trace,
some bloody echo of the instant
and all the reasons requiring such violence.

You, I imagine, feel nothing
more than the weight of a forgetful year
as you let ash become a landscape.

I hoped to start a seed
from some 40 years of mud.

But now it is up to me to trust
yet again. So, walking
by a flooded rice field,
I sink my hands into its rich, black thickness,
layered of seasons and frog crap
and 10,000 insect corpses.
Squeezing, the earth sucks,
as though things hidden underground
are gasping for breath.
I can feel my fathers
slipping through my fingers,
unwilling to release me
from a grasping more than gravity.

Standing, the mud starts
to dry on my hands like gloves of earth.
Inside, I feel my pulse
throbbing at my finger tips and palms,
more evident as everything gets a bit constricting.

But, before all the rain evaporates,
I pull out my heart--no different
than a yellow mustard seed-- and plant it
in the garden of my hands.
Between my thumbs, I whisper:
“I vow to abandon you
to the moments.”

7.21.06

--

(For the 92 word challenge)

Burning every word,
the candle is my only companion.
Its tear of light
a stab
through the tiny window of my eye
into night’s long revenge.

In sleep, I watch
the hands of mosquitos
building the humidity
bit by weary bit.

In the house I live
I tell them I’m almost finished with pain
and the night shines
a little more.

The Art - Patrick Widdess

2006-08-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

The Art - Chizuru Masumura

2006-08-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

The Challenge - July 2006

2006-08-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

In May, Reading Words put out a Challenge to the attendees to write something starting with only A,B, or C. Many people accepted so we again threw down the gauntlet and below was July's Challenge.

Quote:

Well, this month, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to write using only the 92 words from this:

The house has long since stilled with sleep but I remain, hunkered in my pool of light. The humidity and buzzing drone of mosquitos and fans are my only live companions. And the night. The night whose candle shines through the window, burning up with every word. Just a little bit more, I tell myself, I'm almost finished. My weary eyes tear up and stab pain in revenge when I force them to focus on the tiny revolving hands of my watch. 2: 30a.m. Just a little bit more, I'm almost finished.

The rules are: Use only the words from the text and only the number of times they appear--thus you get only one "drone." You don't have to use all the words. And, you can add three words of your own choosing. You can write poetry or a short short story or surprise us with an abstractoid explosion. Or, whatever.

Show us how many ways there are to reword 92 words.

Amanda Hare (30.7.06)

2006-08-06T16:58:00.000-07:00

FOR WANT OF A STORM

- Amanda Hare

Weary candles burn in tiny windows. Night hunkers a little bit more in the humidity and remains still. The house remains still. I remain still and watch, only revolving a hand to fan a buzzing mosquito. My only live, droning companions in the night almost finish stabbing through the dirt. I burn up with pain, hunkered in it, weary in remaining still every night since my lovely sleeping companion has remained in the dirt.
My revenge is almost finished. Just revenge, I tell myself. Every fan will still and every eye focus to watch my lovely companion shining in a pool of light. Every hand and fan will buzz words. My eyes tear, focusing on the candles shining through the windows of the still house. My revenge is almost finished.
Stabbing, stabbing stabbing through the dirt. A tiny pool of dirt. Just a little bit more dirt remains. Just a little remains. Just remains. Tears hunker in my eyes, just a tiny word. Remains. Remains I am focused on. The remains of a live companion whose tiny hands focus up through the dirt. My lovely companion remains wearily in the dirt, not long since stilled with sleep. I will watch my companion finish with sleep. Words will shine through my companion, burning up my weariness. I will watch my companion’s tiny hands focusing on the house, focus on the candles.
The night will stab a candle through my companion. My eyes will tear and focus, burnt when the light has forced my companion to words. Live. Live, I tell myself.
I hunker and watch. My revenge is almost finished. My lovely companion, long since stilled with sleep, live. I focus down through the dirt. Almost finished my lovely companion. Almost.

Words added: will, dirt, lovely

Ralph Famularo (30.7.06)

2006-08-05T02:12:00.000-07:00

THE 12 CHALLENGES

- Ralph Famularo

1. Kidnap as many millenium babies as possible.

2. Celebrate Flag-Burning Day.

3. Give birth while chewing gum.

4. Read the TV news in a clown costume.

5. Hang "Road Closed" signs on "Open Campus" days.

6. Organize a group of Anarchists.

7. Teach a parrot Esperanto.

8. Forgive Hitler & Himmler from a synagogue podium.

9. Hand-out cigars at a funeral.

10. Eat a chocolate crucifix.

11. Replace the men & women silhouettes on restroom
doors
with question marks.

12. Take a librarian to a "Battle Royal" pro-wrestling
match.

The Art (25.6.06)

2006-07-07T02:26:00.000-07:00

Goth Carter (25.6.06)

2006-07-07T02:25:00.000-07:00

Kent English (25.6.06)

2006-07-07T02:24:00.001-07:00

GALATEA

Kent English

"Pygmalion, son of Belus, fell in love with Aphrodite and, because she would not lie with him, made an ivory image of her and laid it in his bed, praying to her for pity. Entering into this image, Aphrodite brought it to life as Galatea, who bore him Paphus and Metharme."

Robert Graves

The Greek Myths

Chapter 1

Feet. Or rather, sweaty feet. I have always thought that popcorn smells like sweaty feet.

It's not really the smell of popcorn itself that bothers me so much as that of the warm salty butter that has usually been slathered over it with greedy abandon. There's just something sickly about that aroma, and given my sensitivity to such things, if I'm around it long enough, like a greasy larva it creeps up my nose and squeezes into a spot behind my eyes where it begins to throb. It was for that reason—and a suspicion that the buttered variety was more likely to grow mould—that I had chosen to use unbuttered popcorn, and the two grocery bags I was carrying home were, I thought, filled with the last of it that I would need.

Although night had long since established itself, some of the day's precocious heat was still lurking about in the streets. As I was making my way along the row of old limestone houses leading up to the laundrette that marked the corner of my street, I felt a rivulet of sweat break free near my neck and work its wretched way down my back, sending shudders of revulsion through to the ends of my extremities. I berated myself for having put on my windbreaker, for even having taken it in the first place: spring had yielded quite a bit earlier than usual, so it had been a couple of weeks since there had been a need for anything more than a T-shirt and shorts. Yet, as a detached, objective part of my mind noted with frustration, I would without a doubt take my windbreaker again tomorrow and every subsequent day until autumn finally took firm hold, and something warmer was required. It was, this same droning part of my mind conjectured, a kind of security blanket that I used to shield myself from the scrutiny of the world, even at the expense of my own comfort. This knowledge was ultimately more distressing than the temporary agony caused by the sweat coursing towards my waist: sensations fade, but circumstances can remain like a scab that is picked at and picked at until a scar takes permanent root.

Quickening my pace as I turned right at the laundrette, I soon reached the steps of my apartment block, where I gently set the two bags down, careful not to spill any of my hard-earned popcorn. That done, I immediately took off my windbreaker and paused to let what little breeze there was caress me through my damp work polo. Standing there, enjoying that delicate embrace, I felt that there was something a little different about my surroundings, but I could not immediately say what it was: the faded sienna paint was still peeling off the door, the ivory Honda Civic was still loyally awaiting its negligent owner to rescue it from the encroaching rust and weeds, the brush to the south of the building was still littered with empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette packs. I was perplexed until the wail of an ambulance's distant siren began competing with that of a tomcat making his rounds a block or so away, and it suddenly came to me that it was the familiar wail of heavy metal guitars that was joyfully absent. That realization was enough to silence even my annoying internal commentator: any night that my neighbour's stereo did not cause my wall to vibrate in time to a Mötorhead bass line was a night to cherish. With a smile lighting up my face, I tied my windbreaker around my waist and took out my keys.

My smile had diminished a bit by the time I reached my door, but traces of it still remained in place of the grimace that usually marked my features after climbing the three flights of stairs to my bachelor apartment. I set the grocery bags down again, this time, being out of breath, allowing a few pieces to fall out onto the floor. I had thought that moving into a third-storey apartment would help me get in shape, yet a year had passed and I was still left panting on a daily basis, which made me think that there was perhaps a congenital defect in my pulmonary system, maybe a diaphragmatic hernia or bronchiectasis. However, when I had recently gone to see my GP—the venerable Randy P. Lithau, M.D.—in the hope of gaining a referral to a lung specialist, he merely sighed and informed me that a daily three-minute climb did not "constitute a sufficient amount of exercise, so I'm hardly surprised that it wears you out. Get active, man! And for God's sake stop worrying so much!" Yes, well, although I was sure the good doctor had admirable intentions, I was all too aware that in my vulnerable state, sustained exertion could result in a cardiac event, so I had opted to proceed with caution. I devised my own exercise routine, which involved going down to check my mailbox at least once every hour that I was home during regular delivery hours. That allowed me to not only "get active", but also to reduce my anxiety levels by regularly confirming that a) no important mail had just been delivered, and b) I had not missed anything the last time I looked. I was sure that, had I the opportunity to tell him, Dr. Lithau would be proud; unfortunately his secretary had called me shortly after my last visit to inform me that because of his busy schedule, Dr. Lithau was being forced to ask some of his patients to transfer their business to other clinics. She was kind enough to provide me with the number of a doctor recommended by Lithau himself; it, however, turned out to be for a psychiatrist's office. I chose to assume that it was an innocent mistake, despite the significance imparted to it by the part of my mind that calls itself rational.

The door to my apartment, though of sturdy manufacture, looked as if a small rhinoceros had taken a profound disliking to it, and as such, I was not overly confident in its integrity. I had therefore installed extra locks—seven, to be precise—as a precaution, so my breathing was almost back to normal by the time I finally got the door open. I slipped out of my shoes just past the threshold and turned to take the bags from the hall. Crossing the room to the large box in the far corner, I emptied them onto my now considerable pile of popcorn.

Two and a half weeks earlier I had taken a job working behind the concession counter of a small downtown movie theatre—The Mind's Eye Cinema—which specialized in independent and foreign films. I generally went there at least once a month (I have a thing for subtitles), and on a recent visit to watch an Italian film that wasn't playing anywhere else, I had noticed a HELP WANTED sign as I as buying my medium ginger ale (which, incidentally, was to be the last soft drink I would ever purchase at a theatre: the storage area for the cups, at least at The Mind's Eye, is far from meeting my idea of sanitary, a fact which I was later asked to stop mentioning to customers). I had been wondering how best to obtain the popcorn I needed for Galatea, and the opportunity that had presented itself seemed highly appropriate, as I was also in dire need of employment, or at least of a source of income. I take particular pleasure in solutions that simultaneously solve more than one outstanding problem; there is an aesthetic quality to them not unlike an elegant chess move that achieves both defensive and offensive objectives at once.

After a perfunctory interview, during which I was able to ascertain (without sounding too desperate, I hope) that any popcorn left over at the end of the night was up for grabs, I was told to show up the following day for my first shift. The work was not what I would describe as fulfilling or stimulating, but I was able to quickly fill my popcorn box, despite one of my four shifts being in the afternoon. Any time I was working in the evening, I would take along four grocery bags, and was on average able to fill two of them. My bank account unfortunately did not full up as quickly—did not, in fact, fill up at all—but with the first of my biweekly paycheques I was able to buy myself a much needed respite from the recent influx of eviction threats. Not that I was likely to get kicked out: my landlord, Sean, had been a friend —or at least a classmate—of mine at university and had inherited his small housing business when his father had suffered an aneurysm while ice-fishing two years earlier. Sean owned and managed three rather rundown apartment buildings just outside the downtown area and did his best to survive in a business about which he knew little and for which he was ill-equipped: romantic, pushover types are rarely successful in any kind of managerial position. When it came to tenants like myself who were always late or even months behind in payment, his strategy was to bombard them with letters of warning, ranging from pale lemon for slight infractions through to a deep goldenrod, which signalled a major issue and was a precursor to the series of red letters of pending eviction, of which there were again five shades, each with increasingly dramatic threats. I had even heard tell of a fluorescent orange please-vacate-the-premises-immediately letter, but I suspect that even it, like the others, carried no more tangible threat than the shrill yapping of a toothless Chihuahua. Standing six-foot-four, thick as a lumberjack, with a shaved head and eyes the colour of moss, Sean was physically more intimidating than a toothless Chihuahua, at least until someone confronted him. At the slightest indication of hostility, his startling eyes would mist over, and he would seem to physically shrink, not as though he were coiling his bulk for a retaliatory strike, but rather as if he were trying to make himself a smaller target in the face of what must have seemed to him like curare-tipped arrows. All this I had known since the days when I sat next to him in first-year Latin: the professor had once asked Sean to read a portion of the homework aloud and had then challenged his version of the translation. It had left Sean shaking, mute and on the verge of tears. (The professor, a kind but distracted fellow, had later realized that he had been looking at the wrong section and had offered an apology after class. Sean went on to major in classics, and his colourful letters all included small-print footers of cryptic Latin phrases like OMNE IGNOTVM PRO MAGNIFICO or ALIQVANDO BONUS DORMITAT HOMERVS .) I knew, therefore, and I'm certain others quickly learned for themselves, that if one merely spoke to him in person, it was preposterously simple to get extensions or work out payment plans. Of course a thread of guilt always followed me after my timid (for I, too, dread confrontation) manipulations of dear old Sean, but it was tempered by a) my need to hang on to my apartment, and b) the knowledge that I would never cheat him out of any money in the long run. (Not unless I really had to, anyways.)

However, I had recently been pushing my luck and limited negotiating skills further than I liked—I had received the maroon letter of pending eviction, the last and most sinister—so my acceptance of the concession job was timely. The job did, unfortunately, have one glaring (as in baseball-stadium-halogen-floodlight glaring) drawback: the butter vat and its insidious miasma. By the end of each shift my cranial pain centres were firm in the pulsing grip of the vat's malicious fist. It had seemed fitting that I should suffer in my pursuit of popcorn—I guess I saw it as a kind of final offering to the idea of Galatea, and such offerings are meaningless without sacrifice—but I had not anticipated the extent to which my poor olfactory nerves would be afflicted. I was therefore very thankful for the large bottle of Tylenol 3's that I had pocketed while my grandfather's room was being cleared out after he passed away (of lung failure, I should add, so my concerns are not entirely without basis). Without their analgesic aid I doubt I would ever have lasted behind the concession's coral counter, and with my pill supply starting to run low and my popcorn supply exceeding its goal, I could now ask if I could be transferred to the box office, which was a safe distance from the dreaded vat.

That night I was beset as usual by the throbbing, but as I turned from my popcorn eager to self-medicate, I noticed with a shock that I had left the door wide open. I gingerly hopped over Galatea, lying as she was in the middle of the floor, and stepped to the door. I remembered then that I had left it open in order to retrieve the few pieces of popcorn that had fallen out in the hallway. Luckily they were all within reach of the door, so I was able to avoid stepping on the cracked sorrel linoleum in my socked feet. I studied the pieces once they were in my hand, trying to decide whether or not to add them to the pile, but given the filth of the hallway and the impressive size of my hoard, I opted to toss them in the garbage. Then, once the door was securely locked and double-checked, and my windbreaker was carefully draped over the back of a kitchen chair, I was finally able to head toward the bathroom.

I thoroughly washed my hands and forearms and dried them on a fresh yellow towel, then washed my hands again and dried them on a fresh white towel. (I have developed a wonderful—patentable, even—system for towels: blue is for when I wash my hands while or after cleaning, green is for when I am cooking, yellow is for general use, and white is reserved for when I have washed my hands after drying them on another towel. I can hardly imagine what my life was like before I initiated this system.) I then took the bottle from its spot in the medicine cabinet and tapped two precious pills into my palm. These I took to the kitchen, where I tore off and folded in half a paper towel on which to set them while I poured a glass of distilled water. I always drink a large glass of water (usually distilled, although reverse osmosis is also acceptable) when taking tablets. Caplets and gelcaps I can swallow no problem, without water and regardless of their size, but tablets always feel as if they're stuck just below my Adam's apple. I know that's not really the case: the pills themselves are busy dissolving in my gastric juices and distributing their pharmacological bounty; it's just a residual sensation —probably caused by the powder tablets so readily shed—but it's nevertheless distressing. Given the choice, I never purchase tablets, but of course, considering the way I had obtained my T-3's, I had little choice but to grin and bear the itching in my throat.

The pills reluctantly went down, and I gargled the last of the water to rid my pharynx of any remaining powder. After I had given my glass a good washing, I lifted my arm and sniffed my sleeve: it, like the rest of clothing and person, was saturated with the smug stench of the concession counter. Disgusted, I began stripping, and everything except my boxers went into the laundry basket that I kept next to the door. A dresser stood in the corner opposite my box of popcorn, and from it I took a pair of jeans that was worn from countless washings and a camouflaged T-shirt that was missing one of its sleeves. Lifting them to my face, I inhaled deeply and let the scent of fabric softener—one of the truly great inventions of the modern era—dispel the olfactory memory of buttered popcorn. Already starting to feel better, I got dressed and then turned to look upon Galatea lying incomplete on the floor.

Kevin Keane (25.6.06)

2006-07-07T02:24:00.000-07:00

After the Bang

churches cats and banks
melting.
crows cried
their blackness camouflaged
by carnage.
and the clouds bled.

— by Kevin Keane

At the Resort

white waves
white sand
tranquil horizon at my feet

the sky slumbers in the mirror sea
the sea floating up to the sky
gazes
down

— by Kevin Keane

Persona

the mirror which has sheltered every countenance
has befriended the snide eyes that unblinking lie
the static ears that listen though deaf
the gaping mouths that move but never speak

the looking glass has hosted desolate parties
of babbling crowds and diplomats launching vague words
like secret missiles of the night

the faces of the world have hidden the gardens
of the mind and masked the colors of dreams

— by Kevin Keane

Arthur Ponsonby

2006-07-07T02:23:00.000-07:00

Kelsye Nelson (25.6.06)

2006-07-07T02:22:00.000-07:00

Amanda Hare (6.25.06)

2006-07-07T02:15:00.000-07:00

Amanda read the short story "Big Boy" from David Sedaris' hilarious book Me Talk Pretty One Day.

ABC's are best

ABC's are best because
continents and big architechtural constructions
can be beautifully conversed about.
Also amazing characters
can be clearly created
and bonds can be cut
and also crystallized.
Buddies are arrested by amigo's conversations
Civilizations are blown apart
and close associations bonded and annihilated
children and adults are chastised, cajoled
belittled, ashamed, cuddled and beautified
Billys, Bobbys, Christys, Amandas
Alices, Barbaras, Clarks and Andrews,
All are christened.
Before ABC all alphabet characters
bow and cringe
ABC's are best because
a big chunk about certainly anything
conceptualized by anyone
could certainly be articulated, artisitcally, concisely, anyway, anyhow

Jerry Gordon 6/25/06

2006-07-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

ABC--Adam's Abstract Ass

As Adam began another boring afternoon announcing another bird as another bird and another cat as another bean-brained cat, a big announcement came. As always, the announcement came from the Almighty and all Almighty announcements came in Aramaic, an annoyance as Adam always associated Aramaic as an angelic, but ass-kissy, tongue.

But, after a bit’a contemplation, Adam asked a beast at-hand, “Ah, before’s announcement’s Aramaic, a bit, abnormal?” But, as always, the animal avoided answering Adam and acted as if chewing amaryllis bulbs constituted an acceptable conversation between creatures.

As can be conceived, Adam broke, cried and angrily attacked, berating the beast, “Ask and answer!! Ask and answer!! ‘at’s a conversation, ai?”

Adam beat his chest angrily.

But, after a brief break, Adam conceived of a brilliant alternative. Adam began constructing an abstract companion, and after another break, Adam began creating an actual companion, announcing it as “Adam’s Constructivist Alteration Against A’Communicative Beasts and an Anally Compulsive Almighty.”

As Biblical authorities cite, Adam began creativity as a blasphemous act.

But, after all, consider Adam’s context. An almighty ‘at could create all animals and astronomical bodies couldn’t adjust animals’ aural/oral apparatea about a centimetre and allow beasts conversational acts.? Come again?!! ‘At ain’t brain breakin’.

Anyway, after another afternoon break, Adam began building an actual companion. But, as always, actual creativity comes of abstraction, and Adam began by creating a couple anatomical aspects completely abstract at ‘at age: Breasts and an ass. Adam began by crafting a concrete breast and an animal crap ass.

But critics bemoan, complaining, “An ass ain’t abstract, as Adam ‘ad an ass.” And art criticism is born.

Breasts are accepted as actual abstractions, but Creationist critics always complain against an ass being abstractification by Adam. But, consider Adam’s actual condition. Alone, Adam couldn’t aptly ascertain his own ass’s actual appearance anymore than an ambiguously bumpy backside. Assuredly, Adam created asses as conceptual and abstract art.

Thus This

On this train
with this man holding his case
and this roar rumble
through this dark tunnel
and the universe
All
coming together thus,
I lean out
and kiss your head
to participate in the perfection
like this.

It Asks

"Why are you here?" it asks.
I'm here to drop the bubble of poetry into your vein,
to commit the necessary crimes of shame and grandeur,
to abandon every mask of self I love and therefore fall in hate with,
to set the clock forward and back,
to always be arriving in the chariot of doubt,
to learn how to carry each person into burning buildings,
to film this slow-motion car crash.
I'm here to ride the tattoo ink and build castles of smoke,
to appear,
to drift beyond sanity,
to keep each creek in tune,
to miss the chances others take
and paint a single corridor of mind with soot and prophesy.
I'm here to lose my way and every sense of punishing sureness.
I'm here to be fearless
because what matters is to get hit in the face, to smile in photos
and to encircle my arms with flowers.
My healing and decay ressemble my mirror of pride and envy.
I'm here to touch the surfaces of water,
to ruin what I've worked for and ignore what's important.
I'm here to look into your eyes as you look away,
awaiting your return before I flee into dream bedrooms.
I'm here to lock doors wide open and collect the nails of effects.
I'm here to beg and be betrayed, as is every bastard son's birthrite.
I'm here to breathe and never cease returning.

Old Men

This summer, everywhere I look, I see old men holding onto things, as though the buildings are about to come apart or start tumbling down onto our hats.

Two days ago, walking in an underground mall in Namba, an old man who had wrinkles in his pants which were older than me was leaning with all his leverage against the store fronts, slowly moving from palm-press to palm-press against the wall. Lean hard to the wall. Long pause. Move. Lean hard. Long pause. . .

The rest of us flowed quickly past. At one point while I was watching, he came to a window front that he judged wouldn't support his weight, so he "dashed" to the next section of wall before pausing again.

Yesterday, I saw a man in clothes not of this season simply frozen static, both hands up against an apartment building's corner. As I rode by on my bike, he didn't shift or twitch. The morning sun slowly turned his shadow beneath him.

And just now, as I crossed a busy intersection to the east of here, I saw a man draped in a shade of faded green clinging to the grey steel box that controls the traffic signals. His arms were hooked over the far edge of the box as though his boat were about to tip and he knew to lose touch with the thing would set him adrift alone in the seas of change. His grip was locked and scared, perhaps how all of ours should be if we really knew what was what.

For some unreasonable reason, shabbly-dressed old men always make me imagine prophets. Mumbling strange impromptue incantations. Their messages too complex to understand. Too many tongues in their mouthes for even them to fathom, much less for us to get it when they speak or try to write it down on grimy paper or scratch it on the sidewalk. Aware of this impossiblity, I feel somehow urged to leap towards them in imitation, to somehow simply follow their lead without understanding. Someday I might. You might find me there on the railing near the freeway on-ramp, covered in car exhaust soot and clinging to a yellow caution triangle with my fingernails growing long and thick.

You might honk, but I'll be too absorbed in memorizing the stringing loops of truth to nod.

Kelsye Nelson (5.28.06)

2006-06-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

Petit Mort

Forgive this sweetgrass woman
This sweet scent bare back
Plagued by the passion king
Tremble in your dream death, man in my bed
Dream death, dream death and
Trace the terrible scar across my belly, my breast
Tactile woman, purple woman, oversleeping
Luxury of laxitude, trash mouth
Trash mouth man in my bed burning my insides
Sparring chitchat, fearing my father, together,
The threat of the boot
Ducking under cover of tall meadow grass,
Sandal-free toes tracing curve of freckle-dappled leg
Only the animals know where we lay
Trash mouth trash mouth my sides are burning
My insides are burning on this
Lonely pine needle bed, magnificent receptacle of death
Dream death, dream death, my dream death
My little death, passion king
Forgive this sweetgrass woman.

Desert Revival

I.

I met my friend in the desert; the woman who is occasionally blonde and who sings in bars where people stand and clap and fall in love with the way her voice breaks on the high notes and overpowers the clamor of the bar, the street and the din in their heads. She held my hand. She led me into unknown lands, over dry, crumbly ground. She identified the Joshua trees, warned me not to scrape my bare white shins on the stubby cacti and whispered to me that whiskey tastes better when it's warmed by the sun. She loves Jesus. She wants me to love Jesus too, and I do, when I am near her and she is singing to me, or laughing drunkenly at what I have written in recent wandering weeks, or when she is standing near and our arms rub against each other. I'm not supposed to lust for her, so I pretend that I don't. She pretends that I'm not pretending.

I'm married. She's divorced. We both partnered with those sweet sensitive types. Neither of us are as patient or giving as our husbands. We boss and bitch. We moan and groan. Her husband wouldn't stand for it. He left. He was strong in that way. My husband is not strong in that way. Thank Jesus for that.

She loves me. We pretended otherwise. I acted like I didn't know that she was pretending not to lust for me. She suggested the wine. I read her what I wrote on the plane, on the way to see her. She cried. Then she laughed. Then she took me to the guest bedroom in her grandmother's house made me kneel on the bed, facing her facing me.

She likes to sing songs written by men with deep thundering voices. Those Seattle men. Those forceful, soulful, dreary, men. She assumes their power. It isn't right – their darkened voices, darkened souls, darkened songs coming out of her round desert glow face. She has baby pure skin. She has chubby arms. She has Marilyn Monroe lips, and breasts. She has dark circles under her eyes. She had draped my arm across her thighs and run her rough, guitar string fingertips from my wrist to my shoulder. Goosebumps in sweltering summer heat.

She wouldn't like what I am writing. I'm not supposed to lust for her. She would tell me this isn't the way to Jesus. This isn't the path to salvation.

I gave her the money to record her first CD. My husband told me not to do it. I said he doesn't understand how talented she is. He told me I don't understand how poor we are. I do understand. That is why what I do give is all the more valuable. I would much rather invest in her songs than a week's worth of beer and bread. Which is really the pointless waste? She doesn't know about our money problems. You're a success, she says. I'll never be like you, she says. Thank Jesus for that.

II.

It's Tuesday and I left her a week ago. My husband is cooking spaghetti and listening to the war reports on the radio. I'm sitting at the table with my laptop, surfing the Internet, tying up the phone line. She called me earlier, but I made an excuse and hung up. I loathe the sterilized long distance connection. I can't see her skin. I can't see the dark circles under her eyes. God has a new plan for me, she told me. The record producer loves her. He's going to marry her and make her a star. She'll send me a signed CD in the mail. Fantastic, I said. I hate the record producer, but I love getting mail from her. Evidence of her existence.

III.

My husband pretends I don't lust after her. He takes me to bed and lets me assure him of my fidelity with my rolling moans and rocking hips. He spoons me afterwards, his arm heavy on my hip. His thick fingers intertwine with mine. I make my breath deliberately slow and pretend I'm sleeping, not daydreaming. It'll be at least another year until I see her again. Thank Jesus for that.

Amanda Hare (5.28.06)

2006-06-02T04:43:00.000-07:00

My Grandmother's Hands
- Amanda Hare

Why do people value pictures and family portraits so much? Is it to keep a shrine of reverence to the dearly departed? Or to keep the presence of a stern hand pushing down on the still living? Or is it just to keep fresh the image of someone who has passed on which we would otherwise forget?

Whatever the reason I'm glad I live in an age where photographs are a real thing and not just wishful thinking in some science fiction book.

Every day my grandmother smiles up at me from the family portrait that I missed because I had to work. Don't worry, I'm there thanks to my mother's skill with photoshop.

The woman in the picture is very much the one I remember. Her gray hair still shot through with streaks of blond and an intricate map of wrinkles laid over her face. She was strong enough to raise 10 children under the umbra of an alcoholic husband an d yet not lose her sense of generosity. Every person who walked through her door was welcomed and asked their fod allergies. It might be five years before she saw them again but she would remember who had an allergy to peanuts and who to brusselsprouts.

Most of all, Gramma was patient. She ran a tight ship but there was always time to stop and wait for the child who was slow at picking berries (me) or a kind word and gentle guidance when someone spilt an entire bowl of cake batter all over the floor (also me!).

There are only a few memories of my grandmother that are very clear. In each one her face is fuzzy although I clearly remember in one her eyes but most of all, her hands.

One morning when I was five, I woke up just after the sun and being five I jumped out of bed and went to see who else was awake. My grandmother was ambling around the room that served as kitchen, dining room, laundry room, entryway and in the winter, clothes drying space. Oh, and don't forget the old fashioned wood stove and the homemade barrel stove that served to heat the house.

My grandfather designed the house and most of my uncles chipped in to build it. Still today the trunk that was the main house support is in the kitchen of the same, but slightly remodelled, house where my cousins now live.

Gramma was a short woman, she got progressively smaller with age thanks to a calcium deficient diet from being poor, and at the age of five I almost came up to her shoulder. That morning I found she had already gone out to the woodpile and laid a bed of wood on last night's cold ashes. She was busy balling up newspaper and stuffing it in the stove.

Seeing me she called me over and said, "Do you want to learn how to light the stove?"

Now this was an exciting thing. By this time I had already learned the power of flame after almost setting the house on fire by playing with my mom's cigarette lighter behind the couch. Although the house didn't go up in flames the drapes certainly did and I still burn with embarassment at the thought of a firefighter's daughter burning down his home.

Hooking her foot around a stool so I could peer down into the stove, Gramma explained how she had put the wadded newspaper between the logs so the dry bark would catch.

Covering my hand in hers, she helped me hold the match to the side of the Eddylite box at just the right angle and strike. To this day I still light matches at that exact angle but cigarette lighters are beyond me.

Marilyn Mendoza (5.28.06)

2006-06-02T02:07:00.000-07:00

Waiting

Writing is lighting my path
stumbling and bumbling my way for a laugh
Just for today
I strive to obey
I cry, I sigh,
but TRY, always TRY
You must move ahead until your dead
or die before your time
active, not passive
taking chances
never refusing dances
The prance of life
Is full of strife
but all we know until we go
never let life defeat you or beat you
just greet you
rise up and be brave
Its your life you:ll save
we;re too soon in the grave
be great
don:t wait

Manilla 1990 Tondo

Looking out of my air conditioned taxi or *aircon* as they say ther in Tondo. Tondo- Manila, where the poorest of the poor live. Tondo, the slum of slums. Sights sounds and smells of Tondo engulf me.

A mother in rags sits on a sidewalk holding her naked baby. It Christmas in Tondo.

Another family push a cart. The cart is their home. A baby is asleep in their home. A baby is asleep in the cart on top of all the familys possessions.

The streets are full of garbage. Some of the garbage is on fire. Some of the garbage just rots in the hot tropical sun. The smell is detestable

People talk here of *Smoky Mountain:, the major grbage dump of Manila. People live there right in the middle of the dump, mostly orphins, and make a living by scavaging rubbish. It reminds me of a living hell, like Gehenna, the burning garbage dump in Jerusalem depicted in the Bible.

People in Topndo speak of Smokey Mountain with hope. "At least the children are earning more than we can here" they say.

Grease tht hs be reused it seems since the beginning of time permeates the whole Manila, but in Tondo its much worse. It combines with the worst pollution you can imagine to form a burning noxious poison that affects all the senses. In Manila most people have handkerchiefs pressed to their faces at all times. In Tondo I saw not one.

In Manila, the residents are poor but they sacrifice and scratch for their dignity. They hide their poverty behind * Calvin Klein* jeans and gold chains. I am told they sometimes don:t eat for days to acheive this,

In Tondo there is no such pretense. The poverty is deeper. The residents accept their poverty and try to survive and even thrive despite it.

Children of all ages and sizes, looking in our aircon taxi, with longing begging for a Christmas present. I look at them hopelessly, give them a few pesos, and wonder how I would feelif our places were changed. My friends here call it an accident of birth. I call it frightening. How would I manage in their place. What can I do for the children?

Do I see hope in Tondo? A "calesa" (a horse drawn carriage) is being used to give a lucky family a Christmas ride to a lucky family in Tondo. The horse is so skinny you can see all his ribs, and yellow foam is seeping out of his mouth. I wonder how such a skinny hourse can carry such a load. The family is a large one, as are so many Filipino families. This is an extended one, grandparents, parents, and as always children upon children are packed in the calesa dressed shabbily but in their holiday best. I wonder how long the family has saved up for this treat. All year probably. They look happy. This is a major characteristic of Filipinos . To be happy despite adversity, despite this hell of a life in Tondo. Filiipinos call it being flexible, I call it a miravle.

I see mostly happy people here in the Phillippines. "We are happy because we are together", a Tondo store owner tells me. " We have our family, friends, we share our food and possessions, we gather together. The family is everything." I observe the Tondo residents touch constantly. Haznds join, arms around shoulders, pushing, crowding against one another, laughing together, teasing, always together.

Some say there is a paradox in Tondo----The Santo Nino Church-- Santo Nino means child Saint and represents the baby Jesus. There are many Santo Nino churches in the Phillippines, b ut Tondos is one of the oldest and well known. We attend Midnight mass but we cant fit inside. The humanity is overwhelming. We end up in the parking lot. A loud speaker blasts "God bess you merry gentlemen" and two priests wse can hear but not see conduct a mellow but lovely service. A stranger takes my hand and wishes me a merry Christmas.

After the service the church empties and I climb the gray stone steps to peek inside. I am dazzled by gthe sight of the Santo Nino shining wsith a crown of pure gold framing a sweet face with silky brown hair. Flowers surround him. I am surrounded suddenly with the feeling of joy the people must feel when the Santo Nino is paraded through the streets during Tondos famous festivals.

There is no accident the people here shine with a spiritual beauty I have never before wittnessed.

An old toothless woman takes my hand. Merry Christmas and welcome to Tondo. She looks happy this christmas. So am I

Kevin Keane (5.28.06)

2006-06-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

Monday Morning, 5 a.m.

under a sullen sky
you make this barren house
your lover, doors whining
in the wind─
and search for a dream that would
erase the armies of hate
and swallow up the night
and hug the relentless
infinity of waves
and light

─by Kevin Keane

Prehistory

Silence is silver,
shifting chrome reflecting
dreams grasped by the eyes
Up on green hills the wind
speaks in mute syllables
born before language cried
out after the womb.

─by Kevin Keane

Jerry Gordon (5-58-2006)

2006-05-29T04:36:00.000-07:00

The Halo

The first day of jury deliberations went nowhere.

There could be no beginning the discussion of evidence, no review of arguments, and definitely no polling of guilt or innocence until John, jurist #4, turned off his halo. That was something all the rest of us agreed on.

But, there was no reasoning with him. He simply sat there silently, one leg lazily crossed over the other. He didn’t talk back or argue or even explain why he wouldn’t shut the thing off. If he had, that might have changed how we felt about the whole issue. But nope, he just sat there and thumbed through the book he’d brought to each session of the trial while that thin circle of light hovered just above the round of his head. Stubborn bastard; he just sat there going through that little book and glowing.

He was forever turning the pages, back and forth. He didn't have a page marked, as far as I could tell. No one ever saw him actually reading it, and I spoke to most everyone. He just browsed, seemingly without beginning or end. Jurist #8 joked to me about it on that first day as we stood at the wall urinals after lunch. He said, "If John could decide where to start, he could use that halo for a reading lamp." I laughed with him because it seemed funny, but then stood there in front of that somewhat abstract shape of white porcelain and silently considered if it was in fact possible: if in fact the light would cast as far as the book. I didn’t think it could. And the book wasn't really an interruption. The halo was. That’s what was really causing the problem.

The gold ring of vague light was clearly visible to the naked eye, but it wasn't bright. It didn't glow strong enough to create a shadow any farther than the edge of his brow, and I didn't really think it was a distraction in the beginning. But, gradually, everyone else seemed to find that is was impossible to continue on with the halo lit. It seemed to become something of "a matter.” There was discussion about it outside the jury chambers. Whispers and low talk, you know, when John was at the vending machine or out of earshot.

Jurist #3, a woman who lived in the desert and asked us to call her by her middle name, Helen, was developing a multi-stranded theory about how the halo could go unnoticed in the jury selection process. The parts of her thesis that I couldn't follow involved hypnosis. I could never keep track of who was supposed to have been hypnotized. In another theory, which I liked the idea of but had unanswered questions about, Helen said that the lawyers were unable to see the halo because their souls were clouded. I asked her why we could all see it. Weren't any of our souls clouded? She said I obviously answered my own question and left it to get a styrofoam cup to mix some powdered medication in.

But the part of her theory that seemed to fit the general feeling of the members of the jury was that John could control it, that he could turn it off and on like a flash light. But Helen wasn't satisfied with us simply agreeing on that much. She wanted to pin down more of it. She felt driven to explain how he controlled it. It seemed like without getting the rest of us to agree that John was given the special power of illumination by aliens or by a lightning strike, she wouldn’t settle for the fact that we all agreed that John could turn the thing off. Everyone else just wanted him to get rid of it or make us stop seeing it. By flipping a plastic on/off switch, removing a battery or however.

On the first day, we broke early after lunch, aware that we would get nowhere.

On the morning of day two, we all waited for John to arrive. Everyone knew what everyone else was wondering. The room became heated with the dull electricity of anticipation. Jurist #8 made several quiet jokes to two of the women, but they only laughed in courtesy. I became worried that sweat would stain my shirt, and didn’t want to take my jacket off just in case. When we heard him at the door, the room hushed. The door opened, and when he came in, his halo was still glowing.

As I looked at it on that second day, I thought it was rather a waste of a halo. It lit up a blurry ring on the crown of his head, but because he didn't seem to take much care of his hair, the ring didn't appear as crisp as I imagined it could. It was nothing very impressive. It seemed a bit of a shame. I thought that it would have been put to much better use on the head of jurist number five, a beautiful woman from, I think, Vietnam. She had rich black hair that she was obviously very proud of. She gave out audible sighs of loss when strands became snagged on the screws that attached the seat-back. She would have done the halo real justice. I'm sure it would have been dazzling on her.

John took his seat with his book in hand. Everyone looked at each other like, “what are we going to do now?” It seemed like an affront to us all. He knew how we felt. He knew what we wanted. There was a raw silence that I was very afraid to break. I watched as thoughts floated in and out of my mind. Then I suddenly started to feel sorry for him. I thought, maybe it was something that he couldn't control. Maybe it was like a childhood disease that would flare up and embarrass without warning. Maybe John didn't like people to pay attention to it, like it was a hand that stopped growing at around the age of 12. He could live with it, but he wanted people to just go on, to not make it get in the way.

Then #10 spoke in a paced rhythm. He said, "Look, #4, (he called everyone only by their number), that thing has got to go off. It's not fair to the rest of us. It's like one person smoking in a room full of non-smokers."

No one understood what he meant by that.

He went on, "It makes me uncomfortable and I need to be comfortable to think clearly and I need to think clearly to determine guilt or innocence. So, please turn it off or cover it up."

That made more sense. We all nodded. It was uncomfortable. And it was true, we needed to be comfortable to make the kind of decisions we were entrusted to make.

John got up and left the room for a short time. When he returned, the halo was gone and his hands were empty.

Everyone thanked him for his cooperation and we began to work on the case. We went over many different parts of the complicated transcripts and met with little or no disagreement. We seemed to be delightfully in sync. We were all working well together. We broke for lunch and left the room having made speedy progress towards a verdict.

As I was moving through the adjacent room, where a guard sits staring and keeps things quiet, I tossed a paper Kleenyx into the trash can and noticed that John's book was in there. I looked down into the vinyl-lined basket, interested to see what the book was. I picked it out of the swirl of newspapers and scraps, but there was no title on the blue cloth cover. Then I noticed a vague glow of gold above my forehead.

I dropped it back into to the basket before the guard became suspicious and looked up from his staring and found me guilty under the gold halo. I left the book in the trash, but I couldn't remove the experience from my mind for the rest of the afternoon's session. As we left the room at the end of the second day, I lagged behind. Most of the jurists were eager to get on the freeway and home, so there was no suspicion about my pauses to tie my shoe and to carefully place the chalk back in its white card box. But as I moved into the adjacent room, I sensed I would have trouble from the guard who had to clear everyone out before he could close the rooms and turn in his day's report. I wanted to get that book, but I didn't want to get in trouble, so I came from the threshold of the jury room and moved straight for the trash can. I thought, it would be best to make my interest in the trash evident, because to try to camouflage my plans would for sure raise the suspicions of a trained professional.

My plan worked. The guard said to me, "Where you goin’? I gotta close the rooms up."

"Yes, I know. I just wanted to check the trash for something. I think I threw away my Tupperware bowl by mistake after lunch. Is it o.k. if I give a look?"

"Yeah, go ahead."

And there it was. The book was still resting in the nest of crumpled xeroxes and morning papers. I stared and moved the trash can around with my hands to give the guard the impression that I was searching for my Tupperware. I opened my briefcase and said loud enough for the guard to understand, "I'd throw away my head if it wasn't screwed on." Then I reached in quickly and dropped the book into my open case. "My wife would have my hide if I lost that plastic tub."

"Hmph," the guard responded while quickly filling out his daily form.

Once I got home, I closed myself in the bedroom and studied the book. As I looked through it, I didn't see anything written on the pages, but images and lines of language appeared in my mind. I was reading without reading. The book was empty, but my mind became filled with clear prose as long as I stared at the bare pages. If I turned the page, a new topic was present in my mind. But the topics didn't follow any theme or particular subject. One page showed details of obscure history; another page was a passage from the secret diary of a middle aged woman. The page I was looking at would change if I turned to another page and then turned back. It was as though the book was an endless stream of information without beginning or end. As though it wrote itself at the edge of the instant. It was as though I was able to breath the thoughts of humanity, particular but non-selective. As though consciousness were a charge in the air that the book could translate into mental visions. A dream-link that crossed over divisions of space and time.

But, to be able to sit in on a never ending flow of other people's thoughts soon became consuming and I found that I began to lose an idea of what I myself thought. It was as though in my act of randomly experiencing other people’s thoughts, I lost the need to distinguish my own as apart, to hear my own mind as separate and distinct from others. I found that I became lost within the clarity and purity of other people’s random jottings. A woman’s mumbled and simple concern about her watch running slow had the power of take all my attention. As I stared at the page, all I could realize was the directed thought of that instant, as it was thought by that person. My thoughts became replaced. My feelings became replaced by the purpose or concern contained in the random words as long as I looked at the book. I was transformed into nothing of me, as though I felt the thoughts of everyone else, but without preference or choosing. I could understand each person’s unique intent or desire or worry or fear in the precise way that they understood themselves. As long as I held the book I knew compassion and real acceptance. And, surprisingly, this angelic seeing extended to myself, for on two occasions during my flipping through the book I came across my own thoughts and concerns. And while I might describe my thoughts as petty and unimportant now, when I had the chance to see my own situation through the leaves of the book and beneath the glow of the halo, I felt a sincere sense of care for myself. I valued myself then as I have since or before valued nothing else. I was able to love myself and my situation for precisely what it was, just as I was able to do with all the other things that I saw through the book. The smallest of things seemed to require nurturing and appreciation. It was as though everything hinged on those bits of nothing. It was as though perfection was being shaped from the base and random happenings of the world.

The next morning, I was exhausted after spending the entire night going back and forth through the book. As the time to leave for jury duty approached, I began to grow fearful. I knew it would be a problem if I went into the jury chamber with a halo. I didn’t know what to do. Looking in the mirror, I shuffled my hair into place and could see the faint gold light play across the shape of my hand. I put the book into my briefcase and went to my car without any breakfast.

I was still unsure of what to do. But as I sat stopped in the left turn lane, waiting for the light to change, I took out the book and stared at the traffic rushing right and left across the intersection in front of me, the sound of my turn indicator keeping time with the pace of the cars. I opened the book and the whispering self-talk of drivers, and of passengers on buses, and of a person deciding whether to use exact change when buying a pack of cigarettes or to break a twenty, filled my mind. I closed the book and opened the car door just as the green left-turn arrow flashed on. I leaned out of my car, my seat belt tightening around my waist and slipping off my shoulder. I thought, “The cars behind me aren’t beeping.” I set the book on the concrete meridian and then righted myself into my seat. Still no beeps. I closed the door and made my turn, followed by a line of four or five cars.

I got to the court house on time and it took only two hours that morning for us to decide that the defendant was guilty.

Amanda Hare (4-23-06)

2006-05-14T00:15:00.000-07:00

Amanda read from the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. Here are the excerpts that she read.

By sunup, Jonathan Gull was practicing again. From five thousand feet the fishing boats were specks in the flat blue water, Breakfast Flock was a faint cloud of dust motes, circling.

He was alive, trembling ever so slightly with delight, proud that his fear was under control. Then without ceremony he hugged in his forewings, extended his short, angled wingtips, and plunged directly toward the sea. By the time he passed four thousand feet he had reached terminal velocity, the wind was a solid beating wall of sound against which he could move no faster. He was flying staight down, at two hundred miles per hour. He swallowed knowing that if his wings unfolded at that speed he'd be blown into a million tiny shreds of seagull. But the speed was power, and the speed was joy, and the speed was pure beauty.

He began to pullout at a thousand feet, wingtips thudding and blurring in that gigantic wind, the boat and the crowd of gulls tilting and growing meter-fast, directly in his path.

He couldn't stop; he didn't know yet even how to turn at that speed.

Collision would be instand death.

And so he shut his eyes.

It happened that morning, then, just after sunrise, that Jonathan Livingston Seagull fired directly through the center of Breakfast Flock, ticking off two hundred twelve miles per hour, eyes closed, in a great roaring shriek of wind and feathers. The Gull of Fortune smiled upon him this once, and no one was killed.

By the time he had pulled his beak straight up into the sky he was still scorching along at a hundred and sixty miles per hour. When he had slowed to twenty and stretched his wings again at last, the boat was a crumb on the sea, four thousand feet below.

His thought was triumph. Terminal velocity! A seagull at two hundred fourteen miles per hour! It was a breakthrough, the greatest single moment in the history of the Flock, and in that moment a new age opened for Jonathan Gull. Flying out to his lonely practice area, folding his wings for a dive from eight thousand feet, he set himself at once to discover how to turn.
(p. 27-29)
...
The gulls were flocked into the Council Gathering when he landed, and apparently has been so flocked for some time. They were in fact, waiting.

"Jonathan Livingston Seagull," said the Elder, "Stand to Center for Shame in the sight of your fellow gulls!"

It felt like being hit with a board. His knees went weak, his feathers sagged, there was a roaring in his ears. Centered for shame? Impossible! The Breakthrough! They can't understand! They're wrong, they're wrong!

"...for his reckless irresponsibility," the solemn voice intoned, "violating the dignity and tradition of the Gull Family..."

A seagull never speaks back to the Council Flock, but it was Jonathan's voice raised. "Irresponsibility? My brothers!" he cried. "Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a reason to live-to learn, to discover, to be free! Give me one chance, let me show you what I've found..."

Jonathan Seagull spent the rest of his days alone, but he flew way out beyond the Far Cliffs. His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

He learned more each day. He learned that a streamlined high-speed dive could bring him to find the rare and tasty fish that schooled ten feet below the surface of the ocean: he no longer needed fishing boats and stale bread for survival. He learned to sleep in the air, setting a course at night across the offshore wind, covering a hundred miles from sunset to sunrise. With the same inner control, he flew through heavy sea-fogs and climbed above them into dazzling clear skies...in the very times when every other gull stood on the ground, knowing nothing but mist and rain. He learned to ride the high winds far inland, to dine there on delicate insects.

What he had once hoped for the Flock, he now gained for himself alone; he learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that he had paid. Jonathon Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.
(p. 38-41)

They came in the evening, then, and found Jonathan gliding peaceful and alone through his beloved sky. The two gulls that appeared at his wings were pure as starlight, and the glow from them was gentle and friendly in the high night air. But most lovely of all was the skill with which they flew, their wingtips moving a precise and constant inch from his own.

Without a word, Jonathan put them to his test, a test that no seagull had ever passed. He twisted his wings, slowed to a single mile per hour above stall. The two radiant birds slowed with him, smoothly, locked in position. They knew about slow flying.

He folded his wings, rolled and dropped in a dive to a hundred ninety miles per hour. They dropped with him, streaking down in flawless formation.

At last he turned that speed straight up into a long vertical slow-roll. They rolled with him, smiling.

He recovered to level flight and was quiet for a time before he spoke. "Very well," he said, "who are you?"

"We're from your flock, Jonathan. We are your brothers." The words were strong and calm. "We've come to take you higher, to take you home."

"Home I have none. Flock I have none. I am Outcast. And we fly now at the peak of the Great Mountain Wind. Beyond a few hundred feet, I can lift this old body no higher."

"But you can, Jonathan. For you have learned. One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin."

As it had shined across him all his life, so understanding lighted that moment for Jonathan Seagull. They were right. He could fly higher, and it was time to go home.

He gave one last look across the sky, across that magnificent silver land where he had learned so much.

"I'm ready," he said at last.

And Jonathan Livingston Seagull rose with the two star-bright gulls to disappear into a perfect dark sky.
(p. 52-53)

In the days that followed, Jonathan saw that there was as much to learn about flight in the place as there had been in the life behind him. But with a difference. Here were gulls who thought as he thought. For each of them, the most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they most loved to do, and that was to fly. They were magnificent birds, all of them, and they spent hour after hour every day practicing flight, testing advanced aeronautics.

For a long time Jonathan forgot about the world that he had come from, that place where the Flock lived with its eyes tightly shut to the joy of flight, using its wings as a means to the end of finding and fighting for food. But now and then, just for a moment, he remembered.

He remembered it one morning when he was out with his instructor, while they rested on the beach after a session of folded-wing snap rolls.

"Where is everybody, Sullivan?" he asked silently, quite at home now with the easy telepathy that these gulls used instead of screes and gracks. "Why aren't there more of us here? Why, where I came from there were..."

"...thousands and thousands of gulls. I know." Sullivan shook his head. "The only answer I can see, Jonathan, is that you are pretty well a one-in-a-million bird. MOst of us came along ever so slowly. We went from one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come from, not caring where we were headed, living for the moment. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in tis one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome."

He stretched his wings and turned to face the wind. "But you, Jon," he said, "learned so much at one time that you didn't have to go through a thousand lives to reach this one."

In a moment they were airborne again, practicing. The formation point-rolls were difficult, for through the inverted half Jonathan had to think upside down, reversing the curve of his wing, and reversing it exactly in harmony with his instructor's.

"Let's try it again,"Sullivan said over and over: "Let's try it again." Then, finally, "Good." And they began practicing outside loops.

One evening the gulls that were not night-flying stood together on the sand, thinking. Jonathan took all his courage in hand and walked to the Elder Gull, who, it was said, was soon to be moving beyond this world.

"Chiang..." he said, a little nervously.

The old seagull looked at him kindly. "Yes, my son?" Instead of being enfeebled by age, the Elder has been empowered by it; he could outfly any gull in the Flock, and he had learned skills that the others were only gradually coming to know.

"Chiang, this world isn't heaven at all, is it?"

The Elder smiled in the moonlight. "You are learning again, Jonathan Seagull," he said.

"Well, what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no such place as heaven?"

"No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect." He was silent for a moment. "You are a very fast flier, aren't you?"

"I...I enjoy speed," Jonathan said, taken aback but proud that the Elder had noticed.

"You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there."

Without warning, Chiang vanished and appeared at the water's edge fifty feet away, all in the flicker of an instant. Then he vanished again and stood, in the same millisecond, at Jonathan's shoulder. "It's kind of fun," he said.
(p. 60-65)

Marilyn Mendoza (4.23.06)

2006-04-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from "I do too" by Hawaii-Jason Luis Riveras book "Sorrows Crows"

Young man

what plan do you entertain

what song

do you sing

within your brain?

without love

what comliness

can be maintained

in what frame

what comparison

would you say

this clarity

would explain

to the sane

the insane

to me

it is all the same

with or without fame

with or without

a lady to entertain

who will enjoy

my lines of rhyme?

Anytime

anytime

Every time

my lie

to you subsides

I cannot cry

though I sigh

and my lines

are sublime

like our life

in the tides of Hawaii

to saddle our horse

one for me and one for thee

the horizon to see

in the deep

purple pink

sunset sky

island sea

island dream

be with me

eternally sing

what the corner of my eyes

thinks to gleam

waterfalls to rinse

out the sea

you and me

in sea

where will we be?

in the sea

Hawaii

you and me

eternally

I'll make you sing

If you would be there with me

226-10-1 Come by Hawaii -Jason Luis Rivera

Words flow

with all its power

as a stage show

in its hour

is a lame doe

left to cower

all alone

as an age known

for two towers

and two planes

go in an hour

smoke and flames blown

tasting sour

lift to roam

tears sown

fear empowers

spirits roam

passing towers

soft goodbyes

left from quick

cordless phones

as the roe

moans and cowers

all alone in that hour

so the homes full of flowers

send their groans

to the throne

all is known

all is known

Love sick fool by Jason -Luis Riveras "Sorrows Crows"

If you should find this love sick fool

strolling through Liverpool

would you stop to just say hi

or would you you keep on

rolling by

would you put on a disguise

and come up close to see my eyes

though I am no one

and your sublime

and time has turned our hearts and minds

will you still remember when

a crumpled paper and a pen

two lonely hearts

alone to blend

could turn this world

into a friend

(some hopeful words to Paul I send)

hoping this is not the end

If the Beatles turn 2

I was born on St. Patricks day

so you must wear green or I'll pinch you

till black turns blue

as asphalt ends

to sail me to emerald green

I'm coming back to you

it's the first thing I'll do

If the Beatles turn 2

Branko (4.23.06)

2006-04-29T20:28:00.001-07:00

David Schooley (4.23.06)

2006-04-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

Jack Yohay (4.23.06)

2006-04-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

Patrick Widdess (4.23.06)

2006-04-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

Marilyn Mendoza (3.26.06)

2006-04-13T03:49:00.000-07:00

These are the poems from my sons first published book, "Sorrows Crows"

SORROWS CROWS

Sorrows Crows

In throngs I long to hold

GOD only knows

AS LONG AS THE ROAD IS WINDING

The sun was hot

I was alone

I longed for deaths last breath

to take me home

the road was long

yet still I roamed

filling my pockets full of stones

Hawaiian hills

that lacked the thrill

empty beaches

onward still

The pain that fueled

my quill to spill

the days I long to remember

to forget

ME IN YOU

I'm missing you

miss kissing you

till time is through

and rhymes come true

in songs soo blue

from me

to you

and wrongs of long

that I shall shew

through and through

till I've set my love aglow

from me

to you

till angels sing the songs on wings

and mortals follow through

that I shall stand with rod in hand

and stand beside my pew

and behold it's you

it's you

so come to me my love anew

and stand behind our pew

and sing the signs so true

deep within me

in you

deep in sleep sand slips and creeps

and lands in mounds anew

forever one is two

and two is me in you

UNBOUND

Can't keep me down

Unbound

Chains that surround the ground

Unbound

Tears falling down on the ground

Unbound

Love is the sound that I've found all around

Touch the ground

Unbound

A POET WITHOUT A PEN/LUDICROUS

I gather a letter

one of wanton rends

I'd rather a feather

my lonsesome hearted friend

to the road that has no end

from Japan

to the friend of a friend

salutes and hands

I haven't a pen

dear fans

from heaven to zen

HAWAIIAN RIVER RAN

Hawaiian river ran

rocks my form was bent

deep into the sand

my aimless shot was sent

healing rock that time has spanned

trusty friend my heart would lend

out of place in foreign land

easing broken hearted friend

in a heart within a hand

in a cart that came and went

arms so strong their rise remand

towers gone now past and spent

two towers strong their rise demand

fool and a cart to heal what rent

soothing hearts strong to withstand

casting our lots in cool wet cement

Jerry Gordon (3.26.06)

2006-04-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

Castles of Smoke

"Man is most nearly himself
when he achieves the seriousness
of a child at play.” -- Heraclitus

I started growing buildings when I was in junior high. It's what started me smoking. I've never liked smoking, really, and don't need the nicotine to calm down, but I keep it up as a sort of nostalgia for those early castles I exhaled. Those still have a purity I continually strive for, something that is perhaps only visible in the eyes of innocence. Those early castles are what inspired the whole field we now know as Grown Engineering.

In elementary school I began experimenting with growing buildings. I did it with milk in water. One morning while eating my breakfast cereal--for no real reason--I leaned forward and spat a little bit of milk into the goldfish bowl on the table. It was simple act and virtually free of motivation. I just peeked over the glass rim and “bloop.” That was the extent of the inspiration: bloop.

I wasn’t shooting at Pinch, our fish. I was just spitting. But, then what I saw was somehow so beautiful. I was attracted by how complex a structure the milk made in that little environment of semi-balanced gravity. Every arabesqued wing and elaborated strut and the curvilinear column of the main trunk of the spit-milk revealed the amount of energy it carried for as far as it extended within the turbulence and drag of the water.

I didn’t understand any of these ideas then, but I knew it was marvelous. From my deviant little lips, beauty played itself within three liquid and gravity-soft dimensions.

I kept it up that morning, turning the fish bowl into a murky mess. I changed the water again and agian. Each time, the spit milk shot into the tranquil clear water with an energy. Then, it would slow into a calm stasis, become semi-stable as a structure and then begin to drift and dissipate, vanishing into a total graying of the water. The energy of the milk created ripples and turbulence that undid the castles. And, of course, the gold fish didn't help any. Finally, I felt his little movements were destroying things too quickly. I knew I couldn't continue to experiment with him there, so I asked my mother it I could flush him down the toilet and out to the ocean. She said, no, because he'd die in the treatment plant before making it out to sea. So, I poured him into a coffee cup and gave him a bit of clean water and a Cherrio to chew. Then I filled his bowl again with new, clear water from the tap and got down to further experimenting.

I refused to go to school that day, my adamance slightly scaring my mom. But I went the next day and brought my bowl to show all the kids.

As it turned out, no one understood the significance of my discovery. Some of them said, "Cool" but then just wanted to try spitting into the water from greater and greater distances. Most just said, "That's gross."

I eventually got a big empty fish tank of my own, specifically for engineering purposes. That's where smoke castles actually came from. Water was a good environment to work in at first, but it was ultimately just too wet. Besides, it required changing water all the time just to see the structures. Smoke was, and still is, a better balance of exhalation forces, environmental turbulences, soft-gravity and spontaneity. All that, and it's more conducive to contemplation because it's dry and you can lean back in a comfortable chair.

To do anything creative, a person can't have too much control. Mastery is not really about having total control. While it’s true that precise control of some skills is essential, this is because having this ability makes it more possible to open up larger areas to play. Then real creation can happen. The artist's job, ultimately, is to be a passionate witness, to see what was previously not just invisible but unseeable. That's how something can be made from nothing, which is where the ancient origin for the word poetry comes from: “To do; to bring into form from nothing.” The best artists are those who can watch the most honestly, the ones who can see what even they can't admit is imaginable. The artist is the one who can't look away from even his own death, and in that way transforms it and everything into moments that can’t be fixed as life, death, play or any other form of purpose.

And, perhaps for this reason, the very first castle of smoke I made is still the finest. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps it is because I have unwillingly compared all the subsequent to it--or because I have reimagined it in infinitely greater degrees of fantastic abstraction and theory ever since first noticing it churning and coming to a pause in the air beyond my exhalation. Regardless, that first castle of smoke has taken on the pathetic but grace-filled elements of a romantic quest. No matter how much I resist it, I know I hope to see it again. To examine that first one’s mystery with the tools of analysis I have developed in these subsequent decades of reflection. I hope to retouch the naïve with the hands of the master. Like some sort of arrogant Utopian in the Industrial Revolution, I harbor the hubristic hunch that that castle can save us all.

Of course, the monkeyfooted brat in me that first leaned out and spat into that fish bowl knows there's nothing to save us from, but the only thing more complex than turbulence is the workings of one's motivations, so please don't crucify me for my contradictions, okay?

. . .

Kansai Underground

Last night, drunk with two friends.
Wine and wiskey.
I'm sure God keeps track
of such things. brash temptation.
Back at the last-train station,
everybody on God's folded little list.
So many blushing knuckles and glasses askew.
I ask you, yes you there across from me,
"Why is it only the end of night
when we can meet?"
Yes, noone else knows either. So, i imagine
stacking stones between this creeping distance.
A little mound of rocks
on the floor of the subway car,
piled in the unmortared way
God likes His gravity.
A salaryman turns to watch me
shifting brain-sized bulks of basalt, and then
he's down on the grubby floor too,
his fingernails getting chipped and noble,
working amidst the floating ghosts of hair
as each lump of dust gets balanced
in the rattle and the bump
of the train pouring through the dark.
And then a girl with a mouth so full of teeth
there's barely room for words
hunches down and from her purse
pulls out rock after rock the size of hearts, each
sung smooth in a river beyond our echoes.
She fits them in, like keystones to lock
all the world's cracks and steady the impossible architecture.
I look up, looking for more eyes unwilling to look away,
and say, "Don't mind us, late-night commuters.
We're not building a wall
or barricade. It's just our way
of giving to the community,
to us as we
speed deeper into night
together, our flesh one breath
and stinking booze."

. . .

The Instant that Isn't

The crowd, too, is a trio--
three strangers here becoming
nothing less than unknown
as ourselves. Why else sit
with this look of
jazz in our eyes? I see you
and before the glance decays
there is time to forget
the 64 words for now.
There is the instant that isn't
before or after.

Beyond the end of your boot
begins the logical curve
of your calf.

The flawless flow
from limit to limit;
how many worlds are lost
in a language?

Thus, this is
how we unknow them,
much as ourselves. The invisible
within invisibility. And, so I love
to say, "Your face," and
"Let's behave like the dance of smoke
that shows our grave is smouldering."

3.10.06
watching Bebop International at Savannah

. . .

How I Started Smoking

I am not a trend-setter. I am more of an inventive imposture who follows the wrong details.

And, so I started smoking.

We've all been there. The group pressure. The room is packed with so many stripes of cool and I feel awkward, as though even the way I hold a glass of beer shows I am a poser, as though everybody else is weaving notes into their memories: "Alert! Alert! Dork drinking from a pint glass like it's some sort of trough of butter, thumb and fingers all up at the ceiling. Do American's really have no education system at all?"

And, so, one night in a crowded room around a glass coffee table littered with deep red Marboro triangles and flat red Lucky Strike dots and the tiny promises made by Hope boxes and bags of roll-your-own streaded leaves and a famously phallic Cuaba Generosos smouldering on a $80.00 ash tray, I decided to start smoking. I saw into the rhythmic beauty of hands performing intricate simplicities of work and gesture. The way the flame is cherished. The way delicate paper is held and moved. The way the embers glow more faintly than candle light. These were the pressures that got me to start smoking. But, I should clarify that I smoke incense sticks.

I'm no idiot. I'm not going to suck the stuff into my body. I have enough trouble with alcohol and starchy carbohydrates. I don't need to add nicotine. I just want to join in the ritual of timing. And, so, I started. Of course, in bars and other public places where the priests of the personality cult gather, there are pauses and some looks weighing me for mockery when I slide a very thin steel case from my pocket, open it like a book and carefully remove a stick of incense. I can almost hear people think, "What the fuck?"

I hold the stick just below my face and carefully light the tip with an expensive micro-lighter. A tiny flame burns silently for a moment. Then, I calmly wave the stick through the air to out the flame and start the thin and constant line of white smoke into its life of ephemeral calligraphy.

At this point, it’s hard to find any difference between my smoking and others'. I tend and care for the stick throughout its burning, making sure to not let the accumulated ash fall anywhere but in an ash tray. To do otherwise would be uncouth. I usually hold the stick between my fingers, but, of course, I never put it in my mouth. Beyond not sucking on it, I can find almost no difference. Well, that and the smell. But, do any two tobacco's really smell the same? Cigar smokers speak of the aroma being one of its ritual pleasures and they give it as a reason why they won't smoke cigarettes. Clove cigarettes. Pipe tobacco. Each has its kind, scent and brand. Each has its individuality. And, within the intricate subtlties of culture, the task has become just this, to define oneself as unique without becoming a dick. Wouldn’t you agree?

Civility then seems to be to know where “interesting” transforms into “freak.”

Kent English (3.26.06)

2006-04-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

Parades
by Jesse Ball
(from The Paris Review no. 174)

And when you are finally caught and questioned,
it is discovered, sadly, that you know
nothing of use. Your captors exchange glances, nod.
You are released in the freedom of some afternoon,

some autumn of the year, your coat, hat, returned
as if to continue your life. Now it is you

in the world again. In yellowing rooms, life
becomes no more than the places where it occurs.
At the pier in darkness, parades will cross the water,
visible but once. Or I could say

I saw the wind coming hard along the river
touching all it passed.

How are things consequent? When they catch you
again, what will you say? That all things
may be weighed, may be raised and weighed
by two human hands?

Ovid in Tears
by Jack Gilbert
(from The Paris Review no. 175)

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. "In the cities,"
he said, "there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman," he said. How like
a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds
later he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn't read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped and he fell.
"White stone in the white sunlight," he said
as they picked him up. "Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world." His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. "Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all."

Dan Marlin (3.26.06)

2006-04-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

BEFORE THEY LET YOU SUE

The good mailhandler Breader
Educated me
As we watched a wild truckyard storm
Whirl out to sea

"They'll pay for your codeine
For your splint for your nurse
For I.V.s and transfusions,
If they have to, for a hearse
They'll pay a million dollar bill
For anything you break,
They'll pay for jacuzzis, acupuncture, witches brew
--But you one stone fool
If you think they'll let you sue!

They'll pay you compensation
For all the time you take
Then put detectives on you
To see if you a fake
--But one thing they won't ever do
For man or pity sake
Jesus Christ will come again
Before they let you sue!

It don't matter if what fell on you
Wasn't made right
Or if they'd been warned about it
40 days and nights,
Or if they had you doin' shit
You ain't supposed to do
They'll truss up your guts
And phenobarb your seizures
Pay for your ultrasound
Catscans and procedures
They'll pick your veins for blood
Til your arm is black and blue,
But you'll pitch in the World Series, boy,
Before they let you sue!"

RONALD REAGAN'S ENTRANCE TO HEAVEN
PORTAL OF EL SALVADOR

Ronald Reagan was welcomed to heaven by a manicurist, her black hair pulled tightly back from a widow's peak. She took his hand, looking up at him.

"What do you see?" he asked, from his chair of gleaming combs.

"The book of your eyes."

"And in them?" ( ' It goes well' he thought, ' Truly as on earth, so is it in heaven.' )

"I see....myself".

" And what are you doing in the blue field of my eyes?"

" I am looking for my mother," and she lifted his hand to her mouth.

" Where is your dear mother?" ( ' The tenderness in my voice has perfect pitch ', he mused.)

" She is deep in the village well with the other women, packed like pigs' feet in a jar.
She lies in the field of bones, unburied, in a skirt of mud and spiders. I see her torn in the vulture's beak, where you left her."

She curled her tongue around his little finger, sucked out a microphone, a cowboy shirt, a papaya, and spit them at his feet.

He jerked his hand away, hissing, " You're not from here, are you? Go back where you came from!"

" We've all come here from the same place" she spoke slowly, " We can only go back to each other."

Ronald Reagan closed his eyes and prayed, " Our father who art in Heaven"

" Yes? "

" This woman does not belong here! Send her away!"

" I will send her where she belongs."

"Thank you Lord", he sighed, opening his eyes.

The manicurist, her hair black as obsidian, sat before him.

BESIDE A RAIN CANAL IN MUKONOSO

The first warm evening in March. I'm walking beside a rain canal in Mukonoso, across which I can see the open back door of a small restaurant's kitchen, where a pair of mops lean into the yellow light. There's a swift, sudden shadow at my shoulder; I turn, watch it dip and climb, blend into the penumbra, then reappear.

I recognize this bat by the red gold spot at the base of her left ear.

"Hey, I know you, rice paddy down the road. May 14, 2000."

" You have a good memory" she replies, " Where has the wide world taken you?"

" I'm trying to find room for it in here " I say, tapping the hard bone of my brow, " And you?"

" Just heading out for the fields. By the way, have you been by the field where we spoke last time? A quarter of it has disappeared."

" When did that happen?"

" A week before New Year's I saw the old farmer out there with a couple of guys in business suits doing a play by play on their cell phones. Couple of weeks later a truck came by and they unloaded thick--I mean manhole-thick iron plates --and covered the rice stubble in the southeast corner of the field. Pretty soon people started driving over the little ramp the farmer used to wheel his tractor down on. First there were only three or four; now you got cars crowded in like so many billiard balls. Each model has to have a name, you know: Mellow Cruise, Swift Glow, Cuddle Cube, Every Jerry, Sambar."

" Sambar? That's a weird name for a car. "

" Tell me about it! Do you know what Sambar means in India? It's a kind of lentil soup. Add a little dumpling to it, and you have Idli Sambar. I had a cousin travelled over to Madras on a container ship. They don't call cars Sambars in India, though."

" You're not thinking of Samarkand are you? "

" I do know the difference, friend, between Uzbekistan and Mother India. But as long as you mention it, the bazaar in Samarkand is fragrant through the night, especially when they unload summer melons."

" Sounds lovely" I reply, " but back to the field? Maybe those iron planks are temporary, until Spring planting. Could be the old farmer is having trouble paying his land tax."

"That's possible, but here's how I see it: the less planting, the fewer bugs, the fewer bugs the harder to feed my bat babies and my own face. Tell the truth, I'm getting hungry right now. If I don't eat six, seven bugs a minute I get light-headed. Where are you headed?"

" Me? I'm just walking no place in particular; that's how I find my sense of direction. It makes it easier, when I get home, to enter my wife's eyes."

" Huh? Sounds interesting, but just because we're both mammals doesn't mean I know what you mean. Never have expected human beings to make sense."

A bit self-conscious, I look at my shoes for a moment.

" You know, I'm not sure I know what I mean either. Give me another couple of years to think about it, OK?"

But when I glance up I realize she couldn't wait, and I am talking to the wide, empty face of the neon-sprinkled darkness.

NO BABIES TONIGHT

The lovers arrive in the country night,
Slip off their shoes
At the kitchen door.
As the old florescent bulb flickers on
Crystal lenses glint
In the brown moons of her eyes
Where the cataracts' clouds were lifted.

They will make no babies tonight.

His sperm, tainted once
By chemo poison
Cannot pass on the genes
For foolishness, narcissism, ardor.

Her one ovary
Cannot drop an egg
To the altar of the womb,
Which was taken long ago
To stop a great bleeding.

The weave of their tongues
Will be real
Though all of their teeth are not;
The warmth of cheek and thigh
Smoother now
That the liquid nitrogen torch
Burned their warts away.

Deep within his scrotum
Spent radioactive seeds
The size of rice grains
Float in the withered prostate--
Vigilantes once,
Who hunted down renegade cells.

Tonight, though, they do not think
Of death or tumors
As they sweep the tatami floor,
Lifting away a weightless, knuckle-size spider,
Unfold the futon and sheet,
The flowery faux-wool cover
And lay themselves down.

Ralph Famularo (3.26.06)

2006-04-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

"The Crying Trapeze Artists"

My Aunt Joan
would whisper hysterically
on every Birthday Eve.

"Oh my God, I'm no longer 27"
was her HUSHing yearly Mantra.

27 was her favorite number.
She said it had once shouted out to her
from a wall emblazoned in florescent orange-pink
in the "most exquisite parking garage I have ever seen."

With the wispy dew of fond memory
welling in her eyes,
She quavered, "I was with Grandpa -- for the last time.
He shuffled up the rectangular concrete staircase
looking like a tired Leonid Brezhnev. But Grandpa,
dear Grandpa", she would add with pride, "had 2
good eyebrows."

"I always judge a man by his eyebrows"
concluded the Spinstress.

"Funny", I said. I always remember Grandpa
as looking something like Bing Crosby on dope.
Every Yuletide, the frosty air outside our house
would thunder with the jolly tones of
"I'm dreaming of a (*sniff*) white Christmas."

He would enter the warm, cozy living room
wiping the numbing snow from his
red, Santa-like nose.

My brother, Janik, would greet him with,
"What didn't you bring us THIS year, Grandpa?"

"Bad boys don't get nuthin' -- except maybe a little
Budweiser from time to time."

Grandpa was referring to the often not-spoken of
family scandal. Janik had been dishonorably discharged
from the Jamaican Army. We all knew it was political,
though.
Besides Janik not being a Jamaican citizen, Jamaica was
merely
looking for a scapegoat in retaliation for the Canadian
Press's
treatment of Ben Johnson during the 1988 Seoul Steroid
Olympics.

So, Janik was sent packing and came home to Pennsylvania.

I've never understood why my brother and I have different
passports.

I've never bothered to ask.

We have a TV.

At sundown we would all take our seats around the round
table
in anticipation of another Xmas-TV dinner. Consuming it
with glee,
we eagerly awaited desert. Aunt Joan could defrost a Sara
Lee Cherry Cheesecake
like Nobody's Business.
I preferred Boston Cream Pie but she insisted that THAT
would be a slap in the face to the Keystone State -- not
to mention Canada.

Then the phone would ring -- as it did every
Xmas night around 7PM. My mother & father
would emotionally voice their Holiday Greetings to the
family.

You see, my parents are rarely home. They are understudy
trapeze artists
traveling w/ the Ringling Brothers Circus. At least,
that's what I've been told.

After completion of the heartfelt and tearful collect
call, we'd sit back down
and intently listen to Grandpa tell us memorable stories
about how he heroically
crossed the Delaware and built a house with his own 2 bare
bank accounts.
Or, perhaps he would engage us with the tale of how he had
come up with
an idea for an incandescent device. Of course, Edison had
already invented it but Grandpa proudly explained that HE
had thought of it independently,
and without the help of "a fancy workshop and Big Money
backing me. It came to me in a Flash! It was as if a
lightbulb went on over my head."

We'd all retire and at mid-morning on the 26th, Aunt Joan
and Grandpa would go out to the mall just over the hills
and through the Woods Retirement Village
to stock-up on Xmas week provisions
Janik and I would be up after noon and commence the
arduous task of repacking the Xmas presents so we could
celebrate Boxing Day.

But, on this particular Boxing Day, as we labored at
affixing the green and red bows back on the partially torn
wrapping paper, the sun dissolving into the cold, hazy
horizon, the front door opened and in-walked Aunt Joan. .
.without Grandpa.

Pale-faced, tongue-tied, the wispy dew
of painful memory welling-up in her eyes,
She said, "Grandpa has passed-on."

"He's not alive!?" blurted Janik.

"Worse than that. He's gone to Columbus, Ohio.

He's forsaken the Keystone State -- not to mention Canada.

He said he was tired of entertaining
a family of gullible liars.

He left me standing at the station wagon with a 6-pack in
my hand and boarded the bus to Ohio."

"Well I'll be damned", I said, dumbfounded. "The Xmas
snow has finally
destroyed Grandpa's mind. The chemicals have eaten away
his roots."

And Aunt Joan, 2 sad eyebrows, has been unable to stop
Whispering Wildly
on Birthday Eves.

Ralph Famularo

Kevin Keane (3.26.06)

2006-04-03T06:36:00.000-07:00

Uncertainty

I spoke to the graves
lying in rows, indifferent,
bleakly reflecting
the dim twilight,
but they were silent
as the gray sea at dusk
when the fog envelops us
in obscure mists.

briefly finding relics of the dead:
cherry smell of a pipe, frayed brown
slippers, yellow pages of Othello-

lost unsteady stumbling
falling silently all night
down endless dark corridors
that open out unsurely
to the morning sky.

— by Kevin Keane

Dreamscape

Black sea where we swim
in the silence of stars as
boats bellow in the distance.

Night a dark country
across the invisible
sea-

swim still waters
to the quiet
fields of memory
slip on sand dunes of regret
or scale the peaks of the unseen.

-by Kevin Keane

Rocky Femia (3.26.06)

2006-03-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.

Plato, The Republic

Amanda Hare (3.26.06)

2006-03-27T06:21:00.000-08:00

Amanda read from the collection of short stories, Winter Count by Barry Lopez. She read the stories "The Lover of Words" and "Buffalo".

Thank you! (3.26.06)

2006-03-27T06:19:00.000-08:00

Thank you to everyone who came to the second installment of Reading Words! The evening was wonderfully entertaining. We look forward to seeing you at the next event on April 23rd at Savannah in Shinsaibashi (start time is 5pm!).

O Literacy! Bring your friends! Bring your books! Bring your friend's books!

Reading Words Coordinators

Branko Manojlovic (2.26.06)

2006-03-11T04:02:00.000-08:00

London Us in Please

London us in please
with your crumbled Bloomsbury chimneys and tepid radiators
so our blood can curdle up at the sight of Hampstead haze, jumpy
squirrels and new men pushing perambulators. London us in
will you through your expansion rational or otherwise, your rental vans,
flats, your churches where white folk kneel where negro
sisters clap 'Sweet Georgia', pews on fire on a tearful Sunday. It is
at this closing business hour, by the two-pound-for-a-pound tray
of Berwick street blueberries, by the way of alleyway and peep show
cross-legged tarts, that we need you, London, to show us in, gently,
while the rest of us play it safe from the upper decks, suburb-bound.
Don’t forget also us the non-invitees, volunteers, usher us all in through
your splendidly denuded lawns and gardens, into a Georgian mansion
where butlers, called Joseph or Swankin, arrange for the early spring
massacre of magnolia – yes, the good old magnolia
that has never tasted so toothsome.

Dan Marlin (2.26.06)

2006-03-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

CLASSIFIED TESTIMONY OF A SOUTH TEXAS QUAIL

In February, 2006, the Vice-President of the U.S.
accidentally shot his hunting companion.

1.

In the mesquite grove
of my ancestors,
as I measured the grass ahead
in the ripening light,

I was the target,
but I was spared.

2.

After bending to pick up a souvenir
of his afternoon pleasure
-the blood and silver feathers of my sister-

he stood up, taking the shot
meant to break my flight.

Because there was fifty times
more of him than me
it not kill him,

and he rose again
from his hospital bed
to stand before a microphone,
the flesh above his white collar
a sour rainbow of bruises.

3.

Accidents happen, he said,
I don't want this to spoil
all the happy memories
of hunting South Texas quail.

And sorry for the trouble
caused my good friend
who deserved to relax
from his important work.

Sorry?
-but I am not.

The shot which
pocked his face
was a small price to pay,

for though I was the target
in the mesquite grove
of my ancestors,

I was spared.

THE NIGHT BEFORE

Ants ascend the green woven threads
of the bean vines
beneath a long moon,
this night of pollens
before you arrive.

Cricket pulse, racoon's eye
the poorest sleep on stone,
moving on before the dew dries.
A night of footsteps
before you arrive.

In the memory of my hands
your small breasts rise.
A hummingbird, I wait their blossoms,
this night of breezes
before you arrive.

IRAQ BODY COUNT

"We're not in the business
of counting civilian casualties"
- U.S. Military

None of your business
to know them:

breadwinners, orphans, matriarchs, invalids

whose eyes form a single gaze
into the mirror of the living.

They are estimates, imploded fractions
of the Tree of Life,

whose numbers are disputed,
identification incomplete,

confirmed by birthmarks, scars, schoolbooks

when their faces can no longer be read.

As they pray and mourn,
sip tea and suckle,
cinch the donkey's load

they become the suicide's baggage
to Paradise, atoms of the fireball
dried in fissures of pavement.

Trembling behind windshields,
they die before they can explain
to the Checkpoint's jumpy trigger finger.

They die for the lie that beguiles us,
as the power at hand
slays the touch of the fingers.

With arms raised in a wedding dance,
cut down beneath the shrieking wing,
labeled insurgent after the fact.

Carried out of the blue-eyed prison
bearing the scorch-marks of shame,
cast into a desert of vengeance.

Found face-down
in a line beneath the eucalyptus,
wrists bound,
lips enclosing the vowels of pleading.

Sweep them into the evening wind-
they will return to the city
one by one,
the uncounted, substantial number
walking beside those who grieve them,
their loss braiding
the wild hair of years.

Patrick Widdess (2.26.06)

2006-03-04T23:54:00.000-08:00

Hide and Seek

Kiss something orange.
Triple your eye shadow.
Turn right at the second handshake
and wait for the girl with the leopard skin camera
to guide you down the harizontal staircase.
Play hopscotch with an armadillo until you lose.
Undress with your left hand,
bathe in swan's milk,
then sneeze in F sharp.

You're invisible now
until somebody finds you.

http://patrick_widdess.podomatic.com/

http://www.ukauthors.com/userinfo-a_harmless_poet.html

Thank You! (2.26.06)

2006-03-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

Reading Words would like to thank everyone who read and attended the event on February 26, 2006 and made it such a huge success! The subjects and styles of readings were varied and it made for a wonderfully interesting evening.

The Book Swap was also a smashing success! We hope you enjoy what you took home and please bring more books to the next event!

Thank you all!

Amanda Hare (2.26.06)

2006-03-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

'The Cremation of Sam McGee' by Robert Service

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee,
Where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam
'Round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold
Seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way
That he'd "sooner live in hell".

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way
Over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold
It stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze
Till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one
To whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight
In our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead
Were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he,
"I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you
Won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no;
Then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursed cold, and it's got right hold
Till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead -- it's my awful dread
Of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair,
You'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed,
So I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn;
But God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day
Of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all
That was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death,
And I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid,
Because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say:
"You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you
To cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid,
And the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb,
In my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight,
While the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows --
O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay
Seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent
And the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad,
But I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing,
And it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge,
And a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice
It was called the "Alice May".
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit,
And I looked at my frozen chum;
Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry,
"Is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor,
And I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around,
And I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared --
Such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal,
And I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like
To hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled,
And the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled
Down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak
Went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow
I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about
Ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said:
"I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; . . .
Then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm,
In the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile,
And he said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear
You'll let in the cold and storm --
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,
It's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Charlie Canning (2.26.06)

2006-03-02T04:22:00.000-08:00

Inoue Yasushi’s English Grammar Lesson

While there are those who profess a love for English grammar, most
of us would rather do without it. First of all, there are the
unfamiliar terms like gerunds, participles, and compound complex
sentences. As if that weren’t enough to confound one, there are
countless rules and even more exceptions to those rules. In fact,
sometimes the sheer number of exceptions to a rule makes me wonder at
the utility of having a rule in the first place.

Nevertheless, grammar has to be taught and somebody has to teach
it. Unlike some of my colleagues whose eyes light up when they are
discussing one of the finer points of grammar, I do not enjoy teaching
grammar. Grammar is only palatable for me – and for my students, I
imagine – in context. So when I have to explain something that comes up
in one of my classes, I usually try to use an example from a writing
class or something from literature.

Recently, I have been reading the work of Inoue Yasushi
(1907-1991), a writer of the Showa Period who wrote beautifully crafted
short stories and novellas. It was in one of his early works called
“The Hunting Gun” (Ryoju) that I came across one of the most
imaginative grammar lessons that I have ever read. The excerpt that
follows, on the difference between the active and the passive voice, is
from the “Saiko’s Letter” section of “The Hunting Gun:”

To love, to be loved – our actions are pathetic. When I was in the second – or third-year class of a girls’ school, during an examination on English grammar, we were tested on the active and passive voice of verbs.

To strike, to be struck; to see, to be seen. Among many such examples was a brilliant pair: to love, to be loved. As each girl, eagerly looking at the questions and thinking about them, licked the lead of her pencil, someone mischievously started passing around a piece of paper, and the girl behind me gave it to me. When I looked at it, I found a pair　of　questions: ‘Do you want to love? Do you want to be loved?’ And under　the words ‘want to be loved,’ many circles had been written in ink or　blue or red pencil, while under ‘want to love’ there wasn’t a mark.

I wasn’t in the least an exception, and I added one more small circle　under ‘want to be loved.’ Even at the age of sixteen or seventeen,　when　we don’t know fully what it is to love or be loved, we women seem to　know by instinct already the happiness of being loved.

But during that examination the girl sitting beside me got the　scrap of　paper, glanced at it, and without hesitation made a big circle with a　bold　stroke of her pencil in the place where not a mark had been left. She wanted to love. Even now I can remember vividly that at the moment I felt confused, as if someone had suddenly attacked me from behind, though somehow, at the same time, I felt a slight revulsion because of her uncompromising attitude. She was one of the duller students in our class, an inconspicuous and somewhat gloomy girl. I don’t know what she has grown up to be – that girl whose hair had a brownish cast and who was always alone. But now, while I am writing this letter, more than twenty years since that time, the face of that lonely girl somehow floats before me as if it were only a short while ago.

When at the end of their lives they lie quietly and turn their faces to the wall of death – the woman who can say she has tasted fully the happiness of being loved and the woman who can say that even though she was unhappy she has loved – to which one would God give the true, quiet
rest?

Yet, is there anyone on earth who can say before God that she has loved?

Yes, there must be. That thin-haired girl may have grown up to be one of those few chosen women. Her hair and clothing may be in disorder, and her body may be scarred, but she can say with pride that she has loved.
(70-71)

References

Inoue Yasushi. The Hunting Gun. Trans. Sadamichi Yoko and Sanford Goldstein. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1961.

mjsalovaara (2.26.06)

2006-03-01T07:10:00.000-08:00

Give the Police State A Chance
(adapted from Lennon's song of almost the same title)

Ev'rybody's talking about
Terr'ism, Bushism, Pushism, Wussism, Bathism, Facism
You-ism, ME-ism
Isn't it the most
All we are saying is give the police state a chance
All we are saying is give the police state a chance

. . .

What is this vassal state of man
that allows him to be led by another
into darkness and call it daylight?

What is this vessel we call life,
so casually tossed over to the side
of despair and insist that it is hope?

Don't call me brother
and then ask me to follow
your dim imaginings of reason
wreaking from blood
spilled by ambition.

And don't oblige me
to couple to the plan
designed to feather your bed
and leave mine empty
and in grief.

No, I won't listen
to your dead and hollow march
while fools dance in the streets
proclaiming the virtues of ruin
believing paradise awaits
around the corner.

For I have been to your Feasts
and the meat was stone,
the wine vinegar,
and when I excused myself
of your hospitality
I was branded a criminal
and thrown back into the paradise
of fools dancing in the streets
exalting the justice of chains;
proclaiming the thousand lashes of poverty,
"the common good;"
claiming to have seen the light
while climbing over each other
for a crumb of promise
tossed from your table.

You are not my Prince
and I am not your Pauper
who believes in the blandishments
falling from your lips
thinking they are the diamonds
which can save me
from the treachery of opportunity
you too easily call democracy.

(in dedication to the Mulroney Conservatives – any resemblances to other conservatives perhaps isn't so coincidental given my aversion to their ideological bent)

. . .

Haiku/esque #1

This midnight air
is blue black
with a bit of hazy moon.

This midnight air
doesn't hang well
in my living room.

This midnight air
is like the woman
I left behind.

This midnight air
is a pool
and my mind a stone.

This midnight air
is the virgin
I once was.

This midnight air
is a lover
who tells no lies.

This midnight air
is not afraid
of the sunrise.

This midnight air
is
without darkness.

(Written in Mie-ken while looking east over the Pacific in the spring of 1997)

. . .

Are you willing to join the revolution of One?
Or are you just gonna sit there and cry?
You say you want freedom
but you put yourself in chains
then complain of the misery.

I went down to the river
where people were dancing
with the man in the long grey beard
he said, "Bring down the hammers;
free our sisters, free our brothers
there be glory in all the land."
But when I said that I was hungry
I was told that I was lazy
and was given a shovel instead.
Now I work all day for my daily bread
but still I haven't been fed.

Are you willing to join the revolution of One?
Or are you just gonna sit there and cry?
You say you want freedom
but you put yourself in chains
then complain of the misery.

Well, I went downtown
saw the wisdom of the right
asking for some change
mothers all deranged
babies disengaged
fathers with no wage
children in a rage
hamsters in a cage
creatures
roaming in the dark
hoping for a spark
to light a joint without regret
maybe they'll forget
money is hell bent
not enough to pay the rent
our future is all spent
on something we all believed in
career, money or something
blood and guts or nothing
now there's nothing
or something like ___________
or something.

Are you willing to join the revolution of One?
Or are you just gonna sit there and cry?
You say you want freedom
but you put yourself in chains
then complain of the misery.

(in honour of ideologues on the Left and Right)

. . .

William Blake's Take on War

O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
To drown the throat of war! -

When the senses Are shaken,
and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand?

When the souls of the oppressed
Fight in the troubled air that rages,
Who can stand?

When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
Throne of God,
When the frowns of his countenance
Drive the nations together,
Who can stand?

When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand?
O who hath caused this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?

The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!

by WIlliam Blake

. . .

Haiku-esque # 2 (abridged)

Sweet emotion
Sweet potato
Yaki-mo

Jerry Gordon (2.26.06)

2006-02-26T19:21:00.000-08:00

Abandoning the Solid

The wall is where we start.
From there we can't resist departing
and abandoning the solid. We touch
and it is touching myself.

I let the ocean fall from my hands as rain.
At such times I almost know generosity.
I almost fathom the infinity of
your patience,
letting each foot fall in its print
and each head loll in its sleep.

This is the language I read in dream billboards--
the city of poetic highrises
where words are building the sky
as a slightly unfinished sentence.
I read it
for as long as I can leave off understanding it
as what I want.

What does it mean?

I'm still afraid enough to ask that.

. . .

It Asks

"Why are you here?" it asks.
I'm here to drop the bubble of poetry into your vein,
to commit the necessary crimes of shame and grandeur,
to abandon every mask of self I love and therefore fall in hate with,
to set the clock forward and back,
to always be arriving in the chariot of doubt,
to learn how to carry each person into burning buildings,
to film this slow-motion car crash.
I'm here to ride the tattoo ink and build castles of smoke,
to appear,
to drift beyond sanity,
to keep each creek in tune,
to miss the chances others take
and paint a single corridor of mind with soot and prophesy.
I'm here to lose my way and every sense of punishing sureness.
I'm here to be fearless
because what matters is to get hit in the face, to smile in photos
and to encircle my arms with flowers.
My healing and decay ressemble my mirror of pride and envy.
I'm here to touch the surfaces of water,
to ruin what I've worked for and ignore what's important.
I'm here to look into your eyes as you look away,
awaiting your return before I flee into dream bedrooms.
I'm here to lock doors wide open and collect the nails of effects.
I'm here to beg and be betrayed, as is every bastard son's birthrite.
I'm here to breathe and never cease returning.

. . .

A Trespasser

I come out of my door
in the big-drop rain
and find a man taking shelter
beneath my eave,
like some elderly angel
in a soaked white shirt,
an odd pattern printed on his chest.

My first thought is he's my daughter--
the girl whose name means Dream.
But she never looks at me
with the humble eyes of a trespasser.
She'd never appologize
for being on the stoop.
She does not have
the thick skin of the sun
around her eyes.

So, to find him here
feels like catching a glimpse
at a mirror of a future;
a man paused by rain
using a tiny roof to wait
for the sky to dry.
A stranger, enough like me
to one day be me, unknown
but just beyond the door.

. . .

It's Afternoon

It's not everlasting,
it's just the afternoon
and with it we're completed
in our flawless incompletion.
It's not tender.
It's not new.
It's just what we are going through
and that's the Big Bang culmination
of God's first exhalation of the word.
The honest ease of all our struggle.
The indigo dragonfly's flutter.
The dust and magic song of rust
as it takes us back to grass
beyond our longing. Our belongings
coming back from all these
strangers' pockets.

. . .

Asleep
on the other side of the train,
a woman's head lolls
to the shudders of the LoopLine.
Her mouth is open
in an endless "ah."
Her finger keeps
a place in her book.

I don't imagine the world
she is dreaming.
Last year I would have
been so arrogant.

Today it is enough
to see her thumb tap twice
and know she believes her lies
as much as I.

. . .

This End of Night

I have no pet.
I only have my ignorance
so I chain it to a leash
and walk it proudly
through this end of night,
dressed up
in elaborate fashions
that never hide the fact
that it is really my ignorance.
People smile as it barks and bays
and yips and yaps
and tries to hump their shoes.
"Oh, so cute." "Look, look at it. It's
just like you," they say
as their dog squats, delicately shitting
polite memories on the sidewalk.

My ignorance sniffs itself
in such delight. It would be happy
to do it all night long, but I drag it on,
against its will. We have our loop to make
and a schedule to keep. We have to get back
to see the man made of light
and nod when our cue is flashed.

I have no pet.
I only have my ignorance.
I walk it proudly
through this end of night.

. . .

As Fallen Flowers Do

Ophelia floats within
her world of fluid blues.
Watching the past grow faint upstream,
she dreams of gravity
and our only moment.

Her shoulders fall.
Her hair looks full of wind.
A bubble escapes from her lips,
rising past paper flowers folded for emotions:

Irises of papyrus for guessing.
Roses of vellum for rememberance.
A hyacinth of cigarette foil for doubt.

They float around her breasts
as fallen flowers do; obscuring
what is too beautiful.
They will never get to burn
and leave their lines of smoke in our eyes.
For that, we must imagine
beyond what is and isn't
possible.

for a Chika Yoshii painting at Panarama 9.10.05

. . .

Falling Down

No one else can fall down for you.
It's all your own
embrace with gravity
and the intimate percussion of splat.

That!
That's the face
we all know firsthand
rising up through hands stinging
like the smallest sands of fire.

And I can imagine the earliest man
followed your ritual lead:
standing up, wiping his hands
down his hairy pants
and then clapping two or three times
in the way that has come to mean,
"I'm done with this."

inspired by seeing a 2 year-old boy trip and fall
9.13.05