10 minutes to midnight on 11/28/24

after the roast beast           & the fellowship of wine

we return          to the old spells          thank you for coming

          thank you for everything          thank you thank you thanks for you

i quench the fire          in the fireplace          we put the dishes away 

the leftovers in the fridge          loosen our belts     sigh 

another year in the bag          another gathering done

& still          we return to the old spells          the video clips & sounds

we go back to it again & again          where else goes such magic & despair

the pained expression          the rumpled suit          the resignation & defeat

as the boss on tv           who tried to do good          the promises 

the filth          his clean hands          when the election went south          says,

'as god as my witness          i thought          turkeys could fly!'

my spy

when i was a lad i was obsessed 

with the word espionage

not for its definition or hints

of duplicity or mystery

but in its sound as a word

the music of its syllables

& sibilance of s & soft g sounds

how trouble is made in the mouth

& the motors of politics 

rumble in the shadows

of gumshoe fiction

the netherworlds of spycraft 

& alternate identities

how a word might bring

darkness into light

while singing to myself

softly the refrain

espionage espionage espionage 

quote unquote

There's no greater embarrassment

Our intention was to change the world

And in the end the world changed us

Those who yesterday called for the Dictator's head

Are content today with seeing it better combed

It makes one weep oceans

I will end up shooting myself

--nicanor parra [from 'you will wonder' translated by dave oliphant (after-dinner declarations; host publications, 2009)] 

what a fly heard outside the dive bar

'yes, satan!  satan!  satan is here!  my mother told me satan is here!  & has come for me!  satan is here!  for me! what can i do!  lucifer!  beelzebub!  prince of darkness!  oh please, no, satan!  oh god of light!  my mother told me satan has come for me!'

the uncontrollable urge

is not to write when every fiber of your being is demanding you write so you write anyway even if what is written is screaming at you that that is not writing so it goes to show that not writing is writing while writing is an uncontrollable urge to keeping on going living

quote unquote

I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives.  I have no handwriting, for I never write.  I alone in Russia work with my voice, while all around me consummate swine are writing.  What the hell kind of writer am I?  Get out, you idiots!  

Nevertheless, I have many pencils, of various colors and all of them stolen.  They can be sharpened by a Gillette razor blade.  

The Gillette razor blade with its sharp, barely serrated edge has always seemed to me one of the noblest products of the steel industry.  A good Gillette blade cuts like sedgegrass, bends but does not break on one's hand.  It is like a Martian's calling card or a memo from a dapper devil with a hole pierced through its middle.

The Gillette razor blade is the product of the Death Trust whose shareholders include packs of American and Swedish wolves.  

--osip mandelstam [the fourth prose, translated by jane gary harris & constance link; osip mandelstam: complete critical prose; ardis, 1997]

haiku from the frog's prayer

silhouetted in moonglow     sat upon a rock by the pond

before the plash of water

holy diver

this green fuse

may we figure out this terrible shit

it's friday nite & you wanna hear a song from another, not so long ago, era of political, socio-economical & demographic turbulence

quote unquote

Ah!  I'm fed up:--But, dear Satan, a less fiery eye I beg you!  And while awaiting a few small infamies in arrears, you who love the absence of the instructive or descriptive faculty in a writer, for you let me tear out these few, hideous pages from my notebook of one of the damned.

--arthur rimbaud [a season in hell, translated by louise varese; new directions; 1961]

let's review!

yeah, i confess it.  when shit goes south i read poems.  perhaps that is not quite the full truth because i read poems all the time.  but my reading is contingent on the things going on in my life, & in the life of our civilization.  yes, that is a big claim.  but it is to absolute music i aspire.  & i know that there are a great many poets of the recent past who have gone thru so much more than i have.

at any rate, i also love reading reviews.  blogs, once upon a time, were a great source of reviewing books & poems.  sometimes they still are.  so tonight, after a long day at the office, when my mind is still shocked by the turn of events yesterday, i looked up a poet that i've read off & on for a couple of years now, doug anderson.

doug anderson started writing poetry rather later in life.  he served in vietnam as a marine corspsman & seen some serious shit.  much of his writing is about his experience in war.  but surprisingly most of his poems, that i've read, remain buoyant.  even if their subjects are very dark  anderson is the kind of poet that writes of horror & despair but his style 'sings of hope.'

so then but, i read this review, https://www.valpo.edu/valparaiso-poetry-review/2023/05/19/doug-anderson-review-by-rob-greene/, written by fellow poet rob greene tonight & am utterly charmed by it.  greene is a new poet to me as well.  i looked him up & found a few of his poems online that have a grit & honesty to them that makes the reader keeping going in their horrors & adventures.  as an aside, because my own name is common as clay, there are a few other writers named robert greene, one a contemporary novelist, i think, the other is an elizabethan dramatist who was apparently a rapscallion criminal bohemian [my kind of writer!].

what charmed me in greene's review is the rather simplicity of style.  no post-graduate show-off writing.  no critical theory vernacular.  & this moment of honesty & tenderness when describing the hallucinations of a speaker in an anderson poem greene says

On the trip “Driving Down Route 9 Last Night” we motor on by the Veterans’ hospital, where some of us hallucinate in the radical dark either by way of the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Schizophrenia. I am not positing the speaker has either of these conditions though I, as the reviewer, have both these illnesses so I can easily see the hallucinatory images Anderson conjures up from his memories of the Vietnam war, and yes, these are valid and yes, they are believable.

you got me rob greene!  your humility & bravery in your honesty about your illness is just, i don't know why, it just is, the balm i needed after the harrowing we have all gone thru these past 24 plus hours.  greene's forthrightness underscores, to me, his vitality while having a mental illness.  which is, again, a balm for me in my own sufferings of mental illness.  for mental illness is not, should not, be a taboo.  mental illness is a fact of life for some of us.  to which we do, because we got no choice, in keeping on keeping on.

'Everything Is Going To Be All Right' - Derek Mahon

from one of my favorite northern irish poets who have seen, & lived, thru some shit

sure, i am optimistic by default.  sue me!  but as mahon says, 'there will be dying/there will be dying' & still 'everything will be all right'.  

but this is bizarro world.  virginia woolf claimed human nature changed 'on or around december 1910.'  that really wasn't so long ago.  she was talking about modernism.  & the lead-up to the Great War, the war that broke the world.  now we live in a post-post-modernist era.  & the way things worked even 20 years ago have changed.    

into what?  we are still learning that as we go.

still, i believe, as mahon says in this poem, 'that everything will be all right.'  cuz we got no choice but to live in the present age.  there is no other age for which we can go.

 i hope mahon is right.

i really fucking hope so

Greeting the Sun

by jonathan hayes

With bong rips and beers

In pajamas with Netflix fired up on the screen
 
A beautiful and loving wife in bed snoring
An annoying cat asking to be fed again, and again…
Along with the neighbor staring into my apartment window
 
Out in the yard:
 
The rain has stopped
And the zombie girl eating a severed hand and the ghost
Hanging from a tree are all soaked wet and dripping
 
Cardboard tombstones bleed black permanent marker scrawling
 
I greet the sun to come
 
4:05 a.m.
And counting
 
Soon enough, maybe a beer or two more
 
I greet the sun, because
 
As small as I am in the universe
I’m still attracted to warmth
 
And the house waking up
 
 
Halloween Morning October 31^st, 2024

pinball wizard

b. & i stopped at a local pinball arcarde, the kind that serves beer & food, that caters to an older clientele who might be nostalgic to the things of their youth, like pinball machines.  we were on our way to get dinner for the evening from a local mexican restaurant.  we had some time to kill so b. gave me a few tokens & in we went.

i found this machine

 

i picked it because i was a hot wheels kinda kid.  the pinball machine reached back into my own memories of hot wheels cars & pinball machines but the machine here wasn't a vintage game.  rather it spooked into the player's nostalgia of a time long past.

still, it was fun playing.  senses on full as i put my fingers & eyes to the test of keeping that little silver ball in play.  there was so much noise in the arcade that i couldn't hear my own machine.  how was i doing?  how much did i score?  i fucking don't know!  

still, i set myself against the machine & looked into its works

i felt like a hybrid of machine & man as i worked against the lights to keep the silver ball in play.  my fingers became flippers.  my body leaned into the machine.  who am i?  what was my purpose?  how to stay in the fight of a system i could never have designed?

did i do well?  did i fail?  the silver ball ceased play & became stuck in a crevasse of the interior of the machine.

there it stayed.  for a few minutes.  i even tried to tilt the pinball machine to get it unstuck.  b. finished his own playing & waited for me.  i was done.  kaput.  finished.  then the silver ball dropped back into play.  i hung on.  i flipped the flippers.  i did what was necessary.  i watched the ball slip out of view.  it was over.  like life.  the play felt like it took a lifetime.  that lasted only for a few short minutes.  if i possessed any skills it was this one, the ability to hang on.  & keeping going.  all the way to the very freaking end of play when the silver ball dropped, inevitably, out of sight.

sometimes the things of this world sync up

waiting on the red light on the corner of howe ave accross the street was the 7Eleven anna & i were running errands & listening to satellite radio

'seven nation army' by the white stripes started & you know that bass heavy beat you can't help but groove to the song

well, it was then that we saw a street person a man in raggedy clothes crossing the ave dancing dancing dancing to the beat of  'seven nation army' 

just as if we had planned it to be in our movie script of life how our life & the street man's synced for a few bars of a tune 

& i said

holy shit! this is going into a poem!