Me and Sylvia

2010-05-01T10:00:00.003-04:00

May Day

May 1st and winter gone for good. What a gorgeous morning. Went for a walk around the block and through the cemetary. Saw bleeding hearts which my mama loved. Saw a man who used to be the little boy across the street in horn rimmed glasses. I took a picture of him once on his bicycle in those glasses and it got put in a show at the highschool. Thought about Scarlett O'hara and her love of Tara. That's how I feel about this neighborhood. There are other places in the world I love and I am glad this is not the only place I know, but still this street, the house I grew up in, the woods on the hill, are furled inside of me as immoveable as a heart or a kidney

The Morning Glories

The morning glories
bloom, securing the gate
in the old fence

Matsuo Basho

2010-02-06T11:39:00.007-05:00

Tick Tock

Morning that is supposed to be full of snow, but nothing yet. Friends in Copiague have snow, but not here. I am not complaining as I have errands to do in my newly returned and already breaking down car. Blue morning and need to go to the doctor today. Out of meds. Listening to Sinatra which is making me bluer. Reminds me of dancing with Sonny at my wedding. Oh lord, hard to keep it together today, which I am only admitting because I know there's not much of a chance anyone will read this. Like writing on the wind.

Miss my dad so much. And my mom. Tired. Bone bone tired. And teary. Gonna get myself to the doctor before I get worse...damn.

Depression in Winter

There comes a little space between the south
side of a boulder
and the snow that fills the woods around it.
Sun heats the stone, reveals
a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,
and tufts of needles like red hair,
acorns, a patch of moss, bright green....

I sank with every step up to my knees,
throwing myself forward with a violence
of effort, greedy for unhappiness--
until by accident I found the stone,
with its secret porch of heat and light,
where something small could luxuriate, then
turned back down my path, chastened and calm.

Jane Kenyon

2010-01-03T13:44:00.002-05:00

And So it Goes, 2010

January 3rd and getting ready for the journey home from Weehawken. Not sure how I am going to drag the boy away from the football game. Girl child stompy and sullen cause she wants to go home. I have to say I am not looking forward to the sub zero temps out there. Spring, spring where are you? I'd even take global warming today.

Got an anonymous message from someone regarding this blog that made me pause. I have become a Facebook Junkie, but maybe I should spend some time back here again. Wrote a good poem the other day, another Mary poem. Think now I want to focus on Mary as opposed to different women in the bible. Jack got a bible for Christmas and I have been reading it. Funny how some books are grim and utilitarian in their writing, and other books more like poetry. I know next to nothing about the bible so the reading is fascinating to me. And makes me angry. I hate how Jesus is depicted as interacting with his mother. Always imperious and demanding. And referring to the her as "woman." No wonder we have so much trouble.

Kate now has her coat on and Jack is refusing to budge off couch. Must shepard everyone out the door. Oops, now we are staying for pizza because auntie is indulging the boy who is not allowed to watch football at home. Kate fuming. No way to make everyone happy.

The Wind Cries Mary

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary

The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
‘Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it’s old age, and it's wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary.

Jim Hendrix

2009-08-16T09:45:00.004-04:00

Off the Couch

Sunday morning and kids with BFI. Friday night I did a reading at Barnes and Noble in Huntington and it went very well. Good friends, including the lovely Jr. in the audience. Drinks and dinner afterward at Applebees. Jr. invited the libertarian with the petition to join us, and suggested that he and I do the two for one on the menu. I will pay her back. I decided that I am no longer going to read any of my old work at readings, which means I have my work cut out for me before the next reading in September. Why is it so hard to get back to writing?

Saw Julie and Julia last night and was delighted. Inspired me to focus, and on the way home I passed the sign in front of the Korean church that always has a message. This week it was "Burying your talents is a big mistake." Amen.

Judy, my beloved roommate from the University of Bridgeport, 1978, was at the reading last night. All the years pass and it's as if nothing has passed. We both have kids now and our daughters are the same age. We plan to get together very soon as we live a half hour's drive from one another now. Facebook may have lots of negatives, but it does bring people back together.

Oh swami, I am going to find a poem from "She Rises Like the Sun" which is sitting on the broken printer next to the keyboard here, and find something apropos for this post.

The Two Gretels

The two Gretels were exploring the forest
Hansel was at home
sending up flares

Sometimes one Gretel got afraid,
She said to the other Gretel,
"I think I'm afraid"
"Of course we are", Gretel replied.

sometimes the other Gretel whispered,
with a shiver,
"You think we should turn back?"
To which her sister Gretel answered,
"We can't. We forgot the breadcrumbs"

so they went forward
because
they simply couldn't imagine the way back.

and eventually, they found the gingerbread House,
and the Witch, who was really, they discovered,
the Great Good Mother Goddess,
and they all lived happily ever afterwards

The Moral of this story is:
Those who would have the whole loaf,
let alone the house
had better throw away their breadcrumbs.

Robin Morgan

2009-05-30T11:44:00.003-04:00

Saturday with Demons

The children are watching a movie about children who dig an opening to the mouth to hell in their backyard. Kind of like Goosebumps on acid. We certainly are family.

Taking the kiddies to Weehawken tonight, bad movies, lasagna and a game of catch between Jack and Uncle Troy. The Girl and I are going to Washington DC for a class trip beginning on Wednesday morning at four a.m. I'll have to get an alarm clock. Or since the girl and I are both insomniacs maybe we'll just stay up and sleep on the bus. The boy is going to stay with BFI, which means when I get back I'll be paid back in angry 13 year old boy behavior, in spades. I think before his teen years are over I will either be dead from stress, or he'll have been given away to a traveling circus--step right up and see the meanest 13 year boy in captivity.

Katie mama has volunteered me to chaperone another little girl on the trip whose parents can't go. Thank you Kate. Please say a little prayer it's a nice kid and that I don't lose her somewhere. You would think the principal, who is well acquainted with me, would have picked somebody more mother like for this kid.

Happy weekend all.

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Frank O'Hara

2009-05-18T07:36:00.001-04:00

Poem Medicine

Sometimes you find a poem that comes to you just in time.

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:

I am living, I remember you.

Marie Howe

2009-05-16T09:53:00.001-04:00

For Jack

Because I Told You So

if i gave you the sky
if i laid down my life
would you believe me then?

if i promised to change
if i carried the blame
would you believe me then?

could you see it like me
and believe what i see
could you listen, and remember that i love you
only, because i told you, because i told you so.

if you told me you lied
but i stayed true and tried
would you believe me then?

and if your beauty was gone
but my love lingered on
would you believe me then?

could you see it like me
and believe what i see
could you listen and remember that i love you
only,
because i told you, because i told you so.

you take the wheel for now
i'm too tired to drive this one home anyhow,
for now

and when you mention my name
let this one thing remain,
my love,
believe me now.

Jonatha Brooke

2009-05-10T09:16:00.002-04:00

Mother's Day 2009

Happy Mother's Day to all the excellent moms I know...Am, Camille, LiaLia, Kath, Linder Loo, Alison, Jen, Stef, Pamela, and on and on. And me too! And to my mama, who never let us want for a thing and taught us how to love and, by example, to be strong women. Sending a big bunch of celestial Irises to you, Vi.

Sonnets are Full of Love

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come
And so because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name:
In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.

Christina Rossetti

2009-03-28T11:32:00.003-04:00

Reconnect

Saturday morning and listening to Sarah McLachlan. Downloaded music from Amazon this morning and just listening to Surfacing is bringing me back to myself. Funny how we lose ourselves for weeks or months at a time and then hearing certain music can stop the autopilot madness. "There's no one left to finger, there's no one left to blame..." Kids are with their father obviously or I wouldn't be able to write or listen to anything vaguely mom-like in peace. My life is beginning to seem too small and circumscribed lately. Safe has lost its appeal and I'm tired of the couch and the t.v. and even my job which is no longer so absorbing. The soul will out eventually I guess. God grant me the courage and strength to move on to the next chapter.

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .

Jane Kenyon

2009-03-08T12:16:00.002-04:00

Stage Mama

Had thoughts of abandoning this blog as I am busy, and, unfortunately, now addicted to Facebook. For now, I will continue weekly additions as this blog keeps me connected to poetry and keeps me writing.

The boy is writing an EXCELLENT story, it's weird and surreal and funny. For all his protesting he will never be a writer like his poverty stricken mother, he IS a writer. He has been going to an open mic for teens on Saturday nights and will be reading his story there next week. I'm not allowed to attend of course, but perhaps I will lurk in the back where he can't see me. I am so proud of both my kids...Kate recently kicked butt playing a racist, southern old man defendent in a school trial based on the book Shiloh. Her teacher says she is a joy to teach! Thank you God for giving them each something of their own to be passionate about.

The Dog of Art

That dog with daisies for eyes
who flashes forth
flame of his very self at every bark
is the Dog of Art.
Worked in wool, his blind eyes
look inward to caverns and jewels
which they see perfectly,
and his voice
measures forth the treasure
in music sharp and loud,
sharp and bright,
bright flaming barks,
and growling smoky soft, the Dog
of Art turns to the world
the quietness of his eyes.

Denise Levertov

2009-02-28T08:50:00.002-05:00

Blue Morning

When I Look To The Sky

When it rains it pours and opens doors
And floods the floors we thought would always keep us safe and dry
And in the midst of sailing ships we sink our lips into the ones we love
That have to say goodbye

And as I float along this ocean
I can feel you like a notion that won't seem to let me go

Cause when I look to the sky something tells me you're here with me
And you make everything alright
And when I feel like I'm lost something tells me you're here with me
And I can always find my way when you are here

And every word I didn't say that caught up in some busy day
And every dance on the kitchen floor we didn't have before
And every sunset that we'll miss I'll wrap them all up in a kiss
And pick you up in all of this when I sail away

And as I float along this ocean
I can feel you like a notion that I hope will never leave

Whether I am up or down or in or out or just plane overhead
Instead it just feels like it is impossible to fly
But with you I can spread my wings
to see me over everything that life may send me
When I am hoping it won't pass me by

And when I feel like there is no one that will ever know me
there you are to show me

Cause when I look to the sky something tells me you're here with me
And you make everything alright
And when I feel like I'm lost something tells me you're here with me
And I can always find my way when you are here

Train

2009-02-21T09:56:00.002-05:00

Out of Step

I just figured out that FP is one of my friends on Face Book. I don't really get how Face Book works entirely, because I am old and foggy. FP, forgive my idiocy. I love you very much!

Odd happenings, spent some time yesterday at work trying to figure out how to best describe a client's illness in a case summary, an eye disease called nystagmus that I never heard of. Then last night I was reading a novel called Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, and a character in the book had nystagmus. Weird coincidence. Then last night I dreamt that the kids and I drove to my brother's house, twice to squirt scented powder all over the front of the house to make it smell nice. I don't talk to my brother really, so what the hell did that mean?

The boy is driving me bonkers, but my friend Lia suggested a book called Yes, Your Teen is Crazy. Thank god for Lia and that book! It is already helping me deal with my teen whose brain seems to have been replaced with a swirl of hormonal mush. Lesson one, do not engage in arguments with a crazy person! I have some work to do.

Mothers, Daughters

Through every night we hate,
preparing the next day's war.
She bangs the door.
Her face laps up my own
despair, the sour brown eyes,
the heavy hair she won't
tie back. She's cruel,
as if my private meanness
found a way to punish us.
We gnaw at each other's
skulls. Give me what's mine.
I'd haul her back, choking
myself in her, herself
in me. There is a book
called poisons on her shelf.
Her room stinks with incense,
animal turds, hamsters
she strokes like silk. They
exercise on the bathroom
floor, and two drop through
the furnace vent. The whole
house smells of the accident,
the hot skins, the small
flesh rotting. Six days
we turn the gas up then
to fry the dead I'd fry
her head if I could until
she cried love, love me!
All she won't let me do.
Her stringy figure in
the windowed room shares
its thin bones with no one.
Only her shadow on the glass
waits like an older sister.
Now she stalks, leans forward,
concentrates merely on getting
from here to there. Her feet
are bare. I hear her breathe
where I can't get in. If I
break through to her, she will
drive nails into my tongue.

Shirley Kaufman

2009-02-15T14:25:00.002-05:00

Hurray for Three Day Weekends

Tomorrow is Monday and I am off! I think tonight when kids get back from BFI's I will take them to see Coraline. Went out Friday AND Saturday night and am exhausted! I am however going out to peruse the poetry section of Barnes and Noble before kids get back, and perhaps buy a new vacuum cleaner, whoo hoo, at Sears. Went out with co-workers on Friday, including the lovely Linder Loo, and ended up salsa dancing in a club called Havanna. Yesterday was my friend Miriam Stanley's book launch party at the Bowery Poetry Club. Made a new poet mommy friend, ate Korean food, and generally had an EXCELLENT time. Sometimes I really love my life! The clip below is amazing...enjoy!

2009-02-08T18:03:00.003-05:00

Sunday and the Deep Freeze is Over

The computer gave up the ghost last Sunday and so I have dug out the old Dell and am back online, after a fashion. This computer was purchased in 1999, so you can imagine how SLOW it is. But it is better than nothing, and I managed to do my taxes on it today. Bonus, music I had downloaded on it is again accessible. Listening to Train right now, which is bringing back a lot of memories from approximately 2001 to 2005. Well, kids are back so now football is on, so much for memory lane.

Went out with work colleagues on Friday night, which was fun and I stayed out until 11:00, late for this old lady. Saw Steve, my old fascist work buddy that I adore despite his twisted thinking. And Rod, another former Binder-ite, who is now teaching English to public school kids in Bellrose. How cool for those kids to be studying Romeo and Juliet with a teacher with an English accent. Took me until Saturday afternoon to recouperate. Used a computer at the library to complete the intro for a book I am writing for a friend's publishing company. I have been sworn to secrecy regarding project, so no details, but boy does it feel good to be writing.

BFI has a cell phone and told kids not to tell me. Then BFI, being the genius that he is, called my house from phone. Star 69'd, and now I have his number for when he doesn't show up, etc. Kids, don't procreate with an alcoholic loser!

I am now on Facebook, although I am not really sure how to use it. People are leaving messages on my wall, some of whom I don't know. I will figure it out.

Just served Tofurkey and it is horrible! Beige colored foam rubber stuffed with rice. Maybe it was because I bought the Vegan kind by mistake. It SMELLS like turkey. Tastes like turkey droppings (or what I imagine turkey droppings would taste like.) I am going to have yogurt for dinner. The boy does not seem to mind the tofurkey.

Eletelephony

Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant--
No! no! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone--
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I've got it right.)

Howe'er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee--
I fear I'd better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)

Laura E. Richards

2009-01-31T09:51:00.005-05:00

Winter Treat

Saturday morning and a balmy 24 degrees. The driveway is a sheet of ice and it feels like spring will never come. Well, I did have a moment of hope leaving work the other night with the last vestiges of sunset over the parking lot. It is no longer pitch black at 5:30 pm. Today I am taking the girl and her best buddy Kendall to the movies to see Inkheart, which is little Missy's favorite book. Reviews for movie are abysmal however. Sigh. Perhaps watching Brendan Fraser, who I think is very cute, will make movie bearable.

Went to high school registration with the boy this week. Was feeling very sentimental about my baby growing up until yesterday morning when he told me to shut up. Boy punished for weekend, no computer for him. Dreaming of when he is all grown up now.

I am going to call LC this morning as I miss him and he is not calling me or Jr. and we are getting ready to go up to Kingston and kidnap him for bad movie night. LC, this blog needs you! And FP too.

It can’t be summer,—that got through;
It ’s early yet for spring;
There ’s that long town of white to cross
Before the blackbirds sing.

It can’t be dying,—it ’s too rouge,—
The dead shall go in white.
So sunset shuts my question down
With clasps of chrysolite.

Emily Dickinson

2009-01-24T10:46:00.003-05:00

Money Comes and Money Goes

Got another raise at Binder, albeit a small one. And found out the child support money is going back down to next to nothing as all of BFI's back debt is paid off. Have applied for new court date to recalculate based on BFI's salary which is now substantially more than when he was a deli boy. More family court, how I'm looking forward to that. Took the boy to the dentist and apparently braces are in his future. That would fall into the money goes category, with 13 year old boy fury piled on top. The child won't wear his hat for fear of hat hair. And Kate's glasses have disappeared, linked I think to that fact that her brother has been calling her spectacled bear.

How bout that President Obama? I LOVE him! I am genuinely worried that some homicidal right-to-lifer is going to target him though...Stay safe Mr. President!

Listening to Graceland, Under African Skies...."This is the story of how we begin to remember..."

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

2009-01-20T18:50:00.002-05:00

Happy Inauguration Day!

I Hear America Singing

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The woodcutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to her, and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs.

Walt Whitman

2009-01-19T09:13:00.000-05:00

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood

2009-01-18T11:17:00.004-05:00

Back Again

I have been away from this blog for too long, I need to write and I have been refusing to allow myself, some kind of weird self-denial. I have joined my friend Stefanie's writing workshop, writingyoga.blogspot.com, and it is helping. Listening to Sarah McLachlan right now and will go for a walk in the snow in a little while. One of today's exercises from the workshop was to write down your goals and bury them. I buried mine with a sprig of evergreen, and used a spoon to dig dirt outside the cat door to make a hole...the ground is hard with ice and covered in snow, but the area outside the cat door is protected by the overhang and porch and so diggable! I'm sure the powers that be were laughing at me, one pajamed arm out the cat door, digging with a teaspoon for spiritual development.

I am going to read some poetry now (some Haiku, some Jane Kenyon, not sure what else), and eat some yogurt. America, turn off your TV, and read a poem!

The crow has flown away:
swaying in the evening sun,
a leafless tree.

Natsume Soseki

The first soft snow!
Enough to bend the leaves
Of the jonquil low.

Basho

The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.

Allen Ginsberg

2009-01-04T10:42:00.003-05:00

For FP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RDvmlXeylo

2009-01-04T10:08:00.000-05:00

For Miriam

2009-01-04T09:28:00.002-05:00

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —

None may teach it — Any —
’Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —

When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —

Emily Dickinson

2008-12-27T11:17:00.002-05:00

Farewell Christmas 2008

I have been terribly remiss in my blog writing. Life has been holiday crazy, two cases of strep throat and Little Missy's birthday sleepover the weekend before Xmas. Christmas has now come and gone, and it went well with kiddies happy with their presents and everything delivered on time. Next up is the New Year's Day poetry reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. This year I am the mistress of poet's biographies. The bios are supposed to be a 30 word maximum which of course not everyone followed. I had to edit and sincerely hope no angry poets confront me for chopping their bio submissions.

January is also the end of George Bush! I wonder if my countdown graphic is going to change into fireworks? What a blessed, blessed relief the thought of this new administration is. The recession, however, is scaring the bejesus out of me. My landlord has lost his job and so have a number of other people I know. I think I'm safe as I work for a disability law firm and people tend to go for Social Security after they lose a job. Should be lots of applicants calling for disability advocates. Must Keep Job.

The Instruction Manual

As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new
metal.
I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,
And envy them--they are so far away from me!
Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.
And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning
out of the window a little,
Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers!
City I wanted most to see, and did not see, in Mexico!
But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,
Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!
The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.
Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers,
Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and
blue),
And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and
yellow fruit.
The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood.
First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow
Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat
And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion.
His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and
white.
Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion,
And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see
her face too often.
But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one
I doubt they would notice the mustacioed man's wife.
Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the
sidewalk
Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his
teeth.
He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls
in white.
But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls.
Yet soon this all will cease, with the deepening of their years,
And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason.
But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick.
Wait--there he is--on the other side of the bandstand.
Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl
Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying
But it seems they are just mumbling something--shy words of love, probably.
She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes.
She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her
olive cheek.
Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in
love too;
His eyes show it. Turning from this couple,
I see there is an intermission in the concert.
The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws
(The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue),
And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk
About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school.

Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets.
Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim
That are so popular here. Look--I told you!
It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny.
An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.
She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink.
"My son is in Mexico City," she says. "He would welcome you too
If he were here. But his job is with a bank there.
Look, here is a photograph of him."
And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather
frame.
We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late
And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place.
That church tower will do--the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of
the sky. Slowly we enter.
The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have
been in the city, and how we like it here.
His daughter is scrubbing the steps--she nods to us as we pass into the tower.
Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends
before us.
there is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its
crumbling, leafy terraces.
There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.
There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies
And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and
beige.
Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders.
There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased.
But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand.
And there is the home of the little old lady--
She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself.
How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!
We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her
son.
We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.
And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my
gaze
Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.

John Ashbery

2008-11-29T08:50:00.002-05:00

Happy Birthday Jr, November 28, 1966

The Saturday after Thanksgiving. Kids eating oatmeal on the couch in front of the TV, after 50,000 nasty squirmishes since they fell out of bed. The new particularly annoying call for justice is "ma-om, ____ (insert child's name) is being meee-een." More and more, fantasies of taser ownership fill my head. "Ma-aaa...arghhhhh" and blessed silence.

Thanksgiving was actually lovely at the Velmar homestead. Boss did the turkey and it was the best one yet. And hurray for Jr's crab hush puppies which had everyone begging for one more as they came out of the frying pan. The ladies indulged in maybe a little too much Cabernet, but it was all good. Oh god, more fighting behind me, they are done shoveling oatmeal and now they are slapping each other in the face with pillows. Dear god, make it go away....

On Thursday morning my brother-in-law Troy June of Verdon, Illinois, kept me company in the kitchen as I made the stuffing and sweet potatoes with marshmallows. We talked about the beat poets, and whether Robert Creely was really a beat, and who the founder of City Lights Books was. We are both old and forgetful now, and so resorted to the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti of course! Also couldn't remember who wrote Spoon River Anthology and looked that up too...Edgar Lee Masters. Troy waxed enthusiastic about Charles Bukoswki. Was the blue collar drunken bum thing a shtick? I think yes, Troy thinks maybe not.

Jr. and I went to the courthouse to make my final restitution to the traffic court. Then we went to Home Depot where we were given free coffee and Dunkin Munchkins in honor of Black Friday. Jr. bought a mini Xmas tree and I got screws to put the bedroom door back on. Little missy slammed it and it fell off. Hurray for Jr. again as she put the door back up. We scored BIG at the Dollar Store, three big rolls of x-mas paper and a gift for Uncle Troy for UNDER FIVE DOLLARS.

I wrote out my Christmas cards last night, as I like to do on Thanksgiving weekend. Had to make a few calls for addresses, inviting the wrath of my loving friends and family. "You're doing WHAT?" Followed by name calling, like freak and bitch, and by statements like "I hate you." This is about the only organized thing I do all year so I think I should be cut some slack! Speaking of cards, Buddy, please email me your address.

Oh yes, yesterday was Jr's birthday. She poked me awake at six am to make her coffee, and she almost became a birthday casualty. Jr. is 42! Sending lots of birthday hugs to Weezer, Jr., and a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem...

The Plough of Time

Night closed my windows and
The sky became a crystal house
The crystal windows glowed
The moon
shown through them
through the whole house of crystal
A single star beamed down
its crystal cable
and drew a plough through the earth
unearthing bodies clasped together
couples embracing
around the earth
They clung together everywhere
emitting small cries
that did not reach the stars
The crystal earth turned
and the bodies with it
And the sky did not turn
nor the stars with it
The stars remained fixed
each with its crystal cable
beamed to earth
each attached to the immense plough
furrowing our lives

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

America

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

Robert Creeley

2008-11-25T00:01:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-23T12:30:00.003-05:00

Weekend Chatter

Kingston

LC has been located and has a great new place in Kingston, NY. He lives surrounded by buildings built as far back at the 1700's so we are psyched for some paranormal investigating and EVP recording. Kingston is not far from metro NY so bad movie night will continue! LC is especially eager to check out Jr's haunted Weehawken digs. Troy June saw a teenage girl in braids run past the bed and disappear into the wall on Friday night.

I have been doing some investigating about Kingston. It was settled by the Dutch, and was the third Dutch colony after Manhattan and Albany. The Dutch got rid of the Esopus Indians, then they got rich farming and later on selling cement, bricks and bluestone. Kingston industries eventually faltered, but the chamber of commerce says they are on the upswing again, making stuff like multimedia packages and solar powered boats. Boy doggies! LC says Kingston is a very pretty place with a great bus system and everything he needs within walking distance of his apt, which is the bottom floor of a house built in the 1940s with quadruple the space of his NYC apt. Hurray for LC making a smart and happy move!

I have been Xmas shopping online. The boy (who is currently in disgrace for failing English and who will once again have mama combing his school binder and assignments) has asked for a sock monkey, a flying pig, and an ant farm among other unusual things. Litte missy, who kicked ass this past school quarter and has become a "dynamic" classroom leader, wants lots of techno expensive stuff and Calvin and Hobbs books. I want a new Ann Taylor wardrobe and a trip to Scotland, but will settle for refrigerator magnets, potholders, and a rooster and hen statue set. From the kids I mean. I would like Jr. to get me new speakers for my computer!

Jr. is currently very sick with what I think is a sinus infection. She refuses to go to the doctor however and will probably keel over pulling crabgrass in her backyard in the subzero temperatures. I would like her to go to the doctor and get better before she starts making Thanksgiving food with her germy hands! She called me this morning and ordered me out into the cold to buy our Thanksgiving Turkey Lotto ticket. She is extremely bossy when not feeling well.

Been reading Jane Eyre nonstop, and heartily wish for a Mr. Rochester to commune with. I forget how much I love that book. Jane Eyre on men and women:

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."

Well I must away to the store and do some domestic stuff as Jr. and Troy are coming to sleep over on Thanksgiving night. And buy a "5 dollar unisex friendly gift" to put in Little Missy's Box of Thanks at school. Perhaps I will walk on the blustery beach, so as not to confine myself to "embroidering bags" this weekend.

Here is a poem for my friend LC who will now create music surrounded by new beauty:

Pleasure

A Short Poem or Else Not Say I

True pleasure breathes not city air,
Nor in Art's temples dwells,
In palaces and towers where
The voice of Grandeur dwells.

No! Seek it where high Nature holds
Her court 'mid stately groves,
Where she her majesty unfolds,
And in fresh beauty moves;

Where thousand birds of sweetest song,
The wildly rushing storm
And hundred streams which glide along,
Her mighty concert form!

Go where the woods in beauty sleep
Bathed in pale Luna's light,
Or where among their branches sweep
The hollow sounds of night.

Go where the warbling nightingale
In gushes rich doth sing,
Till all the lonely, quiet vale
With melody doth ring.

Go, sit upon a mountain steep,
And view the prospect round;
The hills and vales, the valley's sweep,
The far horizon bound.

Then view the wide sky overhead,
The still, deep vault of blue,
The sun which golden light doth shed,
The clouds of pearly hue.

And as you gaze on this vast scene
Your thoughts will journey far,
Though hundred years should roll between
On Time's swift-passing car.

To ages when the earth was yound,
When patriarchs, grey and old,
The praises of their god oft sung,
And oft his mercies told.

You see them with their beards of snow,
Their robes of ample form,
Their lives whose peaceful, gentle flow,
Felt seldom passion's storm.

Then a calm, solemn pleasure steals
Into your inmost mind;
A quiet aura your spirit feels,
A softened stillness kind.

Charlotte Bronte

2008-11-16T08:27:00.003-05:00

Night Walk and Cinnamon

Dreamt of Joyce last night. She was back for a limited stay and had some messages for me. LC, please email me pronto!

Last night it must have been in the 60s, with a strong, warm wind. Went for a walk around the block and it was kind of wild and lovely. The weeping willow in front of the Meade's house was tossing and I could reach up and brush the fronds with my finger tips. Nostalgia mixed with tumult. Tried to choose which house on the block I would purchase and move the kids into when I won the Lotto Turkey Raffle New York is holding this year. Jr. and I are going in halves on the ticket which is ten bucks.

This morning I am having a Yo Plait Light Raspberry Cheesecake yogurt. Unfortunately, there is nothing even vaguely cheesecakey about it. Lying Yo Plait bastards! Last night was shop for the week night and I purchased a Glade Apple Cinnamon Candle. Was hesitant to buy even a little luxury item at this time of year (September through December requires mucho cash due to school starting, Halloween, birthdays and holidays.) This candle placed in my newly cleaned kitchen made me extremely happy! Read an essay by Frank O'Hara on poetry writing, at the kitchen table, with the scent of apple pie in the air and was transformed! Sometimes a little luxury is a very reasonable thing.

Took Kiddies for blood tests yesterday as part of their yearly check-ups. Jack had terrorized Kate by telling her that the needle is gigantic and scraps the bone. Poor Moo Moo Kitty was shaking like a leaf but got through it bravely (I helped by singing the
Mockingbird song, which I don't know most of the words to, in my "beautiful" singing voice.) IHOP afterwards where I had bananna pancakes which were sublime. Jack kept getting mysterious text messages throughout the meal, which were probably from Ashley. I almost fell over when I got the bill. Kate's glass of milk cost almost three dollars. No more eating out for us until after Christmas!

The wind coming in around the cat door is cold so the temperature must have dropped last night. Time for some more warm coffee and to put on a sweater. Last night I was instructed in a dream to move to California. I would miss the fall too much. What's in California anyway?

Autobiographia Literaria

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

Frank O'Hara

2008-10-31T10:43:00.002-04:00

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I am home from work today because the boy had a check up this morning and Kate's last Halloween parade at the elementary school is today. Jack is dressed as a banana and Kate is a video character named Link. Kate does not want me trick or treating with her because I am an embarassment. Guess she'll be embarrassed cause I'm going. Tempted to dress up as something really bizzare to humiliate her even further! Other mom who is going, Alison, is dressing as Sara Palin. Apparently other people's mothers don't embarrass little missy.

How fast my babies are growing up. The boy seems to have a girlfriend, although I'm not supposed to know about this. Her name is Ashley. Jr. insists the boy has probably kissed a girl by now. I refuse to believe he has done more than hold hands!

Ghostly tidbit: Jr. has a ghost, a new one, that clomps around upstairs in boots!

The Moon and the Yew tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritious mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky -
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence."

Sylvia Plath

2008-10-25T10:56:00.003-04:00

Say Cheese EVP

Here is a picture taken at my sister's house of the ghostly former owners, the Ziefels. They are the balls of sparkly light next to the yappy white dog. That's part of Jr in the corner.

Ghost House

I DWELL in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;
The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.
It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me--
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.
They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,--
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

Robert Frost

2008-10-19T09:52:00.004-04:00

Missing LC

LC has gone off to the wilds of Washington D.C. and on a journey to find a new home. Jr. and I miss him terribly and this blog is just not a home without him. LC please check in and tell us how it is all going! The holidays are coming and they won't be the same without you. We propose that you come to L.I. for Thanksgiving. I am making the turkey again. Velmar and I have once again fended off Jr.'s hideous suggestions of goose and pigeon. Jr's side dishes, though, will be as heavenly as usual. Planning a sleepover bad movie Thanksgiving night, everybody squeezed into my micro apt. You come too! Segue into poem...

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

Robert Frost

2008-10-18T08:37:00.002-04:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LINDER LOO!

Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Dylan Thomas

2008-10-10T06:55:00.002-04:00

Mommy Takes Manhattan

Going to NYC for the weekend...friends in Arizona booked a room at the Sheraton on Times Square for a wedding, wedding got cancelled, they gave me the room! My good friend Strawhead Burton will be meeting me for whatever madness we can manage to get up to...I'm thinking mojitos and jazz clubs for starters...hurray for a good time, good friends, my lovely sister Jr. for taking the kids, and for Fall in Manhattan...planning Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art roof garden on Sunday. (Staying till Monday morning!!!)

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Frank O'Hara

2008-10-04T22:01:00.004-04:00

Movie Pie

I saw two movies today, Waitress and The Duchess. They both rocked, but Waitress is completely pie-centric and a must for everybody who wants pie! Buddy, if you have not seen Waitress, go to the free movie site and watch it now! You will be in pie heaven, AND Andy Griffith is in it!

Cottleson Pie

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

A. A. Milne

2008-10-04T11:26:00.003-04:00

God and October

This is my favorite month. Jack was born in October and the trees are at their most gorgeous in October. I got married on October 2, and while you might think that would ruin the month for me, it does not. Every October 2nd I congratulate myself for escaping a very BAD marriage. Imagine what October 2nd would be like if I was still married to BFI, a day of handwringing and regret. I was also baptized on October 2nd, which seems like a good thing for no reason that makes sense. I am going to the movies tonight to see Religulous. Jr. thinks I am going to burn in hell. I think I am going to laugh a lot and have my feelings about religious zealots reinforced. And yet I still believe in God. I attended a christening last Sunday in the church I attended as a kid. Realized I love the church itself while feeling contempt for the priest who stands at the front like a little god sermonizing at me. My favorite time to be in a church is when it is empty. You can feel god then. When there is a service, all I can think is where is the feminine in all this, the power of the female? I can't bring myself to feel reverence for christianity, although the jury is still out on Christ.

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My litany would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

Philip Larkin

2008-10-01T13:55:00.005-04:00

Vroom Vroom

Today I am free! Endless traffic court is finally over and my lawyer, god love him, got everything dismissed this morning. Life is good. Today is Joyce's birthday which I took as a good sign for a court appearance. I bought roses after court and left them for her as I suspected a little celestial help this morning. Planning driving trips in my head, to Amherst to Emily Dickinson's house, or maybe the Berkshires and Edith Wharton's mansion in Lenox. Nothing is more beautiful than the Berkshires in October.

AUTUMN

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.

Emily Dickinson

2008-09-20T11:51:00.003-04:00

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Everything is Plundered

Everything is Plundered
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses -
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

- Anna Akhmatova

2008-09-11T18:47:00.002-04:00

Missing

I miss you like a sister,
Like an arm
Cut off in a freak accident,
Like an amethyst bracelet
Left on the F train,
Or October in the middle of August.
I miss you like the rise of a tower
That used to sit near the river.
Like Joy
Sister, I miss you.

M.J. Tenerelli

2008-09-07T14:50:00.004-04:00

Card That I Have Found on the Floor Three Times in the Last Week

Gort

"The ivy grows spreads and flourishes in many conditions--cultivated land and wasteland, in light or near darknes, in fertile soil or in rubble and stones. It will push its way through tiny cracks and crevices to reach the light and it is strong and difficult to destroy. Since ancient times, the Vine and the Ivy have been regarded as enemies. If the Vine, through intoxication, releases prophetic visions, the Ivy, in constrast, puts you in touch with your own inner resources, giving you the ability to see through the eyes of the soul beyond the everyday world. The color is associated with the Ogham Ivy is gorm, sky blue. Retain a vision of the clear blue sky to which you aspire in your mind's eye - don't be gorm-less.

If selected, this card represents the spiral of the self and the search for self. The maze of labyrinth is also linked to the Ivy, since it too symbolizes the wandering of the soul, circling inward and outward seeking nourishment and experience from the outside and from within itself, to achieve finally its goal of enlightenment."

From "The Celtic Tree Oracle, a System of Divination" by Liz and Colin Murray

The Ivy Crown

The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,
one way or another,
from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
Antony and Cleopatra
were right;
they have shown
the way. I love you
or I do not live
at all.

Daffodil time
is past. This is
summer, summer!
the heart says,
and not even the full of it.
No doubts
are permitted—
though they will come
and may
before our time
overwhelm us.
We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate.
We may
by an outside chance
even win! We do not
look to see
jonquils and violets
come again
but there are,
still,
the roses!

Romance has no part in it.
The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.
It has its seasons,
for and against,
whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
to assert
toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
is to tear flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars.

Children pick flowers.
Let them.
Though having them
in hand
they have no further use for them
but leave them crumpled
at the curb's edge.

At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.

William Carlos Williams

2008-09-06T14:58:00.003-04:00

Magic To Do

I turned 48 on Thursday. On September 4, 1973 I turned 13 and my father took me to see Pippin on Broadway. For best birthday moment ever, see below. Thank you Sonny!

Philosophy

If I should labor through daylight and dark,
Consecrate, valorous, serious, true,
Then on the world I may blazon my mark;
And what if I don't, and what if I do?

Dorothy Parker

2008-08-30T09:37:00.002-04:00

Labor Day Weekend

Saturday morning and the Indigo Girls singing "I don't want to talk about it..." Like me of late, avoiding everything including the blog cause I don't want to talk about anything that makes me think (feel). I hear the siren call of my therapist Madeline. Music the first step back to the living.

Kids with BFI who showed up to get them in a wide striped suit jacket that looked like it was stolen off a dead clown.

Lc has moved out of his NYC apt and is on an extended road trip to I'm not sure where. LC, hope you've got a laptop now and can check in. PLEASE do not move out of the tri-state area. Christmas won't be Christmas without you at Jr's for Christmans Eve celebrating under (or next to) the white wire Christmas tree.

Weehawken this PM for a BBQ and early birthday cake. Taking the train this time, I am not up for the hell that is the Lincoln Tunnel back from Jersey on Sunday.

Reading On the Road yesterday at lunch, and got to the part where Sal and Dean are driving through the tunnel into NYC from Paterson and Dean has a shirt wrapped around his head for warmth. He says something to the effect of, "We look like two arabs ready to blow up New York." Psychic Kerouac?

Galileo

Galileo's head was on the block
the crime was looking up for truth
and as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth

And then you had to bring up reincarnation
over a couple of beers the other night
and now I'm serving time for mistakes
made by another in another lifetime

How long till my soul gets it right
can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of galileo
king of night vision, king of insight

And then I think about my fear of motion
which I never could explain
some other fool across the ocean years ago
must have crashed his little airplane

How long till my soul gets it right
can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of galileo
king of night vision, king of insight

I'm not making a joke, you know me
I take everything so seriously
if we wait for the time till all souls get it right
then at least I know there'll be no nuclear annihilation
in my lifetime I'm still not right

I offer thanks to those before me
that's all I've got to say
'cause maybe you squandered big bucks in your lifetime
now I have to pay
but then again it feels like some sort of inspiration
to let the next life off the hook
but she'll say "look what I had to overcome from my last life
I think I'll write a book"

How long till my soul gets it right
can any human being ever reach the highest light
except for Galileo God rest his soul
(except for the resting soul of Galileo)
king of night vision, king of insight

How long
(till my soul gets it right)
[til we reach the highest light]
how long
(till my soul gets it right)
[til we reach the highest light]
how long

Indigo Girls(Words by Emily Saliers)

2008-08-24T09:16:00.003-04:00

Toot Toot

I have a poem on the Rogue Scholars site. Check it out!

2008-08-23T14:05:00.003-04:00

Nunca Nada Nothing

My brain is dead. I work. I sleep. I watch the gameshow network. Yes, my brain is dead. I have nothing interesting in my head that I can transfer to this blog page. I read about a dog in Argentina that saved an abandoned baby by dragging it across a field and adding to her clump of puppies. See, I know there is a word for a bunch of puppies but I can't remember what it is. brain dead. Soon I will be 48. Oh Christ, there's a subject I don't want to think about. Kids back to school. Another subject that makes my brain shut off in fear (Jack, did you do your homework? Really? Really?) Kate would like me to tell everyone that she has new video on Youtube called My Friends Youtube and Otherwise. That's it, nothing else.

The Munich Mannequins

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life

Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice.
It means: no more idols but me,

Me and you.
So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles

These mannequins lean tonight
In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,

Naked and bald in their furs,
Orange lollies on silver sticks,

Intolerable, without minds.
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,

Nobody's about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and setting

Down shoes for a polish of carbon
Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

O the domesticity of these windows,
The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,

The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz.
And the black phones on hooks

Glittering
Glittering and digesting

Voicelessness. The snow has no voice

Sylvia Plath

2008-08-09T10:28:00.004-04:00

Greetings from Long Island!

Weezer Jr. thinks the Montauk Monster is a Koala bear who fell off a steamer coming from Australia. Maybe if it were the biggest koala bear that ever lived. Or maybe someone sewed a koala's head to a dog body...some prankster Aussie sailor! I think it is a poor, decaying dog. What do you think?

Kids with BFI and I am coloring my hair and doing this. And listening to the Hissing of Summer Lawns. I have a new, super short haircut that the little demon girl next door told me looks "like a boy haircut!" I like it, it makes me feel free, kind of like Jo in Little Women!

I have been working like crazy, freelance stuff on top of Blunder and Blunder on top of mommy work. After I finish my hair I think I am going out to the North Fork, just gonna drive drive drive in my newly fixed up (to the tune of 700 dollars when all was said and done) Tracer. Need to recharge, write something, stare at the Peconic bay. I don't know who I am lately.

JOURNEY

Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me--I am so tired, so tired
Of passing pleasant places! All my life,
Following Care along the dusty road,
Have I looked back at loveliness and sighed;
Yet at my hand an unrelenting hand
Tugged ever, and I passed. All my life long
Over my shoulder have I looked at peace;
And now I fain would lie in this long grass
And close my eyes.
Yet onward!
Cat birds call
Through the long afternoon, and creeks at dusk
Are guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry,
Drawing the twilight close about their throats.
Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines
Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees
Pause in their dance and break the ring for me;
Dim, shady wood-roads, redolent of fern
And bayberry, that through sweet bevies thread
Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant,
Look back and beckon ere they disappear.
Only my heart, only my heart responds.
Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day,--sharp underfoot
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs--
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road
A gateless garden, and an open path:
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

2008-07-26T18:02:00.000-04:00

Better Than Church

2008-07-26T13:33:00.002-04:00

A Week in July

Vacation week with me and The Coosh (Ms. Kate.) Jack has been at camp upstate and here at home we have been eating out, (and eating fast food as "vegetarian boy" as his sister calls him, has not been here to function as our Greek chorus) staying up late, sleeping late, tooling around in the car which is back on the road, and yesterday we went to Adventureland with Kate's best friend Kendall. Amusement park was really fun, tons of cool rides, good food, and kids had a BLAST. So great to see Katie so happy. Two trips to the pet store, and last night Kendall slept over. Kate is now collapsed on the couch and I am about to join her. Jack should be back soon and then the kids go with BFI for the rest of the weekend. Fighting the urge to go out to the North Fork instead of doing the freelance project that's due. I'm tired of doing the right thing. Blah!

A Boat

O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.

Richard Brautigan

2008-07-13T10:16:00.003-04:00

Rapture

I have just come upon a site called youvebeenleftbehind.com. For a 40 dollar subscription price you can leave up to six messages to loved ones who didn't get scooped up in the rapture...for the heathens you love I guess. The messages get delivered three days after the rapture...not sure how that works since you'd assume anybody working for this site is a born again christian nut job, a prime candidate for a ride on the rapture highway to heaven. Also confused as to how there is still internet service once armageddon commences. There I go, thinking too much. My lack of faith marks me as a future recipient of a post rapture email. I suspect anybody reading this will be left behind with me so no need for any of us to spend 40 bucks on the site. What do post rapture emails say do you think? "I TOLD you to convert!" "Weather here is fine, wish you were here...if you weren't a filthy sinner that is." "Repent! Oh wait, it's too late." Can people really be stupid enough to avail themselves of this service?

It is Sunday and I am going to see Hellboy II later with my friend Kathleen. Instead of church. Kids will not go to see it, and I am dying to see it, so Kath has graciously agreed to accompany me instead of going to the Cinema Arts Center for an indie film. Joni Mitchell is playing and I wish that was enough to make me want to wash the dishes.

Blueeeeeeeeeeeee, songs are like tattoos!

Heaven has different Signs

Heaven" has different Signs—to me—
Sometimes, I think that Noon
Is but a symbol of the Place—
And when again, at Dawn,

A mighty look runs round the World
And settles in the Hills—
An Awe if it should be like that
Upon the Ignorance steals—

The Orchard, when the Sun is on—
The Triumph of the Birds
When they together Victory make—
Some Carnivals of Clouds—

The Rapture of a finished Day—
Returning to the West—
All these—remind us of the place
That Men call "paradise"—

Itself be fairer—we suppose—
But how Ourself, shall be
Adorned, for a Superior Grace—
Not yet, our eyes can see—

Emily Dickinson

2008-07-09T18:25:00.003-04:00

Look What Kate Rebecca Made!

My baby bunny, who is all of ten years old, made this EXCELLENT youtube video. I am SO proud. Sniff.

2008-07-06T07:02:00.003-04:00

Weehawken Weezer

Sunday morning and kiddies asleep. Spent the 4th in Weekhawken at Jr.'s new place. The house needs much work but is full of possibilities and has an excellent feeling. Kids and I really liked being there, even Ms. Kate who HATED going to Brooklyn and would just wait miserably for us to go home again. The neighborhood is wonderful and the neighbors really welcoming. NYC skyline rises from the backyards. Saw a car with plates that said "Poet JB" on Jr's block, and an apt. for rent across from her house...I could work in NYC if we lived there...ten minute bus ride to Port Authority. Something to ponder........

Jr. has a new dog, a white highland terrier named Billy. He is very cute, sweet, and well behaved. Puts the badly behaved sausage beagle in a very bad light! Jr. can no longer say I never like her animals as Billy is a little white ball of light and I loved him right away.

Have freelance work to do on this rainy Sunday. Please god the children will entertain themselves silently while I work. I need an office.

Dutch Interiors

Christ has been done to death
in the cold reaches of northern Europe
a thousand thousand times.
Suddenly bread
and cheese appear on a plate
beside a gleaming pewter beaker of beer.

Now tell me that the Holy Ghost
does not reside in the play of light
on cutlery!

A Woman makes lace,
with a moist-eyed spaniel lying
at her small shapely feet.
Even the maid with the chamber pot
is here; the naughty, red-cheeked girl. . . .

And the merchant's wife, still
in her yellow dressing gown
at noon, dips her quill into India ink
with an air of cautious pleasure.

Jane Kenyon

2008-06-29T11:36:00.001-04:00

Crazy Love

Seven years after the fact,
Like a blow to the head,
Every one of you dead.
Mama come home,
Daddy hold my hand.
I am so alone here
And fear the fog I’m dressed in.
Shroud, in the car I want to drift
To the highway’s shoulder,
Lay my head down
On glass.
I’m tired
Of this unrequited love,
The ache and the looking
And my empty empty hands.
Please don’t leave
Me here.

M.J. Tenerelli

2008-06-28T08:45:00.003-04:00

Dream Love

Good morning. Just got off the phone with Jr. who spent her first night in Weehawkin and has already seen a ghost! Male figure standing next to a ladder that she thought was Troy until she realized Troy was asleep next to her. LuLu went into the extension in the middle of the night and barked her head off until Jr. went and picked her up. Poor Jr.! Jr. and Troy June have much work to do in new house. Everyone say a prayer!

Kids are gone this weekend and I am going into NYC tonight to a poetry reading. Hurray! LC, if you are reading this, email me. Maybe we can have dinner afterwards. Indian? Have to figure out how to hook up new printer so I can print out new poems to bring, I think there's an open mike afterward. Anybody in the NYC area at six tonight, go to the Cornelia Street Cafe to hear excellent poets Miriam Stanley and Jackie Sheeler read.

So much to do here. Apt. needs to be condemned. Listening to the Siren Songs internet channel though, which will make it easier. Why do I hate cleaning so much? I hate mess, but that doesn't make me like cleaning any better.

My dreams have been like scenes from chick flicks lately. Romance to the nth degree, forbidden love, a little kissing, much longing, no sex, just powerful attraction and love like a teenage crush. Men from my everyday life that I don't actually like in that way...guess they're symbols. I'm a little nonplussed, what is going on with my head?

Time to vacuum. And fold clothes. And maybe read a little Shipping News in between. Have a wonderous day all.

Amelia

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
It was the strings of my guitar
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets thru to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture-post-card-charms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

People will tell you where theyve gone
Theyll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Oh amelia, it was just a false alarm

I wish that he was here tonight
Its so hard to obey
His sad request of me to kindly stay away
So this is how I hide the hurt
As the road leads cursed and charmed
I tell amelia, it was just a false alarm

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

Maybe Ive never really loved
I guess that is the truth
Ive spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude
And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

I pulled into the cactus tree motel
To shower off the dust
And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust
I dreamed of 747s
Over geometric farms
Dreams, amelia, dreams and false alarms

Joni Mitchell

2008-06-18T07:19:00.002-04:00

Any Major Dude Will Tell You

I never seen you looking so bad my funky one
You tell me that your superfine mind has come undone

Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again
When the demon is at your door
In the morning it won't be there no more
Any major dude will tell you

Have you ever seen a squonk's tears? Well, look at mine
The people on the street have all seen better times

I can tell you all I know, the where to go, the what to do
You can try to run but you can't hide from what's inside of you

Steely Dan

2008-06-16T02:51:00.002-04:00

Not Sarah M., But Beautiful

Look what Buddy taught me to do! Above is Avril Lavigne doing a gorgeous cover of Adia.

2008-06-15T19:31:00.002-04:00

Song in My Head

Adia

Adia I do believe I failed you
Adia I know I let you down
Don’t you know I tried so hard
To love you in my way
It’s easy let it go...
Adia I’m empty since you left me
Trying to find a way to carry on
I search myself and everyone
To see where we went wrong
’cause there’s no one left to finger
There’s no one here to blame
There’s no one left to talk to, honey
And there ain’t no one to buy our innocence
’cause we are born innocent
Believe me adia, we are still innocent
It’s easy, we all falter
Does it matter?
Adia I thought that we could make it
But I know I can’t change the way you feel
I leave you with your misery
A friend who won’t betray
I pull you from your tower
I take away your pain
And show you all the beauty you possess
If you’d only let yourself believe that
We are born innocent
Believe me adia, we are still innocent
It’s easy, we all falter, does it matter?
Believe me adia, we are still innocent
’cause we are born innocent
Adia we are still innocent
It’s easy, we all falter ... but does it matter?

Sarah McLachlan

2008-06-14T11:58:00.003-04:00

Thinking

Thinking this morning about the decency and strength of the people connected to my life. Thinking about love and the necessity of give and take, helping hands, the downside of too much solitude. All the people in my life who don't know how much I love them. How keeping the desire to give needs to be stoked because if you don't watch out, it curls up, dries out and drifts off as you get older. Fear causes a gathering in of the soul.

Read this yesterday and it knocked me out. From Howard's End by E.M Forster:

"Looking back on the last six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite efforts we nerve ourselves for the crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty."

Yes yes yes yes yes.

2008-06-09T22:01:00.003-04:00

Heat

Holy god, it is 10:00 p.m. and 93 degrees. Tomorrow school will be closed if it gets to 100 degrees. Lost cable and phone for a while this evening, traffic lights out too. Thank god the A/C is still going.

In other news, the boy has lost air gun privileges because because he shot the computer screen. There is now a bullet ding in the screen. In happier news, the new beds for the kids came today and they rock; really comfy and twice as thick as old ones.

Last night I dreamt I was having a screaming fight with BFI through a screen door. I would like to a have a dream where I run his head over repeatedly in the driveway.

Back hurts from hoisting old beds to curb and putting up new ones so I am going to lay down now. Maybe Cash Cab is on....

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

2008-06-08T08:30:00.003-04:00

Dead T.V.

Are you people watching that t.v. show Lisa Williams Talks to the Dead? That may not be the exact the title, but holy god that show scares the bejesus out of me. Not the parts where she is channeling people's dead mothers and spouses. It's the haunted house part, where nasty energies bellow at her to get out and zoom through her body and show her how they got their heads blown off in drug deals gone wrong etc etc. She actually said last night to some horrible man who throws people's luggage out of "his" room in a hotel, "If you are here touch me or one of the crew." I can just imagine the camera guys thinking "WHAAAAA?" Do not touch ME guy who decapitated a blonde and threw her in the closet! I have been watching entirely too much T.V. Fox cancelled New Amsteram. The show about the guy who was given the "gift" of eternal life by native americans in the 1500s in New York and is now a cop in NYC. I thought that show was genius and am now in mourning. I am very pathetic lately. And speaking of pathetic, I am suddenly blocked from buddy/FP's blog...FP, send me an invite so I can get back in!

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

2008-06-01T12:14:00.002-04:00

Dropping the Axe

After the dusty tablet
I know my core again
The hard oak
Life of the two of you.
I have dreamt of leaving you behind,
When my feet are your roots
My belly your bark and bulk.
The elemental can only be revered.
How easily I would be felled
Without this dense love,
Without the sacred trees
Of the two of you.
How useless
my wild dreaming otherwise.

MJ Tenerelli

2008-06-01T08:46:00.003-04:00

I Don't Know Why You Say Goodbye

New meds and back from the dead. Sunday and listening to Coast to Coast A.M. show about angels, getting ready to clean house. Think some stuff got resolved in dreams last night, though no clear idea what. I actually slept through the night! Kids with BFI until tonight. Disturbing images of the silver revolver gone away again. Being crazy is exhausting.

Back

We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again

like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.

I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,

and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking.

Jane Kenyon

2008-05-27T06:14:00.002-04:00

I Can't Get This Out of My Head

Freedom '90

I won't let you down
I will not give you up
Gotta have some faith in the sound
It's the one good thing that I've got
I won't let you down
So please don't give me up
Because I would really, really love to stick around

Heaven knows I was just a young boy
Didn't know what I wanted to be
I was every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy
And I guess it was enough for me
To win the race? A prettier face!
Brand new clothes and a big fat place
On your rock and roll TV
But today the way I play the game is not the same
No way
Think I'm gonna get me some happy

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I told you so
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone else I've got to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Take back your singing in the rain
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take

Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy
What a kick just a buddy and me
We had every big shot good-time band on the run boy
We were living in a fantasy
We won the race
Got out of the place
I went back home got a brand new face
For the boys on MTV
But today the way I play the game has got to change
Oh yeah
Now I'm gonna get myself happy

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I stopped the show
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone I forgot to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Don't think that I'll be back again
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take

Well it looks like the road to heaven
But it feels like the road to hell
When I knew which side my bread was buttered
I took the knife as well
Posing for another picture
Everybody's got to sell
But when you shake your ass
They notice fast
And some mistakes were built to last

That's what you get

I say that's what you get

That's what you get for changing your mind

And after all this time
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes
Do not make the man

I'll hold on to my freedom
May not be what you want from me
Just the way it's got to be
Lose the face now
I've got to live

2008-05-25T12:14:00.004-04:00

Bad Movies and Eggplant for Memorial Day

Hello from beautiful downtown Bed Stuy! The boy and his uncle are watching a hockey game, Kate is eating a ham sandwich against her will, and I have been enjoying the gift of sight! Got my new glasses from Sears and I can now read without squinting and holding my reading material at arm's length. It is a beautiful thing! I love my new glasses, they have thin pinkish frames that twist in a cool weird way on the arms. They feel weightless and I CAN READ AGAIN. I don't need to make the computer print enormous anymore either. Saw bad movies last night, including Ghost Ninja which was SOOOOOOOO bad, shots at night were indeciperable (even with my glasses) and there were several makes absolutely no sense sex scenes that the boy was forced to look away from until fast forwarding could occur. Thanks for that a fine choice LC! One good part was when the little Japanese kid BoBo was whipped into the air by bad ghosts and spun around at about 100 miles an hour. Why do little Japanese boys in bad movies always have on micro shorts? It is very disturbing. Saw an EXCELLENT movie after that called Zombies on a Plane (I think) which, after Ghost Ninja, seemed like fine art. Jr. outdid herself with the food again, yummy eggplant parmesan. Have to get ready for Brooklyn outing. Happy Memorial Day!

Dedication for a Plot of Ground

This plot of ground
facing the waters of this inlet
is dedicated to the living presence of
Emily Dickinson Wellcome
who was born in England; married;
lost her husband and with
her five year old son
sailed for New York in a two-master;
was driven to the Azores;
ran adrift on Fire Island shoal,
met her second husband
in a Brooklyn boarding house,
went with him to Puerto Rico
bore three more children, lost
her second husband, lived hard
for eight years in St. Thomas,
Puerto Rico, San Domingo, followed
the oldest son to New York,
lost her daughter, lost her "baby,"
seized the two boys of
the oldest son by the second marriage
mothered them -- they being
motherless -- fought for them
against the other grandmother
and the aunts, brought them here
summer after summer, defended
herself here against thieves,
storms, sun, fire,
against flies, against girls
that came smelling about, against
drought, against weeds, storm-tides,
neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens,
against the weakness of her own hands,
against the growing strength of
the boys, against wind, against
the stones, against trespassers,
against rents, against her own mind.

She grubbed this earth with her own hands,
domineered over this grass plot,
blackguarded her oldest son
into buying it, lived here fifteen years,
attained a final loneliness and --

If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.

William Carlos Williams

2008-05-22T04:19:00.003-04:00

Happy Birthday Buddy/FP!

My best Acquaintances

My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word—
The Stars that stated come to Town
Esteemed Me never rude
Although to their Celestial Call
I failed to make reply—
My constant—reverential Face
Sufficient Courtesy.

Emily Dickinson

2008-05-18T10:04:00.004-04:00

Pie, Eyeballs, Rodeos and Mary Magdalene

My belated Mother's Day brunch with Jr. and Troy June was excellent! Food fantastic as was my pecan pie (pah!) dessert. Jr. and I had margaritas served in little jars. Mine tasted like the punch they used to serve out of garbage cans at dorm parties. Afterwards I dragged everyone to my old apartment on Perry Street so I could forlornly rattle the wrought iron gate to the courtyard and beg "Take me back!" After I got bored with that we walked up to Chelsea and visited a couple of flea markets. Jr. found a hopping bloodshot eyeball for LC which I duly delivered when I met him for dinner. I was instructed to say "plastic eyes" in a weird falsetto voice as this was an EVP we are all familiar with from a mortuary that we heard on the Art Bell show. LC was duly impressed.

Dinner with LC was great, Thai food instead of mac and cheese as mac and cheese place was tiny and packed with people. Pad Thai and thai iced coffee for me and a steamed veggies and rice for LC. LC thinks he is going to move to Philadelphia. I like Philly and as that is not too far away, I approve. Discussed Jr's insane idea to go visit some evil place in Jersey called The Devil Tree. LC will go with her, I will not. I do not want any malevolent spirits attaching themselves to my aura and coming home with me.

The "documentary" Bloodline was interesting but I am not sure it wasn't a hoax. Movie states Jesus did not die on the cross, but 21 days later in France with his wife Mary Magdalene and his kids. If that really was Mary Magadalene's tomb they found in France, I wouldn't want to be those film makers. They ripped open her shroud, said stuff like "This is gruesome" and ripped some of the hair out of her mummified head for DNA analysis. Jr. and I may be in trouble too as she gave me a mug for mother's day that says "Jesus Shaves." You pour hot liquid into it and Jesus, who is holding a pair of shears and a fistful of money, loses his beard and mustache. I am drinking out of it right now. Russ and I tried to make Jesus lose his beard last night but my coffee was not hot enough. This morning, while talking to Jr., Jesus lost his beard. Guess the coffee was hot enough. Can everyone please go see Bloodline so we can discuss? Thank you.

Experienced synchronicity last night! Lc and I were in a coffee shop after the movie. The giant TV screen in the place, directly behind LC's head, was playing a rodeo from San Antonio. LC is from San Antonio and we have often discussed how he always hated it and wanted to live in New York from when he was a kid. All the people behind the counter seemed to be of arabic extraction. Nobody in the place was watching the screen, and for godsakes we were in downtown Manhattan. Very weird.

Well, must face the fact that the apt. has to be cleaned. I will listen to paranormal radio and it won't be too bad (but oh how I long for a maid.) LC has told me about an internet radio station called "Haunted New Jersey" which I will look for. Enjoy your Sunday all.

In Childhood

things don't die or remain damaged
but return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.
Later this vision is not True:
the grandmother remains dead
not hibernating in a wolf's belly.
Or the blue parakeet does not return
from the little grave in the fern garden
though one may wake in the morning
thinking mother's call is the bird.
Or maybe the bird is with grandmother
inside light. Or grandmother was the bird
and is now the dog
gnawing on the chair leg.
Where do the gone things go
when the child is old enough
to walk herself to school,
her playmates already
pumping so high the swing hiccups?

Kimiko Hahn

2008-05-17T07:57:00.002-04:00

Saturday in May

Meeting Jr. and Troy June for brunch at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Russ later on for dinner and a movie. A beautiful day for traipsing around NYC. I have suggested a movie about the conspiracy to keep the blood line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene quiet, followed by dinner at a place in the East Village that mainly serves macaroni and cheese. Heaven!

Saw Juno last night and loved it. People in Canada are so lovely. I think I should be raising my kids in Vancouver. Speaking of the babes, they are with BFI right now. Boy in trouble for not doing his homework again. Terrified the Chrissy inertia/I am a genius and therefore idle gene is rearing it's ugly little head (tail, chromosone?) in Jack. In nice Jack news, he asked for a haircut and we went to a new place. Guy working at the salon gave him an excellent, fairly short cut. Jack loves it so the green wool cap he's been wearing all day, every day for two months is now history. He looks so handsome and grown up. He had a school concert the other night. Dressed in a white dress shirt and a tie, and towering over me by three inches, he looked like a man. I got teary. Then he ran outside without any shoes and tried to ride off on his bike, and was my 12 year old again.

Have to get ready to go. To music. Hurray for tax returns and a new computer.

My young son asks me...

My young son asks me: Must I learn mathematics?
What is the use, I feel like saying. That two pieces
Of bread are more than one's about all you'll end up with.
My young son asks me: Must I learn French?
What is the use, I feel like saying. This State's collapsing.
And if you just rub your belly with your hand and
Groan, you'll be understood with little trouble.
My young son asks me: Must I learn history?
What is the use, I feel like saying. Learn to stick
Your head in the earth, and maybe you'll still survive.

Yes, learn mathematics, I tell him.
Learn your French, learn your history!

Bertolt Brecht

2008-05-11T11:54:00.002-04:00

I Found a New Poet

There is poet named Anna Swir that I just stumbled across. I think she's fabulous.

She Does Not Remember

She was an evil stepmother.
In her old age she is slowly dying
in an empty hovel.

She shudders
like a clutch of burnt paper.
She does not remember that she was evil.
But she knows
that she feels cold.

Anna Swir

The Greatest Love

She is sixty. She lives
the greatest love of her life.

She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,
her hair streams in the wind.
Her dear one says:
"You have hair like pearls."

Her children say:
"Old fool."

Anna Swir

2008-05-11T10:55:00.003-04:00

Happy Mother's Day!

The Daughter Goes To Camp

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning—
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to reassemble the hot
gritty molecules in the car, to
make you appear like a holograph
on the back seat, pull you out of nothing
as I once did—but you were really gone,
the cab glossy as a slit caul out of
which you had slipped, the air glittering
electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

Sharon Olds

2008-05-10T07:34:00.003-04:00

My Blog is Two Years Old

Good morning all. Cool,sunny morning and kids still sleeping. Today we are going to see Iron Man with LiaLia and her girls. Robert Downey Jr. Yum. Also going to Sears to order glasses (no more "super magnifier" Stop and Shop glasses for me. Taking kids to get Mothers Day presents as well. Kate wants to be taken to...Stop and Shop. I said "Are you buying me food?" She insists not. Good. If she got me chocolate I could just paste the box to my ass and be done with it.

I have been thinking about re-writes on my Lilith poem this morning. Realize the first half doesn't work cause I wrote it without any personal experience in the back of my head. That's the problem, to make poems work you have to visit places you work very hard to ignore most of the time. Kind of like cutting your wrists and sprinkling blood all over the page instead of watching the Game Show Network. Doctor my eyes...

Little Missy is awake now and Super Smash Brothers Wii playing has begun. Heavy sigh. I'm gonna get more coffee and try to read Jung while Mario and Wario battle it out in the background. Happy Saturday.

Kindness

Kindness glides about my house.
Dame Kindness, she is so nice!
The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke
In the windows, the mirrors
Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.
Sugar is a necessary fluid,

Its crystals a little poultice.
O kindness, kindness
Sweetly picking up pieces!
My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,
May be pinned any minute, anesthetized.

And here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed in steam.
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses.

Sylvia Plath

2008-05-03T11:42:00.004-04:00

I Miss XP

Good lord, spent 45 minutes looking for the plug in to Windows Media I had to download in order to make the damn player work. Apparently the Player doesn't work with Vista without the plugin. Once I go find the stupid codec and download it, I can't find it on the damn computer to install it. Not listed on the C drive, not in documents or on the desktop, not anywhere. Finally, in desperation I type Applications in the search bar and it shows up with a list of pictures the kids downloaded...don't get why, but click on it and the installation begins...Now I can listen to Coast to Coast AM. Which I am doing right now. Hurray for paranormal radio shows! I will be cleaning to a show on ghost hunting in North Carolina. Jr., I broke down and got my own account so I don't have to borrow yours.

Kiddies with BFI and I am going to the movies tonight to see the new movie by Helen Hunt, Then She Found Me. It has Colin Firth in it, who I LOVE (Oh Mr. Darcy!) and Helen Hunt directed. And Bette Middler too, who is excellent of course. This freedom is still new enough to feel like Christmas.

There is a man on Coast to Coast talking about how he predicts earthquakes by noting the increase of missing cats in newspaper ads. Cats apparently run away from home several days prior to a quake. Who knew!

I went to my boss's going away party after work last night and drank too many gin and tonics. My brain is still soggy so I am going off to do simple, repetitive work. Happy Saturday!

Frustration

If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

But I have no lethal weapon-
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.

Dorothy Parker

2008-04-27T13:21:00.003-04:00

A Love of Poetry is Not Genetic and How About That New Computer

Well, I have gone and bought a computer; a slimline HP that came with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and printer. With the purchase of Microsoft Office, the total price, from Best Buy, 878.00, tax included. I can't install till the boy finishes his poetry project, which it turns out has been a torturous endeavor. I am sitting here like a sentinel, making sure he keeps working. Much "Poetry sucks!" "I Hate this." "Can I take a break?." Dear god let this be over before I kill him. He wants the shortest poems he can find of course, and has nixed any and all Emily Dickinson because she's "boring." My eye twitch is back.

Much trepidation about Windows Vista which I hear only bad things about but its installed on every PC. And WHEN did they stop installing Microsoft office on computers? Probably after my last computer purchase of 7 years ago. Am excited to get this up and running.

Okay, he's on the last poem of 25. He is using William Carlos Williams' Red Wheelbarrow. He is using it in his "poem I really like" category, because "there is a chicken in it." And because its short. I think this childs' main object in life is to try and make my head explode.

The Red Wheel Barrow

So much depends
Upon

A red wheelbarrow

Glazed with rain

Beside the white chicken.

William Carlos Williams

2008-04-26T08:41:00.002-04:00

Testing, Testing, Check Check Check

The boy has a poetry project due on Monday. A big one. That I only found out about last night because my friend Alison's daughter has the same teacher. Will be spending all weekend helping boy with this and I am...DELIGHTED! Have gathered tower of poetry books to look through. Jack has to find 20 different poems, picking from a list of themes such as "Poem by a Person from England" "Poem after
1960" "Narrative Poem" etc etc. While looking for books to go through I found my Frank O'Hara anthology, my copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel, and Second Hand Coat by Ruth Stone. I also found a gorgeous hard covered biography of Edith Wharton (Thanks again LC!.) A lot of my books got packed away after last move and never got unpacked cause of lack of space. Jack said to me last night, "I want to do one of your poems." Wow. Now if only I could find one acceptable for a classroom full of 12 year olds.

Am going to try to go computer shopping today. The tax checks have been cashed and this computer was bought for me by my mother who has been gone lo these seven years. A computer with sound that doesn't move slower than molasses in winter time. The mind boggles! My Live365 presets, including the Sirens Songs channel with Joni Mitchell, Shawn Colvin, Dar Williams, Indigo Girls, etc etc! And Art Bell paranormal radio. And no more kids yelling "Mom, IT FROZE" and "Why is it taking so long?" Any suggestions on what kind of computer to get? That is modestly priced of course.

The kids are still asleep because they got up again after I passed out. I woke up at 1:00 and they were in here watching Jack Ass. Unbelievable. Sent them back to bed and the one good thing is that it's after nine and still silent. I am going to read Ariel. Have a lovely Saturday all.

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Sylvia Plath

2008-04-20T12:27:00.001-04:00

Check This Out!

sylviaplathforum.com

2008-04-19T08:13:00.004-04:00

Soul Poems

Good morning all. It is Saturday morning and beautiful outside. The boy has plans to play some kind of battle game involving nerf guns and medieval war weapons with buddies from school. Must get little missy outside too...maybe we can go to Sweetbriar Nature Center and walk trails/see the animals. She may be tempted if animals are involved.

This is what Carl Jung said in a lecture about poetry:

"The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers."

I think that when a poet writes something that the audience recognizes on a gut level (not a concrete one, although that can happen too), it creates a feeling of recognition, kind of like "Oh yeah, I know that!" This makes the reader feel connected to the people/world around him/her. A kind of coming home or being reunited. Am I making sense? Here are some poems that do this for me:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That opresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the meanings are--

None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air--

When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--

Emily Dickinson

HOWL

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Allen Ginsberg

Elm

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminshed and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrevables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Sylvia Plath

2008-04-12T09:32:00.002-04:00

Vacation

It is a beautiful morning. Kate and The Boy have gone off with BFI for weekend. The boy is driving me insane...he is too big and restless for this apt. He is also in trouble for cutting up in general music class and not following directions. Now he can drive BFI insane for two days. I AM FREE. Meeting the wonderous LC in NYC tonight for dinner and movie. Going in this morning for an eagerly awaited visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Me and Jr. going to the Brooklyn Musuem on Sunday to see a Japanese Anime show recommended by the lovely Jogi in Oregon. Life is good.

Last night dreamt on and off of Binder, actually woke myself up to stop it at one point. Jesus H. Christ. I need a new job. Everyone please send good luck thoughts and prayers to Jr. who is having some difficulty with the Weehawkin house deal. And Jr., think about how we're getting to museum on Sunday as I'm not driving in but taking the train (car still sounds like a dirt bike and has no acceleration.)

Later, gators.

Why I am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" be
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES

Frank O'Hara

2008-04-05T04:34:00.002-04:00

Somebody Turn Out the Lights

Why am I waking up every night at 3:30 like clockwork?! I think I am going to die of sleep deprivation. I heard some people at work talking about how they get up in the middle of the night too. And Jr. and FP also. Is it a collective phenomenon? I want 8hours damn it! In other uplifting news, I think I am joining Jr. in the defective lung club. Exhaust pipe on car broke, breathed in toxic fumes to and from work today, lungs congested and strangely light headed for most of the day. Hell's bells.

Sleep

Come, Sleep; O Sleep! the certain knot of peace.
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw:
O make in me those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind of light,
A rosy garland and a weary head;
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.

Sir Philip Sidney

2008-03-31T19:19:00.003-04:00

Jr., We Hardly Knew Ye

Apparently Jr. is dying of consumption. She is sleeping on her roof and coughing blood delicately into a lace-edged handkerchief. Her dying wish is a new post, so here it is.

Life here has been god awful and I waved the white flag today and started back up on the meds. Don't think kids would have survived my insane rages much longer. They come out of nowhere like a tornado, touch down, leave havoc, and then spin off again. Without meds I am my mother

The boy ran away from home at the beginning of the week, and instigated a pile on after a football game over the weekend that freaked out the younger kid on the bottom of the pile...angry words between parents, gah. Oh and I found out BFI was sleeping with hookers when we were married, and doing drugs. And has herpes.

Finally filed my taxes. Hurray for online filing, and enough refund money for a new computer. My mother bought me the one I'm on and that was in 1999. Looked for new clothes for the girl. Her requirements: no pink, no purple, no cartoons or sayings, no hearts, polka dots, or any kind of pattern besides stripes, no ruffles, so ties, no bows, and why can't I buy her shirts from the boy's dept? Why oh why does my blue eyed baby bunny want to dress like a boy?

Jogi is back from NZ. I am going out to Portland again this summer. Very happy about that, we're going to spend a few days on the beach this time.

Okay, Jr. I'm done posting and now I am going to put on my pajamas and read Jung because the kids are playing Wii and won't give me the TV.

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity—

Emily Dickinson

2008-03-23T13:06:00.002-04:00

Easter

Easter afternoon, ham in the oven with a coca cola glaze and kids home from BFI's in about 30 minutes. Poor Jr. has taken ill so its up to me and the Willnaur's to cook. Hoo boy, will this be interesting. Willie's doing the vegetables and a pasta dish for the boy. I got the ham and made the glaze and bought some lovely loaves of semolina bread and a beautiful braided challah too. Desserts also had to be purchased as poor Weezer will not be bringing any of her homemade delights. Cherry pie and a cake thats says HAPPY EASTER! is what we will be finishing dinner off with this year, compliments of the Stop and Shop bakery. Can't wait for the kids to see their Easter goodies and the house smells like cinnamon and cloves.

A light exists in spring
Not present on the year
At any other period.
When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That silence cannot overtake,
But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.

Emily Dickinson

2008-03-22T09:07:00.004-04:00

Happy Birthday Velmar!

Today is my good good friend Kathy Willnauer's (nee Valma)birthday. We figured out that we have known each other for 34 years....my god, 34 years. We met in Bernie Fenster's 9th grade science class. She was writing the words to a Spark's song on the desk and substituting the name "Bernie" for "Albert." We soon found out that we were both Elton John freaks. We became best friends very quickly. Early cherished memory: working as partners on a "simple machines" project in Bernie's class. We made an automatic book opener which involved tying a thread loop around a book page tying the other end to an egg beater, and then cranking egg beater. Much barely supressed laughter during presentation which helped earn us a D minus. I have spent every Christmans Eve with Velmar since 1974, and most other holidays as well. She's smart, she funny, she's quirky, she's steady, she's decent, she's fair, and she's family. I would send her a hyber hug but she'd cringe. No mushy stuff for her...

Talent is an Asset

Albert is smart, he's a genius
Watch Albert putter, an obvious genius
Someday he will reassess the world
And he'll still have time for lots of girls

When he grows up he'll remember us
When he grows up we are sure that he'll remember us

We made sure that Albert wore his mac
We kept all the strangers off his back

(Go away)
Everything's relative
(Go away Albert's mother say to me)
We are his relatives and he don't need any non- relatives

Talent is an asset
You've got to understand that
Talent is an asset
And little Albert has it
Talent is an asset
And Albert surely has it

One day he'll sever his apron strings
All of the while he'll be scribbling things, genius things
Look at Albert, isn't he a sight
Growing, growing at the speed of light

(Go away)
Everything's relative
(Go away Albert's mother say to me)
We are his relatives and he don't need any non- relatives

Talent is an asset
And little Albert has it

Talent is relative
That's hypothetical
We are his relatives
That's parenthetical
Spare your superlatives
There's the receptacle
There's the receptacle

Leave Albert's study room
Leave Albert's happy room
Leave Albert's neighbourhood
Leave Albert's city, too
Leave Albert's country seat
Leave Albert's coun-rer-y
Leave Albert's continent
Leave Albert's hemisphere
Leave Albert's planet, too
Leave Albert's universe

No one must see him now
Only the medical
No one must downgrade him
Don't be too cynical
Don't be too critical
Cancel the magazines
They're much to political
Don't buy him any jeans
They're much to casual
Talent is relative
We are his relatives
That's parenthetical

Sparks

Friends

I hope the day will be a lighter highway
For friends are found on every road
Can you ever think of any better way
For the lost and weary travellers to go

Making friends for the world to see
Let the people know you got what you need
With a friend at hand you will see the light
If your friends are there then everything's all right

It seems to me a crime that we should age
These fragile times should never slip us by
A time you never can or shall erase
As friends together watch their childhood fly

Bernie Taupin

2008-03-20T18:57:00.003-04:00

Rays Run Amok

Rays are out out to eradicate the human race! First, Steve Irwin is speared, then one month later some poor old man is skewered and spends months in a comma. Now, a mom is standing in a boat in the Florida Keys and a giant ray comes leaping out of the water and knocks her to her death on the deck. I know I will be staying away from Florida AND aquariums. We are all just sitting ducks in an aquarium. Imagine the carnage near the petting tanks. I think Satan is controlling the rays. Or maybe its eco-terrorism.

The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battering upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

2008-03-17T06:37:00.002-04:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Beannacht (Blessing)

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

John O’Donohue

2008-03-15T05:29:00.004-04:00

Happy Birthday Violet

Saturday morning, 5:30, and I am craving a charbroiled hamburger. The rain is heavy outside and kids of course are sleeping, exhausted after night of relentless playing of Super Smash Brothers Brawl. God help me it was like being in Chuckie Cheese but with no escape. I estimate another week at least until the novelty of this new game wears off.

Happy news! BFI has agreed to start taking kids overnight again, starting next weekend. Okay, he sounded drunk, but I'm holding him to it. The long night of the Chigger is over. Here is my plan for next weekend: Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday. I think I may cry when I get there. There is nowhere on earth I love better than the Met. Stroll through Central Park when...oh crap, just realized next weekend is Easter...plans deflating like air escaping a balloon. I want the kids for Easter weekend, baskets in the morning, egg hunts, etc. BFI can't have them. And I guess the Met's not going anywhere...

Ave Maria

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know

Frank O'Hara

2008-03-13T06:14:00.002-04:00

Report from the Inside

Shock and woe at work as passel of new writers begin to realize the horror that is Blunder and Blunder. All were called into a meeting where apparently they were berated and humiliated for their laziness and stupidity. Seems they just didn't deliver acceptable file reviews. And after an entire hour long training session! This came while security cameras were being installed all over the office. Can't have employees stealing paper clips or talking to one another I guess. Newbies looking shell-shocked and miserable now. One poor girl came over to ask me about a tower of file review bins she was supposed to do with tears in her eyes. Kinda like the queen in Rumplestilskin. I predict much jumping of ship as many of these people are kids living with their parents and have a safe harbor from which to find a new job. In more Blunder and Blunder news, news which has the entire office laughing behind their hands, the post office has become aware that the firm has tens of hundreds of post office bins in their possession which are being used to store files and medical records. Each bin has a warning that a 1000 dollar fine and a prison term are possible for anybody who steals the bin. Somebody called up the post office and turned Blunder and Blunder in. Imagine that! We all eagerly await the arrival of a post office swat team to confiscate the bins and take out the brothers Blunder in handcuffs.

Instant Karma

Instant karmas gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon youre gonna be dead
What in the world you thinking of
Laughing in the face of love
What on earth you tryin to do
Its up to you, yeah you

Instant karmas gonna get you
Gonna look you right in the face
Better get yourself together darlin
Join the human race
How in the world you gonna see
Laughin at fools like me
Who in the hell dyou think you are
A super star
Well, right you are

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Well we all shine on
Evryone come on

Instant karmas gonna get you
Gonna knock you off your feet
Better recognize your brothers
Evryone you meet
Why in the world are we here
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Why on earth are you there
When youre evrywhere
Come and get your share

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Yeah we all shine on
Come on and on and on on on
Yeah yeah, alright, uh huh, ah

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Yeah we all shine on
On and on and on on and on

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Yeah we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun

John Lennon

2008-03-08T11:37:00.004-05:00

Cake!

Cake for FP, and a lamby cake even old ladies can make. Weezy, find a lamb pan and get baking!

Cake

i wanted one life
you wanted another
we couldn't have our cake
so we ate each other.

Roger McGough

2008-03-08T02:49:00.002-05:00

Bloggin', Free Association Like

Been over to The Fourth Person's blog and now cannot get Graceland out of my head, as in Graceland, Graceland, Memphis Tennessee. How I love that album....

The Mississippi delta was shining
Like a national guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the civil war
I'm going to Graceland
Graceland
In Memphis Tennessee
I'm going to Graceland
Poorboys and pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland
My traveling companion is nine years old
He is the child of my first marriage
But Ive reason to believe
We both will be received
In Graceland

She comes back to tell me she's gone
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed
As if Id never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

I'm going to Graceland
Memphis Tennessee
I'm going to Graceland
Poorboys and pilgrims with families
And we are going to Graceland

And my traveling companions
Are ghosts and empty sockets
I'm looking at ghosts and empties
But Ive reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland

There is a girl in new york city
Who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I'm falling, flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
Oh, so this is what she means
She means were bouncing into Graceland
And I see losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

In Graceland, in Graceland
I'm going to Graceland
For reasons I cannot explain
Theres some part of me wants to see
Graceland
And I may be obliged to defend
Every love, every ending
Or maybe theres no obligations now
Maybe Ive a reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland

Isn't that fantastic?! It is close to three a.m and I am awake, perhaps because it is the witching hour and I am a witch...a good witch although I would never wear a hat that looked like a plastic trash receptacle like Glynda (sp?) of Oz. Okay, I just wish I was a witch, making potions, casting spells, flying over the trees, dancing in the moonlight....ooops I feel another song coming on:

Dancing In The Moonlight
( King Harvest )

We get it on most every night
When that old moon gets so big and bright
It's a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Everybody here is out of sight
They don't bark, and they don't bite
They keep things loose, they keep things light
Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Dancin' in the moonlight
Everybody's feelin' warm and right
It's such a fine and natural sight
Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight

We like our fun and we never fight
You can't dance and stay uptight
It's a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Dancin' in the moonlight
Everybody's feelin' warm and right
It's such a fine and natural sight
Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight

[break]

Everybody here is out of sight
They don't bark, and they don't bite
They keep things loose, they keep things light
Everybody was dancin' in the moonlight

Dancin' in the moonlight
Everybody's feelin' warm and right
It's such a fine and natural sight
Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight

Dancin' in the moonlight
Everybody's feelin' warm and right
It's such a fine and natural sight
Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight

Dancin' in the moonlight
Everybody's feelin' warm and right
It's such a fine and natural sight
Everybody's dancin' in the moonlight

Doesn't that song make you happy? Going to get ginger ale (left over from the stomach virus siege...read this poem with ginger ale in it while I'm gone)

Running Away Together

It will be an island on strings
well out to sea and austere
bobbing as if at anchor
green with enormous fir trees
formal as telephone poles.

We will arrive there slowly
hand over hand without oars.
Last out, you will snip the fragile
umbilicus white as a beansprout
that sewed us into our diaries.

We will be two bleached hermits
at home in our patches and tears.
We will butter the sun with our wisdom.
Our days will be grapes on a trellis
perfectly oval and furred.

At night we will set our poems
adrift in ginger ale bottles
each with a clamshell rudder
each with a piggyback spider
waving them off by dogstar

and nothing will come from the mainland
to tell us who cares, who cares
and nothing will come of our lovelock
except as our two hearts go soft
and black as avocado pears.

Maxine W. Kumin

Refreshing! What is a dogstar by the way? I guess I could look it up...probably some constellation reference. Guess I will go lay down before I fall out of my computer chair...Tonight the must not eat temptation in the kitchen is Pepperidge Farm Nantucket cookies...the big ones...if only I could think of a spell that would make them non-caloric.............................

Song (Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?)

Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian's
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in the twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now

Frank O'Hara

2008-03-05T15:59:00.003-05:00

Laid Up

Home sick today with virus that kids just got over. Sleeping, reading, sucking on ice pops, not a bad way to spend the day (aside from the annoying aspects of having a stomache bug). Been reading Jane Austen and the Gnostic Bible. Picked up bible because I wanted to read about women who are not in the bible proper for poetry project. Very interesting story about a woman name Thecla who got tied to the stake and thrown before lions and bears for not getting married, was protected by a lioness, baptized herself and went on to preach the word of god. Small part of me hoping I'll find god someplace in the book as well. Head aches some, kids are home from school and outside playing for an hour before homework. Need more ice pops and to lay down...........

HEAVEN is what I cannot reach!
The apple on the tree,
Provided it do hopeless hang,
That “heaven” is, to me.

The color on the cruising cloud, 5
The interdicted ground
Behind the hill, the house behind,—
There Paradise is found!

Emily Dickinson

2008-03-01T07:55:00.003-05:00

The Sound of Rain

Morning has broken...la la la...Cat Stevens. Boy is back from his school trip upstate and he and the girl child are still fast asleep. It is raining...I know this because I can hear it on the air conditioner. Today is a Chuckie Cheese birthday party day (will the hell that is Chuckie Cheese ever end for me?!!!) and I have to go cash my paycheck so I can give poor Am upstairs the March rent. Kenny lost his job, got another one for the interim, but there are no med benefits and four little girls upstairs. Ack, what a world if we don't weaken, to quote my dearly departed mamma. Oh no, stirrings from the kiddie area, Boy is up and has put on the T.V. and Home Improvement...it burns it burns! Noooooooooooooooo. Sigh. Guess I'll go start my day. Hugs all around.

Spring Snow

Rain of remembering;
late snow turning to rain.
Then in the cold house,
alone in bed,
the soft stutter on the roof,
random phrases; your voice,
only your voice. How can
it be that voice that touched
me everywhere?
And what you said,
if only I could hear it again
in its intensity.
Essence distilled
in the moment of waking,
the delicate mold and odors
of the breaking apart of winter,
in the soft snow that comes
between the past and the chill
distillation, the whisper of air
split between the perfume
of melting crystals; the clasp
and letting go.

Ruth Stone

2008-02-29T02:02:00.002-05:00

Ramblings at 2:00 A.M.

Every time I hear the song Cisco Kid it makes me think of my friend Joyce.

I think the baby factory is finally closed for business. Brain fog has cleared.

I love the song "Dancing in the Moonlight" (It's such a fine and natural sight!)

Audrey Lickins is the cutest cat on the planet.

What if ghosts are dead people who are avoiding the light because its a a vacuum that going to pull them off the earth into nothingness?

Must not eat chocolate ice cream in freezer.

Cisco Kid

by War

The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
He drink whiskey, Poncho drink the wine
He drink whiskey, Poncho drink the wine

We met down on the fort of Rio Grande
We met down on the fort of Rio Grande
Eat the salted peanuts out of can
Eat the salted peanuts out the can

The outlaws had us pinned down at the fort
The outlaws had us pinned down at the fort
Cisco came in blastin', drinkin' port
Cisco came in blastin', drinkin' port

They rode the sunset, horse was made of steel
They rode the sunset, horse was made of steel
Chased a gringo last night through a field
Chased a gringo last night through a field

The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid he was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine

The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid he was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine

The Cisco Kid he was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid he was a friend of mine
The Cisco Kid he was a friend of mine

2008-02-24T11:33:00.005-05:00

Roots

High Street, Paisley, 1900

Mainstreet, Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, 1904

I have been researching my family on my mother's side and have discovered the following:

A great, great grandmother on my mother's side was named Grace Brogan. She was born in Ireland in about 1839. Her family migrated at some point to Scotland. By 1871 Grace was married to Bernard Rice who was also originally from Ireland. They lived in Old Monkland, Lanarkshire, Scotland. Census records seem to indicate that Bernard worked in a "lab". Not sure what that would mean in a place that made thread and textiles, and had iron foundries and coal mines. In 1872, My great grandmother, Bridget, was born. By 1881, Bernard no longer appears in the Census. Perhaps he died or ran away...Grace now lives with her brother John Brogan at 46, Close, Paisley, Scotland. Her children include my great grandmother Bridget and her siblings Bernard, Catherine, Ellen, James, Mary and Susan.

By 1891, Bridget is living with her sister Mary and Mary's Husband James Mclear at 176 Inkermans Rows in Paisley. She is a millworker. Also living in the house is Bridget's sister Ellen, and her nieces and nephews Mary, Patrick and Kate.

By 1901, Bridget was married to my great grandfather William Hamil. William was born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire in 1871. They lived at 77 George Street in Paisley. William Hamil's occupation was brickfield Labourer. Family lore has him as a foreman in a textile factory who fell into a vat of dye and drowned. Hmmm..certainly more romantic than brickfield laborer. Bridget has three children at this point, my grandfather Michael who is four years old, William, aged 6, and Sarah, aged 8.

That is pretty much all the verified stuff I have. I do know that my grandfather Michael married my grandmother Frances Howe in Glamorgan, Wales. Family history has my grandmother living in a rooming house for miners run by her mother, where my grandfather was renting a room (or more probably a bed). After Frances and Michael married, my grandfather moved to Scranton, PA to work the coal mines there, followed a year later by my grandmother with my uncles Bill and Mike. My mother, Violet Sarah, was born in Scranton. Grandma Hamil's mother's name was Frances O'Leary before she married Albert Howe. Grandma Hamil was born in Bedminster, Bristol.

SO, seems we are Irish Irish Irish, although we have been brought up believing we are Scottish and Welsh as much as English and Irish. Rice, Brogan, and O'Leary, Irish families all! I look at my Kate and her face has "the map of Ireland" on it. BFI's mother is Irish, so of course that may have contributed...but I see my Brogan, Rice and O'Leary ancestors in that beautiful little face now!

I think this may be a somewhat boring read for non-family, but I'm hoping other "family" members doing geneology searches, might come across this post and connect. Off to look for photos to post!

363. Gloomy Winter’s Now Awa’

GLOOMY winter’s now awa’,
Saft the westlan’ breezes blaw,
’Mang the birks o’ Stanley-shaw
The mavis sings fu’ cheerie, O!
Sweet the crawflower’s early bell 5
Decks Gleniffer’s dewy dell,
Blooming like thy bonnie sel’,
My young, my artless dearie, O!

Come, my lassie, let us stray
O’er Glenkilloch’s sunny brae, 10
Blithely spend the gowden day
’Midst joys that never weary, O!
Towering o’er the Newton wuds,
Laverocks 1 fan the snaw-white cluds,
Siller saughs, 2 wi’ downy buds, 15
Adorn the banks sae briery, O!

Round the sylvan fairy nooks
Feath’ry breckans 3 fringe the rocks,
’Neath the brae the burnie jouks, 4
And ilka 5 thing is cheerie, O! 20
Trees may bud, and birds may sing,
Flowers may bloom, and verdure spring,
Joy to me they canna bring,
Unless wi’ thee, my dearie, O!

Note 1. Larks. [back]
Note 2. Silver willows. [back]
Note 3. Brakes. [back]
Note 4. Dodges. [back]
Note 5. Each. [back]

Robert Tannahill (1774–1810)

2008-02-23T13:17:00.003-05:00

Everything Comes and Goes, Marked by Lovers and Styles of Clothes

This morning I plugged new speakers into the computer and they didn't work. Sick with wanting to hear music, I plugged speakers into The Boy's discman, and low and behold, Houston we've got music! I am listening to Court and Spark and I am as close to bliss as I get. "All the people at this party, they've got a lot of style, they've stamps of many countries, they've got passport smiles..." God bless Joni. "I told you when I met you, I was crazy...I feel like I'm sleeping, can you wake me?" Kids not here obviously, spending the day with BFI. Imagine how I'll go nuts when they're gone overnight again...scored a haircut appt. with my favorite stylist today, last minute and she can see me...AND I found the exact cut I want on the internet and the very tempermental printer spit it out after about 30 minutes. AND I got an email from the lovely Jogi in New Zealand. This is a red banner day!

Me and the kiddies all felled by a virus....girl child first, then The Boy and finally me, although I seemed to have gotten off easy with only one night of vomity grossness. Just checked time and gotta book to salon. Cut above is what I'm aiming at, followed by 50 pound weight loss.

Just Like This Train

Im always running behind the time
Just like this train
Shaking into town
With the brakes complaining

I used to count lovers like railroad cars
I counted them on my side
Lately I dont count on nothing
I just let things slide

The station masters shuffling cards
Boxcars are banging in the yards
Jealous iovinil make you crazy
If you cant find your goodness
cause you lost your heart

I went looking for a cause
Or a strong cat without claws
Or any reason to resume
And I found this empty seat
In this crowded waiting room
(everybody waiting)
Old man sleeping on his bags
Women with that teased up kind of hair
Kids with the jitters in their legs
And those wide, wide open stares
And the kids got cokes and chocolate bars
Theres a thin man smoking a fat cigar
Jealous lovinli make you crazy
If you cant find your goodness
cause youve lost your heart

What are you going to do now
Youve got no one
To give your love too...

Well Ive got this berth and this roll down blind
Ive got this fold up sink
And these rocks and these cactus going by
And a bottle of german wine to drink
Settle down into the clickety ciack
With the clouds and the stars to read
Dreaming of the pleasure Im going to have
Watching your hairline recede
(my vain darling)
Watching your hair and clouds and stars
Im rocking away in a sleeping car
This jealous lovins bound to make me
Crazy
I cant find my goodness
I lost my heart
Oh sour grapes
Because I lost my heart

Joni Mitchell

2008-02-17T08:46:00.004-05:00

Everybody Do the Zombie Stomp

Here in Brooklyn with kids. Jr. is at work and Uncle Troy is out running. Going to a poetry meeting in Queens later regarding next year's New Years reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. I have agreed to be the "Mistress of Biographies." This means I hound all the performers for bios before event. Nice to be included in this and looking forward to hanging out with other poets for a few hours. Kids driving me BONKERS. Feeling trapped lately, like I can't get two minutes of free time away from them. Trip to poetry thing today should help. BFI has told kids he "may" keep them overnight next week. As he has no beds for them to sleep on and god knows he won't give up his own, I don't see how they will stay there. But miracles occasionally occur and maybe, just, maybe, I'll have a whole free weekend. I know this makes me a crappy mother, but so be it. I DON'T CARE.

In other, non-complaing news...last night was bad movie night (with Jack glued to my side...oops, sorry) and we saw The Horror of Party Beach. It was funny as hell and there was this band called "The Del-aires which was way groovy! Zombies walked like they were doing the twist and had fish heads for some inexplicable reason. The "blood" looked like smeared grease and the hairdos and outfits were excellent! I would highly recommend this one. A movie from 1982 called "Q" was also on the schedule. That one sucked eggs. Michael Moriarty overacting like crazy as some loser small time crook. It was like two separate bad movies at once; monster movie, bum on the skids movie. Neither was so bad they were good.

Think its time for my meds...

Brasilia

Will they occur,
These people with torso of steel
Winged elbows and eyeholes

Awaiting masses
Of cloud to give them expression,
These super-people! -
And my baby a nail
Driven, driven in.
He shrieks in his grease

Bones nosing for distance.
And I, nearly extinct,
His three teeth cutting

Themselves on my thumb -
And the star,
The old story.

In the lane I meet sheep and wagons,
Red earth, motherly blood.
O You who eat

People like light rays, leave
This one
Mirror safe, unredeemed

By the dove's annihilation,
The glory
The power, the glory.

Sylvia Plath

2008-02-16T10:00:00.003-05:00

Poetry Morning

I would like to sit in the sun all day and read poems, make haiku attempts. Been reading the work of a poet named Lola Haskins who knocked me out. Have to attend to the humdrum now, dishes, food, blah.

How reluctantly
the bee emerges from deep
within the peony

Basho

2008-02-13T05:52:00.002-05:00

In Honor of the Weather

My friend The Lovely Jogi suggested we try our hand at haikus and exchange them. Because the weather is icy and god's awful, I am posting my haiku. Writing inside a form is HARD.

Winter

No heat in the car.
My raw hands hurt on the wheel.
Slow slide across lanes.

M.J. Tenerelli

2008-02-09T11:26:00.000-05:00

I Hear You Knocking...

I am freaked out this morning. Dreamt last night that I was pregnant with BFI's child and we were going to get back together again. THEN BFI shows up to get kids today and brings a book he thought I would like. WHAT THE FUCK. The devil is soliciting me in my dreams and coming to my home bearing gifts...I will not be tempted back into hell, no no no no. Especially interesting is that just before BFI knocked at the door I was watching Mick Jagger exhorting the crowd to love each other before singing Sympathy for the Devil and just before somebody got stabbed at Altamont.

Hail Mary full of grace...

The Evil Eye

It comes oozing
out of flowers at night,
it comes out of the rain
if a snake looks skyward,
it comes out of chairs and tables
if you don't point at them and say their names.
It comes into your mouth while you sleep,
pressing in like a washcloth.
Beware. Beware.

If you meet a cross-eyed person
you must plunge into the grass,
alongside the chilly ants,
fish through the green fingernails
and come up with the four-leaf clover
or your blood with congeal
like cold gravy.

If you run across a horseshoe,
passerby,
stop, take your hands out of your pockets
and count the nails
as you count your children
or your money.
Otherwise a sand flea will crawl in your ear
and fly into your brain
and the only way you'll keep from going mad
is to be hit with a hammer every hour.

If a hunchback is in the elevator with you
don't turn away,
immediately touch his hump
for his child will be born from his back tomorrow
and if he promptly bites the baby's nails off
(so it won't become a thief)
that child will be holy
and you, simple bird that you are,
may go on flying.

When you knock on wood,
and you do,
you knock on the Cross
and Jesus gives you a fragment of His body
and breaks an egg in your toilet,
giving up one life
for one life.

Anne Sexton

2008-02-05T15:15:00.000-05:00

The Boy is in Trouble

Just got The Boy's report card in the mail. His grades have plummeted. No Honor Society for him. I am horrified; missing assignments and projects, latenesses, decline in effort. I should have been on top of him. This is a very big missed opportunity and I wasn't involved enough in his schoolwork. Well the tide has turned...starting this afternoon when he walks through the door. No more unrestricted T.V., no more unrestricted computer, no more unrestricted PSP until he can prove that he has consistently been doing his homework and projects. I guess the proof will be in next quarters report card. Oh and his youtube account is cancelled until further notice. His homework needs to be done by the time I walk through the door at 6:00 p.m. If its not, dinner, homework and bed.

Just got off phone with guidance counselor. Jack will be going to "homework help" three times a week after school. His teachers will also be signing his scheduler, where he writes down his homework, everyday after class. I will then compare the homework he has done with scheduler each night.

Too disgusted to look for poems or art.

2008-02-03T08:31:00.001-05:00

Going to the Florist

Just read that fresh flowers have been scientifically proven to improve your mood. I will buy some for the apt. today.

The Silver Lily

The nights have grown cool again, like the nights
Of early spring, and quiet again. Will
Speech disturb you? We're
Alone now; we have no reason for silence.

Can you see, over the garden-the full moon rises.
I won't see the next full moon.

In spring, when the moon rose, it meant
Time was endless. Snowdrops
Opened and closed, the clustered
Seeds of the maples fell in pale drifts.
White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree.
And in the crook, where the tree divides,
Leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight
Soft greenish-silver.

We have come too far together toward the end now
To fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means. And you, who've been
With a man--

After the first cries,
Doesn't joy, like fear, make no sound?

Louise Glück

2008-02-02T07:34:00.000-05:00

Wet Ceiling, Bad Walls, Pederast Poem

Saturday morning and all is quiet. Jack is asleep on the couch behind me as his side of the bedroom ceiling began sending showers of water down on Thursday. Plumber is supposedly coming today. Just checked on the girl whose bed has so far escaped soaking. She is sleeping surrounded by every stuffed animal she owns and a scattering of crayons.

Jr. has sold her bed stuy apt. to an acrobat! Weehawkin is now in my holiday future. Actually probably my more immediate future as Jr. has confessed the house pretty much needs to be condemned and she needs demolition help. How she thinks I am going to be able to swing a hammer hard enough to bring down a wall is beyond me. Apparently this house is so bad I am not allowed to view pictures of the inside of it. I have told Jr. I can hear our construction worker father cursing and yelling from the great beyond. Jr.'s determination to rewire the house herself has me extremely nervous.

In other me me me news, a local law office and big competitor of Blunder and Blunder has expressed interest at looking at my work for possible "work from home" appeal writing. And the child support enforcement bureau has begun to garnish BFI's checks. Doing the happy snoopy dance (come on Jr., dance along!)

Reading Alan Ginsberg's White Shroud this morning. Poem about boinking an 18 year old student pissed me off. If that was my kid, Professor Ginsberg, I would hunt you down and kill you. There was a poem called Brown Rice Quatrain that I was going to post for Jack, but after reading boinking poem, I have changed my mind. White Shroud is signed by Ginsberg, with date of reading held at St. Marks Church, and the word "AH" after a poetry quote on fly leaf. Wonder what I could get for it on Ebay?

My Little One

My little one whose tongue is dumb,
whose fingers cannot hold to things,
who is so mercilessly young,
he leaps upon the instant things,

I hold him not. Indeed, who could?
He runs into the burning wood.
Follow, follow if you can!
He will come out grown to a man

and not remember whom he kissed,
who caught him by the slender wrist
and bound him by a tender yoke
which, understanding not, he broke.

Tennessee Williams

2008-01-26T10:16:00.000-05:00

The Post with No Name

BFI has come for the children, late and reneging on his promise to take them to breakfast. Still won't take them overnight as his imaginary chigger problem continues. Thanks to Steve D. and Velmar for doing chigger research which pretty much lays to rest any doubt that BFI's contentions of continued infestation (or any infestation at all) are bogus. Have on classical music and trying to decompress after awful week at work and the usual day to day kiddy madness.

New torture at Binder...solitary confinement. I have been torn from the company and camaraderie of the other writers and have been seated in a no-man's land across from the Evil Brenda's office. I have been told this move had nothing to do with retribution. This is a lie and I miss my buddies. Steve has been moved away from other writers as well and poor Jamie sits by himself now. Jamie put it succinctly when he said it was a "divide and conquer" move. Now there is nothing making the place bearable, which is probably the point. They want us to quit.

In other bleak news, Issac Mizrahi has been replaced as Target's star designer by a snow-boarder named The Flying Tomato. Somehow I don't think the Flying Tomato will be designing clothes for the over-forty ladies crowd. Deep and heavy sigh. Must rouse myself and think happy thoughts...

The Boy is being considered for The Honor Society! My cold is better...there is a glimmer of sunlight on the horizon when I leave work now...I'm not married...I don't have diabetic neuropathy or lumbar spine impairment...anybody who can come up with more reasons to be cheerful, please post...

Happiness

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

Raymond Carver

2008-01-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Sunday Sunday

Sunday morning and my throat is killing me. Hot coffee helping. Hope kiddies stay asleep awhile longer. Feel like I'm swallowing tiny swords.

Went Target shopping yesterday with remarkable results! Got a very cool pair of Isaac Mizrahi shoes for seven dollars, perfect for work, and an Isaac Mizrahi soft red turtleneck for eleven dollars. All hail Isaac Mizrahi, king of inexpensive, slammin clothes for women! Also got sneakers for the boy at the lowly price of six dollars and change. Sneakers he LIKED. Felt like I was shopping at the Salvation Army. Fleetingly wondered if these prices were the result of a very bad national economic downturn, before skipping off to the register. Today I have to look for sneakers for the girl child. May the fairy of low priced footwear still be with me.

I am feeling my way toward doing what I do at work from the comfort of my own home. Sent out emails to a bunch of law firms offering freelance services with a few interested responses. Purchased a memory card to take to work so I can bring all my written decisions home, and have to price fax machines. This could be something wonderful...everyone keep their fingers crossed!

Mr. Jiggers, AKA BFI, has gotten a real job, at a real company, with wages that can be garnished! I figure this will last about 8 months before he is canned, so we'll have abour half a year of steady support checks coming our way. Hurray!

Well the boy is now awake and I must away to put biscuits (Poppin Fresh) in the oven. Today is house cleaning day (the high point of my week). Poems below to make this post something other than banal.

Digression On Number 1, 1948

I am ill today but I am not
too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.

A fine day for seeing. I see
ceramics, during lunch hour, by
Mir6, and I see the sea by Leger;
light, complicated Metzingers
and a rude awakening by Brauner,
a little table by Picasso, pink.

I am tired today but I am not
too tired. I am not tired at all.
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall, his perfect hand

and the many short voyages. They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.

Frank O'Hara

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

Alan Ginsberg

2008-01-13T07:54:00.000-05:00

Loaves and Fishes

Jr. has been harrassing me because she does not have a new blog post to read. Here's some new thoughts:

. Although you would think cats would be happy to eat smushed up fish sticks when their cat food runs out, they are not.

. Antidepressants make you fat

. Banannas are best with ice cream and chocolate syrup

. Emily Dickinson, John Keats, and Jane Kenyon all suggest that god is in the trees, the air, the light, the sea, and we are better for noticing.

On the Sea

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from where it sometime fell.
When last the winds of Heaven were unbound.
Oh, ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody---
Sit ye near some old Cavern's Mouth and brood,
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!

John Keats

122

A something in a summer's Day
As slow her flambeaux burn away
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer's noon—
A depth—an Azure—a perfume—
Transcending ecstasy.

And still within a summer's night
A something so transporting bright
I clap my hands to see—

Then veil my too inspecting face
Lets such a subtle—shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me—

The wizard fingers never rest—
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes it narrow bed—

Still rears the East her amber Flag—
Guides still the sun along the Crag
His Caravan of Red—

So looking on—the night—the morn
Conclude the wonder gay—
And I meet, coming thro' the dews
Another summer's Day!

Emily Dickinson

Twilight: After Haying

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed--
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
--sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen. . .the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses. . .

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

Jane Kenyon

2007-12-29T08:45:00.000-05:00

Visions of Sugar Plums

Christmas went off extremely well...babes very happy with gifts...mom scores! My living room is still looks like Christmas morning though. No place to store all the goodies. I'm thinking lots of shelving in the bedroom is the solution...Jr.? Come help me put it up! I'm going to a poetry party in Harlem tonight. Can't think what I'm going to wear as I'm the size of a small planet and everything I have makes me look fat. New Year's resolution: join Weight Watchers and stop eating chocolate at 3:00 a.m. Oh yes, and find a new job that doesn't pay slave wages. Went out with colleagues after work to say goodbye to Eugene who we all love and who is destined for greener pastures. Eugene was the first person I saw when I came in every morning and always had a cheery greeting. I am going to miss that boy; and not just because he was a fount of legal knowledge and everybody's go to guy. People are leaving Binder in droves. I'm the last person left from my training session last year. MUST GET OUT!! Even the lawyers are trying to escape. As Eugene loved Johnny Cash, this post is for him:

Folsom Prison Blues

I hear the train a comin'
It's rolling round the bend
And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when,
I'm stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin' on
But that train keeps a rollin' on down to San Antone..
When I was just a baby my mama told me. Son,
Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns.
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry..

I bet there's rich folks eating in a fancy dining car
They're probably drinkin' coffee and smoking big cigars.
Well I know I had it coming, I know I can't be free
But those people keep a movin'
And that's what tortures me...

Well if they freed me from this prison,
If that railroad train was mine
I bet I'd move it on a little farther down the line
Far from Folsom prison, that's where I want to stay
And I'd let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.....

2007-12-23T08:42:00.000-05:00

Christmas is Coming!

Holiday cheer to all! Reasons to feel festive: I am not at work; I finished Xmas shopping after running around like a crazed animal Friday night and yesterday; I got a very cool Zombie Guide to Zen from my buddy Jamie at work; subversive secret Santa went off without me getting caught out by the Binder Nazi Management (I was the ringleader and we had been forbidden to engage in Secret Santa); my daughter put Lindor Truffles on her Christmas list (she's ten); and Jr. and I just reminisced about when she decorated me as a Christmas tree and took a picture in 1978. I love Christmas! Special thanks to Jogi for sending me a Santa finger puppet to decorate my mangled finger with.

Last weekend was little mama's birthday sleep-over and it went off very well. Heard whispering in the middle of the night, "eat more candy so you don't fall asleep." Pinata was especially fun in our little apt., it broke off it's plastic ring and fell off the mop handle I was dangling it from so I let the girls do a mob attack and then dive on candy and little monster finger puppets to jam into their Enchanted loot bags. We had seen Enchanted earlier and I was pleasantly surprised; it was clever and funny.

I'm trying to think of a Christmas poem other than The Night Before Christmas to post here. I think I will search around and put some good ones below...Joni Mitchell comes immediately to mind...Noel Noel!

River

It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on

But it don't snow here
It stays pretty green
I'm going to make a lot of money
Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene
Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
I wish I had a river I could skate away on
I made my baby cry

He tried hard to help me
You know, he put me at ease
And he loved me so naughty
Made me weak in the knees
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad
Now I've gone and lost the best baby
That I ever had
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

Oh, I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I made my baby say goodbye

It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

Joni Mitchell

Back

We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again

like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.

I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,

and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking.

Jane Kenyon

Napping on the Greyhound

It's Christmas Eve in Texas.
Your bored self is outside the bus
running barefoot on the red shale.
The bus wheezes with the slushy road.
Sage and collapsed yucca, snow snagged
on the barbed-wire fences;
you close one eye.
Outside leaping over boulders,
your bored self stares in at itself sleeping.
The big-headed yucca, helpless as fresh born,
are uncovered in the blizzard.
They are quiet as happy birds.
"Inscrutable inhabitants," say shy visitors
from Planet Zizz. "Very tasteful antennae."

Ruth Stone

Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan

There's no holly, but there is

the glass and granite towers

and the white stone lions

and the pale violet clouds. And

the great tree of balls in

Rockefeller Plaza is public.

Christmas is green and general

like all great works of the

imagination, swelling from minute

private sentiments in the desert,

a wreath around our intimacy

like children's voices in a park.

For red there is our blood

which, like your smile, must be

protected from spilling into

generality by secret meanings,

the lipstick of life hidden

in a handbag against violations.

Christmas is the time of cold air

but in our hearts flames flicker

answeringly, as on old-fashioned

trees. I would rather the house

burn down than our flames go out.

Frank O'Hara

2007-12-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday Emily and Other Stuff

Help! The cable is out and the children are entertaining themselves with rousing choruses of the Poo Poo Pee Pee Sandwich song. over and over and over and over. Only 8:30, bed time a million hours away. Must remain calm.

Christmas time is closing in...tree up and decorated and much shopping to still do. And Missy K's sleep over birthday party is Saturday. Game plan: pick up girls, take for pizza, take girls to see Enchanted (oh boy), take girls back to house for sleep over...birthday cake, candy, DVDs, and some species of party game. Party favors this year are reindeer antler headbands with Christmas bells. Are you guys bored yet? Must also find place for The Boy to stay while girly party is in full swing. Hopefully Jr. will come and help her sister entertain kiddies...makeovers and manicures again.

Okay, enough of that. I am boring myself now. What else is going on? Yesterday was Emily Dickinson's birthday. A man in England faked his own death and tried to plead amnesia five years after his supposed drowning. Despite the cleverness of this plan, he was arrested. A woman at work is from St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) and we have been discussing Russian poets. We both love Ahkmatova. She used to have a summer home near Ahkmatova's grave. One of the new writers is from England, Yorkshire I think. Nice guy who hates Binder like all right thinking employees do. He used to be a cop in London.

I'm out of practice here. Mr. Jack needs to check his homework on the school website (which he tells me now at 8:53 pm), so I'm off.

Always Mine!

839

Always Mine!
No more Vacation!
Term of Light this Day begun!
Failless as the fair rotation
Of the Seasons and the Sun.

Old the Grace, but new the Subjects—
Old, indeed, the East,
Yet upon His Purple Programme
Every Dawn, is first.

Emily Dickinson