The Thief

I've stolen breath from luffing air,
and water from blue seas,
warmth from winter suns,
and cool from summer's breeze.
I've stolen thoughts from purling streams,
and sleep from thieving time,
shade from bosky greens,
it’s sure I've led a life of crime.
I've stolen mist from cataracts,
and views from mountain climbs.
My gold's from autumn leaves,
my diamonds all from rime.
Such wealth though stolen’s never grudged,
though some of virtue be,
who'd never steal an hour from toil,
to steal what's had for free.

Bazookamouth

It mails lighting bugs
through my vertebrae,
remembering that first time,
and with me now bold-hued in the
encaustic
of you, there's nothing,
nothing, I wouldn't say
or do. I'd

dogpaddle across the foamstorming
whitewaters of Iguacu Falls,
drink all the frog spit
in the Okefenokee, lip-skimming
thick algal mats like the froth off
freshly brewed lager-wort.
I'd bobsled clearcut old-growth redwoods down
Cascade lumber flumes,
through the middle
of an EarthFirst skeetshooting range.
I'd front unedited jeremiads
ghostwritten by Salmon Rushdie
ridiculing missile-toting,
mandatorily bearded,
fundamentalist Shiites.
I'd go angling for cavefish
in Tora Bora after
taunting Norman Schwarzkopf
and Donald Rumsfeld,
and stealing all the warlord baksheesh
in Peshawar. I'd field Barry Bonds
line drives with my teeth. Memorize
the collected works of
Carl Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Iggy Pop and Sting,
Noam Chomsky, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller and
Yahyah Ling. I'd amble barefoot
across Saharan runway tarmacs.
Pucker for Rottweilers.
Dicker with aircraft carriers.
Flutterkick through lava flows.

I would milk a menstruating grizzly.

I wanna be your veejay,
my liquid crystal display
dancing in opaque patterns to you like
an electric sandwich.

I don't wanna be no roué,
lecherously dissipating my
dwindling years away,
no human shield
protecting the coward
inside of me.
I don't want to live my life
like a grammar teacher in a ghetto high school,
correcting spelling errors
on suicide notes.
I would rather flatline
than be a concierge
in the overeducated concentration camp
of a world without you,
gnarling like a bonsai in a
potted premise.
Without you I’d be so empty
you'd need a scanning tunneling electron microscope
to find the purpose in me.
Besides you there is no solace for
shambling through this boomtown whorehouse,
no matter how much cheap whiskey
you chase it with.
This activated charcoal only gets
one chance, and being without you is like
being swaddled in wasps and eating bees.

Save for the moveable feast of you,
your eyes bluer than all the bluebonnets in Texas,
save for the chance of my fingers
dancing the macramed geography
of our shared embrace,
my biography would be a
diorama of a bread line.

A landlocked navy.

When the picked bones of my
fully procured cadaver lodge
beneath six feet of the ultimate DNR,
I don't want to be remembered
as an eponymous invective
for impacted bowels,
or toothless smell-bitten
scurvy-laughter.
And that is what has made me
the wadded
dayglo-pink-gummed
Bazooka-mouth who is
trying to bolt the here-and-now,
to your vervetrumping

wow.

If Time Were Music

No sooner does a thing become final than I
recant it. Finding enchantment in the recanting,
enchained by the refrain,
circumscribed by the reprisal,
the lines of the round
decline defining, as if definition were an
end instead of a worm in the beak
of a mother robin whose nurture
proceeds from clutch
to brood. Verve,
to vibe, tremble,
to quake. Minuet to march,
as the end-systole s-s-s
syncopates to the enthralling chanteuse
of gothic romance, a pas-de-deux with the
last or the next diastole, the four-chambered
hypocrite vetoing the proclaimed intentions of truth,
while diction evaporates like fire the strawmen logic erects,
and rues. If water were ink
then oceans would publish,
and if time were music then air
would sing. Final vocabularies
riff and string. Skep and skeptic,
honey,
sting,
lavish and perish
desert,
spring.

Like water making light of fire,
and murdered beggars defining kings,
this worm-like word is death and hope,
love and need, child
and parent,
sacrifice,
greed.
Bait and purpose,
earth and flight,
nest and office,
gloom and sprite.
In a tongue upheaved
by unspoken sins,
all ends are quickly ended,
and the means of words begin
to mean, where words are found
transcended.

Career Day

Let's review:
high paying manufacturing jobs:
thing of the past. There's still
manufacturing work to be had but
only for the same wage they're paying
the illegals. Healthcare is growing, and not a bad option
as long as you don't mind denying services to the mothers
of poor children, or taking away the houses of frail
elderly grandmothers, filling out
thousands of pages of reimbursement forms
and you aren't too upset by the people who die
while yer preoccupied with all that timbertrashing
topsoil depleting flash flood paperwork.
Working with children's another fastgrowing
career path because after all,
the children are our future. Course the goin rate
on the future's a bit shy of minimum wage, truth-be-told,
and then there's all those licensures and regulations they're imposing now
cos you can't be too safe with our kids.
And ya'd better not be above a fair bit
of pokin and proddin, needle's wortha blood here,
vial a urine there, battery of psychological profile tests,
maybe a few questions round to the neighbors, FBI,
local police, fingerprints, maybe even a polygraph…maybe.
Not that all that sophisticated testing'll keep people from lookin at ya
sideways, like yer the biggest pederast since Father Geoghan.
Careers in TV, now that's the job ta be had if there's a having any.
Pay's like you wouldn't believe, and all the notoriety and celebrity
and there's always plenty of the opposite sex eager for a taste of fame
if you know what I mean. Course there's a thousand unemployed for every
liposucked, botoxed, blowdried, rhinoplastied tribute to good grooming
that gets their face up on the screen but that's no reason for not
following your dreams. Which is the least of your problems
since if you have any talent well that's the
meanest aspect of the whole thing, the way you have to watch
people who sing like gorillas, act like cardboard, and think like fleas
rise to the top cuz their one true genius is for getting the tongue
in deep when it comes time for some serious --- career climbing.
If you don't mind lying and beating the crap out of people for
demanding a fair day's pay for a fair day's labor,
firing rubber bullets that are only
occasionally lethal into people demanding peace, or freedom,
or whatever nefarious cause the case may be, well, there's a
pretty good future if you want to join
the police. But if you can keep your smile
when all about you, are losing their jobs,
and blaming it on those silly little pink slips
yer handing out by the thousands, and the oinking
multi-million dollar stock option stocking stuffers
you use to grease the political campaigns for
regulatory reforms that turn grand theft into
aggressive offshore accounting irregularities
well yours is the high skills high tech
job market of the
free trade agreement future.
Yours is the career path of unlimited
prosperity, the path that assures this great land will always be
number one; the path of rewriting the rules and
controlling the biggest guns.
A titan of industry, an entrepreneur, a CEO,
teaching a lesson they don't teach you in school,
that if you want to make it
in a neo-liberal, fascist state economy:
the thing that matters most is
who they fear,
not what you know.

Bothfulness

One or the other.
Both.
Solemn oath.
Solitary confinement.
Russ Feingold.
Rheingold.
Barbara Boxer.
Boxer Rebellion.
Taiping Rebellion.
I Ching.
Spring fling.
Shoot your wad.
Johnny Wadd.
Holmes County.
Sherlock Holmes.
Merchant of Venice.
Venice Beach.
Omaha Beach.
Mutual of Omaha.
Mutual of Tokyo.
Tokyo Rose.
Gypsy Rose Lee.
Bruce Lee.
Li-young Lee.
Natura non facit saltum.
Saltation.
Sodium chloride.
Drinking-water fluoride.
Skin flora.
Skin of our teeth..
Skin flick.
Dental floss.
Ipanema Bikini.
Hydrogen bomb-test Bikini.
Edward Teller.
Edward Said.
Raed in the Middle.
Middle Kingdom.
Middle Passage.
Passage to India.
Bollywood.
Bali bombing.
The goddess Kali
Nicola Calipari.
Gay Paris.
Paris is worth a mass.
Mass energy conversion.
Mass media.
Propaganda.
Manufacturing Consent.
Consent without consent.
Commodify Your Dissent.
Descent of Man.
Decent respect for the opinions of mankind.
Sexual selection.
Intelligent selection.
Intelligent design.
Designer drugs.
Drugstore Cowboy.
Cowboy Junkies.
Brokeback Mountain.
Heath Ledger.
Cliff ledge.
Heathcliff.
Jane Eyre.
Emerald Isle.
Emeril Lagasse.
Michael Simon.
Lolita.
Lola.
Cost of living allowance.
Coca leaf.
Bolivia.
Simon Bolivar.
Paul Simon.
Simony.
Donatist.
Campaign donation.
Campaign reform.
Reform school.
School figures.
Figure skating.
Peggy Fleming.
Ian Fleming.
James Bond.
Junk Bond.
Collateralized Debt Obligation.
Junk stock.
Famous in the neighborhood.
Speak meaningfully.
Speak truthfully.
Speak bothfully.

Shouting Over the Band

Music so loud you can barely hear
above the distortion,
work hard at ignoring it as we
shout to each other competing for love,
but mostly attention.
One television, the big game.
Another, the latest war,
and in the back the pool balls
break. On stage the singer who has
sifted his life for importants, finds nothing
but love mislaid, greed
unlanced, hearts betrayed
by hearts forever unknown,
chances forever past,
lives unplayed,
undanced. The quivering
petals of blue-bells in spring,
the taut skin of youth brushed by feather-soft fingers,
linger only until the refrain
skirts to a minor key
we neither will nor dare attend,
as shouting over the band
we ignore, and become
the singer.

Homeless Kings

Remember,
all of the fiat
money in the world,
all of the watermarked, counterfeit-
protected, silver-threaded floating currency
fiat money in the world couldn't buy a simple
transistor radio. Not
for all the money in the world.
Before there was
radio.

And you didn't know
what you were missing.
It felt,
it felt,
it felt

much the same as now,
which is to say
you couldn't feel a thing.
Even when, like right
now, a hundred
or a thousand stations
bathe you in music and urgency
you can't hear. Soft.
Electromagnetic vibrations in the ether,
you can't hear.

Even homeless people can afford them now,
even homeless people are richer
than the transistorless kings
of yesterday. Living in used
cars, abandoned
factories, in subway
tunnels, and under urinous highway
overpasses,
the homeless are richer than yesterdays'
kings.

We call this
progress.


Wealth, once inconceivable,
like music,
once unhearable,
everywhere.
By fiat.

And grimy, unclean men,
friendless,
roofless,
loveless,
toothless,
patrol the streets devoid of shelter and saturated
in miracles,
paroled straight from mother's womb into this place
of placental predators.

And I wonder,
once you put down that TV guide,
just how well do you know
your next-door neighbor?

To Have and Have More

Found this posted at the Crisis Chronicles lately. Here's the text.

Bogart said to Faulkner “hey man,
pass me some of that single malt.”
Then turning to Ernest Hemingway he asked,
“do you think I’ve got a shot with Lauren Bacall?”
Well the story’s set in Cuba
but we can move it all to French Martinique,
It’s got these terrorists from al Qaeda
but in the screenplay they are much more elite,
In the novel it’s a “Not” you know, but
reality is a photo-op war,
for the base the point’s not having,
the point is just to have and have more.

Could be freezing, could be burning,
could be starving for just one bite of food,
you can stow them in a hell hole
with jailers all lascivious and lewd,
from the Bremer-walls of Baghdad
to troops murdering a 10-year-old in Ni’ilin,
making a living is illegal,
making a killing is not even obscene,
the rich are always covered,
but convulsing for an hour on the emergency room floor,
the uninsured discover what it means
for them to have and have more.

What to do about the poor,
“let them eat yellowcake,” she said.
Then Marie Antoinette Paris Novak Hilton,
she handed her her head.
Well Barack was such a rock star
in Berlin when his jelly donut moment came,
even though he wasn’t Gable,
everyone said he also wasn’t John McCain,
and where there’s blood on the tracks, you know
you just might find Al Gore,
‘cos when your country’s lost in the bushes,
all that matters is to have and have more.

Santayana's Blue Period

--- for Patrick Marblo, born 4 April, 2001

On the day you were born, 24 American spies were captives on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Their spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet that crashed, and killed its pilot. No one anywhere knew how this would turn out. An embargo, or worse, a war? Imagine how their families worried about them, as your mother would go nuts if it had been you, as the Chinese pilot's mother must have rung in agony, the bell of her heart peeling in her chest, the sound of her keening unheard, mute in the American press. You should ask yourself what those Americans were doing there, 10,000 miles from home, what freedom they were defending there. Consider how the word defense is contorted when it refers to military action on an enemy's doorstep, and what the word 'freedom' means when neither you nor I have any right to know exactly what information those spies were after, and how, or why. Some will say they were protecting our freedom but you should note it is only our freedom to be ignorant of the activities of the rulers of our own country.

On the day you were born the Nasdaq stock market had lost nearly 70% of its value from the preceding year and people were very concerned about an impending economic collapse. Before that the Nasdaq had gone up and up and up, as if it were in earth orbit and no longer had the ability to fall. Companies that had never turned a profit were worth many millions of dollars and the only people you could hear on radio and tv were telling you how the internet would revolutionize everything. Many people disagreed with this but they were not let anywhere near the radio or tv for fear that stock prices might go down. Mass media had become the marketing branch of the electronics and computer industry. From this you should note that the fact that everyone is saying something, especially if they are rich and famous people who have a financial stake in what they are saying, does not make it true. Also note the implication that rich and famous people do not become so merely by telling the truth.

On the day you were born a 10 month old Jewish baby was injured by a Palestinian mortar attack, and 77 Palestinians were wounded by a 'retaliatory' Israeli helicopter rocket attack. Lying there barely sentient, you could make very nearly zero sense of this; I could make little more. For the record I think you should pay very close attention to the use of the word 'terrorist', and how often people speak as if 'arab' is just a contraction for 'arabterrorist'. When one group of people uses rockets, tanks, and helicopters to fire on another group of people who have only slingshots, stones, or are completely unarmed, I propose that you think of the people with the tanks as the true terrorists.

On the day you were born the thousandth victim died in an epidemic of meningitis according to reports from the Burkina Fasan capital of Ouagadougou. Most people I know couldn't begin to tell you where Burkina Faso is, or what Ouagadougou. I have always thought that just the sound of the word Ouagadougou was kind of funny. You should ask yourself if people's lives are worth less because they live in a place that sounds funny to your ear. Before answering this you should consider whether or not Washington might sound funny to a Ouagadougan.

On the day you were born a man named Jason Massey was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas. Despite the fact that all civilized and educated people condemn the death penalty, executions happen nearly every day in America. Note that you were not born into a country ruled by the civilized and educated.

On the day you were born your mother was reminded that human blood is not always red, but rather is blue when deprived of oxygen (note the blue of the veins in your wrist.) The particular source of this reminder was the color of your face when you were but seconds old; the placenta had wrapped twice around your neck and you were born blue in the face. What I take from this is how very precious human life is, how it seems to be made more so by being always so very close to death. You, are, what you choose to make of this.

I wish I could say it was a day unlike all others or at least the end of an era; no more provocative and pointless spy missions, no more bubbles of irrational exuberance in the business world, no more provocations and massive retaliations, no more disdain for unfamiliar peoples, no more savage state-sponsored revenge. The most notable difference between the present and that fateful day of your birth however, in my estimation at least, is the way that your face is no longer blue.

Nearonym

Names must be both
different, and the same. Without
difference, we'd meander
through the city streets of a placeless
homonym, a single zip-code
where everyone's phone rings
simultaneously, while over undecipherable
food, we'd puzzle how to share
the multi-million page bill
from Mastercard. Without
similarity, the characters
of the alphabet would need to outnumber
insects, and the excuses of politicians.
Then we'd be absorbed in the tongue-
babble sound-mimicry of
toddlers struggling to master the endless
palette of phonemes in a lifelong preparatory drill
for a skill that had outlived all
utility.

As for this dif-sameness
of naming, it costs
us a pas-de-deux of nuance and
ambiguity. Creates a world
that confuses
foot doctors, the unabridged
legacy of educational method, and the sexual
abuse of children. Where diamond
weights pass for rabbit food, or the purity
of gold. Chintzy or chancy,
whimsy, fancy, mansion or shanty, rhyme
impossible or endlessly
riche.


Even if reach
may exceed metaphor
as might may right,
or capsize,
we, in the same both
hear and name
near and there.

Named, unnameable and naming
neither anto-, hom-, nor synonyms
awkward, we juggle as if
nearonyms, recognizing alike
surprises. Embody in-
consistency, distance in proximity
convey both fact and impossibility
of conveyance.
Like authors
who create sound and meaning
never entirely
the same with difference.

James Gang

Jesse, Lebron, William, and Etta James.
James Brown, Paul Brown, Jim Brown,
Marlon Brando, Florida Marlins,
Richard Florida, Keith and Renee Richards,
Richard Keith, Rene Descartes,
Cartes Blanche, Blanche Dubois,
W.E.B. Duboise, DW and Andy Griffith.
Andi and Roddy McDowell, Sam
MacDowell, Sam Mayday Malone,
Malone, New York, Mary Doyle,
Doyley Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan.
Higher Ed, New Hire, Nude Painting,
Newt Gingrich, Gingham tablecloth, red tablewine,
Red Foxx, Michael J. Fox,
Fox News, Fox Chase,
Chase Manhattan, Salmon P. Chase,
Salmon Run, Milk Run, Iran Air Flight 655,
USS Vincennes, USS Stark, David Stark,
Pete Stark, Peat Bog, Bog Man,
Isle of Mann, Mann Act,
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice,
Benicio del Toro, Che Guevara,
Gael Garcia Bernal, Martin Bernal,
Black Athena, Hugo Black,
Hugo Boss, SS uniforms, Boss Tweed,
Tweetie Bird, Charlie Bird Parker,
Robert Parker, Maceo Parker,
Burt Lancaster, Cynthia Plaster Caster,
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes,
Hugh Downs, Downs Syndrome,
Syndrome X, Malcolm X,
Malcolm Ten, Tintin,
Rin Tin Tin, Howard Zinn,
Zen Buddhism, Pali Canon,
Bali bombing, Balm of Gilead,
Gilligan’s Island, Fantasy Island,
Voted off the Island, Vote early
And vote often, often a bridesmaid,
Brideshead Revisited, All out Waugh,
Elinaw hates Waugh, Leo Tolstoy,
Crimea and Punishment, Raskolnikov,
Rasputin, Vladimir Putin,
Put-in Bay, San Francisco Bay,
Sydney Harbor, Sydney Greenstreet,
Easy Street, Easy money,
Chicks for free, I want my MTV,
I wanna hold your hand, the hand that rocks the cradle,
Tim Robbins, Baskin Robbins, the Emperor
Of Ice Cream, the naked emperor,
Hans Christian Anderson, Mr. Christian,
Captain Bly, Captain Queeg, Humphrey Bogart,
Lauren Bacall, Key Largo,
Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner,
The Importance of being Earnest,
Oscar Wilde, I knew Oscar de la Renta when he was just
Oscar Renta, Veal Oscar,
The Academy Awards, Plato’s Academy,
Platonic relationship, Nambla,
Allen Ginsburg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
Badr corps, Marine Corps, Semper
Fidel Castro, Reinaldo Arenas,
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men,
Cormac MacCarthy, McCarthy Hearings,
Bobby Kennedy, Arthur Miller, Rebecca Miller,
Daniel Day Lewis, Cecil Day Lewis,
Cecil Rhodes, Rhodesia,
Rhodes Scholar, Bill Clinton,
Bill Bradley, Bradley assault vehicle,
Omar Bradley, Omar Khayyam, Khayyami Vice,
Jalali calendar, Gregorian calendar,
Gregorian chant, Rule of Saint Benedict,
The good words of St. Benedict’s dictionary,
Benedict Arnold, Arnold Palmer,
Palmer raids, Mario Buda,
Mario Andretti, Barney Oldfield,
The purple dinosaur, the purple pill,
AstraZeneca, Astro the Jetson’s dog,
Hanna-Barbera, Hannah Montana,
Miley Stewart, Miles Davis, Willie Davis,
Davis-Bacon, Kevin Bacon, Matt Damon,
Casey Kasem, Ben Affleck, Jesse James.

Toe-blow

(Apparently I wrote this back in 2005.)

Today is Maj Ragain’s 65th birthday celebration.

65. The age of traditional retirement. The age at which, in a culture obsessed with youth, in a culture of Jon Benet Ramseys, of prepubescent high-gloss crotch-shot magazine-fashion allure, the age at which one becomes, old. Officially, old.

My wife Karen tells me he is a remarkably young-looking 65. I make a mental note not to mention this, or the next thing I know he’ll be painting her toe-nails, and once a man has painted a woman’s toe nails, his lips gently blown the wet tight-bound reflective lacquer-sheen to dry, there is no telling the levels of sensual podiatric intimacy that may ensue.

What does it mean to be old in a country where people routinely poison their faces into wrinkleless masks, where the natural history of expression, the skin-seams of laughter, smiles, tears and worry are so avidly erased by injections of botulin toxin, botox, one of the most poisonous substances on the planet, as if one’s life could be improved by being unlived? What does it mean to be old when the storm surge of electromagnetic multi-national corporate propaganda only targets demographics with pimples or in pampers, because their elders are living inside particle-board starter mansions for which have been mortgaged their next 30-years of discretionary spending? When that storm surge scrims the horizon of manufactured desire like the surf of a broken giant bonsai-pipeline wave, the awesome psychic spumante of televised national consumer demand, whose froth we live inside?

These are not the days of Anthony the anchorite, the Father of All Monks, the Coptic Christian who was born in 250 A.D., and who lived to the age of 105. That was an era of self denial, a time when men engaged in a kind of “austerity Olympics”, when stylites lived for years on tall fingers of desert rock, when men such as Anthony could not hear of a feat of deprivation without aspiring to surpass it, when greed had been turned inside out, and as if anticipating Thoreau by over a thousand years, men sought wealth in proportion to the things they could live without.


It is a myth of our own making that old age is a recent phenomenon. It was high rates of childhood mortality that reduced the life expectancy of ancient times, and those who lived simply and who were not taken by epidemics, or killed by the fraudulent cures perpetrated by doctors, often lived beyond their allotted three-score years and ten. It is men like Anthony in his 105 years who remind us just how little life progress has brought us, how simplicity and privation suffice as tonics not improved much by peroxide, insulin, Prozac, Viagra and all the poison a face can survive.

And so, however officially old you may be my friend, I know in your heart you are still a toe blower, and that no one has or ever will genetically engineer your spirit. I know your face is untempted by the latest poisons.

I know that you see the world for what it is and not for its masks; the blood-smeared killing coat and the Christmas unemployment line, the ruby-throat blown across an ocean, the vast luminous light that fills eternity, and bathes our lives in the shadow of God.

James Stewart Mulrooney to his Daughter Brigid

My friend Katie Daley wrote a poem about a 15-year-old in Ireland named Brigid Mulrooney, which was so wonderful she's never been able to escape from it entirely: in an odd way a blessing and a curse, I suppose.

In it, Brigid refers to her parents as tubby, or, if you will, "tooby."

I wrote this piece as a response from the perspective of Brigid's father.

If you want to know more about Katie, check out her web site.

You can find there an audio version of her poem about Brigid, which will help a great deal in deciphering the following.

James Stewart Mulrooney to his Daughter Brigid

Tooby?

Tooby?

“...don’t want ta be tooby like me ma

or me da...”

I’ll give the jung missus tubby?

“Paht yer hond on em anywhere”

Paht yer hond anywhere on me

and the next thing outta yer mouth’ll be a

stump speech, I guarantee thot.

Jung missus invitin’ the whole neighborhood to be

paht-in their honds on me.

Blamin’ me “gray whiskers and gray ways”

on me gray food. I got news for ya me darlin’.

There’s nuthin’ fer gray whiskers like a moonth fool a

past-midnights of cholicky screamin’ fer hours, and hours,

and hours on end: thar’s a revolutionary for ye,

snot nosed wailing and screamin and shriekin

from the moment she hit her crib.

And me gray work. Who’s she think poots the

mango orange and champagne booble spangles on her

dinner table? Think it cooms from the Gawd’s honest graces

of Mrs. Thatcher, and Mr. Major, or that free-trade poppinjay

Mr. Blair? There’s nuthin’ in Ireland for an honest Catholic

save work that’s grayer than Cleveland November.

Who exactly is it Brigid, who is it pays for those records by the

Beatles and Stevie “shooby-doooby-do-dah-“ Wonder?

What do you reckon its like for a collier working the graveyard

shift, with a daughter who’ll throw back her head

and unfurl her tongue for every Tom, Dick, and Harry

she mistakes for the second revolutionary coming

of Jaysis? For Charles Stewart Parnell’s sake,

the gair-rel would make luv to a Black and Tan.

No, Bridgy dear, it’s nawt Jaysis, but the where-ld ‘at has

“a tittilatin bit a nuthin draped across its altogether.”

It’s called childhood.

It’s called family.

For all we know, you could be at some trook stop datin’

Osama bin Laden, you could be George W. Bush’s private

circus tutor, and when the hurt cooms

we’d still be here waitin for ye

to pick ye oop,

and hug ye in the softest, toobiest, lovingest arms

this side of Paradise.

Anubiety

Like a gust of wind, neither here nor there because both here and there, and not here and not there, both then and now and later. The same and different. Like a gust of wind. Over the phone, through my left ear you, a mile away, and the train whistle. Through my right, the same whistle ten seconds delayed. The moans of that horn on the left spell my future on the right. One sound, and several. One time, and many. One place, and none. I sent you that train: for me the train that passed, for you, passing; two different trains and one, passing, and past. Where are we as we speak? You with me here? I with you there? Together. And not together. And what is the time, yours or mine, passing, or past, and, as before where?

Etymology recapitulates phylogeny

(This was originally posted at the clevelandpoetics blog.)

The proverbial “they” call it the “etymological fallacy”, casting the truth as a falsehood before it even gets out of the starting-gate.

The idea is simple enough: the original meaning (temporally original) of a word is its correct meaning.

Taken to an extreme and deprived of pluralistic context, the “fallacy” is indeed a prescription for “mind forged manacles”, a prescription for prescriptive linguistics itself: but the world is always already the sum of all its meanings; we grasp a “meta-meaning” by including the historical process of its evolution in our understanding of its use, and this deepens and enriches our deployment of, and participation in the language.

All this by way of an introduction to an etymology that has intrigued, guided, and directed me for some time now: the idea that the word “poetry” comes from a Greek word meaning “to make”.

Arthur C. Danto, the historian and philosopher of art, has made much of how Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Box” collapsed the question of “what is art” into a single art-transcending instantiation.

I know of no equivalent poem, but certainly the question “but is it poetry” has never been far from the modern poet (“tennis without the net”.)

You will perhaps begin to sense my enchantment when you reflect that the Latin equivalent to the Greek “poem, is “fact”. That is, the legacy of the Roman word for “to make” is, in English, a “fact”. A Greek poem is a Roman fact.

Very… poetic.

The remnants of this legacy are palpable. “Manufacture”. “Factory.” The etymology of the word “manufacture” preserving as it does the Latin root for “hand”; to manufacture being “to make by hand.”

My how things change.

As a digression I can’t help but note how the words “manacles” (mind-forged or otherwise), “emancipation”, and “manumission” are allied.

If you share my fascination, perhaps you will wonder at how a “factory” would correspond with a Greek poem. As a first approximation, consider an MFA program in poetry.

Although I am skipping around quite a bit, and concentrating on the word “poetry”, I would like to make clear that the methodology I am using, the “etymological fallacy”, is quite general. It is also authoritative. Beyond this, it is scientific, both evolutionary, and ecological.

Without dwelling on it, recall the old evolutionary tongue-twister “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, the answer as to why, according to whichever evolutionary authority you choose, Charles Darwin to Sarah Palin, people have gills as embryos? At the end of the day, any evolutionary process will select genes that preserve pre-existing ecological functions, since it is relative to these “functions” that competition will be defined. Now observe that that evolutionary origin of language (in the sense of natural history) had to preserve whatever ecological function predated it. Not only this, but every subsequent linguistic “improvement” has therefore been a successful evolutionary adaptation.

OK, so even I can barely understand what I’m saying. It’s just that the idea of a poem as a fact, and a fact as a poem just kind of hits me over the head and sends black tarantulas down my spine.

The bigger picture is that language has an evolutionary and ecological function, and by studying language, we are studying natural history.

Thus, poetry is an act of making, and anything made is a poem.

In this context it is worth recalling that there is both an orthographic and semantic echo of this sense of poetry as making, in the words “hemopoiesis” (the making of blood), and “onomatopoeia” (the making of words from related sounds.) “Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood/ jewels and miracles…”

It is possible to debate whether this or that is a “good” poem, but that will depend on the etymology of good (it is useful in this regard to meditate on the etymology of the word “etymology”), but it is not possible to debate whether anything “made” is a poem. In this sense, we possess an objective measure of whether or not something is a poem.

In a post-logical reality however, it is possible for something both to be, and not be a poem. What is or is not a poem to me may not be or be to you in the same way or others.

What then does a poem make?

Like the New York Times, it may make little more than a wonderful liner for collecting droppings in a bird cage.

Things are called poems most often when they make rhyme, when they make new language, or, and this is related, when they make, believe.

A poem is what makes, believe.

Rajasthan Rap

Charpoy children, lazy sun.
Sari sisters, mothers, young.
Dinners cooked on flaming dung.
Beggars touch, urine runs.
Fog of dust, squat swept streets.
Bajaj swarms, chai brewed sweet.
Clay red pan spit, bus goat bleat.
Baksheesh motherload,
commission agent cheat.

Goa to Bhubaneswar,
Bangalore to Srinagar,
Jaisalmer to old Bodhgaya,
McLeod Ganj to Madurai.

Horn blasted right of way, black choked air,
Nerve racked bus skin, street cross dare.
Disabled rickshaw meter, tripled tourist fare.
Bedding down on sidewalks, home is everywhere.
Pillow bread bhaturas, dhaba, dhal, and rice,
Lassi’s on the rooftop, soaring vulture flies,
Sandcastle desert fantasy, haveli stone carved lace,
White marble love dirge, Taj’s sunset grace.

Campfire studded mountain stars, Rajput fortress walls.
Lungi lounging servant boy, Kashmiri men in shawls.
Hasheesh hawking rupee hounds, ‘hello’ until you’re numb,
Brothers’, uncles’, cousins’ shops, ‘no’ means you’re not done.

And Ganja flows, and flows, and flows,
Remaining ever still,
Through Varanasi’s burning Ghats,
And flow it always will.

Voracious Appetite

"You are in heaven right now, and your only job is to play. Don't screw it up."

--- Virgil Provost

Waking up after midnight
as a child, and
piling into the impossibly large
Chevrolet Bel Air, going
I could not know
where. In those days we could still discover dirt
roads to lose our way on, places the
glare of self-obsession had not yet
destroyed, had not
polluted the perfect darkness of, roaring
white-noise hum,
electric Narcissus now
shackling us into our wholly
terrestrial
selves.

Past the deep glassy
mirror-skin of the frigid
Tomhannock Reservoir, piercing the
rusty sponge-needle silence of
pine-forested hills in their
grave darkness,--- thick, deafening, sound-
deadening mats --- we braked into
an open field alive with
the time-lapse symphony
of nuclear stars, and raised the
tripod of a nine-inch
reflecting telescope like
cosmic conquistadors raising a
Mount Suribachi flag,
asserting rule over
infinities that required
no passports.

Not what or who we are, but
what and who we aren't, a pure and undespoiled
otherness. The promiscuous moons of Jupiter.
Saturn’s rings so sharp they could
slice meat. The stark,
bone-white ridges of the Sea
of Tranquility, we were
jealous cosmic voyeurs in
hot pursuit of
some lunar occultation,
a little leg from Venus,
the spark-torched shower of
a self-immolating meteor;
for a child in an age almost entirely
pre-digital, nature's web extended
so far beyond everything
that was merely
world wide.

That was where we anchored
as a family, in the primal forces that hurtled on
waxed slats down snow-glazed
Berkshire ridges in
the wind-burned recesses of winter;
that hove white canvas sails on
rigid aluminum masts through
the Beaufort frills of storming
whitecaps, solar breath, and that
tattooed the night sky
with million-degree brilliance ---
Deneb, Vega, Altair, and an
avalanche of others---
my father could somehow always
navigate. Even now

when the neurological
Swiss cheese of his mind can no longer
find the way home from
around the nearest corner, even
now, sometimes
before his voracious
forgetfulness can interrupt,
"there's Jupe" will dart from his
unthinking tongue, as it did from
the man who always knew
exactly where
we were going
when I was young;
and for that split second
at least, may be,
I am, and he still
does.

Guns for Jesus ---- Op-ed classic

( Every year around the Christmas season, there seems to be some new, vague, terror alert. Did you hear this? That's what gave me the idea for this poem.)

Terror for Christmas

Well the terror alert had been raised to high,
so our F-15's were patrolling the sky.
Keeping us safe, keeping us free,
protecting the homeland security.
Every day of the week, every week of the year,
we're armed to the teeth so we got nothing to fear---
except maybe,
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

The kids were asleep all snug in their beds,
while visions of Predators shot through their heads.
They were slaughtering badguys like you wouldn't believe,
with their Hellfire missiles there on Christmas Eve.
They were pint-sized heroes in an army of one,
and for Jesus's birthday all they wanted was guns;
guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.
Guns for Jesus,
and fear itself.

Well the terrorists are always around,
so you better never lower your guard.
So while we celebrate the baby Jesus,
you know they're trying extra hard.

It was just after midnight and NORAD radar
showed that something big was coming in fast.
There was no time to think, and no time to argue,
act now or it might just be your last.
And they mighta thought twice,
and they mighta thought better,
but the terror was already so high,
well that was the night that the US Air Force
blew Santa Claus outta the sky.
We blew Santa Claus outta the sky.

And it was raining bits of blown up reindeer
for hours and hours on end,
and none of our jets,
and none of our missiles
could put Santa back together again.
And though fear and hate,
may keep you safe,
from everything the enemy sends,
the problem with answering fear with guns,
is that you're gonna end up killing your friends.
The trouble with answering fear with guns,
is that you always end destroying your friends.
With nothing to fear,
and nothing to love,
except maybe
fear itself.
Except maybe,
fear itself.

By any other name

Hariri, Harare,
Takfiri, Zarqawi,
Scary as SCIRI
Corrupt as Allawi.
Paintball Timimi,
Tariq Ramadan
Posada, Padilla,
Korematsu, Bagram.
Sistine, Sistani,
Taliban, Talabani,
Ex-con, A.Q. Khan,
Rendition, Pentagon.
Wasabi, Wahhabi,
Bandar, Chalabi,
Abu Ghraib, al-Jamadi
on ice, his body.
Blackwater, Goldwater,
Whitewater tea,
Hotwater, coldwater
Torture macht free.
Potatahs, potahtahs,
Paredes, Fadlallah,
Trireme, intifada,
al-Marashi, Muqtada.
Pat Tillman, Calipari,
Little Egg, Camp Victory,
JLO, AMLO,
Castro and Chavez,
Boykin, Geoffrey Miller,
Alberto (El Submarino) Gonzales.
Osama, Idema,
Jidda, Jihadi,
Sgrena, Mejia,
"Karen Ryan", al-Jaafari.
Downing Street memo,
you know the fix is in.
Our guy's Karzai
in the land of heroin.
Ayatollah, Hezbollah,
Ali Ismail Abbas.
George Tenet, Sean Baker,
a Tafari named Ras.

The Compassionate Emperor's New Clothes

I was having lunch with Uncle Clarence Thomas Jefferson Davis
and Senator Strom Essie-Mae Washington Williams Thurmond,
Uncle Jim Crow Strom Booker T. Sally Hemings Washington Thurmond Williams,
and over lunch at the Woolworth's lunch counter,
over lunch as we were sipping our ever so delicious
Trent Latte's, separate but equal parts espresso and steamed milk,
we discussed Uncle Thomas's Log Cabin Republican
Jim Crow High Tech Lynch law. Uncle Clarence Thomas
High Tech saving Private Jessica Ryan Lynch counter lunch law.
And in this age, in this age of
Jefferson Davis Anita San Juan Hill Bill Lewinsky Clinton lynch law,
we were all agreed what matters most is not so much the
stringing up, or the innocense, or the guilt, but, but well
the rounding up
of the usual suspects. Rounding up the
they all look the same
usual
when the Saudis attack it's Iraq we strike back
suspects.
Because when you are
stringing people up with rough shod rough rider
San Juan Thrill Hill justice, what matters is that they all
look the part. That they all look like
Osam Saddama Domma or the Ayatollah remember the
Khomeini Hussein Reign of Terror Maine-iacs
on the Herve Villaschez 9/11
"de Plane de Plane."
God is great, god is great and we are not
Ayatollah Falwell's Wahhabi wannabes,
we are not Ayatollah Ashcroft's charter school
madrassa dropouts, we are the subjects of the compassionate conservative
empire, the compassionate neocon conservative
empire, and we have prepared a compassionate
lynching for anyone who claims
that our compassionate emperor is naked,
our compassionate emperor is naked,
our compassionate emperor is just as naked
in his hooded Vietnam,
or his Dora Farm ROCKSTARS Nick Berg decapitation strike
as eleven year old Kim Phuc,
or the human sex pyramids
of Abu Ghraib.