You Can't Move Mountains With Tales Like These

Nega-Sheep
***
now, you've all heard about how
we're like sheep. i mean, when
Jesus called us that, do you think
it was meantas a compliment?
alas, i'm afraid
sheep are stupid creatures
less brains than a cow . . .they'll walk right in to a slaughterhouse
and let you hammer their brains right out.
now, the time has come
for a new breed of sheep
to emerge, and so you see,
i am sort of a Nega-sheep.
my wool's not white,
probably quite tie-dyed, and
very seldom do you encounter
a sheep with fangs.
no, honey, that's not a smile,
i'm just baring my teeth for you.
yes, i bite.
this sheep fights back.
this sheep has a survival instinct.
this sheep has already been sheared
so some idiot can wear a sweater
but don't think this sheep's just gonna
let you hammer out his brains
so some idiot can eat lamb chops.
i got your chops, right here,sucker.
a sheep in wolf's clothing, yes it's true,
but i'll still bet i've got
more bite than you.


Varf!
***
Varf! Everything gets back to varf! What is varf? Where, there are
several potential definitions. Varf could be when your cat
hacks up a hairball on the carpet and it gets sucked up into
a vaccuum cleaner, where it develops a sort of vampiric life.
But, that's pretty nasty, so we won't contemplate that. Another
kind of varf could be a vampiric smurf, but let's just hope he doesn't
hack up a furball on the carpet while he's running the vaccuum,
because that would only complicate things by creating such conditions as "Smurfy Vampire Furf Varf," "Furfy Varf Vaccuum Smurf,"and even "Vampric Varf Smurfs Vaccuum! (Film at Eleven)." But the third and best definition of Varf is a tribe of Vikings,
who were also Veatniks (this was back in the day when
the letter B was excommunicated from the alphabet). They left their recipes on a runestone,
the "Varf Viking Veatnik Recipe Rosetta Stone," referring to such things as "Varf Vegetable Veef Soup," "Varf Viking Vaked Veans and Spam," and "Varf Viking Lizard Surprise." See, you didn't know that the fourth definition of varf is a kind of lizard. "Hey, there's a LIZARD in this stuff!" That's the surprise. It also refers to the fact that you have to surprise the lizard to get it into the stewpot.

Boxed
***
you think inside the box, and
lock your mind inside the box, and
throw away the key.
and then you start to forget
that there ever was a key
that there ever was an "outside"
that the box is just a limit
you've slapped on your head.
there are some people who use that box
like a harness.
they yoke your head to some idea, and you
just follow in line right into the
slaughterhouse, baaa baaa, baaa baaa . . .
oh, and just before they take away
your writing hands, they'll
staple your lips together, too.
if you hurry up, though, i'll
help you look for that key . . .it's gotta be around here somewhere.

Carpe Poem
***
"Seize the echoes of creatures struggling to live against the dagger of man."
--Orannia Hamilton
***
Seize
the naked poem, raw with
vibrant green light and
razored fangs, from the turbid air.
From dark moments, bright things
sometimes shoot forth
like meteors etching a rune
of fire across the aching
firmament.
*
Transform
each piece of dangerous terrain
into your territory, proclaim your
domain in the poetic tongues,
conquer your emotions and yoke them to your plow.
the Earth lies fallow, unless
it is broken to receive the
seed.
*
Blaze
your trail across this tapestry, and
make your path one of light,
translate the celestial messages,
make your relationships inspirations,
receive in abundance the
overflowing cascades of
blessings, flowing from on
High.
*
And may the poem always rise to greet you,
as welcome and expectant as the dawn,
pregnant with possibility,
where each moment
of ascending brightness
is a phoenix of experience,
and the poet is
reborn.

After the Storm

It's been a little over a week since my return to the 'noke, and a little over a year since i've posted in this thing. I figured it was about time. I haven't quite had time to process everything that's been going on in the past year in NYC, and i'm still "in transition," which is usually a difficult time for me to write. Hindsight is 20/20, eh?

Since my return, i've re-connected via Facebook with several friends, including several of my old poetry slam cohorts. Steve Glassbrenner, Leslie Barger, Bill Payne, and Lewis Kleiner are all there. I also re-connected with my long-time friend Vickie Holt, who's remained a friend since my high school days, back when i ran with a group of oddballs we called "Saturn Pattern," and yeah, i was a wing-nut back then, too. I hope they don't mind being mentioned by name in this blog, but they're way too important for me to just give a passing "my old friends" mention.

I'm now 44 years old, which is like being dead in dog years. I'm confused about where my future lies now . . . i guess the path is laid at my feet, and this time of transition is my opportunity to pick the right one, or to screw things up royally again. As far as what i wanted to do back in NJ and NYC, i accomplished about 15% of it . . . i.e., just shy of a total failure. I did LEARN a lot, which may have been God's reason for keeping me up there as long as He did. I've written reams of poetry that, in all likelihood, nobody will read, and there's no slamma-ramma stuff going down in the 'noke anymore (and, considering my track record in the last years of that, i'm not looking in that direction now). Blah, blah, blah. And, no, this isn't-self pity, this is just me making another attempt at the pinnacle of Maslow's hierarchy: self-actualization. It's not enough to simply take pieces of other people's opinions or idealizations of what you are, there has to be some kind of "click" in your mind. One thing i've learned is that my inherent distrust of government, bureacracy, and "the system" in general might have served me better if i'd aimed some of it at the people in NYC i called "friends." I DID have quite a few good friends, but when my ship hit the rocks towards the end of my time there, i found out who were really my friends . . . and there were some surprises there. I'm not going into detail about that here . . . and if i ever do, the names will be changed to protect the innocent (and obscure the guilty). For somebody who can sniff out the connections of a conspiracy, i have the tendency to be far too trusting of my associates, especially considering that a number of my NYC associates are, in a legal sense, criminals. But they're still my FRIENDS, damn it, and i don't think God would be very happy with me if i wrote them off just because they happened to have a few misdemeanors on their record. When Jesus walked the earth, He was called a friend of degenerates and riff-raff (nevermind the fact that most of them reformed once they connected with Him). And some of these so-called "low-lifes" that society rejects and looks down on helped me out in my times of trouble, whereas the more "respectable" members of society left me hanging. So, yeah, i may have trusted some of them a little more than i should have, held them to a higher standard when i should have kept my expectations low. I'm not exactly a hero myself--far from it.

But enough of that for now. I'm sure my readers (the seven or eight of them) don't want me to belabor that point.

This is a poem that i wrote while living in Brooklyn, part of it composed on a subway (which was where a lot of poems i wrote began), and this is probably a work in progress which will undergo several iterations, but while it's still fairly fresh, here 'tis.

Battery Acid #1
***
question: how are we going to
rescue the economy
reduce our carbon footprint
win the war on terror
and provide a future for our children?
objection! too complicated? i'll rephrase:
how many corpses
piled on our doorsteps
or stacked like cordwood
in our toxic back yards
will it take for us to think,
"ummm . . . maybe we fucked up,"
but, since fucking things up is both
easy and profitable, how much longer
can it go on before people
get wise to the act and stop paying
for new and improved ways
of getting screwed? it's like
paying a rapist to rape you again,
only HARDER this time!
pick a problem, and you'll find
50 or more self-help books
(available at Barnes & Noble,
occasionally ostentatiously autographed
by the author)
to help you solve it, but
as any third-grader can tell you,
increasing the number of options
in a multiple-choice question
just creates a greater potential for picking
the wrong one,
and since i don't have all the answers either,
i started by picking up a pen
and writing a poem--say hello
to my little friend!
"you believe the children are our future,"
so you'll croon that song
while making sure that future generations can
be taxed into servitude
eat genetically altered food
watch 500 channels of increasingly stupid tube
and won't worry about what defines "torture"
until it's their turn to get screwed
(and, i might add, if the children in question
are currently involved in conflicts in countries
whose exploitable resources don't warrant
our "liberation" lube,
the future's already dead)!
you're a nation of people who
are kind to others,
as long as it's a tax write-off
or pays dividends,
all smiles while you bury knives
in the backs of your friends,
shoot up that corporate ladder so fast
you get the bends,
and everybody pretends
that they're not losers,
even though nobody ever really wins.
you've got fully functional cybernetic wombs--
think "The Matrix," just designed by Martha Stewart--
and cell-phones and ipods and other pods and mods
that keep you totally connected
but unable to make a connection,
and text-messaging is a lousy substitute
for intense verbal interaction,
and for those of you NOT PAYING ATTENTION,
that's what THIS is!
did you MISS it?
maybe your brain turned off when you unplugged!
they've terraformed the wrinkles out of your mind,
leaving it smooth as a baby's behind
and full of the same runny, yellow crap
until that cosmic roundhouse slap
arrives to wake you from your nap of dollar dreaming,
and you'll leave the world the way you arrived:
fists clenched, naked, covered in blood, and screaming!
oh, and just as a postscript?
if you believe the children are our future?
watch out--they're sneaking up on you
to write "the end."
maybe you'll make good fertilizer, friend,
because that's all you can really do
with
BULL SHIT!

This Just In

I was mulling over the concept of writing, just now, and a simile sprang to mind. I'm going to improv on it now . . . this is stream-of-consciousness, so bear with me:

Ore
***
most people look at their past experiences
with mixed feelings, maybe wishing
they could somehow wade upstream against Time
and rearrange the geography, but
they're missing the point entirely.
writing poetry
is like this: panning for gold.
that streambed is full of silt and grit, true,
but when sifted finely,
sometimes one finds bits of gold,
and how many men have sold their fortunes
just to buy the property
where that stream runs through?
it's worth the effort to sift my past
exceeding fine, to find that raw poertry ore
that will pass the test of fire . . .
and, now, looking back at my history
i see that God is also sifting me
exceeding fine, to reveal
that within me
that will pass the test of fire.

After a Long Hiatus

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything in the blog. I suppose that real life takes me away from the computer more often now, and what time I -DO- spend online is mostly wrapped up in the Poetry Tag group or other such matters. It's been a relief to get back to the stimulus of PTG and Rage, after a dry spell where I didn't write for a couple of weeks.
you
just
walk down the block like you belong there,
half scared to death in your
tattered jeans,
and the wise shadows
are clustered under the trees.
their whispers
are cigarette smoke and cannabis,
and their eyes show only
as chips of starlight
in the gloom.
_____________
More on that later, maybe.
I've written several new poems, but I'm currently wrangling/wrestling over some of the word-choices, trying to decide if i can hew closer to the bone by changing a few. Anyway, here's a couple of recent writes.


Bronx Fires
***
under a steely sky, the sun not so much seen
as felt . . . the trees themselves seem exhausted, there's no
hint of a breeze, and in this motionless torpor, the Bronx
is broiling.
the souls of those who repose on the streets
have taken the burn, and scorched by summer and by
torrid corporate greed, rising prices going up
like the temperature . . . how much hotter
can things get?
i hear the murmur in the streets, the voices beginning to stir
and speak things that haven't been suggested aloud
before . . .
there's something here, a fire that's burned
underneath our very feet
as we walk the streets unawares.
i'm cooking my brains in this oven
so that all the people who think i'm only half-baked
will have to shut down . . .
the dogs in this neighborhood howl
in solidarity
at the tarnished copper coin of a moon
rising from the polluted haze in the East
like a brazen beacon for nightmares.
suddenly, we're all strangers up here again,
where the heat can drive men mad
and create a thirst for blood
that's never slaked, and oh God,
i fear the bloodshed's very near,
hidden behind the haze of heat-shimmer rising
from the broiling Bronx streets . . . .

------------------------------------------------------


Collateral Consequences
***
oh, the initial blast and hard radiation's
quite enough in and of itself, but
it's the FALLOUT that gets ya.
i mean, i know enough about that
from 3-way fights between my mom, sis, and myself
where i always ended uplosing . . .and, that had its own collateral damage,because if i'd stayed around the house more
i might not have gone out in the forest
and gone mad from drinking strange water.
i'm a victim of my own collateral damage, mostly
side-effects of things that, had i known there WERE side-effects,
i doubt i'd have done . . .but that's ink in the water under the bridge, now
making little ideogram-like squiggles in the flow
as i pour out what's been keeping me up nights
and making me lose weight no matter what i eat
and, see, somehow this makes me "other-directed"
which means the system didn't quite like the taste
and i got spit out . . .hey, look at me, America!
i'm your end result,
your collateral consequence,
a grim visage of your future wherein
EVERYBODY will look this scrawny, underfed, and strung-out,
because
we will be.

------------------------------------------------------------------

More later. This screwball blog template apparently doesn't like line spacing, so it takes it away. Woohoo! Ain't modern technology great? We invent New & Improved ways to Seriously Fuck Things Up. Artificial intelligence, my ass. How can we create artificial intelligence when we don't even have the real thing going on?

Postmodern Bestiary (& Other Disjointed Ramblings)

This forms a small part of a "postmodern" bestiary, and is probably a work in progress that will do absolutely nothing but languish in cyberspace.

Hobnoblins: hobnoblins are individuals who gather together to discuss trivialities; typically found in malls, or on city sidewalks and other high-traffic areas, they instinctively locate the area that will most impede everyone else, and stand there in a loose group, chatting, and giving dirty looks to the people who try to pass by them or, heaven forbid, THROUGH them.
Butt Blockers: butt blockers are oblivious fat people who typically walk side-by side through malls, stores, and on sidewalks. They move half a pace slower than everyone around them, and of course resent anyone trying to get around them. They are similar to hobnoblins, but butt blockers (because of their size) are seldom encountered outside of pairs.
Hippiegriffs: hippiegriffs are either old hippies who've held on to their hippiness, or the children of hippies, or people who were somehow raised ina hippie culture. Often surrounded by clouds of incense and/or cannabis smoke, hippiegriffs generally live on the fringes of society and seem to be quite happy there.
Bluggemsnatchem: a bluggemsnatchem is a term for a generic monster of some type that suddenly lunges out of the darkness to snatch you up. Typically, bluggemsnatchems are seen only briefly during their attack, which is quite fortunate, since bluggemsnatchem features are unattractive at best. Fortunately, bluggemsnatchems are solitary creatures (you'd be solitary, too, if you looked like that!)
Yupsters: yupsters are yuppies, typically in the mid-teen to mid-twenties, who want to be "hip," so they adapt things from the hipster culture, generally making them fit for mass consumption, since yupsters tend to move in herds. They are a subgroup of posers; a distinguishing feature of yupsters is that they resent anyone who has less money than they do and still manages to be more hip.
Suitmorphs: these are the middle-echelon corporate businessmen, who have adapted to the whims of their culture by being able to change their paradigm to match that of the head bozohemian (q.v.) They can often be encountered in fawning groups around a bozohemian, or in corporate coffeeshops, bars, and restaurants. You can tell the alpha suitmorph by the fact that his tie matches perfectly the one the bozohemian is wearing. They typically ignore other cultures unless members of that culture somehow become an impediment to their ladder-climbing.
Bozohemians: these are the clowns who think they're supporting the whole circus on their shoulders. Most bozohemians only pay attention to the trends of other cultures in order to figure out how to best turn a profit on them. In spite of their ostentatious clothing and conspicuous consumption, bozohemians are actually quite boring creatures, and respond in predictable knee-jerks to most stimuli.
Zobops: these are undercover cops who still stick out like sore thumbs. Their purpose is to distract you from the undercover cops who actually DO blend in.
More later.
every rose has it's thorn, honey,
but there's
something
in the azaleas over there
with eyes like chips of bad moon
and an appetite
like a gas oven, so
breathe carefully
amongst the blossoms, and
while you're at it, watch
the mountains. they're
sneaking up on you.
(bologna).
You know, this heat is really driving me crazy. Half the time it feels like you're wearing a big wet fur coat, and then it feels like you're wearing a straightjacket made of nettles. I only have mild allergies, thankfully, and i pity those who have even moderate allergy problems in this weather. That thunderstorm we had last night hammered us, but it didn't seem to do anything to lower the temperature. Fortunately, there always seems to be a breeze.
Your
thoughts break up
like really friable rock, and
the chips that land
in your bed
make it hard for you to sleep
at night, so instead of
cleaning the rocks
out of your bed,
you take pills
so you won't feel them
poking holes
in your soul.

Aggressive Statements (Baiting the Inevitable)

Well, here we are again, another evening at the old blog. I wonder who made the word "blog" up, and exactly what they were thinking (and probably smoking) when they created it. A blog sounds sort of like a creature that might creep up on you out of the fog. Well, i guess in a metaphorical sense, my blog is like that. It's just lurking there. Reading this over your shoulder. Annoying habit, i know, this particular blog doesn't have very good manners.
MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!
Okay, now i've gotten THAT out of my system. Honestly, today i felt like i was ready to pounce on somebody. It could have been anyone. Heading down to Popeye's for some chicken, i was overcome with a sudden urge to randomly grab a passer-by, and scream, "HERE! HERE! IT IS THE BEATING OF HIS HIDEOUS HEART!" or "I'M MELTING! MELLLLLLLLLLLLLTING! OH, WHAT A WORLD, WHAT A WORLD!" or something of the sort. Then, at Popeye's, as the pert and perky cashier asked me, "What would you like?" i practically growled "A PIECE OF MMMMEAT!" She wasn't in the least intimidated by this response, a reaction i put down to (1) being totally ignorant of the fact that Grendel was standing across a very short counter from her, (2) being totally ignorant, and/or (3) being a New Yorker. But, for some reason, i'm feeling very aggressive lately. I've also been eating like a horse. Literally. Feed-bag and all. Well, not really, but i HAVE eaten more than is customary for me, which usually indicates that i'm going into a prolonged manic phase. Whee-hah, happy days are here again. The way this usually works, i'll crash at about the time i'm supposed to be leaving my humble room here in the Bronx, and i still have no freaking idea what i'm going to do. I just pray i don't get on some self-destructive kick towards the end of the manic phase (it seems to be a kind of natural reaction, almost like you're trying to put the brakes on because your mind's strapped to a rocket-sled).
Something occurred to me earlier, and i've been trying to work it into "April Fool's Resolution." I was pondering "casting pearls before swine," and then i started thinking of what pearls were. Essentially, they're tiny pieces of grit or other foreign matter that sometimes gets trapped inside the oyster's shell. What the oyster does is build up a layer of what's called nacre around the irritant. This layering continues, eventually developing into a pearl. The seed of the pearl, one might say, is something unpleasant or irritating or painful . . . but, at least in me, the irritants are surrounded by layer upon layer of words. So, i cough up poems instead of pearls. And, given that analogy, the pigs just MIGHT trample my pearls into the mud . . . i'm not worried, i've got more. LOTS more. See, there's that aggressive kick again. I should probably write a few rants when i'm in this mood, that always cheers me up and sometimes actually generates a bit of poetry in the process. Some people, apparently, do not consider my rants "poetry," and since their tastes are so refined, they'll probably be happier in some dark closet performing biologically impossible acts on him or herself, and i cordially invite all such individuals to go and do so immediately.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . .
Just an aside, i sometimes wonder how Aryan Nation or KKK members or whatever they're calling themselves now survive in prison, except that maybe some AGENTS OF THE STATE AGREE WITH THEM, and maybe they've got a few COPS ON THEIR PAYROLL, or maybe THEY'RE ON THE COPS' PAYROLL, or something of the sort. Yes, i did say that.
I guess saying something like that in a public blog COULD be considered a self-destructive act, considering the possible repercussions, but . . . sheesh, almost all of my poems have some sort of potential repercussions, a lot of them unpleasant . . . but i can't quit being what i am just because being what i am jeopardizes my life. Scared? Yes, i'm terrified. I've told people time and time again that i sometimes scare MYSELF with the intensity of stuff that comes pouring out of the old poetry faucet, and what i'm committing to by speaking them aloud. I pray to God not to hold the liberties i take against me. I've also told people time and time again that God is literally holding me up, and holding me TOGETHER . . . i've flown apart in pieces before, and it's not pretty. I know, people don't wanna hear about God unless it's got their particular brand-name slapped on it, like there's different gods for Catholics and Southern Baptists and Seventh-Day Adventists. Well, just deal with it. God. The Creator. The Supreme Being. The One. And, yes, i'll say Jesus, too. If you've got something better, go to it. And, yeah, i've ranged all over the field in this particular paragraph, but it comes to a focal point: i am not PERMITTED to write what i write, i am COMPELLED.
I may be KILLED for speaking uncomfortable truth, but far better that i die WHILE speaking truth, comfortable or not.
Those are aggressive statements, or to put it another way, "them's fightin' words," and i don't think it's going to be a self-fulfilled prophecy, i'm just baiting the inevitable.

A Postmodern Moment

I was just reading over some of the comments in my Postpoems page (this was sort of an aside to looking through the poems to find one that might be usable in performance), and one girl's comments about a poem struck me. In one sentence, she was saying that the poem could be interpreted in so many different ways; in the next, she was saying that nobody could deny the meaning behind what i was saying.

Huh?

If the poem can be "interpreted in so many different ways," apparently i was NOT communicating. Now, there are two types of poems on my Postpoems Page. One type is very direct. There is no doubt about the subject, or my feelings about it. This, at least in my opinion, was VERY blatant. The metaphors may have been a bit over the top, i'll admit, but it wasn't THAT inexplicable. The other type are poems i usually refer to as Myth Sticks, which are really metaphorical Rorschach blots . . . a person's response to one of THOSE poems, and their interpretation of it, really reveals more about them than it does the poem. And, in that case, that's the general idea. I don't specifically mark them or set them apart from the others (although i did at one time).

Other comments i've received have also left me scratching my head. One frequent visitor always makes reference to vegetarian, vegan, animal rights, etc., and somehow ties this into the poems i've written. I'm cool with that on the Myth Sticks poems, but, on some of the poems this reader missed the point entirely. Am i not communicating effectively, or is that person just using a random line as an excuse to mount a soapbox? Now, i have nothing against vegan or vegetarian diets. I simply cannot EXIST on one. For the record, i'm an omnivore. My eating habits include such horrible things as refined sugar, pork, mechanically separated chicken, cholesterol, complex carbs, and FAT! OH, THE HUMANITY!! I can pratically hear the vegans scattering as i approach, lest they smell the carnivorous pheromones and become infected with a desire for a LAMB GYRO. If you don't like what i eat, don't watch me eat. And, above all, don't LECTURE me . . . because that's apt to provoke me . . . and since i'm always being told that "you are what you eat," i am one fucked-up chimera, but it's better than being a walking salad.