days

so the reading that i help run is celebrating it's fifth anniversary.

and yesterday was my birfday.

am i getting old(er)?

Nun rapped for wild dancing

BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) -- A Belgian nun's acrobatic and indecorous dancing with a missionary during the Catholic World Youth Day in Germany over the weekend earned her a reprimand from her mother superior, a Belgian paper said on Tuesday.

Daily Het Laatste Nieuws showed pictures of a dancing Johanne Vertommen being held up in the air by the missionary, and then clinging to him with her legs wrapped around his body.

"I wouldn't do this at home but at such occasions I get carried away by the enthusiasm of the group," the 29-year-old told the paper later.

"My mother superior raised the issue today: she thinks I should watch out a bit and bear in mind that I represent our community," Vertommen said.

Pope Benedict attended the celebration at the Marienfeld, outside Cologne, in the presence of some 700,000 people.

eh

so, tomorrow's my birfday, and i feel like i should be writing.

but, i'm not.

instead, i'm posting something from the idyllwild workshops that i'm fiddling with:


If your breath is a golden platter
and your lungs live beneath the ground;

I need my eyes to go on without me
and a lifetime of whispers to step out of the shadows.

I can see the parachute silk of your spine
and the burning clouds of your lips.

I fight against the wounding of a moment
and the splendid confessions of your hands,

but leave me my fireworks and starfish,
like a dram, a draught, a potion.

Surround me with your night-time breathing
but do not let me taste the cornfield in your smile.

similar minds?

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leopards, farmers and tongues, oh my!

something newish, still very much in progress...


Stealing Thunder from the Storm's Mouth
based on the true story of a Kenyan farmer
who reached into the mouth of an attacking leopard

Of course your name would be Daniel,
and you would listen to the voice
buzzing at you like a vengeful fly--
which you say must have come from God.

It followed that the voice urged you to drop
the machete and use your fist as a dowsing wand
to divine the squirming snake of his tongue.

Then, slow as prophecy,
the tearing of the tongue—
like the baobab tree,
roots torn from the prairie soil
it had always known as home,
tossed across the sky by the hand of god,

followed by the tongueless screams of the dying.

What suprises me is how you lay there, grandfather,
gifting the beast with your sad smile,
waiting for the neighbors to load you into their rusted truck
and take you to the hospital, some 30 minutes away.

How you half-raised your blood-soaked hand in farewell,
but did not tell anyone how the leopard had come to steal your words,
so it might return and pour your voice
like fresh-cooked oatmeal into the ears of your children,
and your children's children.

How you'd heard those lullabyes rustling;
how each clan, each animal, each family has a song it sings;
how your father had pulled you aside one sunday
and taught you that words are smelted in the forge of the mind,
cast on the anvil of the tongue and sliced their way
through the armor of the ear before finding their way home.

How you'd handed the torn piece of tongue
to your eldest son, wrapped in white cloth
and asked him to save it for you, so after the bandages,
after the recovery, after the return to your farm,
you might go with him to burn the thing
and hear a familiar voice drifting through the smoke
up into what you can only call heaven.

a conversation over tut

took a good friend to see king tut the other day, and she told me that i have 'fear of intimacy,' written across my forehead.

of course, this put me on the defensive and forced me to explain that i have a fear of intimacy with the wrong person.

...come again?

yeah, so there it is.

or so i thought.

this conversation led to me to some deep thinking (not my favorite activity of late, especially when it comes to realizing how much of a broken aquarium my emotional life has become), and i realized what a cop-out i've been living for the past year or so.

i've been dating mainly women whom i'm not interested in. at least not long-term. it takes the pressure off, i guess to know that there's no way that it's going to last. finding somebody who i can laugh with, and have a bit of fun, but who doesn't really want or need anything below a surface conversation... whose idea of a deep connection involves gossip about their best friend's life and how truly fucked up it is, and why their life is infinitely better and don't you just love those strappy little shoes they just bought?

but this friend likes to talk about how her ex-lover broke her heart and yet, she'd still go back to him in a hearbeat if he came knocking at her door. and i found myself confessing that my ex, who lives in kansas, has a free pass through my door any time, any place, even though we haven't talked in over a year. plus, the last serious ex (the last one i actually spilt some emotional blood with... who made me hope for something before seeking therapy, breaking off our very stilted relationship and then went overseas and came back with a new husband) found a way to pull my spine out and wave it in front of me and point out that standing on two feet is highly over-rated.

all of which led to a conversation about two other of our mutal friends, who we consider to be an incredible couple and how love is just love... and isn't it a shame people look at two men holding hands like they're a racially mixed couple in atlanta, circa 1950? isn't love hard enough to hold onto without finding ways to put it in a frame that belongs to somebody else and tacking it to a wall?

and right about now, said friend is moving into her new apartment in iowa, and i find myself missing her and her ability to draw me into conversations like these, in spite of myself.

midwestern girls will be the death of me, in the best way.

some thoughts on walking

okay, so this is pretty much the lowest common denominator as far as travel goes, right? Stick your left foot out, stick your right foot out... follow them. Occasionally, shake them all about to complete the hokey pokey.

i probably shouldn't admit this, but walking can be hard. right now, i'm alternating between a mile and a half during lunch at a regional park, and three miles at home around the local college campus. they time out around the same as the park includes a fairly hellacious (for me) ascent at the beginning of the trail, plus the usual rise and fall of walking along the crest of a small hilly range.

if it's not the fact that you're swallowing the not so clean air that we call a sky in southern california, then you're probably doing your best to avoid killing your shins on the concrete sidewalks.

good shoes. that's a key. good shoes and good music to take your mind off the fact that you're walking in a series of straight lines, ending up in the same place you started and discovering exactly nothing new about the land you've just crossed.

quite a difference from the blue... seriously blue skies when you get more than 45 minutes away from a major metropolitan area. you may still be drowning in your own lungs, but it seems like it's worth it. at least until you wake up in the morning and your knees are sending you hate mail.

Okay, enough pirate graffitti

time to get down to business. Though, can you imagine Blackbeard with a spray can?

Something recent that I've been working on:


le métro de regret

Each night, I slip down the stairs beneath
the surface of the skin of the earth. I pay my fee,
join the sad crush of the lost, and ride.

It is, as are all the sad arts, undeniably
french. Edith Piaf would be proud, were she not
so busy breaking our hearts.

The other travelers are whispers of their daytime selves.
Sometimes, we find ourselves caught,
our destinations unexpectedly exposed in the pale
lamplight. Without a word, we shuffle our feet,
board a different train without asking where it's going.

Only later do we realize the sad traveler,
mouth half open catching their breath, might
have been asking the same question sleeping
in our throats, and so we reach a hand to the cold
surface of the window, seeing a mirror reflection
wearing a better coat, longer scarf
rolling away beneath the insomniac city.

We ride all night sometimes, not in the gum-chewing
New York subway fashion, but like a glass of wine
you thought you paid too much for, only to discover its scent
on your tongue while making love two years later.

In the morning, we sleep or pretend to sleep.
In our beds, at our desks, driving our cars,
we shuffle through another number on our
calendar, wondering where we've been.

Yarr, it's graffitti.  

In the beginning

there was a blog. And the blog was good.

Now, it's not.

Will be posting poems, poems-in-progress, strange news and other assorted oddities here.