Tag: Writing
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Seaweed Cabbage
What was that she said about the skin
on his hands and forearms,
seaweed cabbage
boiling on stove, “That looks bad.”Blue dark wet orange oil damp oars drift awake
dawn dress coffee smoke brown falls upon brown
slow walk down curved sandy path to the water
empty nets sea grass tired boats in fresh tide wait.Surf sound spooning shingling
smooth rocks growing on his arms
that opposite real rocks grow larger
with each receding tide.He thinks about love water
work moon sleepy fog
legislated blather laughter
unrequited smiles.He’s not an especially proud man
unless provoked unnecessarily.
He has a few books on a shelf
in the kitchen he touches evenings.He thinks severity and frequency
as all men do capacity purpose
of hymns folk songs and surf music
and silence at the end of the path.He’s no interests but cars and guitars
stars in her eyes sand on her skin salt hair
gloss on her fingernails white
daisies between her wiggling toes.Wave after wave forgotten fishes
swim past her hands sleeved
sheathed knives
embraced recorded let go.At the cannery he never did learn
to stand still that fisherman’s value
he no longer wanted his friend
who now fished a desk in Admin.The smell of tar and turpentine as he cleaned her feet
shampoo that smelled like bubble gum
steel shavings and lead chips the plumber left behind
carob seeds rotting on fog wet boardwalk.Ocean fish air and orange crabs on ice at wood wharf stalls
after shave and Brylcreem Saturday Night adjectives
bingo sock hop carnies and a new noun in town
cool morning breeze on an angel’s moonburned skin. -
This is not an address.
(‘`)
a
d
dress
a peach’s
dappled red
lit dimple dot
if you like green
leaves shading rust
rolling in the other way
round like a fuzzy bulb globe
plan draw lips over the peach skin
and rub speak into ink flesh until every
juice puckers sprinkle. Don’t handle or touch
this stone. Simply lean in and buss a not waltz,
like this, but first, take the pipe out of your mouth.
Why did Rene not close his p’s? 
A preference for peaches over pipes as tastes change over time. -
A New Denouement Comes to The Eidolon
A moon rose pure placebo the day
the dismantlers came to The Eidolon.
A puppeteer hidden in a hard hat
worked sticks and wires from a crane,
his rude yellow wrecking ball
a scraping bald knuckle
-hyphenating-
the yore tony a la mode pink marquee:–
I
D
–
–
O
N
They hadn’t seen a movie there in years.
Instinct drove to the location
now hairy with graffiti and wounded windows
boarded up. “Turn left there,” she pointed ahead,
and here in the V of what used to be
a local lemony clichéd Hollywood and Vine
hung the vertical sign of rainbow chasing lights
popped and glum, now a moon at noon.-OW -LAY-N-
The wrecking crew worked amid yarns,
a thrilling tale of piracy, or chivalric ennui,
beach tar and feathers and a damsel tied to a rail.
Though no one was actually tied down,
back in the days of pretend, when make-believe
waved sun and sea of the bottle bags of beggary,
and kids danced to the possibilities of being free.SW-P -EE-
They drove across town to watch the razing
crew with crowbars and heavy metal
tear down the slumping palatial playhouse,
where teens once held hands,
listening to rock and roll bands,
and before them, kids spent summers in buttery
fingered and fizzy toothed afternoons
matinee rapt in spinning film,
a veteran vaudeville player changing reels.-HIS SAT-R–Y
Nothing could save now the last-gasp plight
of this episodic imperilment, and the moon fell.
The two cold cats sat on the bus stop bench
across the street from the deconstruction,
a couple of stoned Cupids deprived of sleep,
sagely reminding one another to be brave
and behave, lest they be kicked out again
like the day they adlibbed Beatles
and lit bee dough up in the loge.
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Seachange
Blue neon pales the alley and nothing
calms the woeful sea if won’t come she
to the window.No, too drouged to hear.
Her golden green hair billows across
the Motel Fregata bed, and deep her
foghorn bellows mute in pillowed sleep.So solo out off the beam down to the coaly beach,
flip flop in shallow cool pools, lured by a small moon coin.Up the beach a fire spits, a bottle breaks, and a guitar flashes.
Over the wooden trestle, a harmonica passes.
The surf hisses yeses as from the rocks a wiggly piss-take.
Boon a mist sleeks in, so tack-back to the warm room.Seaweed wrapped around orange plastic curlers,
with foam jelled fingers that collect flotsam and jetsam
and want some. Curls taped to cheeks and brow.She was a beachcomber scavenging in kaleidoscope
curly cuffed bell bottoms, passing
across blond sand dunes
where she learned to stretch and yaw,
surfing loose blousy waves off breezy reaches,
coasting through town down to the beach
on a one speed lazy bicycle, surf mat under arm,
red-orange towel slapping behind, salted hair curling,
tangling kite wagtails, waves gushing the beach,
curling around sandcastles where sand crabs
and children bubble and fizzle in the foam drizzle,
no wonder of the surfer’s troubled faith in waves.Wet and salty wind full in our wrinkled faces,
we swim out, hold hands through curling waves,
dive, burbling breathless under waves,
fall and turn and spin with the waves,
hear the waxy epizeuxis of waves.By the coyest hairs we argue, liking to talk
while we surf, something about a tiger shark and riptides,
an illuminated jellyfish, a juicy green sea anemone,
and a Brobdingnagian turtle as old as the ocean.We lock fingers in curls and pull to the curling top,
your oily fisheyes turned to my qualmy cockeyes.A swell rises to a wave of oyesses,
we kick and touch and tussle for air,
and the wave breaks into foam and washes us in,
prone in repose in the rushing foam.
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Micro Poems with Eye Exam
Picnic Technique
Moistly dripping sap
pilly this juicy gusto
pudding wasp crust
paper crisp in cut grass.Sara Monaurally
The staked sapling at the gibbet
gallowed
silent squirming wail.
Fit For a New Hat
- When you measured my head
- blue eyes saw yonder
- sea anemones in tide pools
- I wanted to hug you but with
- the magnifying tape around my head
- ironically did you order
- the hat anyway?
Flashing Lights and Floaters
So tiny she climbed up through my nose and into my eyes and swam around
in the vitreous liquid, kicking off my retina.Such a big name for so tiny a doctor.
“The lights are like paramoeciums falling like electric rain drops
white paisley sparkles on a flat black poster board
down always down never up in the far corner
of the right eye,” she said.“Yes, I see them,” I said. “There goes one now,
like strobes.”“It is still somewhat ambiguous,” she said.
“Asymmetrical.”
She had an accent to my ear.
“Let me drop in some dye
and have a swim around.”High up on the top floor a magnificat view of the streaming
river and tiny cars floaters across the gargantruss
ginormous gargling cement girdles of the fat city.
Straight down where they build the barges
always the two blue cranes shifting
imperceptibly
an orange crane I’d never seen there before.When she photographed my eyes
I saw faces like on the veil of Veronica
but morphing shapes
and a Trinity:
The father seemed bored, the little kid,
annoyed to be kept waiting,
flitted about like a ghost,
and the mother sat quietly slumped
over in a chair, resting, as if
keeping me company while
the dye spread out my eyes
into two flat brown oceans. -
Kafka Blocs
Methamorphosis Roger awoke from nagging dreams to find he’d grown into a whopper, a hairy human swarmed in vermin. “Don’t break bad on me,” his mother yelled at the door. “Bugs don’t dream, asleep or awake. You’re late for work.” But he hardly knew how to work his new legs and arms. How would he get about on so few? His hands and fingers he found fascinating, and he lay in bed studying their shapes and twists and movement. His father banged on the door: “Get up!” He felt his skin – soft! His two eyes saw only one thing at a time, yet he knew his skin was covered with insects so various how or where was he to begin eating breakfast? Even the hands (but he was not quite sure why he called them hands) on the clock moved like the arms of a slow moving cockroach, around and around and up and down. What seemed absurdly a bad eternity, (after all why would time break bad?) three roaches slipped under the rug. Roger watched the roaches dissipate, his body wasted with bedsores, as if he’d come to the roundabout of a pier. The Viral Dude J. had few followers and those probably bots, and he rarely if ever tweeted, so when the POG knocked on his door to ask about something gone viral, Dude assumed some hack had infiltrated his computer system, spreading multi-vile messages about him with perhaps a pic in his briefs. Dude’s habits were simple and hardly worth the effort of tweets, of looking words up in a dictionary, as if a dog’s wag in a side street was any different in Tijuana than in Timbuktu or Paris, Texas, where Dude had often visited, enjoying an escargot with a Beaujolais, taking in jazz in the Business Quarter. None of this of course reached home, and Dude’s annual review relied solely on ratios of quotas to sales, of clicks that stuck to worrisome dead links. The Condo Outside beneath the colossal condo K. camped with the peasants just in from working the streets with their signs but he was in no mood for noir poetry. He curled up on the margin of a broad sidewalk away from the bird stoppers placed all around the condo and out of earshot from the sounds also designed to discourage one from coming too close because the spacious steel walls were warm to the touch like a rubber hot water bottle his mother used to sleep with after his father left them in the cold house to go work a shift in the town factory owned by the rich Mr. Rook. In the morning there was hot coffee and a young woman recruiting men to join her crew of window washers and dressed and harnessed K. arose. -
Back Story Folk Guitar
This Yamaha Red Label FG-180 guitar was probably built in 1969. The woman in the guitar store next to the Loyola Theatre in Westchester said Jimmy Webb had been in the week before and picked up this very Yamaha and played a few chords. She couldn’t believe I’d never heard of Jimmy Webb. It was March, 1970, and I’d just returned from active duty in Forts Bliss and Huachuca. Having talked to some other guitarists, I already knew the FG-180 was the guitar I wanted for the money I had, factory made in Japan, so inexpensive, but playable, reliable, and sound worthy. The guitar, case included, cost $100, a Martin dreadnought knockoff, no extra charge for the Jimmy Webb back story.
A back story is a forward. The forward is not a trailer, nor is it an abstract. The back story never spoils. It’s an appetizer. The back story, moving forward, provides the predicament that explains the current situation. Without a back story, new episodes drift aimlessly and meaninglessly, random dead links. The back story deflates absurdity and fills the reader with hope. The back story is a proposal, a hypothesis, an argument.
My first guitar was a hand-me-down from a neighbor friend, but its neck was broken by an early girlfriend jumping off the top bunk. I then purchased for $25 from an ad in the South Bay Daily Breeze newspaper, a nylon string, plywood top Orlando.
What is the relationship between physicists’ string theories and guitar? The on-line forums for both are full of confusing, contradictory claims, but full of back stories. A guitar often comes with a back story. Several guitar cases were recently spotted for sale in thrift shops, but the guitars were long gone. We might have some idea the age of the universe, but is it old or young, and what does it matter? The Ventura guitar case the guitar shop offered to throw in today shows the wear and tear of travel in a deuce and a half, to Fort Liggett and Camp Roberts and Camp Pendleton, and later trips to gold rush country and various ocean beaches, and not a few years sleeping in a dank basement while the guitar enjoyed an open stand in the living room.
This FG-180 has a spruce, two-piece solid top, mahogany sides, and a two-piece mahogany back. The neck is a thick bar of nato of one piece with the head. The fretboard is one quarter inch thick rosewood. The Yamaha link (above) says the backs were three-piece, but the top and back of this one are both two-piece, book matched. The bridge is rosewood. The FG stands for folk guitar. This one has a thin crack in the back of the head, at the top of the neck.
The top under the bridge has lifted some, and the head crack is a bit worrisome; light or extra-light strings will reduce tension. The FG-180 is now set up with D’Addario XL Chromes, flat wound, jazz light gauge, electric guitar strings. The electric strings when played acoustically don’t produce as loud or deep or full a sound as acoustic strings, but they pop, ping, and twang, “like a steel rail humming” (Pete Seeger, “Hobo’s Lullaby”), and if you do want to plug the guitar into an amplifier, use an old fashion, Dean Markley sound hole fitted pickup.
In Astra Taylor’s film “Examined Life,” Slavoj Zizek explains how we are seduced by ideology. If the universe has a back story, our present predicament can be explained, even if the explanation makes no sense. The Big Bang is a big back story. When an effect tickles or bites or bombards or floods us, we search for a cause. We reconsider our back stories.
We somehow must work and rework, correct or clarify, our back stories into our instantaneous presentations and performances amid the distractions, commercials, hypes, phobias, click bait, news tsunamis – the whole bafflegab of what’s up now.
Zizi Papacharissi, in “A Networked Self,” appears to understand the ability to “back-story” (to verbalize a noun, to go with the flow, “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” as Eliot said in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) as an adaptation skill, the ability to adapt to changes in social environments, from a supposed fixed state, where the self was assumed to be a character bound in a book with a lineal story, to a fluid self that is constantly seeking its own level, walking on the deck of a small boat, changing with every social interaction, mimicry as a survival technique (elasticity of demand in a social market):
“Narratives about the self have always been performative. That’s what renders aspects of our identity a discourse. What changes is that performativity is augmented through online means of self presentation. And it is this enhanced theatricality, afforded by certain online platforms (SNSs, and various forms of blogs and microblogs), that individuals find most appealing.
Sociability is practiced to the network, via the network. Performances of the self enable sociability, and these socially oriented performances must carry meaning for multiple publics and audiences without sacrificing one’s true sense of self. These polysemic performances not only contain many layers of meaning, but are remixed and remixable – sampling digital traces of identity to piece together performances that are further remixed and re-interpreted by multiple audiences and publics.”
That could be used as a back story that may now explain the emergence of the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s. The revival, originally acted out in small coffee shops, living rooms, and campus settings, was at first minimally commercial. Few expected to earn a life-long living from singing folk song covers, but that wasn’t the goal, and the identity of the performer was inseparable from the identity of the audience. The audience participated in the performance. But that participation wasn’t a surge of fans aspiring to go on stage. There often wasn’t a stage, and each time a song was sung it was renewed in an altered form. Many of these performances were not recorded. They were passed on as living songs. Folk music is chameleon and transferable.
One of my older sisters sang in a high school folk group, “The Travelling Trio.” Their travels did not take them out of the Los Angeles Basin. They sang in living rooms and the local high school gym. Imagine a young Judy Garland singing Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train.” But unlike my sister, whose voice flowed like melted chocolate over fresh strawberries, your voice sounds like a galvanized plumbing pipe rattling in the wall with trapped air bubbles. Such a voice might confuse Tom Waits with Hedy West. Still, your Kentucky grandfather played the spoons and the harmonica, to add more filler to your back story, and you were an easy target for the music bug early on.
But a singing gig was not to become part of your back story. You played finger style. You liked the guitarist John Fahey, saw him play at Long Beach State and again at the Ash Grove. Not only did he not sing, on stage he never said a word. You were playing what you pretended was folk blues and fell into jazz. You took up what you called jazz guitar, though not everyone necessarily heard it that way.
Classical guitar lessons are useful for a few years. Your fingers already know how to play, but your brain doesn’t always know what they are doing. Over time, you’ll use up several teachers who will walk you through a couple of Aaron Shearer books, and a few of the Frederick Noad books, and teach you the Segovia scale method (which you might later hear Joe Pass dis, along with the number system). Your first teacher will probably introduce you to Leo Brouwer and his “Etudes Simples.” The Cuban composer’s short pieces are of course not all that simple, but at least you don’t have to sing. You’ll learn to read, slowly, like a stuttering primary school student, and learn enough to work through a Dionisio Aguado book, “Studi Per Chitarra,” on your own. You’ll learn by heart the old cliché: “The guitar is the easiest of instruments to play poorly, the most difficult to play well.” You’ll return to jazz and folk and find your breath and take solace in another cliché: “Close enough for jazz.”
Close enough substitutes feeling for the pursuit of perfection which as Cornel West explains in “Examined Life” is the romantic road to disappointment. So it was in the spirit of close enough that I answered an invitation from Sunshine Dixon to read a poem at an artists’ reception in the campus library, but I suggested that instead of reading a poem I might bring my old FG-180 guitar and sing a folk song. I worked up a folk version of “Gospel Plow,” using Dylan’s version on his first album as inspiration. If a recording pops up on-line somewhere I’ll add a link to the back story or upload a piece of it to SoundCloud. Maybe sister Peggy Ann will tune in.
And if you’d like to read more about the artists’ reception, Sunshine and I collaborated on a short article now on-line here, already part of a back story.
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Pocket Poem Post
Typo walks into Grimalkin’s Pool Hall,
pockets full of rolled papers,
places four quarters in the green
shadow of the felt cushion,
takes a chair, and chalks
up his pencil.In the cool quiet of the pool room,
Typo scratches again and again,
and down five games
to one,
contemplates
his mistakes.Pencil in hand, he
should have kept
to the kitchen,
where the cook laughs
at his filling the pool
table pockets with poems.In the sun after pool,
Typo pulls from a pocket
one last poem: It’s this one,
and poem in hand, he posts
it to a telephone pole
thick with weathered bills. -
Scamble and Cramble Play Pool
Scamble: Where did these lemons come from?
Cramble: This is the way they play pool in Southern California.
Scamble: I thought they were having a drought.
Cramble: The shooter is called a “Willy.” The Willy takes lime in hand and places it wherever he wants within the dish of billeted lemons, turns around, and pokes the lime at one of the lemons, using the shaft of his stiffened tail as a cue stick, attempting to push the lemon out of the dish, at which point he is awarded another “Willy.” When all of the lemons are in this manner poked out of the dish, the players celebrate with a glass of lemonade.
Scamble: I notice there are nine balls.
Cramble: Yes, this particular game is known as “Nein Ball.”
Scamble: But one of the balls is the lime ball.
Cramble: Yes, that’s the cue lime, also know as the green ball.
Scamble: But if the lime green ball is the cue ball, that leaves only eight balls.
Cramble: Yes, you can also play “Eight Ball.” Most shots are called slop shots. There is no penalty for scratching, as long as you keep your scratching to yourself. If you scratch your opponent, that is called a “Zoe,” and you must put a lemon back in the dish.
Scamble: I never knew pool was so much like poetry.
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Haiku on Dog Cloud Piano for Guitar and Voice
Press yes to play here the balls fall for free hear them drop and roll english orb orbit for texting eddies no to go away in pool hall heaven chalk up your cue stick break like a big bang syllabicating maybe to come back no need for quarters green felt of grass field consider the balls men who cut their tongues some day some day soon 8 ball in corner in the universe across the table gaming without words tonight not that moon pocket that was quick full of dandelions stars stripes black and cue ball white as the moon semiquantitatively microdirectionally yet who can’t get no no no unsatisfactorily twisting down the back alley sociodemographic ideologically seven syllable word count so what is the so what here pseudointellectual imperceptibility suspicion grows this is all pseudopoetically irresponsibility what can I say you reading waxing then waning away autobiographical compartmentalization social media neither social nor mediational ideas unsystematically superficiality huge lack of self confidence just give us the artifice we’ll know what to do with it without rhyme or reasoned sense oversimplification he likes unconventional individuality cosmopolitanism syllables all connected he seems influenced by John Cage and that explains anything we seem to be moving to microcommunication We appeal to fruit the nature within seeds meat juice and skin figuratively and then the real fig banana orange grape raisin ugli miracle passion fruit worms flies mildew self-preservation and vegetables puritanism free love free fruit gloss dogs and cats and kids seal it with a kiss cherry red pepper baked raspberry pie apple cloudberry running toward the surf rub it in your palm garlic and onions coconut olive oils and buttery fat when it is cold now back to the sea Press yes to play here the balls fall for free hear them drop and roll english orb orbit for texting eddies
no to go away in pool hall heaven chalk up your cue stick break like a big bang syllabicating
maybe to come back no need for quarters green felt of grass field consider the balls men who cut their tongues
some day some day soon 8 ball in corner in the universe across the table gaming without words
tonight not that moon pocket that was quick full of dandelions stars stripes black and cue ball white as the moon
semiquantitatively microdirectionally yet who can’t get no no no unsatisfactorily twisting down the back alley
sociodemographic ideologically seven syllable word count so what is the so what here pseudointellectual
imperceptibility suspicion grows this is all pseudopoetically irresponsibility what can I say you are right
waxing then waning away autobiographical compartmentalization social media neither social nor mediational ideas
unsystematically superficiality huge lack of self confidence just give us the artifice we’ll know what to do with it
without rhyme or reasoned sense oversimplification he likes unconventional individuality cosmopolitanism
syllables all connected he seems influenced by John Cage and that explains anything we seem to be moving to microcommunication
We appeal to fruit the nature within seeds meat juice and skin figuratively and then the real fig
banana orange grape raisin ugli miracle passion fruit worms flies mildew self-preservation
and vegetables puritanism free love free fruit gloss dogs and cats and kids seal it with a kiss
cherry red pepper baked raspberry pie apple cloudberry running toward the surf rub it in your palm
garlic and onions coconut olive oils and buttery fat when it is cold now back to the sea
Press yes to play here the balls fall for free hear them drop and roll english orb orbit for texting eddies no to go away in pool hall heaven chalk up your cue stick break like a big bang syllabicating maybe to come back no need for quarters green felt of grass field consider the balls men who cut their tongues some day some day soon 8 ball in corner in the universe across the table gaming without words tonight not that moon pocket that was quick full of dandelions stars stripes black and cue ball white as the moon semiquantitatively microdirectionally yet who can’t get no no no unsatisfactorily twisting down the back alley sociodemographic ideologically seven syllable word count so what is the so what here pseudointellectual imperceptibility suspicion grows this is all pseudopoetically irresponsibility what can I say you are right waxing then waning away autobiographical compartmentalization social media neither social nor mediational ideas unsystematically superficiality huge lack of self confidence just give us the artifice we’ll know what to do with it without rhyme or reasoned sense oversimplification he likes unconventional individuality cosmopolitanism syllables all connected he seems influenced by John Cage and that explains anything we seem to be moving to microcommunication We appeal to fruit the nature within seeds meat juice and skin figuratively and then the real fig banana orange grape raisin ugli miracle passion fruit worms flies mildew self-preservation and vegetables puritanism free love free fruit gloss dogs and cats and kids seal it with a kiss cherry red pepper baked raspberry pie apple cloudberry running toward the surf rub it in your palm garlic and onions coconut olive oils and buttery fat when it is cold now back to the sea
The Coming of the Toads 