Wednesday, June 30, 2010

found poem: meredith's notes

The poet will ever steal wherever s/he strays: Facebook, coffeeshop, the Knights Templar, the marshlands of Iraq, your niece's own caffeine-fueled notes in prep for the Bar. Meredith, said caffeinated niece, newly Gonzaga'd JD, is in a frenzy of bar-prep, paper-indentured, Soccer Cup deprived, and soon, as evidence indisputably avers, headed to the Rhode Island School of Design as attorney/artist in residence. Herewith:

[codicil blues]


The doctrine of

dependent relative is

a legal

fiction,

clumsy perhaps, but

imbued with horsepower

casually displayed

in an outlined

reality that

defies all fiction,

legal or illicit.

Invoke Deadman's Statute &

time revokes all

precedent, evidence

blurs, collateral effects

increase & decrease,

as intestacy

rings down

the Almighty death

knell

of Revocation.

Labels:

poem: her worry down

forlorn vaudevillian seeks
rumble pay, shasting off

the decks of newsense

& non: the segue that

counts is ever

the visual spleen. she

were never worried,

never she,

evering her worry

down the stream,

a calibrated tossy

filled with endbrime,

situated just east of

mercy, the mercy chance

down the lobline.

if it actuates,

be blessed, she said,

& we all followed

the maudlin dance,

fiddled our ways

to Sarah's hideaway

in the marshes

in the figment doom

in the stones

beneath the altar.

bended knee

is the possum's

quest; you

forgive, she

bemoans, we

all

shall wail.

Labels:

Friday, June 25, 2010

poem: Acerbity hot murphy

Strange provenance for this one. Friend X is in China with daughter Y; sends a picture of a Chinese menu; amidst menu items, translated into English, there is an item called "acerbity hot murphy." Right between scrambled eggs with ham and season fresh vegetable dish. X throws a little contest our way: best guess at what "acerbity hot murphy" is. I email back that, for one, it is the title of my next poem (how could it not be?), but in reality (so I surmise), acerbity hot murphy is a "saucy courtesan in Irish tweed."

(Teresa, I will get the image to you for proper translation.)


Acerbity hot murphy

in her sassy tweed,

essaying the jonesier joints,

cadillac bars, all

hunky dory callico bliss:

central topics fill

the limelight,

the glut of terra luna

washing down the ways -

bitter, sweet, garish

splendor tumbling,

bookmarking the last

frozen dime

of pleasure's singlemost

dream. castaways

on the fallen line,

one menu you

can't resist:

bloodsweet,

caramelized,

calculating in Qatar's

blistering

Celsius heat;

this were the one

who once,

who will,

who fashions,

who envisions

every
paso doble,
carnivorous,
orthopedic
clime.

Labels:

Thursday, June 24, 2010

slipstream . . .

Nick Drake is one of the gods. Long slipped this mortal coil, but living on down the streams. I stumbled into Alexi Murdoch while watching Sam Mendes' film Away We Go. No surprise the ND echoes. They're both in the slipstream.




Labels:

from the archives (January 2007)

Image (Jacques Resch: Regard et Metal)

[Wake the Penance
]

After the raj
& the naked twins
the cessation of hostilities
the resurrection of splendor
negotiation of bliss
retaliation of knowledge at the western gate:

Hollywood dream
bollywood sentimentality
resolution of mist.

Unseemly doings in the doorway
eventual habituations—
“I was aghast at the midnight wake”—

the penance of feeling
down by the juniper purgings
awash in the coming tide,

we followed. The sane
were missed. The reliable were
sanctioned. The
sanctuary exiled in
darkest blood. Cried

the minions, the armies,
the prisoners of time,
the daughters of truth. Thieves

built the prison that
swept us into
the ghosted night.

The star was emerging.

Labels:

Monday, June 21, 2010

poem: rank and file

[rank and file]

Farah called Tori on
the Daddy line
shook the china
jazzed the jacuzzi
buzzed the itinerant left
of center:
carrie/miranda, celestial
queens of the grassy
knoll, all in
a slather:
cottonwood mirth,
steelhead blather:
7 in line
for the connection:
Di to her babies
Sir Doug to his floundering quintet
niven to cantinflas
j p sousa to the rank and file
cast of partridge family to oblivion
fender to the last teardrop;
Shelley Duvall broke
the line, not yet
posted to the sweet
hereafter, though times
feeling it, days up
laurel canyon, Altman
still babbling in her ear,
no Daddy line, just
incessant flush,
festooned gadabout -
it ached, those nights
in colorado, on
the verge, ducks
in a row, terminal plastic -
she off it or it
off her, she'd given up
that chickenegg
burrito
quandary:
now was the time
to file away
the bits and pieces, all
the inherent flesh,
the little piggies, too,
settle for less,
an audacious decline in
her Queen of Sweden
Sunday
best.

Labels:

Saturday, June 12, 2010

By the Book

Well, I have been having way too much fun over at, yes, that other Ethereal Addiction - FaceBook. I recently updated my hometown as Zutendaal, Belgium, and made my current city Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I've also posted a few goofy things, reflecting on my old and new digs, and then this evening, I ran with this longer piece. In my surf-collaging of Yogyakarta, I ran across the Yogyakarta Principles, which are a body of principles outlined in support of full inclusion of all peoples, regardless of their sexual orientations. As I was already aware of the culture of sexual/gender tolerance in Thailand, it was no surprise to run across this other testament to inclusiveness in yet another Southeast Asian country. I do not doubt that in both countries there is intolerance aplenty, but still, as my fictive narrator declares, we in the Global North are by no means the models for inclusion we like to think ourselves to be. Here was tonight's bit of dreaming:

ECKHART FROM THE ASHES

Odd, of course, being a Belgian living in Yogyakarta, in full support of the Principles that bear this city's name. You who live in the Global North, full of your sense of ethical superiority, leading the world with your sense of being "on the right hand of" (if not on the throne itself), must find yourselves a bit upstaged by these gentle contributions to the rights of all humans to their measures of honor and place. All that is right with the world is not ALWAYS kindled by the whitest of skins, or even by those skins you whiten for your own purposes - as, for instance, the skin of that particular olive-skinned man who spent some time on foot in a backstoried province that might have been the Yogyakarta of its own day.

We Belgians, of course, have no room to talk, no room for moral snobbery, our tiny culinary contributions to the world notwithstanding. We wreaked mighty genocidal havoc in Mother Africa, drawing all manner of imaginary and heinous lines of demarcation between peoples with no business hating each other, all for our own purposes of exploitation. Time out of mind, I played with the notion of disappearing to the likes of, say, Bouvet Island, the better to freeze what was left of the humanity in my heart, but something urged me on, urged me west and south, into the Global South, an area spurned for its lack of substantive witness to the turnings of a New Day.

We have - I say "we," when I hardly qualify as any part of that we: I am, simply by proximity, the sooner blessed by the gentle blessings emanating from the hearts here at play . . . better this, then: those in this tiny province have made a veritable art form of playing in the delightful surf of the larger World's dismissal of them. Free of the tremendous burdens of Mammon and Kapital and Steroidal Power, they have found light and love in a palmful of dried sea grass, the better to gently nurture sparks and flames that have no need of hurry and splashy commercialism and twenty-page spreads in National (and why is it not International?) Geographics. The heart of these Yogyakarta Principles lies within us all: these provincial visionaries claim no ownership of them; still less do they even claim their discovery. A babe in her first joy of falling into Mother Ocean knows what is at the heart of these principles, and that babe would be the first to urge you, yes YOU, to join her in all the hearts at play.

May that palm be your palm; may those tides be your gentle and blessed undoing.

Labels:

Saturday, June 05, 2010

Victory is ours . . .

This fun little toy came via Devil Mood: GenderAnalyzer will attempt to determine the gender of the author of your (or anyone else's) blog.

And the winner is:

"We guess http://murat11.blogspot.com is written by a woman (52%), however it's quite gender neutral."

Cat's out of the bag now.

Labels:

Friday, June 04, 2010

sonnet: as aquifer

goddess lumens,
arpeggios wither,

whether coarsed or blessed,

vision follows the paths

we least resist. gather

yourselves, seek the solace

of leaves, the changing

of blue in green -

the circle green,

the figures blue:

sadness abates, as

aquifer fills

the bluing you,

the scenting green.

Labels:

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

poem: 153

out all night long,
came in with none,

not a one.

bubba sends them back out,

those nets are full. full.

One hundred fifty-three of them.

full. All the boneheads & beloveds

& the lost & founds.

catfish fry on the beach
,
all of 'em sulled up,

till bubba cut loose, mandolin

in hand, some new numbers;

pedro, moved finally

to shuffle, gads about with his fiddle while

old Tom the Twin ignites

under stars the pearl keys

of his squeezebox -

old Russian bayan - with

"Jesus wants me for a sunbeam."

Isopsephists waggin' on
,
they's all about Maggie

& why not, john-boy's got

a hard-on for himself, but

Maggie, she's the one,

though she don't need

a number to tell it.

Hexagonal, narcissistic,

Friedman, Harshad,

Biggs-Smith, call it

what you will,

she washes over,

washes over all:

sunbeams, moonbeams,
fish,
sheep,
all

the mighty horde.

Labels: