poetryplacemaybe

2006-12-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

"Matthew, Mark and Luke and John
all them prophets dead and gone
better keep your hands on that plow boy
hold on!"
"Gospel Plow"- Bob Dylan

" So I'm back in my hotel room with Johnnie Coltrane and the love supreme.
In the next room I hear some woman scream out.
her lover's turning off
turning on the television.
And I can't tell the difference between ABC news,
Hill Street Blues
and a preacher on the old time gospel hour
stealing money from the sick and the old.
Well the God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister!
I feel a long way from the hills of San Salvador
where the sky is ripped open and the rain pours through a gaping wound
pelting the women and children...
pelting the women and children...
who run ...
who run...
into the arms...
of America"
U2 - Bullet The Blue Sky (Rattle And Hum)

"in the Locust wind comes a Rattle and Hum
Jacob wrestled the angel
and the angel was overcome"
"bullet the Blue sky"- U2

"Well the God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister!"- BONO

2006-12-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

runnin' through a few things here:

parabola: love the word! Love the idea of stories that challenge our expectations. Love that is really an attack on our value system, our range of thinking, but really isn't all good writing? Like why I asked about Joyce's Ulysses as a tragedy; i undestand the u-shaped comedy thing, i also see distinctions between the tragedies we create for our selves and the tragedies that God and Satan are creating for us. i know where Leopold Bloom stands and i feel he's punished not in the way Job was (having his loyalty to god tested) but instead in that jealous God way, like Leopold was too loyal, too in love with Molly, only felt the rapture for her and so what better way to strike that than to strike their child?
but back to parabola; it's like Joyce's "Araby" story in Dubliners. This story is a great example of "epiphany", of course in the Joycian sense of epiphany. but really it is simply brilliant story telling by not over telling and Joyce was challenging the accepted social patterns even in Araby (at least what this adolescent Dublin lad percieved them to be. and shouldn't parabols, like politics function as local, or rather, personal?). By not over telling Joyce lets the reader do some work, come to there conclusions. would a person read Joyce literally? good luck! i mean like Jesus telling the priests spies to "give unto Ceaser what's Ceaser's. give unto God what's God's" there is room for the reader, or listenere to work...and choose. up with the parabol!!!

2006-12-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

Ode to a Witness

When he returned
To you
You ran
To find a Roman soldier
Swearing you had seen
Banquo’s ghost.

2006-12-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Lord,

Been taking melatonin to go to sleep, but not just to go to sleep but also to get up early. I get up at five and write for a while. Then about 7:30 I walk over to the coffee shop for a cup of Jo and a muffin. Some days the girls behind the counter are better than others. Right now my favorite is Mary, an ample breasted Irish catholic girl from Butte with a nice smile and inviting way of conversing. Like she likes people, ya know? But other days there is this girl Martha, who is too pretty (she thinks) for her own personality and always busy grindin’ coffee and cleanin’ cups. I drink the house drip because I really do prefer the regular coffee and also, I don’t want to drink the type of coffee these western yuppies drink, but once in a while, if I’m feeling giddy I just order an Irish crème latte and start singing “don’t fence me in” to the tune of “Hava Negeilah” just to remind myself and everyone else that I’ll drink what ever I want, as long as I can afford it! yeah, so I go to the coffee shop and read short stories, write epistles, make journal entries, write criticisms of what ever novels I am reading (right now it is Invisible Man by Richard Ellis. Very interesting for me and life themes and ways I am seeing myself. Also very Dos, you know Note from Undergroundish, dig it. But it moves in and out like, it predates the Beat stuff but is in a cynical way, or actually a realistic way, more beat than the Beats, depending what side of the color barrier you stand on and all in all it seems to be this Faulkner, type thing running through it, but lots of issues that I feel I read and go, “Hey I know what that feels like” or “I know what he’s saying there”. But I don’t think a white guy in America is supposed to think that reading this book, i think i'm only supposed to see Dante and again, I don’t feel exactly that way, I feel my own experience of it, same as when I read Gloria Bird, I mean I’m not a woman or an Indian but none the less I’ve gotten very close to this Invisible Man and it causes me to step back and check if any of this is me projecting the book on myself, or myself on the book, ya know, like feminist reading Hemingway and bringing their agenda into it and coming away with a man who is only a ‘Man’s Man’ macho boxing womanizer drunkard, instead of seeing the ‘Man’s Man’ macho boxing womanizing drunkard who is confessing to being a flawed man! Good lord a character with a blown off reproductive system and an author with a gun in his mouth isn’t enough to please some people! But anyhow, I worry about writing myself into the books I read. Have you ever done that? Or worried about it?)I bet Frye has considered it and Bloom never has. I write criticisms of the work I am writing. I think this helps me to look at my own work objectively and I always feel that I am about to learn something that will allow me to BLOOM into what I want so badly to be. I work for it.
So I threw in Blonde on Blonde this mornin’ because Rachel & the kids are at her moms house. I could turn the stereo on. And of course I skipped the “everybody must get stoned” Rainy Day Women #12 &35 song. Worst in’ song he ever wrote if you ask me, yeah, including the 80’s. And I fried up four strips of pig and two eggs over medium w/ shredded cheddar cheese and brewed a pot of cof. I took my first sip, and as David bowie said, “god given ass!”, you know what I mean, but as soon as I took my first sip I scooted quickly to my computer and sat down to write a letter to you. Funny how good coffee makes me want contact with you. It’s the same with good Scotch and JC.
So here I am writing you a letter and I don’t have that much to say really. Nothing too important anyway.

I must refill my cup for this letter to continue…

I really should be heading out to the job site now, but I’m enjoying writing to you. Besides, these houses build themselves really. It feels strange to be pouring a cup of coffee, your second in 35 minutes, and taking vitamins at the same time. Seems contradictory. But better than not taking them and some days it seems all I have is the rim of my coffee cup to cling to.
I get visions where you, Christ and I are sitting under a highway overpass along the railroad tracks in Pawtucket and we got a fire going in a barrel. Not to keep warm but more just to keep the night going and our coffee warm. In between words and colors and interprisoned thoughts we take turns passing a whiskey flask and it occurs to me that I’m once, Christ is now and you are future, so we play out the rest of our conversation as Japanese characters in a word but we don’t know what we’re trying to say and Christ says if we had some instruments we could play music and I walk into the dark and disappearing way from the two of you I feel scarred but brave and determined and I look back over my shoulder, like I’m waiting to turn to salt and I see you throw in another scrap of wood and Christ pours more coffee in each of our mugs, me having left mine behind, and when I see him fill yours, then his and move to the left and pour rich dark strong steaming coffee in my abandoned cup, I know then that I’ll return...
I return from the dark like some kind of acid tripped car crashed edit from a fat Albert junk yard scene. I got dirty five gallon buckets and a couple of pans for drums, a six foot length of 2 1/2” PVC pipe for a didj, An old coffee can filled with rocks broken glass and sea shells. I got an old strip of sleigh bells that could wrap around a bike rim and be used as a tambourine and an old acoustic guitar from the pawn shop on Broadway where the owner, Lazarus, who’s been there a long time, owed me credit on my account from a favor I’d forgotten about.
As I get closer to the barrel fire I see that there are others. There is a sort of congregation. Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and Timothy & JC. And you are all well dressed. Since I left you and Christ have gotten hair cuts and suits. Your shoes shine in the fire light and everyone welcomes me back gladly and no one says anything but eventually I am caught standing down wind and no matter where I stand the smoke blows in my eyes. I know I’m going to stink, stink like whiskey, dirty smoke, sweat and failure. Failure! All art is failure!
Can failure be salvation?

2006-12-02T12:25:00.000-08:00

The Western Myth
or (Mythical Liminality)

The hyacinth blooms
Outside the doors of a house
On a valley prairie somewhere
In the myth of western
L’America
Children of the pharaoh
Stare off at an azure horizon
Trapped in the sage,
Trapped by the trick of
Insignificance
Under an immense sky,
Unaware of the crawling king snake
Approaching silently, finally coiling-
Delivering a sting
Like one hundred thousand wasps.

I want to tell you all
It won’t be long now
‘till the captain emerges
From the candle lit cabin
Full of rage and fury,
His right fist wrapped around
Some hemp rope exposed at the bottom of a sail, hanging
At an angle, His feet astern His body dangling overboard
His left Fist clinching maps
That promise of prophecy Screaming sea scripture
In the death roaring face
Of this maddening tempest!
Hold tight forsaken Ishmael!
As Abraham looks for the Ram
Sarah looks for you
Hold tight your brother Jonah! The only aperture to home
Exist overboard.
The frontier is your future,
The never ending frontier lies within your breast
While leviathan lay within!
Hold now it shan’t be long ‘till the captain, once lashed to the Mast, returns to the flock and this tempest past and all his sailors row ashore, where the whore is dead and Rome’s no more, and the press lay burnt defiled and cracked, the vine of the earth no longer skiened with wrath.

But how now shall we go forth lord
With no discrimination,
No distinction,
No plan,
You offer us Judges we don’t understand
And command us to colonize the unchosen man,
Yet soon a voice from the wilderness
Will erase the line drawn in the sand?
Is the Canaanite a Metaphor?
Or is he a man?
With no compass or covenant
To direct the land
Alpha and Omega
Become two places
In line to stand.

When honesty is so far from truth
That the distinctions are thinner
Than the skin of your tooth
And you realize that Bloom
Can offer no proof,
At least we have Myth Liminality,
A halfway home, a buffer zone
Between Religion and History.

But still again,
How shall we go forth?
In futile search for
The garden omphalos,
Our Glastonbury twig
Our forsaken omniscient arbor
Forever trying to rescale the height of the fall
A fugitive shadowed figure like a man with a foot in a bucket
Limping along, a serpent clutching at his heel until he too finds redemption!
The serpent clasped with such stay
As to induce alchemy,
Metaphysics,
Two tricksters becoming something new
Something all together different.
Until finally and caringly unclasped
And exhausted, the serpent returned
Along with Man to that spot in the past
A low lying limb
Where he, The Serpent, can also plead in earnest
To the lord, asking
“Is there room for me to repent?
Room for me to come clean?
Can I be cleansed?
Can I make amends?
Through the redemption offered
In John Three – sixteen?
How can you put the blame all upon me?
I only offered the fruit,
I did not plant the tree”.

2006-11-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

Some days you awake and its a warm kitchen with Mickey mouse pancakes and the kids lovin' "daddy can I help!""sure honey, I need you and brother to mix the batter" and neither knows what batter is and brother can barely move the whisk through the mixture- but it doesn't matter, right? Just like it doesn't matter if your heart is breaking and your crying your eyes out while your writing what you write, no matter what kinds of techniques you've developed as a writer or what person you've decided to put the voice of the piece in, our armor can only be so thick 'till you can no longer wear it, you're still there offering yourself to everyone and anyone willing to take- it doesn't matter what you're doing, or how you're feeling or how much you give. It only matters how the reader feels and how much they WANT TO TAKE! We are defined by how much of us people will take.
Some days you awake with the weight of the world sitting on your chest, your knees and your knuckles aware of the weather before you are, the weight of providing, the weight of making a life out of this existence sitting upon you dense and inanimate. And you know you didn't invent this stress. You know you're not the first one to feel it. You know you're not the only one who carries this weight; but sometimes it feels that way. And I'm sorry Job but you do not help. And Mr. Bloom, beyond Shakespeare you sir are tits on a bull.
give me Keats, give me Wilde give me Heaney, Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, Kerouac, Hugo, Plath, Stevens, Alexi, Marquez, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Dickens, Morrison, Mark, Luke or John but I have had all I can take of parasitic critics sucking the genius out of the enthios, the divine, the quinta essentia of art!
some nights you go in to check on your children and you turn to shut the curtain and you do see the frost settling on the window and think of Romantic poets and how all the different elements of life were closing in on them and affecting their lives and their work and just for a moment you believe you can keep that world out and you can protect the most innocent and beautiful things you have ever known in your life...But alas there's your sleep deprivated image of William Blake sitting in the Rocking Chair in the corner of your living room, slowly back and forth rocking across Thel's traechia as she lie innocently on the floor, Blake's laughing, not mean spiritedly but laughing out of EXPERIENCE knowing one day you will open the door and watch your children walk innocently into a world of weight, frost and experience...

2006-09-20T22:21:00.000-07:00

This one earlier posting was started simply so I could communicate w/ Allison Bailey while she was attending school in England. It will now become my English 211 bloc as well. Say, Dr. Sexon, does it matter if i continue to do random postings? my first post i suppose could be considered offensive to someone (what can't really?) so read w/ caution if you do. i am not very computer savvy so i do not expect pictures and such. Getting on w/ class stuff. so, Adam and Eve are in the garden. god says do not eat of the tree of knowledge. if you do you will know what bad is and you will die. then they eat the apple. they do not die they become ashamed. they are banished from the garden. so god must have meant you will die eventually. immortality was a part of the original plan then? but my main question is, if eating from the tree gives knowledge of good and evil then does this mean that Adam & Eve did not know good either? and if they did know good for some reason, then what would John Keats say about that?going back to the "you die if you eat" thing. it seems obvious that god meant you will become mortal. but at other times thee seems to be ambiguity to gods (yehweh) thinking. such as who, or how many he will kill at Sodom & gomorah. Abrahm bargains with god like a used car dealer!!! i wonder what this means the text is suggesting in the way of yehweh's infallibility?god speed- john
10:05 PM

2005-10-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

it is one of those days today, a montana weather day, one of those ones you get sick of hearing montanans take some kind of perverse pride in. "weather changed five times today," some asshole says to his buddy as if they don't live in town, as if they're not drinking coffee in the cozy/phony confines of the bozeman co-op. "yea but we could use the rain...and the snow" the other guy retorts, believing he's being witty, as if hes got thirsty crops counting on the moisture. "shut the fuck up" they hear me say in a disgusted tone, only half under my breath, and they pretend they don't know i'm refering to them, they acting as if someone in my accent (new england, gruff, outside, other) can't call them on their phony bullshit. i'm hoping Holden Caulfield will walk in so i can buy him a coffee and we can sit and aggitate and really bug the shit out of these phony pricks, cause we know neither would ever have the ballz to say something, not only something to me but simply something worth saying. fuckin' billboards for every outdoorwear company in the western part of the united states. acting like they're better than the rest of the people who have to live in crowded spaces and who can't hike mountains (walking up hill for fun for fucks sake!!!) ya can just smell the fuckin'granola on them. a kind of birth control i reckon. who wants to have sex with that stench? then again once you've aquired the smell yourself it probably works as some kind of narcassistic/ hedonistic type turn on. so, yeah, it snowed , rained, hailed and is now sunny as fourth of july. fuckin' annoyin' sometimes.
and i'm drinking guinness and listening top nina simone sing "sunday in savannah" and i wonder if she ever hiked up a mountain side? sometimes i miss providence rhode island. lots of the time i like bozeman but all of the time i miss Ireland, like its a place lots of me can go home to, my dreams, my past and my present, my drunks and my failures and even my future achievements. sometimes my poems go to, or come from ireland and the whole time i am sitting at my desk in bozeman. i wonder if this is the kind of thing richard hugo felt about native american skin and ground and anger. that man felt sorrow. how about you? if i had time and money id have two more things to worry about. i want to paint pictures that show my favorite parts of songs, the music too i mean. i want to use words for color and make a point that is understood by all, so i dont have to listen to some dickface with a phd tell me what brendan behan or earnest hemngway "meant". fuck man, they wtrote it, you just talk about it and write about what you talk. blow it out your ass. i want to know why we have to kill m.l.k. and r.f.k I want to know why woman must work twice as hard to get half as much. is it 'cause they deserve less or 'cause they need less? yeah, thats it brother just jump right in, i wasn't trying to hear what the sister was trying to say , thats right, you go on! preach to the chior! tell us about your day....oh no! not the wweather again my friend. dont you get it? this isnt the only place with unpredictable weather. get over it.

and sometimes i see the tide turning on the same ansd the same becoming the other and it is liquid, it is always in motion, there is no dam with no gate to stop this thing from always moving, a changling of being. here you are the same, there you are the other. but most people trying to act as if there ought to be one set of rules for how to behave. this is i believe a longing for safety, a longing to find a place to not be wrong. theres a place like that, it is called the liminal it is looking at everyone and seeing them and sitting at the table where most of the people atleast have been the other. because although you are not one of them you are more like them than the same, richard hugo knew this, so does seamus heaney. its there in the works of the great. bob dylan knows this. sylvia plath knew this adrienne rich knew this. bono knows this.and they knew it more than anyone else, they knew it as much as woody guthrie because even once they made it, once they became accepted they were made another other by the same claiming them.

i'm going for a walk to buy more guinness. thank god for the widget- jdp