Tabula Rasa

Imagine, she says,

a world without burden,

of memory, sense or skin,  

unharangued by language or history,

the leisure of the unsortable experience.

Imagine no schema more complicated

than living ever after 

the reawakening to windchimes

each morning, 

clanging beneath the cold of a smug half-sun,

the sparrow singing somewhere near,

the fog of morning on the windowsill,
and you

with no thought of what any of it might mean.

A tabula rasa shaken smooth in real-time.

No memory beyond tenderness

No future beyond wonder,

No language beyond joy.

American Celebrity Matryoshka Doll Set

What if you found yourself the third iteration

In an American Celebrity Matryoshka doll set,

Subsequent to an uncomfortably oversized Walter Cronkite,

(he himself subsequent to a colossal Shirley Temple)

antecedent to a miniature Abraham Lincoln,

his top hat sweetly settled into the absence of humanity

just below your nose, and hidden in him a secret Clara Bow

and within her a pygmiesque Donald Trump,

where follows:

At the heart of everything (your heart?) 

a miniscule King George III,
clutching an even littler 

Declaration of Independence,
laughing, laughing, laughing.

soft spot

He glances up at the robin's nest,

nestled atop the loudspeaker box,

Blue eggs scarcely visible beneath their

mother's breast, their father off hunting the

succulence of worms. He ponderously adjusts his tool belt.

'Now, if it was a starling, a swallow,

a grouse or whatever,

I'd say to hell with it,
thwack it down.

But robins? 

Well, I got a soft spot for robins.'

A poem on my birthday

I awoke on my 28th birthday worried
that I was growing older,
wasting my life and given too much
to being alone and unproductive,
wondering at the living left.
Only to read that scientists
regrew ears and hearts and soon
many other bodyparts via stem-cells,
and though our hearts may grow weary
from love, grief and loneliness,
old age may never catch us again.

Imagined my 78th, my 128th, my 888th birthday,
maybe on Mars or the Moon,
Set to hurl myself from Olympic Mons,

Or winning a match of Moonball,
my nanoheart beating
like a conquering drum.

Thus,

Retreating from retreating
into the cavern ofmy mind,
I smile at my friends
in the soft wind rustling past us
as we stand on the edge of the roof,
watching the day's last light caress the hills
and lean. over the railing,
staring down at the city growing between the trees,
feeling tall and mighty
and for the moment
infinite.

Labors

Pressure washing concrete walls,

water spraying luminous and grand,

like a waterfall befuddled by gravity.

It's almost peaceful, slowly raking smooth

the mossy islands and paint chips,

of a concrete zen garden.

Much more zen than the snorting,

guzzling machine would initially let on,

much more zen than the art of carpentry 

would seem to embrace.

Slipping between pressure washing

and the book about Aristotle

tutoring Alexander in Macedonia,

his unmoored frustration

at feeling misplaced,

reciting myths and bad science with boy-kings.

Slipping between daydreams

and the Lamentations of the Chronically Underemployed,

trying never to surrender completely 

the pleasure of anger

to the pleasant emptiness 

of the task at hand.

Jewelry

Already, 

I can hear you fretting about the cost,

but let me smile here and explain that beyond postage,

I didn't spare a dime on this. Riding the plane

home from Chicago, a man sat next to me,

(and while you know how I am about conversations

with strangers, especially lacking an escape mechanism).

We spoke nearly the whole way home, 

about Love, God,

Science Fiction, America. 

He works as a defense contractor,

designing contraptions to save soldiers in work time
designing jewelry in real time,
just to blow off steam.
Jewelry he learned to fashion 

in a sizzling Moroccan bazaar.

He gives whole sets of this jewelry away for free.

He carries thirty sets with him at any time,

gifting them to men and women 

who leave some shadow of themselves within his heart, 

folks who are kind and openhearted with him

help him to learn new things 

or who perhaps just need a lucky break,

From unsettled Saudi oil heiresses, 

to cancer-stricken stewardesses.

And now to you, through me.

On the peculiar failings of the explorers

Francisco Pizzaro was deeply bizarro,

Ferdy Magellan an irascible felon,

Vasco de Gama had a thing with a llama, 

and Hernan Cortez preferred choking on Pez,

While Chrissy Columbus grew fond of Ohio.

Mythologies

Hera threw Hephaestus from Olympus,

just chucked him right down at some Neireids 

taking a breather from collecting seahorse census data

with a vigorous sea foam battle.

The Nereids gave Hepaestus a bath 

and taught him to be kind and hard-working.

Hera threw Hephaestus from Olympus 

because he was ugly and deformed 

and there are no standards for behavior among gods

beyond being obstructively pretty and uncomfortably stupid. 

And Hera was too blind to recognize Haphaestus' mind 

For the numinous clockwork of its genius.

Hera threw Hepaestus from Olympus,

and later he turned his fecund mind to blacksmithing,

forging feet for himself and trinkets for the pantheon,
fixing the profoundly shoddy plumbing around Olympus.

And for all that, they married Aphrodite off to him as a cruel joke.

(Aphrodite, who fucked around and played footsie with Ares and made

duck-faces into reflecting pools for hours on end).

Hera threw Hepaestus from Olympus,

which turned out perfectly fine for Hephaestus,

For from the core of the earth he forged a Harley for himself

and rode off with some Neireids

To plumb the depths of every mystery the earth still offered him,
disavow the why for the how and the when,

to fashion philosophies from hammers,

and a colossal padlock for the feet of the mountain

The keys to which he pawned off 

on the first middle school he found.

Remainders

In the eons after we are gone
what will remain of us?
Certainly the obstinate secret
of Roman concrete will persist,
and the island of refuse in the pacific
will wander up the shiftless coastlines,
and armies of plastic soldiers
will occupy forests we once cut down.
But the beauty of our ideas, our selves,
our souls will have escaped into oblivion.
The leaves of books will not even rustle
in the wind, having carbonized
into something akin to coal.
And when alien footprints unsettle the soil
countless years from now,
they will not know that
The blackened squares they hold
in however many fingers they possess,
are mere fossils of
our sorrows and
our hopes,
our final unheard echo
in the caverns of existence.

The Gift of Language

All this talk--
"The pen is mightier than the sword"
"Words cut deep"
is bullshit.
The implication being
language is sleek,
silent, razored, arced.
In other words:
Elegant.
That language is the
sheen of quickening in
the shocked afterglow
of a knifing.
But in my experience
Language is blunt force trauma.
The bloody bludgeoning of hammers,
the splintering, wincing crack
of axes on the skull.
Language is clumsy.
Messy. Confusing.
intents and understandings
stand waving at each other awkwardly
across the street.
And when they do cross paths,
the results are so often
destructive.
Not lilting, dancing, whimsical.
Just devastating:
"We regret to inform"
"Sorry to say"
"I don't love you anymore"
Words leave marks.
Words leave scars.
Words leave wounds.
Language is violence.

happenstance

There's no use in decrying
the muffled violence of the every day,
boxes of photoframes and the marginalia
of a barely lived life,
nor the quiet, unknown way
tiny things die,
nor the short sharp knocks of
random Tuesday mornings.
don't cry foul to fate  or god--
they aren't listening.
there is no grand force wishing the world well
or damning us.

Life goes on.

Spiders still find a way
to hatch in my house at the end
of every winter.
the rivers still run,
The mail still comes,
beset by junk though it may be.
crooked creekmills somewhere
still churn for tourists.
A tectonic plate tackles
the west coast inch by inch
while reality for three children
found in a shed plummets.

In Passing

"It's so quiet here."

he speaks softly as we stand

waiting for the elevator. He is slight,

There is an easy smile beneath his mustache,

the faintest whisper of an accent.

"It is like you say... a funeral? or a hospital?

I don't like that. I like it much louder."

He laughs, I smile.

"It is somber," I agree.

His gaze follows the lights,

as the humming elevator descends.

He seems hesitant, his eyes flick towards me,

his smile fades slightly

"Everything is changing.

It's all so sad."

There is silence

and the doors open

before I say

"Yes."

Harvest Season

November, driving south of town to a dinner party.
 Among sloping verdant hills in vespertine light
 punctuated by single crooked trees.
 Here and there a moss-ridden barn
 roofs a tractor picking itself to pieces
 since the Roosevelt administration.

I'm boring lately, I know.
 Describing the trees and the weather and tractors.
 But the starting is difficult, What is there
 beyond the sweeping clean the door-frame
 of the mind anymore?

The other day on my walk,
  beneath a sky filled by clouds heavy with rain
  between leaf-splatter beneath the trees,
  bursts of red and yellow like
  nature's best impression of a Pollock,

Two black-and-white cats lounged atop the broken Chevy
 gazing at me. In a word:
 witheringly.
 Totally certain that Yes, Man-Person,
 You Are The least Important Or Interesting Thing We Have Seen This Day.

Two houses down,
 still no clues concerning the
 out-sized rusting orb on the unkempt lawn,
 a kohlrabi starship the size of a boulder.

It's gone now.

I wanted to mine it for some kind of insight on the
 post-soviet post-west post-post-east
 post-everything life we're leading.
 Imbue it with something of the ineffable
 stuffed inside of that spaceship hidden in the
 garage of my ex-Kremlin neighbor,
 brought out only in times of dire uncleanliness.

...Or:

Maybe it was just a stupidly-designed septic tank
 caked not with timeless truth but with shit,
 like every septic tank.
 Maybe it was just a strange image
 that got etched into my head
 to come screaming back out when I'm 85
 and even crazier,
 force-fed anti-psychotics 'cause
 I won't shut up about Sputnik. 

But those damn cats! My self-esteem was shot.
 Those damn cats made me feel the lowest
 I have felt in months. Positive that these walks
 will yield  a pitiful mental crop
 and the tractors up there will go to rust.

Such that even in preparation for this party
 I have plumbed and scraped and grasped
 at the bottom of the closet of my mind
 for the last possible witticisms I might
 have misplaced there months ago,
 In the hopes that in a matter of moments
 I shall appear to be
 a Vaguely Interesting Person
 one encounters at a dinner party
 and not the dull weirdo I so often fear
 I've become.

Literanea

I have been utterly neglectful of you, blog. For that I offer my apologies and in recompense I have decided that this place will also archive a notebook of reading habits.

Since January, I have polished off a scant two and two halves books. I say scant, but in light of my reading and writing habits since June (which have been abysmal) my habits following the new year have been nothing short of stupendous.

I began with Steve(n) Milhauser's Pulitzer prize-winning 1997 Martin Dressler, a richly imagined if slightly anemic exploration of the American through Milhauser's brand of the fantastic. It was finely wrought, but in calling it anemic, I mean in reference specifically to a cast of shallowly drawn characters, or in the case of its titular hero, a kind of empty, chauvinistic shell (Although perhaps that was the point.)

As I've read just this novel and a smattering of other stories by Milhauser and all seem to fit into a semi-fantastical category which I might be willing to label a kind of Magical Realism Americana shared and created by James Tate or John Crowley.

Milhauser also seemingly felt the need to hammer the theme through your skull, page after page. Not that I'm opposed to open-ness (Think Vonnegut) but he doesn't exactly go for subtlety. The American dream is (chorus!) vapid, empty and endless.

Grade: B-

Next on the docket: Neal Stephenson's 1992 Snow Crash. Apart from some awkward plotting, dialogue and character development, a fantastic, intelligent, engrossing novel about power in the digital age, eerily prescient (For 1992) predictions. Stephenson has a firm grasp on and the ability to bring together a veritable library of subjects; digitization, Sumerian history/mythology, linguistics, computer science, economics, politics, etc.

Barring its few amateurish missteps (including a protagonist cheekily named Hiro Protagonist, who seems written intentionally as THE MOST BADASS GUY IN THE WORLD00 Indeed he even refers to himself as something similar at one point), it was such a compelling read I immediately went out and purchased the first book in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Grade: A-

Working on now: Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, which, like Snow Crash, suffers from a cloyingly too-perfect protagonist, as well as a near insufferable need to write damsels-in-distress and no other kind of female... might be the best book I've read yet. It even manages to pull off a framework of stories within stories within without giving me a headache, as Christopher Nolan did.

In a kind of high fantasy university level Harry Potter with inklings of god knows what else, Rothfuss has (after about 400 of 700ish pages) created a world I will be sad to leave at this novel's completion. Luckily, it's part of a trilogy.

Working Grade: A-

And 2010's Man-Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The most frustrating and hopefully most rewarding book on this list. This historical novel recasts the world of the early years of Henry VII as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell (Who, since watching "The Tudors" I can only envision as being played by James Frain.)

Despite choppy phrasing and the occasional murky passage, Mantel displays moments of real beauty and displays prowess with her meticulous research. Further, she does not hold the reader's hand as she leads them through 1530s England, but rather expects them to keep apace with cultural and historical references. (ie, if you're a history snob you'll probably enjoy it.)

Working Grade: Too early to say.

Suburban Elegy IV

There are all these children screeching
in the park next near my home
and I worry that soon,
I might be morally obligated
to make sure they're not dead.

Gandhi

If Gandhi were alive, I would like to sit with
him on our porch. swing I would invite him to smoke
a little weed, but he would politely decline.
I would resist the urge to say C'mon man,
it's not a fucking porterhouse. Instead,
I would nod and gaze out at the harvest moon.
Eventually, the tension would build and Gandhi,
in his affable robed manner,
would ask me what was wrong,
but at that moment, there was was no course
but for me to say Oh, I'm fine.
In part because Gandhi seems like a genuinely nice guy
and who'd want to unload all their problems on him?
But also because discerning the list of what's wrong in my life
is like trying to mow the lawn in the middle of a snowstorm,
it's a goddamn frustrating mess that very rarely makes much sense.
But, knowing Gandhi, he would suspect this, in his
perceptive robed manner. In return, he would
just smile at me and say he'd changed his mind,
could he please have a bit of bud? and I'd tease him
about it, and then we'd sit and stare up at the burning moon,
silent for hours.

Kites

My great-grandfather
was widely regarded
as the Arnold Palmer of kiting.
He was a world-renowned expert on kitemaking
and on the intellectual history of kite-patenting.

(Which I suppose must be a vast and
relevant area of study.)

He was also, in his time,
an advertising Vice President for Kodak-Eastman
after working his way through college
as a Magician on the Vaudeville circuit, a hobby which
he later recanted as falsification and deception.

(Though I wonder if he ever thought the same of
Advertising.)

He and his wife,
my great-grandmother,
a warm, kind woman
with a penchant for cocktail-hours
and tautologies

(and of whom my memories are sadly hazy,)

would travel the world
collecting tribal masks
for some purpose or another:
solemn sentinels warding off
invading mildew from posts
along the staircase.

In my last, feeble memories of him,
I am twelve and he is hunched over,
I am giggling and his moustaches gently droop,
his withered fingers curl around a pencil,
writing down a grocery list.
His failing ears
cause him to mistake 'Corn Chex'
as 'Corn Check,'
a phrase repeated
dutifully.

(a mistake we don't have the heart
to correct.)

His wife is
only recently deceased,
something which seems to have left its mark
in a quiet corner of his heart,
its loneliness settled even in
those careful fingers.

Kites, though. what a wonderfully silly interest.

Koi

There is a thin copper pole
from which our plentiful rain
drips off the gutters of my parents' roof
into a barrel sliced in half.
My father got this idea somewhere,
probably a gardening magazine or Bob Villa,
to fill this barrel
like a makeshift fishbowl
with two or three twenty-five dollar Koi.
Every few weeks, these Koi,
which should theoretically grow
in proportion with their surroundings,
instead grow far too large
and eventually float stomach up
to the top of the water.
When this happens,
A riot erupts in my confounded father's mouth,
"Dagnabit!"
"Fuckin A!"
before he goes back to the pet store,
forks over at least fifty dollars for more Koi
and once more plays the role
of their confused and bumbling God.

Doohickies

A scientist has me tied up
on an operating table.
He cracks my skull open with
a hammer and chisel
and piece by piece,
removes my memories,
carefully examining each
using a jeweler's loupe.
He places them in mason jars he marks,
this one 'joy'
that one 'misery'
this one 'fun'
that one 'despair'
this one 'NSFW'
Each memory smiles and waves as it
is taken away
by his scientific hands.
They look strange.
'Doohickies' may be the best way
to describe these contraptions,
somewhere between
creatures and machinations,
aglow with the light of a film reel replaying
the times I kissed a pretty girl
or times laughter masked sobs,
or beauty wiggled its way into furor,
or all those things I bitterly regretted
which I can barely now recall.
As each leaves in the scientist's hands,
my heart grows a little colder,
and Emptiness pokes his head up at
the end of the end of the table.
I watch the vision of my last happy day
being sealed up in its new home, when
the doctor's voice whispers softly in my ear
"No place will be better than here
or worse."

song for a missed home

Summer, Oregon, Whenever.

Splayed out on the tired porch couch.
The sun peeking out from behind
schizophrenic clouds, for
the first time in months.

We stare up at the trees,
those clouds,
lose ourselves in
gentle rustling, the
the scent of dust.

The music of Liszt
now Debussy
now Schubert
(now some Name
I could not hear clearly...)
drifts out the screen door.

A joint curls
in our fingers,
spicing our lungs,

its smoke rising,
dissipating,
conversing with

our laughter and
faint melodies
(Was it Ravel?)
lost in happenstance glare
and warm breeze.

Breeze which now
beckons the looming trees
to dance.

Soon they will be quiet giants
swaying with Ravel,
unsure of the time.