WHAT KEEPS MANKIND ALIVE? (and an original piece)

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts
—
Originally, I believe, William S. Burroughs, but I took the lyrics from the Tom Waits cover on Orphans: Bastards, Bawlers, Brawlers.

To regain my faith in intelligent spoken word/music after listening to about half of the Fugitives’ “In Streetlight Communion” (who I agreed to go see tonight at the Green Room, I’m sure I’ll enjoy them more live than on an album, but they are, nevertheless, stock spoken-word ‘OHHHH THE WORLD IS SO SO WRONG LISTEN TO ME AS MY VOICE GETS INTENSE AND MYSTICAL’ of poets and musicians who don’t so much lie to us, like Rick Ross, as lie to themselves, the only remedy was this dose of reality, WHAT KEEPS MANKIND ALIVE? I have nothing to rant on about the piece, it says everything I want to say to these types better than I ever could.

On that note, I have noticed, thanks to the whole poetry slam thing, a disturbing trend in my own poetry. I’m becoming like them. So a couple of weeks ago I decided a shift was in order. Here is my first attempt at it, the first draft of the first episode of what will, hopefully, become my first essay into epic poetry. It may never hit epic, but it will at least be narrative.
The First Episode in the Adventures of Will Perez and Real Sharp

And the sun set somewhere around Syracuse,
leaving our heroes facing the flashing lights of Times Squares
with nowhere to stay, no idea that this was mid-town,
and not knowing whether or not they could stop walking and stand,
somewhere, or if they would get fined,
as indicated by the local loitering by-laws.
They took refuge in a coffee house in a street
where they filmed a zombie picture,
and stayed there until Real took his toothbrush to the bathroom
and their German host said, “ZEIT! ZEIT!”
so they left, hurriedly.
It was dawn, now.
The rush hour crests over the towers
and busy people rush to do busy things.
Our heroes, Real Sharp and Will Perez were not busy people.
No, they were on vacation.
So they escaped to the hip corners of East Village where,
outside of a $2 falafel joint an old Orthodox fellow said to them,
“Are ya Jewish?” “Absolutely not, get lost, we’re all goy here,”
said Will, who was the son of a Shephardi.
“Yeah, of course we are,” said Real,
who was Franco-Ontarian and Anglo-Quebecker.
“Come with me!” said the Orthie,
and they took the subway to Crown Heights.
When he was out of hearing range, Will said to Real,“You idiot, this ass is with Chabad.
Did you think he was going to show us the control room?”
And they were there, 770 Eastern Parkway, Lubavitch World HQ.
“This is where the magic happens.”
Inside were hundreds of lost young Jews, anarchists and hippies,
stoned and confused, collected from across the globe like stray dogs.
“With every mitzvah we bring earth closer to God,
and the Messiah will come so much sooner!”
says Schneersohn, and hypnotically they drift into their seats,
where the tops of their skulls are removed,
their brains connected to complicated networks of cables.
“This is the best part,” grins their guide,
and he shows them a room where a hundred chimpanzees type away,
programming into the minds of the lost-seekers outside
the 613 mitzvot, which the chimps knew by heart.
Having had enough, and afraid of having his scalp removed,
Will told their guide, “We’ll stick to Noah’s 7, thanks”
and they fled from New York to the tranquility of New Brunsick, New Jersey
where, next to the bus station, they ate at White Castle,
the one that Harold and Kumar spent all that time trying to get to.

Genjokoan with Pat Enkyo O’Hara, week 1

Watch this.

As all things are Buddha-dharma, there are delusion, realization, practice, birth and death, buddhas and sentient beings. As myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death. The Buddha Way, in essence, is leaping clear of abundance and lack; thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas. Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.

U2

A new U2 album is here, and it’s something that makes me have heavily mixed feelings.  Already it sounds similar to older things I enjoyed by them, and it makes me have this pulling urge.

When I was introduced to them, the music entered my life and filled some gap… it wasn’t the music of course, it was what I made of it.  The lyrics and the earthy tones linked me to something I had previously ignored in my life, and that was beauty and mysticism in nature and life.  I’m a logical person, and I don’t believe in anything… but I believe in U2, and I believe in water, green, blue, cold and warm, drafts, stars, how they impact my life and how I don’t fully understand them or really want to.

There was a struggle for freedom in my life, and a struggle to find “myself.”  That is, to escape notions of what I should be or do, or who I had ties to for reasons I didn’t want to recognize.  There are many moments in my mind of personal nature, and they’re moments no one shared with me… and they are often evoked by two things.  One of them is music, and much of that music was U2.

Now, it’s like my freedom is too easy.  I can sit here all day if I want to staring at the wall.  I can drive anywhere I want practically and spend as much time as I want there.  I can do so many things I would have killed for back then, and I don’t do them.  It’s like having the ability has made me stop wanting anything that I used to crave…

That’s not entirely true though.  I do get a thirst for travel, often; I travel often.  I get done travelling somewhere, and I immediately want to go somewhere else.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy my freedom because it’s easy.  It’s that I miss when it was difficult and distant.

Sketching (free association theatre)

From out of here I send this. It’s explosive out of here.

Stoccato lumiere…
evoking evolution,
from flotsam
from algae
flipping seizure switches
Morse code oscillates
in the searchlights
crashing on the waveforms
looking for survivors.

“Proteus looks a bit strung out tonight,
doesn’t you think?”

Evolving now, quickly,
voracious ghost forms
possess writhing protozoa
cranked up on flashlight photosynthesis
bursting out of myopia,
the cellular boundaries of hyaline
proto-domes.

A new thing emerges from
the ocean’s strained floor.

The oily skin of unfathomable
black splits wide down its middle,
volcanic lashes of toxic smoke part,
& unworldly seismic blades stab the
vice-pressed shins of continental bodies.
Earth’s giant jaundiced eye pries
open form’s defined constraints,
staring up from the bottom
into the harrowed face of time.

End of transmission… Prophet needs a drink.
Last call.

When do we get reparations?

Sammy got his poetic back…

…but to what disastrous ends? Here’s two new ones. I stopped trying to be Anne Sexton’s and Charles Bukowski’s lovechild by the way, so don’t worry as much.

How Do You Say?

I see my days have expanded
to include more than wanting.

Ritual blossoms burn
by the bed and a girl who has never been
addressed by name is quiet in her
contained violence behind vale of youngman eyes.

Smoke folds itself womanlike
above a dozen books on crusades
and communism, it’s ritual purpose woven through
paper – ghosts of meaning
reproducing by themselves, unobserved,
whispering basic instructions
in the oldest language.

How to tell tied-up cosmos
I want only to be a stone
in the river? Whale shudders
somewhere underground, solar wind skims
waterfall-street of days to make ocean. Days have expanded
to include more than wanting.

There is a tidal wave guffawed
somewhere over my hill.

When You Look In Mirrors You Only See Your Reflection, Girl

Beauty, how do you
say you are a crisis of identity,
that you have not seen symmetry
traded for madness in eyes of men?

Why rummage in favourite boxes,
drawers and pockets for pictures
of yourself in foreign rooms
that blend and become less alien?

Prophets see in ruined arches,
prostitutes and other immortals,
reflections of their faces, crowded by blooming beards
of taxed capacity whose madness is wisdom
in other eyes.

There is a window (top-left in your hand-mirror)
that shows the moon that has seen half-nude
Earth: two goddesses in sacramental weakness -
are you not spirits and sisterhood?

A Blacksmith Shop

The site is Penland, North Carolina.  It’s a long meadow, forked into two legs, surrounded by dense forest of trees 50-80′ tall.  The meadow is a continuously rolling hill.

The campus is for the arts.  It is in the middle of nowhere with respect to civilization.  Students live here in order to learn by submersion; in other words, they live breathe and work whatever it is they come here to do.

Learning by doing is the idea, learning by making.  Making and learning things, realizations, testing assumptions, creating ideas and carrying them out.

Then they leave with the knowledge of the art form, and with the Appalachian mountains as a backdrop to the experience.

A blacksmith shop is sitting on trace paper in my backpack, and its plan is simple with a specific intent.  Creating a vast shop with movable permeable walls, in order to allow natural ventilation and light into the workspace.  The walls completely disappear, making the student out in nature while forging metal at outrageous temperatures, beating it with a hammer on an anvil… like something from old black and white line drawings of how things were.

It’s disjointed.  It sits on a slope, where the shop is at a high point, and the land rolls downward as it moves south.  A wooden deck is above this slope, allowing you to feel nothing beneath you and realize the hill your shop rests upon.  As you move onto the deck and walk south, you can enter the restroom.  The restroom is stacked on top of the classroom, where you will descend down wooden steps into that wonderful sloped area.  Just south are the 80′ trees, reminding you how small you are in their presence.  If you ascend instead of descend, you’ll find the offices of the resident artist and shop coordinator, and a wonderful deck behind their offices to take in the views and air.

So much for creative block.

Kate Beaton is funny

you should read her