Come Untogether

2007-10-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

DOAEN 6: The Bottom Line
I keep reminding myself to vist FemiMacus and write a check for the $25.00 that I owe them for last week's pedicure. Remarkably, they do not accept ATM or credit cards and I had no checks with me at the time, having finished writing all my monthly bills and since I do not subscribe to an online banking service, my last Luddite holdout because for some reason I am convinced that my account numbers will be hacked by hucksters; well, you know what I'm trying to say here. I'm feeling guilty and need to go by Park Avenue one day this week to clear both my name and reputation from the soapy registers of local manicure parlors.

"What's the big deal," you maybe ask. Black marks weigh heavily upon my personal credit record. And I can't stop being a throwback to another century when there were standards of acceptable behavior that weren't updated online every hour by the local Webmaster. Certain precepts were chiseled in stone way back then: the Ten Commandments, the golden mean about doing unto others, playing fair and square, and so forth, phrases that are broken links now to another seemingly innocent place and time. Now I keep up, subscribing to lists so I can stay abreast of new content. I also read daily cascades of email that arrive at no special hour in my ever expanding and contracting mailbox that would even overwhelm the Queen of Contractions, Martha Graham. I am on an unending treadmill that ceases only when I deliberately refuse to take my laptop along for the ride, which doesn't happen often, because I actually enjoy this electronic high.

"So what are you whining about?" you maybe ask. Well, I'm not so much whining as reflecting, which was Hamlet's big hang-up although he lacked a good Sunday morning breakfast of coffee, eggs and potatoes. It's what I do best, given my job that keeps me in front of a computer for most of the day with occasional breaks for rides on the elevator. But today isn't like that at all, Virginia. Today I'm thinking about my weekend, this unbelievable thing that has happened in my life which stands outside the doors of email. Something that has caused me to believe that love possibly can exist in this world, or that maybe I've done enough leg work and taken enough Pilates classes to know the real thing when I feel it, which is my bottom line.

To be continued (I hope).

2007-10-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

DOAEN 5: Creating the Links
Maybe Jerusalem needs to wait. After all, I have to request time off from work, and then there's the Oral History Association that's having its 41th Annual Meeting here in Oaktown. Downtown at the Marriott where there are apples for the picking at the front desk for the asking you get a smile and directions up the escalator to where everything's happening in a honeycomb of rooms. It's autumn in New York except it's the Bay Area and trees are shifting their color palette, and I laugh to recall when I first moved here I couldn't tell autumn from madam, but now it's obvious with light changing and Southern California burning, more than 500,000 residents being evacuated from their homes and President Bush and the Gobernator surveying the damage from private helicopters. More political spectacle. Tony from FemiMacus where I sat today getting a pedicure, my favorite part is the end when my foot becomes a candle dipped into wax, said that his twin girls are up from the University of San Diego and my daughter says that her friend from San Diego State has taken refuge in one of the UC Davis dorms. Some people say that the corporations have deliberately burned down Southern California the way New Orleans was sacrificed to the Crips & and Bloods, but I'm still witholding judgment myself, someone who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal and watches how Rupert Murdoch is needling the NY Times about their low stock evaluation and inability to balance their portfolio, someone who's been working with a web team from Chevron these last several weeks since my employer, AC Transit, is testing 22 biodiesel and gas-to-liquid fuel buses for the next six months. I get to create the links. At the Oral History workshop this afternoon on the Problem of Place in Post-Holocaust Life, Shana Penn said that in today's Poland there are Jewish Identity Crisis Hotlines for young people who are trying to connect the dots. Walking back to work from the Marriott, I passed City Hall, the second day of demonstrations against police brutality. People chanted, "No justice, no peace." There was a police officer on the opposite side of the street and I waited for the light to turn green before I crossed, despite my New York inclination to go whenever I see an opening, but I didn't want to openly flaunt his authority. But given the demonstration, I probably could've gotten away with it.

Music: Herbie Hancock, "River, the joni letters"
What's Been Happening: sending out Halloween cards to the kids of my nieces and nephews
On a Personal Level: fighting a cold
Keywords:
Bay Area Aerosol Heritage Assn.
the hinge generation
a foreigh tourist who speaks the language

2007-10-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

DOAEN 4: The Harvard Moon Does Not Shine on Me
I need coverage as I duck between cars and hide from breaking news that rains over me in casualties and partial prisoner swaps. I'm roaming. From meeting to meeting I hear the same thing. It's falling apart. It's going to pieces. There's no hiding from media blab living here in corporate headquarters inside our own cubicles stocked with emergency blow-up rations for the Big One. Where we're entitled to have our own opinions, but none of the facts, which makes us stupid and fat and lazy and very monolingual. I genre to the best of my ability and try to make it work. What else can I do? That's all we can do. So I rename myself. I am now DoAnne after my blog entries which rhymes with Joanne who has a large chain of fabric stores named after her, at least here in the Bay Area where the autumn rains have arrived early and the fog sits in ruffles over the Bay like a bag of soggy potato chips that someone has spilled on the table. So I intend to repattern myself. I'm not sure what that means except I know it will require a trip to the store and that makes me happy because I've been born and bred to be a good consumer. But will the civic center hold, a question probed by Alexis de Tocqueville some time ago when Benjamin Franklin held the winning hand and the new nation didn't want to hear about it. Still doesn't. But I'm getting too old to just sit around and let the grains of sand run out, even Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz knew she had to fly with the monkies, so I vow as Big Momma of the Empty Nesters to fight for truth and justice and the Palestinian state. Then maybe to find a way as a diaspora Jew to understand the humor of a God who does this number about the "chosen people," puts us through hell for thousands of years to burn off any impurities, fixes us up in a nice little place to have Israel become as vile and intolerant as the next country. Feh! What kind of plague is this? So I spend time on the Internet fishing around for the cheapest round-trip ticket to Jerusalem and then go to the store to get a strong cup of coffee. When I see my friend sitting in the cafe, I feel better.

Music: Frank Black, "Teenager of the Year"
What's Been Happening: Monday
On a Personal Level: Coordinating daughter's birthday weekend
Keywords:
where the miles are
genre to the best of your ability
Harvard moon
partial prisoner swap

2007-10-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

DOAEN 3: Identity Theft
I sit on the couch reading books with the cats purring beneath the living room table as the dishwasher thrashes in the background, turn the page and realize I haven't watched television for a week. How long has it been? Open the refrigerator and there's several jars of pickles on the side door that face nothing else. I turn on the television, just to make sure I have the right remote attitude. Later that very same week when I realized I hadn't watched television, I bought a pair of black leather pants online and wore them for real because now I am Bad Momma of the Empty-Nesters.

Where did she come from hidden in Purdah all those years of Motherhood, which was its own special trip? But suddenly she's more recognizable, this woman who always has been my drive and my friend, who wishes to realize her obsessions through me. I feel okay about being a vehicle for someone else's obsessions. I'm a woman, aren't I? But that doesn't mean I have to like it. On the other hand I think it would be more correct to say that I have a gay relationship with myself, and like any good one (Benny Goodman), we're always working on it together. I heard growing up that if you can't love yourself, you can't really love someone else. Which has been my starting point. It's just that I haven't gotten very far.

Music playing: Dance of the Dead
What's been happening: Symposium at UC Berkeley "Continuous Bodies" performance, Space and Technology
On a Personal Level: More of the same :>}
Key Words:
call center operators
identity theft
data surveillance
datasphere
mode-switching
sell some books from inside a trench coat

2007-10-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Ballad of D.Q.

Chorus:
The pressure was real high
with the 2.0 release,
meant to fix all bugs, or die,
tech support would have some peace.

Engineers worked day and night
studying their code,
product managers counted bytes
in pizza-eating mode.

And D.Q., the boy from Alameda,
who put start-ups on the map,
he grabbed a slice of pizza
saying, "Don't give me any crap."

Until deadlines are met,
he promised to stay in the trenches,
software QA'd, security tested,
no one sitting on the benches.

Each week D.Q. e-mailed
a variation of the old,
his message never failed:
keep all new features on hold.

Marketing never heard,
only knew what they had to know,
they'd already given their word,
the product was scheduled to go.

The hour it came for the product to ship,
a month before the big holiday purse.
"Where was D.Q? Can you believe this shit?"
Maybe he had the flu or something worse.

But let me tell you what I saw
I'll give you the entire poop,
when I took the elevator down to the 31st floor
to meet with the core technology group

There was D.Q. telling the marketing folk
to extend the deadline, or be a fool,
he slipped a skateboard beneath his coat
saying, "Good-bye. It's been real cool."

So next time you walk down Mission Street
running to catch the bus or the BART home,
the kid zipping up pavement on his feet,
could be D.Q. on the roam.

The kid who got tired of programming,
tired of deadlines, tired of being a sap,
the head geek who's surfing
on a skateboard, and never coming back.

2007-10-02T19:34:00.001-07:00

Partners in Crime
Kids walk to school along the freeway overpass.
I drive my car beneath them going to work.

Jelly rolls of turf in a pick-up truck.
Green spikes on a brown scalp to be planted somewhere.

A bright blot outlines joggers around Lake Merritt.
Their water bottles are catching sunlight.

I can't tell anyone what you did to me last night.
How you held me close and what you whispered in my ear.

2007-09-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

DOAEN 2
Almost an entire week has gone by since she's left for college, and today is payday with one of those virtual pieces of paper slipped beneath the door that says a certain amount of money has been deposited on my behalf into a bank account. What's important is that the money is there and not particularly how it got placed there, but even as I write those words I shudder as I hear the moral implications of my statement which sounds entirely too Machiavellian although I understand that the guy got a bad rap and his world view was actually more than the end justifying the means which is how his work has been handed down throughout the ages although his emphasis on the skill of applying morality to practical political life lesser so the case and I think of Arnold Schwartzenegger and wish him success in brokering a Northwest passage of medical insurance in the state of California particularly to further the national discourse on this issue. Last night I heard Immaculee Ilibagiza speak at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, author of "Left to Tell," story of how she survived the Rwandan genocide in 1994 by hiding in a 4 by 6 foot bathroom for 91 days with seven other women and went on to develop a profound personal relationship with God, faith, and hope for the survival of the planet in the midst of brutalizing war. Even her name with all those Is and As rolls off the English-speaking tongue like some dazzling miracle on a Cirque du Soleil scale with visceral joy and beauty, which seems to be the kind of thing us human beings respond to from the center of our beings, and there's nothing virtual about it.

My daughter is at college. I'm here and my memories of her are real.

2007-09-26T00:40:00.001-07:00

Diary of an Empty Nester (DOAEN 1)
I think writing with a typewriter or a pencil when I first started was a different kind of writing for me, more physical in its sensibility, while writing with a computer is another experience eliminating a tactile energy that goes into forming words by pressing a pen to paper or by striking the hammer of a keyboard; with the computer I hear the musical sound of words in my head, which makes laptop writing a more private experience, after all it's happening within a small theater that sits a half foot away from me with few interruptions having to do with the rolling of paper on a platen, or the sharpening of a pencil, it's more about the flow of words, forming words on a screen instead of on a sheet of paper, which in some ways makes the creation of meaning more direct, faster, but how has that changed anything, a question from an empty nester at a time when I have the luxury of indulging myself in such thoughts listening to jazz playing after midnight in my living room while I lay on the couch rather than deciding what sandwiches to prepare for lunch, not that I was ever a sandwich maker because the truth is I've always found it a bother to prepare something I didn't enjoy eating so I got as far as peanut butter and jelly and then stopped, but on the other hand, writing letters was always easy, and I can remember learning language, which is what took me to forming letters like some iconography of my soul.

2007-09-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

Third Floor Dorm
In those last several weeks you let me tell you
not to get home after midnight.
You smiled without saying anything.
We both knew it was already too late.

I brought your old clothes stored in the trunk
to Goodwill so we'd have room
to pack your things for college:
an old soccer ball, tennis shoes, a pullover,

nothing remarkable except
you removed everything from plastic bags
to reassure me you weren't throwing away stuff.
I saw there was nothing to rescue.

We needed to rent a U-haul. You didn't start packing
until I'd finished my third cup of coffee.
Your boyfriend helped. Good thing too.
By then we discovered you were on the third floor of the dorm,

as he pulled the dolly upstairs
only a few weeks before his court date
and the chance of jail time, even with a reduced sentence.
One of those stupid mistakes.

On the way outside to the commons,
you held hands with him, fingers threading.
More boxes.
We each carried our own weight.

Your boyfriend rebolted the bed higher
so you'd have more storage space.
We put on sheets. You and I looked at each other
from the corners.

Maybe tomorrow
I'll cook a pot of soup
to have for the week,
or maybe not.

2007-09-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

Kedushat
I am dressed in white linen to celebrate the New Year but know that in Japan, white is the color of mourning, the color of Hiroshima, while black contains all spectrum of possibility. I am feeling brown, not shitty, but filled with the mulch of my many years, as I throw in greens, aerating myself with hope in the event that one of these days things will turn out right. I can only wonder how I smell, even though I use politically correct cosmetics that have not been tested on animals, and not really cosmetics, but more oils and lotion, and rosemary with its sharp clean scent that starches my nostrils open as I rub its essence into my scalp and touch my bush that has burned itself to a gray ash.

2007-09-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

Moon Draught
balancing a cup of coffee
white porcelain handle
held between fingers
dappled light
from outside my patio window
in these moments before
moon disappears
and the boxcar of my day
rattles along its rails
the same way
cats meow me out of bed
for their appointed
bowl of food and fresh water

they are hungry and can do nothing
until I walk to the closet
measure a cup of food
refill their water bowl
as we both return
to our designated corners
coffee and cat food
inaugurating the day

last night the sun in the sky
appeared blood red
sinking inside a pile-up of black clouds
from fires in the south burning
around Morgan Hill
and in the north from Tahoe

there will always be fire
coffee and cat food
and then
there's that morning sun again
as I backtrack
to wanting you next to me
like a star of new shoots

2007-09-05T14:15:00.000-07:00

The Summer of Love and Walter Lowenfels
What I remember about the radical poet, Walter Lowenfels, was his vast generosity, and commitment to the word. He wrote a book entitled, The Revolution is to be Human, a slogan which has guided my life and work. He believed that change comes from young people and nurtured those friendships throughout his lifetime, encouraging new writers at the time like Clarence Major, Marge Piercy, and Ishmael Reed. Walter also confronted the New York Times Book Review section, and wrote an editorial which was called “The White Poetry Mafia,” accusing the establishment of failing to review and publish a burgeoning group of new Black writers.

He had come from a wealthy family of butter manufacturers, but gave up the soft life to throw in his lot with the literary expatriates in Europe including Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Throughout his lifetime he was a member of the American Communist Party, able to reconcile his discomfort with bureaucracy with a greater commitment to change.

Visting Walter on the Hudson
Between 1966 and 1971 when I attended the City College of New York, on occasional Saturdays I’d take the railroad from Grand Central Station in New York City and visit Walter and his wife Lillian in their Peekskill, New York cottage. Once I’d arrived at the station, I’d call. In a few minutes he’d pick me up in a light blue car, almost shaking his hand loose from his wrist waving to me through the window. Then we’d drive back to the cottage where he parked between several trees, and flung open the front door. Our afternoon had begun.

For hours Walter held court in a kitchen alcove talking about different poets, anthologies he was putting together, the birds outside his window, fruit and cheese, all with equal knowledge. He was a hummingbird sampling everything within his field of energy. “Do you know this writer?” he asked. “Do you know this music?” he inquired. I sadly shook my head and accepted whatever he pushed across the table for me to examine, only able to turn a few pages before he leaped to the next subject.

Walter vibrated with palpable energy, hovering in that conversion place between matter and energy, a black beret angled over a nest of wispy grey threads that resisted encampment. He’d always serve me something to drink, lemonade or coffee, whatever was available in the kitchen, a small and narrow space which seemed to have been imported from a trailer with coffee grounds spread everywhere.

Meeting Lillian Lowenfels
His wife, Lillian, daughter of a Yiddish scholar and humorist, occasionally summoned Walter from their bedroom, or emerged herself sitting in a wheelchair. By the time I’d met Lillian, she had suffered several strokes and seemed to be held together by pillows and white cord. Her face was frozen in a permanent grimace. She always stayed for just a short time. Walter solicitously escorted her back to their bedroom. “Lillian, be careful how you move. You’ll hurt yourself.”

Lillian translated Spanish poetry and had co-edited as well as financed some of Walter’s anthologies. When he returned to the kitchen he’d point to several photographs on the piano mantle of a dark-haired siren and say, “She was so beautiful before she got sick,” as if to ask me to see beyond the woman whose body was occupied by pain.

I’d first met Walter during a Communist Party convention in New York City. During those years I’d attended so many meetings, I can’t remember the particulars, except to see a large hall with bridge tables covered in white tablecloths. It was toward the end of the summer, hopelessly hot without air conditioning. I was getting tired of speeches. I was a newly recruited youth. I wanted to be in the company of worldwide revolutionary artists who had caught my attention: Neruda, Casals, Picasso, all Pablos -- Berthold Brecht, Paul Robeson, Ben Shahn, the Hollywood 10 and many others who’d been called to testify in front of the witch-hunting McCarthy Committee including Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and Stella Adler.

Walter was also circling the back of the hall. "Are you Lenore?" he asked, extending his hand.

Technology and Language
I’d just gotten to know Walter who was involved in editing the Cultural Commission’s publication, “Dialog Magazine,” a mash-up of the “New Masses,” which itself was modeled upon “The Masses,” published between 1911 and 1917. Walter had gotten wind of fresh blood around the Cultural Commission and always eager to befriend a young person, invited me within his circle. This was more toward the latter years of his life. (He died in 1976.) Walter was beginning to embark on a series of anthologies, excited by the success of The Writing on the Wall: 108 American Poems of Protest published in 1969 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Walter published my first poem which ended with the line, “this bioluminescence still swimming in the dark.” I was excited by the relationship between science and language. So was Walter. He wrote about it a lot in a great many of his books. From “Every Poem Is A Love Poem” included in The Portable Walter edited by Robert Gover, International Publishers, 1968:

“I am trying to break through this language to get to
                  fireboxes
                  Cooper-Bessemer compressors
                  magnetic films
without the copperbelt lining that keeps my hope
                  from exploding out of this typewriter,
                  desk, window, through the pines, down the
                  Little Egg Harbor River, across the
                  Continental Shelf...”

Or from The Poetry of My Politics, Volume 2 of My Many Lives self-published in 1968:

“My campaign against nostalgia has its base in language, i.e., to use the language of today for today’s emotions: the clean, new, scientific word, woven into the fabric of the poem so quietly the reader doesn’t sense anything but the contemporary pulse modulation. That’s the test of language – that it is alive with today’s electronics – not Ben Franklin’s kite key.”

Summer of Love
So why am I thinking of Walter?

This Labor Day Weekend past, I attended the 40th anniversary Summer of Love celebration together with 40,000 other people in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, everyone dressed in a version of the sixties, tie-dyed, tattooed, and carrying cell phones. There were clouds of a sweet-smelling substance emanating from different points from within the crowd.

Just imagine. More than 40,000 people who had streamed to the park, finding their way on public transportation or struggling with parking, babies carried on shoulders, men and women who’d been the flower children of yesteryear either as part of the Haight-Ashbury scene, a movement that put free community clinics on the map, or who had been located someplace else, and members of a younger generation now wanting to sniff the air in more ways than one; everyone hoping to reconnect with something that had been magical, to feel the spark, to be alive once again with hope. How do I know? I saw it on all of our faces. Then there was the music, lead guitarists or saxophonists from different bands, or almost fully constituted bands and by listening to them, we time traveled back to that era.

There was an ongoing effort to make the day-long celebration more than an exercise in nostalgia, people at the podium addressing a need to keep the resistance going. However, no one mentioned the word, revolution, at least none that I heard. I thought that was curious. Maybe the terrorists of the world and George Bush have co-opted that word for their own use. Or maybe we’ve become tired of hearing it.

Have we become jaded? Do we no longer believe that change can happen, or is that kind of thing only reserved for Hillary Clinton being elected president?

As for Walter, I miss his courage. I miss his ability to constantly reinvent his work and play with language. I miss his insistence on being relevant and honest about love and politics.

Today I know he’d be involved with computers, zipping along on a high-speed connection to the Internet, exploring new metaphors and keeping his light burning in face of humanity’s ongoing war with itself. I think if he was around he’d explore the meaning of this new global consciousness, how we are serving up each others culture and language through a medium that concentrates the world into a gateway that moves as we move through our lives.

In a world of literary dog-eat-dog, Walter helped anyone who was dedicated to the Word.

He heaped food on me, the first thing any young writer needs, the first thing anyone needs.

2007-08-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

Empty Nest
Everyone's asking about my empty nest and how it came to be
After 25 years of raising kids, this is what's in front of me –
a condo with a futon, a cable TV, a computer on DSL,
a kitchen with granite counter top and a litter box with its special smell.

I'm not saying I'm lonely, or want my kids to move back in.
I'm not saying the clock's ticking louder than it's ever been.
I'm not saying I expect to hear a good morning from down the hall.
I'm not saying I can't stand the quiet.
No, I'm not saying that at all.

This place has been good to my family,
not like my last roost upon a hill,
where I stayed up in a plum tree
hosing water on the evening fire drill.

Now the sirens in my life are over,
no more red lights at a cross-walk.
First things first have become second.
Tomatoes are ripening, time for sauce.

Time to build another nest, my last baby gone,
it won't be fancy, but near a stream,
one that I'm betting my last feather on,
betting my last feather on.

2007-08-26T12:06:00.000-07:00

Party at Leona Canyon
Flowers with whiskers mewl through the night,
dance with leaves and by ten they're real tight.

Some wear latex to fish for a catch,
some want money to buy an eye patch.

Some turn around and say squeeze my chin,
pick up a rock and say stuff again.

I was there when they crept to the stream,
closed their eyes and scrolled through their dreams.

2007-08-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

U.S. Soldier With Traumatic Stress Disorder Syndrome, Post Iraq
Deeper down the tubes there's an out-of-box experience,
a self-healing fiber optic ring that offers more response time
to whatever microbrew ales you ought to be in pixels.

They removed guns pointed at our heads because
we were from the same country where the weapons were manufactured,
not because she was so good at polishing her lip with a thumbnail.

The algebra of justice knows nothing about triangulation,
only tit for tat and how we waited all night for day
as we recited bed-time stories for the dead.

God told Oprah he didn't want to pretend he's something he's not,
said his favorite team is the Purple Cobras
and his favorite hangout a little airplane hanger in Missouri,

the same place where dead bees once turned honey into sunlight
and where people now double-park for coffee or run in to get
dry cleaning and where I remain in the country of my jet lag

not knowing where I am, but knowing at the same turntable,
this has not been a good day for love or socially acceptable
narcotics. I'm in your time zone now, baby. Bad credit, no problema.

2007-08-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

Winterwren Spring
Manzanita and red madrone
where a reflection of water flickers
on granite rock covered in its own mossy screen
for an afternoon showing of Newt Time
with catamarans of water striders floating above
the stars two newts undulating their tails around each other
throwing burbly kisses beneath a trickling stream;

now I have no idea what they're doing but I can guess
it's X-rated and none of my business
the sun shifts and the pool sinks into darkness
in these Days and Lives of my fifties
when I'll not keep my private parts to myself
finding new oils to rub the insides of my insides down with
for no audience.

2007-07-19T14:34:00.001-07:00

Song of the Rip Tide

You ripped songs from my heart,
and copied them over to yours.

I've heard how you set them to play all.
Don't you know that's not legal?

You're not playing fair with me.
Everyone I've known always leaves.

Don't leave me now.
See me standing on the corner

with my laptop in my backpack?
Don't leave me now.

2007-07-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

Only

Only in nothingness there is unity.
Here the off-ramp loops around.

Only beneath a glass does a butterfly
become a sepulcher of wings.

Only in the quiet of my living room
does night air breathe pagan song.

2007-07-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

Ode to Norma Leftwich

Norma, you who dared tell me what to do and knew I'd listen,
girlfriend of 50 years since the first day of second grade
when you tapped me on the shoulder to borrow a pencil
and I gave you one with an eraser.

You were a half head taller than me with three braids,
one that reached out of your forehead and over an eyebrow
you could arch into a Whitestone Bridge
whenever we needed to make a quick exit.

You were half a parallelogram and I was your other half
creating each other from the stones of our youth,
writing our names on the sidewalk in pastel chalk
washed away in thunderstorms and smelling of clean pavement.

We held hands on the subway,
rode to Manhattan and discovered ourselves in the Egyptian Room
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, far from
the polluted shores of the Bronx River, by Hunts Point Avenue
filled with the smell of the Cafe Bustelo plant and the stench of garbage.

Your father was a probation officer on the Grand Concourse
who became the first Black Senator from New York State.
My Dad made arch supports in a shop near Bellevue Hospital.
Let's face it. If you'd been white we would've never met
to sun ourselves on Orchard Beach throughout the summer
until no one could tell the difference.

We stayed in each other's sight, looked around corners
and noticed what was there before making a move.
You gave me your birthstone ring before we parted for high school
and told me to never forget you,
Norma, who, like me, said goodbye to everyone whose eyes
were closed before they could be opened.

2007-07-02T19:54:00.000-07:00

Lulu's Story
Some kids have mobiles. I’d look up at the world through bars. What Grandmother did was to find an extra refrigerator shelf from a junk shop and put it over my bed like a lid. She said she didn’t want me to fall out.

The shelf had not been well cleaned by the junk store owner. Yellow bits of dried goop dripped down toward me like so many stalactites, crusted over with ancient droppings from another place and time. It was like living in my own apartment building, above me was my Grandmother’s drawer of underwear, below me, her sweaters. From the time I was around three months old I stared at a refrigerator shelf after my mother, Hilda, had dropped me off at Grandmother’s house for good.

Once I learned how to sit up, I could see my Grandmother's bed that was without the same bars which covered my own sleeping quarters; however, a strangely shaped bag attached to a long-nosed tail was draped across her headboard.

There was nothing on her bed I could see that resembled a blanket, which next to the refrigerator shelf was the other constant in my life, a piece of green cotton hemmed in by a darker moss green satin with a coolness that I liked to rub against my gums. The room consisted primarily of her bed, a lamp table, and the chest of drawers, the floor covered in brown linoleum-looking tile that faded around the edge of the room to white.

Of course, back then I didn’t have words for these things—they were sensations and feelings, a conviction about stripes, which is how everything appeared as I lay on my back.

My vision was segmented; I reconstructed pieces—a dress hanging from the closet door looked like flagged swatches of blue and white. The goop on the shelf, probably freeze-dried orange juice, gave me something to look at, a texture that moved whenever I blinked my eyes, whereas the plaster cracks in my Grandmother’s bedroom ceiling never changed. There was also the white moon of her washbasin, always on the floor, and the lace doilies that hung over a chest of drawers. I carefully studied the crocheted pattern that wrapped itself into petals, but it was the refrigerator shelf that captured my attention mostly because it shared my existence the way nothing else in my Grandmother’s room did. I clutched the blanket to my side and reached out with my fingers, and tried to touch the bars.

I always knew that I wanted to make music--if I could find a way for the waxy orange and the brown crusts to make sounds, they would keep me company while Grandmother sat on the toilet in the bathroom until I heard the water gurgle and the lid fall down, two sounds that signaled her appearance above me. When I looked up, there she was through the grille. She bent down toward me and removed the shelf. I saw her full face now, flesh dug deep into a trench of wrinkles that moved from the corners of her hazel eyes toward her chin, the line of her lips snaked upward trying to camouflage a mouth. But nothing about the refrigerator bars had prepared me to understand how some event in my Grandmother’s life had caused those two halves of her lips to break apart.

Whenever she held me I knew it was to feed me, but the refrigerator bars gave me love. Whenever she shook the green blanket over me at night it was to keep me warm, but the refrigerator bars gave me comfort. Whenever she called my name, “Lulu, Lulu,” it was to get my attention, but she didn’t hear the sound of my name washing over itself. She was too busy covering herself with liquids and creams, tickling smells that caused my brown hairs to stand up and cast shadows along the length of my arm; her lamp table was covered with bottles, jars, tubes, and faces in photographs whose names she'd intone to herself in a quiet prayer, Moishe, Leah.

Sometimes Grandmother’d pick me up, bounce me around several times, and wait for a response that I wasn't able to give, like a doll whom you expect to cry “Mama, Mama,” when you push a button on its back. I wanted to please her and smiled. I can remember her eyes softening as she pulled me closer. Mostly all she’d say was, “I’mprotactingudarklink.” Then she’d put me down and walk away. After she left, I sucked on my hands and fingers and they tasted good.

Later I discovered my feet that propelled themselves upward from my hip sockets and lunged forward. One day as I lay on my back, my toes were wild bandits pressed against the cold metal; I couldn’t stop moving them until I actually balanced the refrigerator grille on the soles of my feet, and watched the metal shelf turn around, spin, then drop, clink on the tiled floor. I was so happy, my feet touched and rubbed against each other. I heard them squeak. I hugged their softness. I told myself, “Lulu, remember this.”

It was Chanel who remembered. She was the girl inside my head Chanel. She always knew I wanted to make music. She’s the reason I’m being interviewed today on satellite hookup. I’ve waited to tell my story because it took a lifetime to understand the shape of my desire.

2007-06-29T03:46:00.000-07:00

Since the moon humbled herself

Since the moon humbled herself to rule by night
The universe decreed that when she comes forth,
stars shall come forth with her,
and when she goes in, they shall go in with her.

Tonight stars have taken a break.
They have been replaced by sound.
I hear breath and cars below.
I go no where. I turn inside my hollow.

Moon and her consorts are mist.
Striated bands of Jupiter are blue.
Other planets are at ease
for they have their own round moons.

Once again I have nothing,
nothing but the back light.

2007-05-26T22:36:00.000-07:00

To Mischa on Her Graduation from High School,
June 3, 2007

What can I say my earthquake girl
who's about to put your first long leg behind you
yeah, I can't believe it's happened so fast,
that's what we parents all say...

You grew up with your cheeks smeared with oatmeal
played with Barbies wanted to do arts and crafts
on the kitchen table, but never to pull out weeds in the backyard,
smothered your cat Curtains with kisses, went from tap-dancing
to swimming to acrobatics where you hated the splits
until you found soccer and stayed constant, covered your entire bed
with stickers from the drug-store, stole nail polish from Long's
and did hard time in the back room on a white stool, turned orator
on Martin Luther King Day and won a medal.

We went everywhere did everything together threw frisbees
and played with ball paddles near Joaquin Miller Park,
swam in Robert's Pool, fed ducks at Lake Merritt,
camped by a stream at Mt Lassen and saw the earth steam
through its nostrils. You let me take you to the museum
until you got old enough to like clothing better...
I'd already watched you tuck red hyacinths
behind your ear before you could
look into a mirror and know who was there.

We had birthday parties and made a witch's cake with
disgusting jello brains,
every Halloween you became someone else
and collected bags of candy
that I let you keep for a day as a dental preventative,
the beginning of my being mean and weird.

I stood with you on the bima at your bat mitzvah,
and how we both washed up
at a new place and helped each other to dry off,
how you started to babysit, wore braces
until you got them removed,
then started to drive and work at a job
where you were making money to pay
for your own clothing, felt your heart rupture
for the first time and found out again what it meant to cry.

We drove through Death Valley to look at wildflowers
and slept in the car to hide from the wind,
and in these last several years I've watched you
wield a lacrosse cradle in your firm hand,
away to Mexico to speak in another tongue,
fall in love again, fill out college applications until you are standing
at a place where I will always be for you, but cannot follow.

Remember the things I've tried to teach you in my own weird way,
to celebrate who you are and to choose to be with people who can
celebrate with you. Work hard. Make the world
a better place. Life is filled with memories,
each a jewel on a golden strand. Wear them all well.

2007-05-21T23:36:00.001-07:00

8Soliloquy Between Closed and Open

I go to the living room
where the tv glares,
and decide whether to turn it off,

or choose a book to read,
when I hear a knock
that disrupts the surface of the door.

Here's a portal leading to the kitty litter box
then to a geranium shining
in full red bloom.

I've been dealt worse.
Shut up, girl.
Just open the door.

2007-05-18T16:10:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Speech

7. Peace Process

Person 1: You said you were going to park your car over there and you didn't. Why do we even bother having these discussions?
Person 2: I don't remember saying that. You must be confusing me with someone else.
Person 3: Anywhere you get Linux clusters you're going to see scalable distributed storage systems.
Person 1: I absolutely remember your saying that.
Person 2: But I have to dodge baseballs flying over the fence from the playground.
Person 3: You can never outsource strategy.
Person 1: That's not the point. You agreed and now you're going back on your word.
Person 2: It's something you wanted me to agree to. There's a big difference. I never really agreed.
Person 3: The Incas had no wheel, no arch and no system of writing. But they knew how to twist and braid countless miles of grasses and slender branches into ropes--sometimes as thick as a wrestler's waist.
Person 1: If you come to a table, you sit down.
Person 2: This is not my day.
Person 3: Stand-up routines hover at the brink of comedy.
Person 1: Now you're talking nonsense.
Person 2: I don't see why I can't use your driveway. It's big enough, and you only have one car. The kids always come out of the playground and leave wads of gum stuck to my windshield.
Person 3: I 'm very appreciative of all the supportive mail and comments!
Person 1: Move your parking problem somewhere else, and stop making it my problem!
Person 2: I've lived here longer than you...burned trees in my fireplace that were growing where your driveway is now.
Person 3: The Product Management role will go away entirely and make it easier to drive data directly to the developers.
Person 1. Does that give you parking rights?
Person 2: I have street cred.

(A baseball comes flying from across the street and bounces in the middle of the three persons. Person 2 catches the ball and throws it back.)

Person 1: You've got a strong arm.
Person 2: I didn't get it from lifting weights in the backyard.
Person 3: Scientists introduced a machine that can read human intentions.
Person 1: Now you're trying to screw with me.
Person 2: I'm so sick of this.
Person 3: Ich wünsche Sie schlecht.
Person 1: I think the homeowners association would like to know the facts.
Person 2: Go ahead! It says in the rules that driveways are to be shared between two cars of differing license plates and colors.
Person 3: To hell with the homeowner's association!
Person 1: What did you say?
Person 2: Who asked you?
Person 3: I want to fix up my car with tinted windows, a stereo system, and a statue of Mary on the dashboard.

(Another baseball comes flying from across the street and bounces in the middle of the three persons. Person 1 catches the ball and throws it back.)

Person 1: Who knows what they're going to throw over here next.
Person 2: That's what I've been trying to tell you! Right now it's baseballs, but you have no idea what they're capable of. Why do you think I want to park here? Believe me, it's not out of love.
Person 3: The Java posse invited him talk at the user conference scheduled for next month at the Simian Ranch.
Person 1: I've seen what they can do.
Person 2: I'm getting nervous. Yesterday the police were giving hardened criminals tours of our neighborhood. One of the cops said that this place is so ghetto, even the wire fences are rusted.
Person 3: A skeleton with techno brats under the nightstick was offed in theatrical portions with their protein guns set on glue.
Person 1: I'm not surprised.
Person 2: You wonder what this world is coming to.
Person 3: Parking labels.
Person 1: A forced settlement?
Person 2: What are you trying to say?
Person 3: Alternate side of the street parking.
Person 1: Just like that?
Person 2: Cool your bootheels in the freezer department, fella. Now what are we going to talk about?
Person 3: May I interest you in a Rolex? Old-school, I know, but damned stylish with the right laptop.

(Opens his coat to reveal many watches. Another baseball comes flying from across the street. Person 1 & 2 started chase Person 3 into the school yard.)

2007-05-13T23:29:00.001-07:00

Freedom of Speech

6. Take-out!

Person 1: (Standing in front of a microphone.) Go on. Say anything you want. This is a free country.
Person 2: (remains silent.)
Person 1: The first thing that pops into your head. It's only a rehearsal.
Person 2: (remains silent)
Person 1: Really. Just open your mouth and say anything. Anything you want.
Person 2. (opens his mouth and makes a brief sound.)
Person 1: Good. That was a start.
Person 2: (Steps in front of the microphone and taps it several times.)
Person 1: After not meeting for a year, the General Assembly will want to hear what you have to say. Go ahead. Take a practice shot.
Person 2: (Holds the microphone and makes another sound. Then steps away.)
Person 1: A sound is good. Words are vibrations. Just open your mouth and start wailing.
Person 2: I.......
Person 1: C'mon, buddy. It's almost lunch-time. I wanna get myself something to eat before the crowd rolls in.
Person 2: You....you.....you...
Person 1: You're gonna do fine. You've got alot of support. People died so you could stand behind this podium. And three of them were my buddies, all operatives. Guys with families.
Person 2: Thank you.
Person 1: They'll all be applauding, hooting their heads off, jumping up and down to see how your shit is tucked inside your pants.
Person 2: It's good to be here today.
Person 1: You're on a roll. Now show 'em who's boss!
Person 2: Ppppplease be seated.
Person 1: Oh, they'll like that. Shows courtesy, a hospitality. Nice touch. Of course we all know about that sort of thing, hospitality. We just take less time to do it. We like 'em in and out, you know what I mean? But then we bring gifts. Give out hats at the main gate. Jeans aren't as big as they once were. Manufacturing's gone to the dogs, I mean abroad.
Person 2: I see.
Person 1: Gee, I'm hungry. I wish there was some take-out around here.
Person 2: Take out?
Person 1: You go to a restaurant, put in an order and then take it out. You dig? So you don't have to sit around in some joint. It saves time. Even better, you call on the phone first, put in your order, and then arrive and pay. Take-out...Okay, so let's hear the rest of it. You know what to say.
Person 2: I've never spoken in public before.
Person 1: Oh Mary, Jesus, Joseph. Never spoken in public before? And this is the guy we put on the hot seat! Those idiots down at headquarters really need to have their heads examined. And three guys killed, tell me what for?
Person 2: You volunteered to be my coach.
Person 1: Coach, right. Let's get back to it.
Person 2: You were going to help with my speech.
Person 1: Put one word in front of the other and try not to trip. That's the secret. Exude confidence. Why do you think we have so many actors back in the States turned politicos? People love someone who's walked down the red carpet. Get your licorice stick in gear.
Person 2: Like this? (Adopts a stance.) Or this? (Adopts another stance.)
Person 1: Fine, fine. But it's how you sound that's important. You ever heard about the talkies?
Person 2: (Shakes his head.)
Person 1: I have to teach you everything. That's before the movies, they had these silent film stars batting their eyelashes. Once the talkies came in, they had to sound like something. And you've got to sound like something. You've got to convince people you're not just another American puppet. You've got to show 'em you believe in free speech!
Person 2: But what if the bride has moved inside my house without a proposal? How do I know if I can trust her?
Person 1: This is no kind of wedding shit. Deal with your personal life somewhere's else. Free speech man, that's what people have died for.
Person 2: I'm already married.
Person 1: Then what are we talking about?
Person 2: So my mouth is free to speak?
Person 1: You betcha.
Person 2: It seems, my self-enamored sir, you are the one who likes to do all the talking.
Person 1: (No response.)
Person 2: Or did you want to order a certain kind of speech? Something upbeat, sprinkled with a few jokes to ignore the obvious facts?
Person 1: Don't be ridiculous! You know what we need! A call to the opposing forces to cooperate with us on the ground. How many times must I go over this?
Person 2: Take out!

(Person 1 signals to the back of the auditorium. Two guards come and drag Person 1 away from the microphone. Another officer approaches Person 2 with a pizza box. He sits down and opens it, and begins to eat.)

2007-05-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Speech

5. Online Daters

Man: Drive?
Woman: Stretch.
Man: Walk?
Woman: Catch.
Man: Bike?
Woman: Sit.
Man: Go.
Woman: No!
Man: Yes.
Woman: Stay.
Man: Huh?
Woman: Eat?
Man: Ball.
Woman: Play.
Man: In.
Woman: Now?
Man: Right.
Woman: Rain.
Man: Stain.
Woman: Shirt.
Man: Pants.
Woman: Plaque.
Man: Huh?
Woman: Sweet.
Man: Swing.
Woman: Sue
Man: Mike.
Woman: Meant.
Man: Ann?
Woman: Lynn.
Man: Meet.
Woman: New.
Man: Tree.
Woman: Climb.
Man: Swing.
Woman: Waltz.
Man: Split.
Woman: Huh?
Man: More.
Woman: (Says nothing.)
Man: Big.
Woman: Room.
Man: Pain.
Woman: Drain?
Man: More.
Woman: Gee.
Man: Whiz.
Woman: Kid.
Man: Man.
Woman: Nice.
Man: Splice.
Woman: Two?
Man: Help.
Woman: Kelp.
Man: Sea.
Woman: Free.
Man: Gone.
Woman: Pawn?
Man: New.
Woman: Try.
Man: Work.
Woman: Time.
Man: Ahhhhhhhhhh!
Woman: Ahhhhhhhhhh?
Man: (Says nothing.)
Woman: Mouth.
Man: Word.
Woman: Last.
Man: Ahhhhhhhhhh!
Woman: Ohhhhhhhhhh!
Man: Yes.
Woman: More?
Man: Bahhhhhhhhhh!
Woman: Bahhhhhhhhhh?
Man: Bahhhhhhhhhh!
Woman: Pooooooow!
Man: Doooooooooo!
Woman: Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Man: Briiiiiiiiiinnnnng!
Woman: Loooooooooose!
Man: More.
Woman:Push.
Man: No.
Woman: Puuuuusssssh!
Man. Good.
Woman: I
Man: Love
Woman: It
Man: When
Woman: You
Man: Talk
Woman: To
Man: Me
Woman: Like
Man: Thaaaaattttt!

2007-04-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Speech

4. Lost on the Street

Man: Say, lady. The light is red.
Woman: What has that to do with me?
Man: If you like your life.
Woman: You don't know anything about my life.
Man: The light is red, and there's a lot of traffic. See those cars? How 'bout waiting for the green?
Woman: You one of those do-gooders? One of those people who stick their nosey where they shouldn't gosey? I've seen plenty like you. Tell 'em from a mile away. Sir, soup's on, but we ain't got no oyster crackers, and I'm meaning to get some at the Rite-Aide over yonder. Got me a coupon right here. (She pats her breast pocket and pulls out a toothpick.)
Man: You far-sighted or hard of hearing or what?
Woman: Can't you understand what I'm saying to you, sonny?
Man: If you want to kill yourself at the corner of Broadway and East 14th, I suppose it's as good a place as any. Sure. Why not?
Woman: I can stick this right in your eye right now. (Challenges him to a duel with the toothpick.)
Man: You got a nice toothpick there. First class.
Woman: Aarf! Aarf! And for your information, I've got 10 more where this one came from in my pocket. Dum-de-dum. I thought you were more bright.
Man: I saw a man last week who threw himself under the bus wearing his backpack. The bus driver missed him by this much. Heck, if I wanted to commit suicide, I'd just take a bunch of pills and go to bed with my magazines.
Woman: A suicide pact with your magazines? Pity the magazines and kill the editors. What's wrong, darling? You seem like such a nice young man.
Man: The light's green now.
Woman: I don't want to go.
Man: Not me either.
Woman: I'm going! Fooled ya!
Man: Actually, I'm waiting for the bus.
Woman: Going to the post office?
Man: Uh, no.
Woman: David Letterman, I'm stuck on you.
Man: Not going for the green light?
Woman: Gold. See how my nippples are like bronze medals. (Heaves out a breast from her white blouse.) I would've put them in first place myself.
Man: Ma'dam, put that thing away!

(The bus pulls up, and the driver exits for a smoke. A few passengers, including the Man, get on board. Woman looks at the green light. Boards the bus . Sits down in the empty seat next to the Man.)

Man: Back so soon?
Woman: I forgot.
Man: ...you were undressing in public.
Woman: It was a worm that slipped away.
Man: ...something about oyster crackers in your soup.
Woman: That's perfectly ridiculous.
Man: You were crossing the street to the Ride-Aide.
Woman: C'mon. You sure you're not making this up?
Man: Look lady. I have my own problems.
Woman: It was aspic.
Man: Maybe a Pop Tart? A gallon of Gatorade?
Woman: Early onset of oblong aspic.
Man: Drugstores don't carry aspic. Maybe in a specialty gourmet store, but you're not going to find one in this neighborhood. I think your best bet is to find some gelatin--stir it around with a spoon in hot water and let it dissolve.
Woman: They say I'm losing my mind.
Man: Who's they?
Woman: Dr. Drake.
Man: The TV doctor? I think I know him.
Woman: Poor thing. Are you losing your mind, too? Or have you caught mad cowboy disease, and the docs can't do anything about it for four more years?
Man: They think it's an advanced cancer. But they're not sure. The doctors want me to take another test.

(The bus driver re-enters the bus and starts the engine.)

Woman: I'm losing my keys, and the ones I have don't fit anymore.
Man: They say memory's the second thing to go.
Woman: The first?
Man: No one knows the score anymore.
Woman: Look at that guy sitting in front drinking water. Can you guess how much a bottle costs ?
Man: I've got a coupon in my pocket for water. Here, you take it.
Woman: A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow...
Man: I guess this is where I transfer. (Gets up to exit.)
Woman: (Takes the coupon.) Excuse me, blubber-nose. Do I know you?

(Man exits from the bus. Woman stuffs the coupon in her pocket and moves to the empty seat next to the man drinking a bottle of water. The driver pulls out from the stop.)

2007-04-23T23:42:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Speech

3. Conversation Under Water

Scuba 1: Fish can only hide behind each other.
Scuba 2: Glub, glub.
Scuba 3: Blub.
Scuba 1: Don't you guys have anything to say?
Scuba 2: Glub, glub.
Scuba 3: Blub.
Scuba 1: I said, (louder) fish can only hide behind each other.
Scuba 2: Oh.
Scuba 3: Oh.
Scuba 1. Don't you guys have anything else to say beside, "Glub, blub, and Oh?"
Scuba 2: Glub, glub.
Scuba 3: Blub.
Scuba 1: The Big One's gonna come and sweep us away. Oxygen tanks will sink to the bottom. Hoses will float to the top with just a red pool to mark our dive.
Scuba 2: I told you we shouldn't take him along. Now he's going to start crying in the middle of the ocean.
Scuba 3: Salt tears.
Scuba 1: In the end, we're gonna get our just desserts.
Scuba 2: Honey money!
Scuba 3. Shark alert.
Scuba 1: You see what I mean! (Starts swimming away.)
Scuba 2: No, you fool. Stay put.
Scuba 3: There's more accessories in numbers.
Scuba 1: He's touching my hand. He's gonna eat me.
Scuba 2: Just pretend like you don't see him.
Scuba 3: Stop bubbling.
Scuba 1: Gee. Thanks. That was close.
Scuba 2: The shark's gone.
Scuba 3: Don't worry. Remember your position in the food chain.
Scuba 1: That's what I'm afraid of.
Scuba 2: Dang! I don't believe we're having this conversation.
Scuba 3: We're not, really.

(A shark swims past them again. They hold hands and tread water.)

Scuba 1: The skin of my teeth.
Scuba 2: No, not me.
Scuba 3: Sort of.
Scuba 1: Look at all these shipwrecks below us! Scientists want to dig; developers build.
Scuba 2: Fish gotta fly.
Scuba 3: Make mine a job at the permit office. That's what I call steady employment.
Scuba 1: I don't know how much longer I can keep rescuing this muck from the past. Dredging up columns, buildings, cities. And what good does it do?
Scuba 2: Don't sweat it....
Scuba 3. We get paid.
Scuba 1: To spend most of our lives under water.
Scuba 2: What's his beef now?
Scuba 3: Call it diver's dipsey.
Scuba 1: Diver's dipsey?
Scuba 2: Glub, blub, blub.
Scuba 3: Glub, blub, blub.
Scuba 1: Just take up space and breathe.
Scuba 2: Natch. I'm doing what I do best.
Scuba 3: Hose to hose and belly to belly.
Scuba 1: Don't tank now! Here comes the Great White!
Scuba 2: I don't see a thing.
Scuba 3: You're hallucinating. You're crazy.
Scuba 1: No, no. Turn around and look in front of you. God, I've never seen such big teeth.
Scuba 2: Don't move!
Scuba 3: Je le n'existe pas.
Scuba 1: Philosophy won't help you now.
Scuba 2: Holy Abalone!

(The Great White Shark swallows them. Oxygen tanks sink to the bottom. Air hoses float to the top. I forgot to mention the red pool.)

Scuba 1: I think we nailed it this time.
Scuba 2: Shark emergency preparedness training.
Scuba 3: Man, that was the best. Gave me a rush.
Scuba 1: My elevator's going through the top floor.
Scuba 2: Mr. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Scuba 3: Right.
Scuba 1: Right.
Scuba 2: That was our best time.
Scuba 3: It was also the worst time.
Scuba 1: No way.
Scuba 2: Gotcha.

(They all start laughing. Barb, the Shark Woman, takes off her shark head and joins the divers for a bottle of water on the pier.)

2007-04-20T22:48:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Speech

2. Conversation On Line

Person 1: The line is longer than it was last weekend but shorter than it was two days ago.
Person 2: However, it’s much longer than the tail of a fox.
Cashier: Paper or plastic?
Person 1: I believe, my dear Madame, you’ve been standing in line for too long.
Person 2: (She has various thoughts, but none of them concrete.)
Cashier: Sunday grocery shopping at the Bowl.
Person 1: Autumn in New York.
Person 2. Are you from the east coast?
Cashier: Roll ‘em, roll ‘em.
Person 1: I guess you could say that.
Person 2: (Laughs.) I’m glad I did.
Cashier: (To someone else in line.) D’you need help out?
Person 1: I’ve got errands to run.
Person 2: Bub, maybe they’re running you.
Cashier: Paper or plastic?
Person 1: In an hour, you’ll be sorry you said that.
Person 2: In an hour, I won’t be looking at your sorry face.
Cashier: Sunday grocery shopping
Person 1: I think the line is shorter than it was last weekend, but longer than the one from here to the parking lot.
Person 2: You know, that’s the first intelligent thing I've heard. Suddenly, I'm feeling very attached to you.
Cashier: (To someone else in line.) D’you need help out?
Person 1: Thanks. We could be dating online.
Person 2: Nothing like a beautiful day.
Cashier: Roll ‘em, roll ‘em.
Person 1: Nothing can’t be like anything else.
Person 2. A beautiful day is serene.
Cashier: Like Sunday grocery shopping.
Person 1: Now we’re getting some where.
Person 2: We?
Cashier: Paper or plastic?
Person 1: Who asked you?

(Shopping carts of persons one and two move closer to the cash register. Person 1 is eye-to-eye with the credit card entry machine.)

Cashier: I'm a person you have to reckon with.
Person 1: That's to be seen.
Person 2: (from behind) One word singes another.
Cashier: Did you find everything all right?
Person 1: Oranges, apples, a baguette with seeds, vegetables in an assortment of green guises, organic and otherwise.
Person 2: Don't beget. You're holding up the line.
Cashier: I asked if he found everything all right. We're supposed to ask. If I don't, I could get the coboots from the manager.
Person 1: For example, this carrot. Springy, good color, nice carrot shape.
Person 2: I agree. The Internet totally sucks. Shop here to satisfy all your erotic needs.
Cashier: Aisle?
Person 1: (Doesn't say anything.)
Person 2: Oh, Bobbie.
Cashier: Do you two know each other?
Person 1: Paper, please.

(A youngster rides his tricycle up and down the aisles delivering newspapers. Someone in line catches a paper and starts reading it.)

Cashier: The line is getting shorter the longer we keep talking.
Person 1: Then we should keep talking.
Person 2: As long as we can agree.
Cashier: The line is getting shorter as to the number of actual people, however, their shopping carts appear more full. That's the way I see it.
Person 1: You're a force to be reckoned with.
Person 2: Sunday grocery shopping.
Cashier: Sunday grocery shopping.
Person 1: Roll 'em, roll 'em.
Person 2: D'you need help out?

(Persons 1 & 2 wheel their carts out to the parking lot together as the Cashier ducks behind the Girl Scout Coookie table for a quick smoke. The Manager watches. You scratch your head.)

2007-04-15T20:15:00.000-07:00

To Be an American Jew in the 21st Century

To be an American Jew in the 21st century
is to be offered a choice. If we decide to look aft
and watch our children drown at the mall
as the path of centuries warps
from spirit to thing, our homes collection plates
for eating fruit with the luscious bloom of preservatives,
then we forfeit the generations.

If we choose not to remain silent,
but urge daredom, even at the water's short fringe
where the sand is suffused black, there
to sketch out the face of peace,
a mouth, a nose, an ear,
repeating our desire like a song of syllables.

2007-04-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Speech

1. Conversation on the Air Plane

Aisle seat: I wish the place would take off.
Window: Cranberry juice.
Middle: (Shuts off his cellphone and music plays "I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane.")
Aisle seat: Water for me without a cup.
Window: You're curious.
Middle: Look out.

The captain steps into the aisle with a deck of cards and introduces himself. He says his wife thinks that he his handsome. Passsengers lift their heads to see what she sees in him.

Aisle seat: We're not at the bottom of the deep blue sea.
Window: Au contraire.
Middle: Everyone knows about the Wright Brothers.
Aisle seat: This airline is a money shaker.
Window: Of course it does.
Middle: How d'you know?
Aisle seat: We're sitting in our seats. We're buckled in. How come?
Window: I like reading the Journal and counting my investments.
Middle: A person has to be able to count. Case in point.
Aisle seat: (Takes a swig from a water bottle and puts it on the tray table in an upright position.)
Window: We fill our seats like a repetitive stress injury.
Middle: Hey, give me a good AA meeting any day of the week. I'll go.
Aisle seat: My husband was.
Window: Madam?
Middle: A carbuncle grows in Brooklyn. But that's not where I'm headed.
Aisle seat: Let's hope we fly right and straighten up.
Window: None of my business. But I still like Mary Blige.
Middle: And you, sir, have no predecessors?

(An airplane attendant announces that the crew is getting ready for take-off and everyone assumes a 45 degree angle.)

Aisle seat: I'm feeling sick.
Window: You can't.
Middle: You can't feel sick.
Aisle seat: But I do.
Window: There are no air bags.
Middle: They went the way of watercress in salad.
Aisle seat: Which?
Window: The airlines cut corners and made doilies. So you can't be sick. You can use the bathroom. You're in the aisle. Take advantage of your position.
Aisle seat: What are you insinuating?
Window: (Opens a laptop and starts tapping on the keys.)
Middle: Quite, quite. Appreciate the things you have in life. One day leads to others. Enormously.
Aisle seat: When did the airlines stop providing air bags? I'm going to ring the bell.
Window: You're in no position to do that.
Middle: And you?
Aisle seat: Please don't answer a question with a question. That's what my kids do.
Window: I might be a kid at heart. Or just a kid. You'll never know.
Middle: Answer the question, man.
Aisle seat: I don't understand how the air bags could have disappeared, vanished, with none of us noticing. how could something like that happen overnight without the tea boiling over? It upsets me. It sets me on edge. I suddenly feel very tense.
Window: These things happen. Not a lot of us get sick anymore and if we do, we want a health plan.
Middle: A non-smoking flight that turns over a new leaf without a single bud? Scary.

(The captain announces that the plane has just climbed to 10,000 feet, and that it is still climbing.)

Aisle seat: I asked for water.
Window: Thanks.
Middle: Someone's got to pop the question.
Aisle seat: Do I look like a Fulfillment Prophet Center?
Window: That would be my job. But I still like to paint.
Middle: Depends how you look.
Aisle seat: Fundamentally.
Window: Don't choke up on the honey peanuts now.
Middle: Consider the lack of food. Since 9/11, no one wants to eat on airplanes.
Aisle seat: Not, nottie. Before 9 /11, they still served food in the air corridors.
Window: Oh, of course in the beginning, it was about attracting the most customers. But now everything's fallen off the margin.
Middle: Make mine margarine. But really...
Aisle seat: So what you're saying is ...
Window: Exactly.
Middle: More like we all hated airplane food. But there wasn't a critical mass at air traffic control. So they kept serving boxes.
Aisle seat: Then there was the vegetarian option.
Window: Even so...
Middle: Until one day, meals were gone. We'd reached the vanishing point, and quickly did an Einstein. Did any of us care? No, we wondered why we'd hadn't thought of it sooner. Not eating made sense. It was like a national holiday without a day off.
Aisle seat: Change can be good when it comes in small bills.

(The pilot announces that he's turned off the "Fasten Your Seatbelt Sign." He asks for volunteers to help clean up the popcorn in the aisles.)

2007-03-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

The Caterpillar

I listened to you listening around the dinner table when we visited Aunt Clara whom you wrote about in your letters to your young wife, my mother-to-be, Olga, about her stuck-up sister who hardly drove to the Bronx because she and her husband, Jack, worried about their car parked outside being broken into; but we always went there and you were polite and blotted your mouth with a napkin, and listened to Aunt Clara describe her work with B'nai Brith, and Uncle Jack who liked being involved so he could get more business, and let them talk about planting trees along a boulevard in Jerusalem, making the Holy Land into a Suburbia; azaleas and rose bushes grew in their backyard, gladiolas, flaming torches.

We lived in the Bronx in the Hunts Point Section that drooped into the Bronx River where they later built an addition to the Fulton Fish Market behind P.S. 48 where I went to elementary school. The block was the street but Israel was another country. I knew about it, a place where the Jews in Europe went after World War II, hugging the edge of a boat in striped pajamas. I could take a subway to Manhattan and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I could take a bus from Pelham Bay Park and go to Orchard Beach. I walked there once from the subway station and a strange man followed me along the rushes to the beach. My mother never knew.

My cousins were much older than I and had braces that shone like the Star of Bethlehem. They wore organza dresses to their proms and had proms. There was an attic in their house with boxes that smelled of mothballs. Uncle Jack took pictures of us at every holiday with a 16 millimeter camera and showed them on a white screen in the basement that had a shuffleboard court painted on the smooth cement floor. We used “pucks” to play the game. They had a bar. During the summer Aunt Clara sometimes served us dinner in an enclosed porch where I could see the fireflies and drink orange soda from tall aluminum glasses that were purple and green. Once she gave me a book as a present.

My father worked six days a week in his shop near Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Then he worked five days a week like everyone else and on Saturday morning went to Orchard Beach to do acrobatics with his Hungarian friends. When my parents had their 25th wedding anniversary we celebrated in Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack’s basement where my parents’ friends drove and parked far from the house so Olga and Marty wouldn’t get wise to what was happening. Everyone shouted “surprise” when they came down the stairs. It was their silver anniversary. Platters braided in silver handles shone in white tissue paper.

Our apartment needed to be dusted every Saturday morning. There were cockroaches in the kitchen, babies that my mother squashed when they rushed out from beneath the dials of the stove, and sang her song about "Poor Little Fly Upon the Wall." We had linoleum, not floors. My Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack visited Israel. They went on vacations. During the winter, they flew to Florida and brought back alligator purses. To close mine, I had to press hard against the alligator's mouth. I never could make it close.

We didn't live in Port Chester where we could drive to Playland near Rye Beach and go on rides, especially The Caterpillar whose skin blew open with a hot burst of air and then covered us on the next curve in bluish silk. Israel was like Port Chester, far away from me but related. We didn't talk about Israel at family gatherings because we wanted to get along. I listened to my father listening. He didn't know how to make money with his strong hands; he was always the bottom man, holding up pyramids of acrobats. Other people depended upon him and he found a balance between what he wanted, and what he could live with.

I wanted him to have more.

2007-03-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

New Grimmerling Start

Around the start of Spring 2007, an incident occurred in Oakland, California that appeared on the front page in the newspaper for several days. The newspaper reflected the increduality of a woman’s close family and friends who witnessed her being gunned down and killed by an abusive husband in front of a church where she’d arrived as usual for Sunday morning service. But even more than the horror of watching this happen, there was a disbelief about how this had happened at all.

Day after day, the newspaper painted the portrait of a 40 year-old woman who was loving, hardworking, and professional. People recounted how she always wore sleek hairdos and dressed to impress. Newspapers reported that she was confident, assertive, and worked two jobs. As a real estate agent, she’d personally managed to acquire six homes.

A friend described her by saying, “She was like a Rolls Royce…All you needed to do was look at her and you knew that she had class.”

Her friends also remembered a deeply religious woman who carried scriptures in her purse and sometimes shared a reading if another co-worker was having a bad day. But few knew that she hid a secret. Court records showed that for two decades she'd struggled with domestic violence. There was a shocking gap between her success in the world and the reality of her home life. Following the arrest of her husband and an emotional funeral, a question rose up from the newsprint and the community—how could such a smart and driven woman remain in such an abusive relationship?

For several days I read these reports and cut out the articles, placing them on a corner of my desk until I realized that I was responding to certain similarities within my own story. Of course, my situation was much less extreme, but this woman’s death raised familiar questions. How do so many of us, particularly women, manage to function in physically and psychologically damaging relationships without getting the help we need? And how can the people who are closest to us not realize the issues that we are struggling with?

Unlike the woman in the news reports, I did not struggle with domestic violence. Instead I lived with ongoing verbal abuse for more than two decades from a man whose life was controlled by alcohol and childhood wounds that he was unable to heal.

From the outside, our relationship looked like love. But for years, I began my day by wrestling with the issue of my marriage. Should I leave or should I stay? Those thoughts preoccupied me. They drained energy and caused me to withdraw into myself. After finally reaching a point where I was unable to retreat further, I left my husband who died shortly afterward. In grieving for him and our lost lives together, I also began a journey to understand why I choose to remain in an unhealthy marriage. Why did I do it? Was it because of the children? Was it because I was afraid?

I think the crux of my issue was that for me there was no real choice. I had built a trap from materials that I didn’t even understand, materials that are not available at the supermarket or lumberyard. They were more intricate and cunning and fabricated out of my own being and needs, wrapped together with invisible threads and as such, I was unable to recognize or to speak of them to others. Or maybe it’s more accurate to speak of them as swaddling clothes, a family cocoon that shaped me into having certain expectations of what was comfortable and familiar, which I then sought to recreate in my primary relationships. I also believe that I was bequeathed certain gifts, which as an adult, allowed me to reach toward more understanding, the way the fairies at Rose Red’s birth each granted her a certain strength or curse. As she matured, those positive and negative gifts helped to cancel each other out.

I’m not sure that my life could have unfolded in any other way because how could I as a child be conscious about my own upbringing? I also think different children probably respond differently to the same circumstances, part of the nature or nurture argument, but having to do in this instance with a kind of learning that shapes how we make choices and then live with them.

Growing up, there was something deep within myself which I needed to heal. I needed to spring myself free from my own trap, but even with the intervention of counseling and drug programs, I was unable to do so. Self-help books took me walking step-by-step, but it was not where I needed to go. Clinical psychology books put me to sleep in front of the television. I was unable to recognize myself in literature from Alcoholics Anonymous. Like the woman in the newspaper story, I’d built an outside shell to keep the truth not just from others, but from myself.

I’d graduated with an MA degree in Creative Writing and worked for years as a technical writer, periodically changing jobs for reasons of advancement, but also with a nagging sensation about wanting to change something more basic. I participated as a PTA member, went on field trips, volunteered in different organizations, and served on synagogue committees. I continued to layer my inner disquiet with a layer of normalcy. But the veneer clouded. After my husband died, I wasn’t sure how to rearrange the shattered pieces of my life, or if they should be rearranged at all. I only knew I needed to recognize my own truth.

So I set out to write this book. I didn’t want it to be a story of blame. There was so much I loved about my husband who was also the father of my children. I wanted the book to be a personal story that didn’t draw upon the clinical language of dysfunctional families. To heal myself, I needed to return to that place where as a writer I'd first encountered story, which was within the fairytale. I think the idea of being asleep for a very long time and then waking up has great power, or in being assigned a seemingly insurmountable task in order to achieve greater understanding. Both stories are universal.

I also wanted to offer others who are close to those who are locked inside their own traps, a metaphorical notion of how to intervene. Most of all, I wanted to give thanks for the time that has been allotted to me to explore and understand my own journey as I now begin to wake up.

2007-03-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

Reflections on the Holocaust

The Holocaust is a word that makes me feel cold, a picture of some nuclear winter stretching into oblivion. To me it’s always sounded like the death of everything, an evil spirit with green blazing eyes ripping the earth into open mass graves. But this wasn’t a Halloween costume that appeared once a year; it was something that happened to the Jewish people, my people. The Holocaust made me understand that I was Jewish. Someone could want to kill me because I was Jewish. I had olive skin with dark hair and brown eyes and my lips were thick and I was chubby from bread dipped into the gravies of Friday night pot roast dinners. I wasn’t like the blond and blue-eyed kids who appeared on the back of cereal boxes, society’s chosen who were always smiling with white teeth.

The Holocaust was a word that was not uttered in my house, maybe for fear that its power would gather like a tornado and blast our glass windows into shards. I heard references to the Holocaust at home, never at school, in snippets of conversation regarding FDR’s awareness of the concentration camps, and the English trying to turn the Jewish refugees away from entering Israel.

I’d also met Shaddie and Irving whom my Aunt Jeanette and Uncle Harry from Brooklyn had rescued from the concentration camps. Shaddie surprised me with her blue eyes and curly blonde hair and Irving, a gold tooth that gleamed when he smiled. He worked in New York City’s jewelry district on 47th Street and wore what I thought looked like some kind of small telescope in his eye when he examined diamonds. They both spoke with thick Hungarian accents. My Aunt Jeanette told me that Shaddie had escaped the Nazis when she was 16 by hiding beneath a hay mound and holding her breath. I practiced holding my breath. One summer they came to New Hampshire where we stayed for a few weeks to escape the New York City heat, and the polio epidemic. I saw blue numbers tattooed on their forearms, uneven numbers that leaned in two directions no more than one-half inch tall. My Aunt Jeanette, an artist who twisted her voluminous hair into a knot that was held in place by long bobbie pins which she dug into her scalp, said that Shaddie and Irving were thinking of getting plastic surgery to remove them.

“Why?” I asked. I was probably around six or seven years old.

“So they won’t be reminded of what happened.”

Shaddie and Irving didn’t talk much to me, probably because I was a child. Later, they had a baby, a little girl with those same blue eyes and blonde ringlets who laughed all the time. I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust. Together with Shaddie, Irving, and their daughter, those memories faded. I became older and left New York City where I imagined that the walls of brick apartment buildings had absorbed stories of the millions who had perished.

Shortly after I arrived on the West Coast, I decided that I wanted to learn more about the Holocaust, perhaps to put down roots as a Jew who was living in a new place. I read books written by survivors, and located cinemas where I watched sepia skeletons cry out in striped pajamas before being shot to death. I kept reading until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Somewhere I understood that my very existence was a miracle because I was Jewish. I was one of survivors who lived to light candles, to dedicate myself to understanding how humanity had the capability for such terrible cruelty. But it was almost impossible for me to allow into my consciousness; it was like trying to imagine infinity or God.

In the end, the Holocaust was a pile of shoes, a mountain of discarded clothing, green fields growing on mass graves.

I was Jewish. My pores exuded centuries of prayer. I knew that wasn’t enough.

2007-03-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

The Piecework Of Being A First-Generation American Jew

“My Dear Cucie Olga,” my father, Martin Weiss pencils in a four-page letter dated August 8, 1939 when my mother is vacationing in Mountaindale , New York with her mother and my oldest sister, Elaine, who is eight months old. A quick check on the Internet tells me that Mountaindale was a vacation hamlet in the lower Catskill Mountains, which offered boating and other amenities to working class families who were seeking a respite from the intense heat of New York City ’s summers. My father writes to my mother of more incoming business at his arch supports store in the Bronx , and a sore shoulder which is keeping him from playing soccer. In another letter exactly one week later, written this time with a fountain pen in graceful broad sweeps that I recognize in my own handwriting, he gives her another business accounting and soothes my mother about a family matter involving my Aunt Clara, her sister, and Uncle Jack.

My father talks about playing billiards in my mother’s absence, soccer training at Starlight Park and a new bridge table. He reassures her that he is not losing big money at cards, something that Clara and Jack seem to have insinuated. He writes, “I wish peoples would mind their own darn business and not make the other feel miserable just so that they can hear themselves talk.” He ends by teasing, “You got some nerve not to write me anything about the baby, wait I’ll fix you for that.”

The letters, contained in a plastic bag in a green box at the bottom of my closet and my fading memories are what I have salvaged of my parents. They died within 15 months of each other when I was in my early twenties, more than 30 years ago, too young for me to have known them as an adult, and at a time in my life when I was necessarily distancing myself from them as to make my own way in the world, much as my daughter is doing now. I am the same age as my mother when she died.

Over the years I have pieced together my knowledge of my parents through random family stories although not much is available there either. The one remaining family member of both my mother and father’s generation, is my Aunt Elsie, my father’s sister who soon will be 97, and has not chosen to share much about the family history save references to her “poor mother” who kept the family together, four brothers, and herself, a girl who learned the hard lessons of survival well enough through the family’s immigration from Hungary in between World Wars to make security and accumulation of money the top priority in her life. As a result, she like her mother, Bertha, often rescued her brothers and their families financially, and wasn’t shy about reminding them of her generosity. Graciousness has never been one of her strong traits.

But this is not about Elsie or my parents or my Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack, for that matter. It’s more about my own sense of being Jewish, what I learned in my home, and how I have carried that into my own life. It’s about the piecework of being a first-generation American Jew, how I construct my identity as a 21st century American Jew living in the United States . There isn’t much available documented history at my fingertips. By the time I was born, both sets of grandparents had died. But I preserve the scraps of what has been left to me.

My father arrived in this country when he was 11 from Hungary and my sister Elaine tells me he had his bar mitzvah here. I have a copy of his steerage papers from Ellis Island . My mother’s family was from Budapest, but as the youngest, she was born in New York City. She graduated from New Utrecht High School. My father had been accepted to Stuyvesant High School, but had to leave in the second half of his senior year to help the family as his father had just died and only his older brother, Sol, was available to help support the family. At one point before my mother met my father, she worked as a milliner, affixing fruit to the brim of hats. In preparing to become his town’s next Rabbi, my father had studied midrash (interpretation of Jewish Biblical text) at an early age in Hungary, but later rejected the observant Jewish life and became active with the Hungarian-American social clubs, at that time hotbeds of radicalism. It was sometime during the Depression that he became involved with the Communist Party helping to organize the Painter’s Union. At one point he chose to leave and travel the rails, spending time in Cleveland because of a confrontation at a New York City demonstration where a police officer possibly was killed by a falling brick.

I do not speak the language of my parents’ origin. My parents discouraged our learning Hungarian, since it was their private adult language that they used to shield us from their conversations. My father knew Yiddish but spoke it infrequently with his mother when she was alive. I can recall my mother saying how Yiddish was “too Jewish,” dismissing this with a downward sweep of her hand. Likewise, we didn’t eat herring or lox at home, foods associated with Ashkenazi Jews, but they put their store on Hungarian stuffed cabbage and Chicken Paprikas, two dishes including my mother’s wonderful yeast cakes, which always gilded our kitchen table together with a pot of Maxwell’s House coffee. On the other hand, my two older sisters and I, Elaine and Nancy, were always aware of being Jewish, something that was associated with holiday celebrations and family gatherings. We were secular Jews.
There is much I don’t know and so much I’ve had to intimate.

I don’t recall my parents discussing the Holocaust except to allude to the fact that my Great Aunt Jeanette and her husband, Harry who ran a shoe store in Brooklyn, had helped some surviving relatives move to Israel and to New York City. Today I have no idea who these relatives are although Elaine, who is 10 years older than I, visited these Israeli cousins in 1963, but since then, we have mostly lost contact. Something was so terribly cut off for us. A generation died and a canyon of silence replaced their deaths. My parents didn’t want to talk about their experience. Instead, they were about the business of making a new life, burying old pains, and assimilating into a new culture.

My father’s father worked in the United States as a waiter, and it is rumored that he ran liquor during prohibition. For years, my father worked six days a week. My mother joined him at the shop after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer and then lived for five more years. It took all their strength to make a new life in this country. On his deathbed my father said, “I raised three girls and sent them all to college.” I believe he felt this was his greatest achievement. I think my mother who died a year after him, also of cancer, would’ve concurred.

The legacy that my sisters and I received from them was a strong sense about celebrating life. Whenever I hear L’chaim (to life) I associate this Jewish toast with my parents. I believe they chose life so that they and we could live and thrive. My parents expressed this in their love. They cared deeply for each other, always hugging and teasing. My father’s pet name for my mother was, “Toots,” and my mother simply called my father “Marty,” with a certain demur blush. My father thought my mother was beautiful and told her so frequently.

He gave my sisters and I a healthy sense of our bodies, an athlete who as a young man won the “all American Hungarian Goalie” prize, also an amateur gymnast and acrobat, who taught us to do shoulder stands or caught us in the air from the time we could walk. “Stand up tall,” he’d admonish me as I’d approach him to do a “birdie” where he’d catch me at my hips and swing me over his head so I could see the beach umbrellas and the ocean washing up on the shore. He’d coach me, “Here’s the rhythm. One-Two-Three-Jump!”

As a kid I didn’t think there was anything unique about acrobatics, but was aware that we always drew a crowd around our beach blanket. I assumed that this is what we did together. Occasionally, even my mother would get up from her beach chair; dust off sand from her legs, and do a shoulder stand on my father’s knees to prove that she could still point her toes better than any one in the family. “Watch!” she’d announce. Not only could she do shoulder stands, but my mother enjoyed reading poetry. Every poem that she’d memorized from her youth regardless of who had written it was by “Robert Louis Stevenson.”

My friends joined us on the beach and also watched as we paraded through our repertoire of “tricks,” being encouraged by my father to join us. It was only as an adult did I appreciate the gift he’d given us: to take joy in our bodies and to be comfortable with physicality, which I believe was unique in his generation. My parents were progressive in ways I didn’t totally understand. I knew something of my father’s radical background, but by the time I was an adolescent, year round he worked hard in his shop and then went to the beach on the weekends. As I became more politically involved during the sixties, he occasionally took the subway with me to Union Square for Labor Day rallies, waving to a few older men in the crowd whom he recognized from the old days.

While my mother strictly kept her eye on us, she also encouraged her daughters to get an education and lead independent lives, but was more conflicted when I didn’t wish to follow her own projection of what my life should become--a teacher so I could enjoy my “summers off with your children and a husband.” As an adult, I now understand that this probably was as far as she was able to see. As a child, I craved for her to have more vision.

Most of all what I appreciate is that my parents didn’t stand in the way of my developing an important friendship from the time I was in second grade throughout middle school with my friend Norma who lived several blocks away. Norma and I grew up in each other’s households. Every morning for years, I knocked on her door so we could walk to school together. We visited all the New York City museums, and once on my birthday, head down to Times Square before the area had become sanitized and saw “Midnight Cowboy” not understanding the odd squirming in the seats around us. Norma is Black and I am white and the fact that my and her parents did not stand in the way of our growing up together during a time when interracial friendships were not the norm and still are not -- was another gift which Norma and I to this day celebrate.

We attended New York City public schools and each one of our teachers was Jewish. The schools shut down during Jewish High Holydays. Albert Shanker reigned as the president of the teachers union. Through my political activity and books, I learned about a radical Jewish history of organizers in the garment industry, about the women in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the formation of the AFL-CIO, the Wobblies, the Haymarket Square Riots, the Spanish Civil War, and somewhere I heard about the Freiheit, the radical Yiddish newspaper of the left. Curse words were never used at home, at least not in English. We went to hear the Weavers at Carnegie Hall. I heard about Jewish comics like Mort Sahl and Groucho Marx who we watched on television. My parents admired Albert Einstein; Karl Marx was not mentioned in the same breath. I think my mother had become disillusioned with politics because she felt it caused dissension. Maybe she remembered when my father had to go “underground” during their early years together. Maybe the McCarthy period had put fear into their hearts as they watched “blacklisted” men unable to provide for their families. I know that somewhere there was a line for them between whatever progressive ideas they harbored and the ability to take care of their immediate family, and when one began to impinge on the other, it was time to redress priorities. Part of this may have been my mother’s overriding influence, and my father always a dutiful husband, bowed to her wishes. Always choose life. As a result, I think of them more as being conservative than radical. I don’t envision that if given a choice, either of them would’ve died for principle. I think they believed in the strength of compromise.

I also have to believe that growing up in Hungary, my father who had helped to protect the younger Jewish boys from getting beat up by the Gentiles and was known as one of the Mordecai or wolf brothers, had been shaped liked many youth of his generation by the Jewish Labor Bund founded in 1897 and which had atheistic, anti-Zionist and socialist trends. He was a forward thinking man whose radicalism became tempered by his adult experience, but I believe that he never stopped dreaming of a world where each person’s potential could be realized. I can remember as a young girl asking him if he believed in God. He seemed shocked that I would ask him such a question, swallowed hard, and said “No.” But when he was dying, he admonished us to “never forget you are Jewish.” Until the very end, he and my mother continued to help people who were low on cash, food or clothes, especially where he worked in Manhattan . Once as a little girl, I remember walking in the Bowery in New York ’s Lower East Side and my father stopping to give money to a man who’d approached him on the street.

“Why do you bother, Marty?” asked my mother when we got out of range. “He’s only going to use it for drink.”

My father shrugged. “I know,” he said. “But he’s been forced to ask.”

During the sixties, I had conversations with him about politics. “According to Marx’s class analysis you’re not a worker,” I announced.

“I’m not?”

“No,” I patiently explained. “You’re a member of the petit bourgeoisie.”

“That’s not true.” I could tell that I’d upset him. “I go to work every day.”

But I wasn’t attending a Marxist study group in Manhattan twice a week for nothing. “That’s not possible. You possess your own means of production.”

“What kind of crap are you talking?”

That was the only time I can remember him getting upset with me, except when I announced that I wasn’t going to finish college, and instead become a full-time political activist.

“Over my dead body.” We never discussed the subject again. Both he and my mother highly valued education and wanted to be sure that I got one.

So who were my parents? At this point they are mist, gone for so long and never present as I’ve walked through my own life cycles; they didn’t have the opportunity of knowing their grandchildren, never saw me age and become more tempered in my own beliefs, and I will face my own old age not having the experience of walking that path first with them. But what they did give me feels at its core essentially Jewish: a reliance on family and love to create stability in this flawed world and by choosing life to also choose to make this flawed place better because for them and for me there is no other choice.

2007-03-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

Music Box Ballerina on Low Battery

Go for jugular meaning, I said, using open source
to cut and paste myself into your picture,
but you didn't want to hold hands in Gaza.
I pointed my toe like a digital Rockette
when I heard a voice page someone
for a defibrillator.

My partner in circles, I can tell you what the media won’t say:
An army of poor schnooks casts a giant shadow in sage paint.
Brother, lest you believe in stones don’t throw them at me.
This I keep pirouetting around and around finding no room
for partial measures, interim agreements,
or road maps leading no where.

2007-02-18T21:00:00.000-08:00

For Irena Klepfisz

I plotzd on the couch with you,
the first poet I'd read with new glasses,
me, the same age as my mother
when she'd died on the plane.
At that exact moment.
I heard her apron strings snap.

Before that even happened, ancestors
had whispered about other shadows,
things a child shouldn't hear
preparing me in a way my parents
couldn't since they'd been too struck dumb
by two World Wars.

In third grade we brought shoeboxes for a project.
No one knew about my inside diorama,
arms melting near chintz-curtained windows,
wind blowing softly through the fire escape.
I never saw how closely my face resembled loss
until I felt how you'd wrestled with its dead weight.

Poet Irena Klepfisz was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 and spent the first few years of her life there until her father smuggled she and her mother to the Aryan side in 1943. Her mother had Aryan papers and worked as a maid for a Polish family while Klepfisz was placed in a Catholic orphanage. After her father died what many would term a "heroic death" on the second day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April 20, 1943, Klepfisz's mother took her out of the orphanage and they survived the duration of the war in hiding in the Polish countryside.

2007-02-16T22:40:00.000-08:00

Four Mood Swings

1.

It's just like me to plant bulbs
at the bottom of the condo's steps
in sandy soil where workmen
have been digging
for these last six months

how can we live without flowers
we need flowers not just boxy shrubs
I see stalks
rise up from between
clumps of ivy don't
remember if I planted daffodils
or hyacinth think I should
be able to tell the difference.

Each morning at the bottom
of the stairs I worship them.

2.

I've got a job
after the first few
hours at the office
post appointments in Outlook
everyone knows I'm busy

park my car in the Chicago Title Mortgage lot
get the picture?
don't pay for parking most of the time

sometimes there's a good lecture
at UC Berkeley even though
I have to pay for parking there.

3.

The speaker was from Jerusalem
a professor talking about religion
and politics
how Palestinians and Israelis
after too much of a good thing
history hate each other.

When the speaker finished,
a thin man who'd been dehydrated
to gesture,

I asked if
women in both societies
have been involved in talks
he nodded
explained
to each other, yes, they've talked
but so many Arab men are
ultra-conservative Israeli men
security-crazed
and women
across the border
protectors of life
who can, he nodded, he said,
may be the only ones
to allow that concession.

4.

No matter how good
my weekend I wonder
when it's going to include
love a memorial for Tillie Olsen
a performance at The Beat Museum
with naked pictures of Allen Ginsberg
and Gregory Corso strewn
across the walls.

Then there's Monday.

I hear more people in the United States
are addicted to Valium than to any other drug.

2007-02-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

For Yair Dalal

Driving to Monterey
where fog caresses telephone poles,
and cypress trees bend to the waves,
where Pampas grass etches
an arc above a pod of surfers,
all their wet suits glistening black,

as your music slices a hole
through the roof of my car
without acetylene torch,
a dance of sandstorms fills my head
and runs out my ears.

Sitting aloft the camel of your oud
there's a country vast before me,
unlike the U.S.
where my parents emigrated
as yours did from Iraq to Israel.
My soul drinks deep from desert wells

as light parses sky
into successive openings,
just watch as layers fall apart,
a veil shakes loose from the Shekinah
who appears like a Bedouin on the horizon,
luminous in her presence.

I want to believe there can be peace.
I want to believe that a face viewed
through the cross hairs
of a weapon
is another human being
with eyes,
nose,
tongue,
mouth,
and two ears
that listen.

2007-01-20T23:46:00.000-08:00

Hands

There are hands around me.
They keep watch and wave when there is danger.

They gesture with broken metal wristbands
and ringed fingers,

hands whose fingernails are edged
with night and creased with years,

who have shaped dreams
when dreams had ruptured wings.

These are hands who have been teachers.
So when I speak, when I ask

why G-d has sent the Jews to wander
once again in the desert,

as bombs blow up restaurants in Tel Aviv
as bombs destroy mosques on the West Bank

without a bird to nest
in the cracks of the Wailing Wall,

a pale beak tangled in barbed wire
still estranged from its own song,

as I stretch out my hand to an invisible hand
and squeeze hard.

2007-01-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

Hands Around the Lake

Today we held hands
around Lake Merritt
actually
it was more like hands around
the sound truck
while seagulls and pigeons
flapped a 500-wing salute
and no one saw the geese turd
in the grass it was that special
with Congressman now he's our Mayor
Dellums sure looks like Frederick Douglass
and Congresswoman Barbara Lee,
the only one
who had courage
to stand up in those days
when it was seating room only
for Republicans in the House.

There were striped-glove hands,
and leather-covered hands, and bare hands.

There were raising in the air
"Stop the Violence hands."

There were big hands.
There were little hands.

There was a mike in somebody's hand.
They were our hands.

Did people hear the drums around Lake Merritt
all the way back to Washington D?

I hope so.
Because we have a dream

it hasn't been asleep
it was drugged by power.

It's been in the courts
but not in the newspapers for years.

No one knew peace and justice
had camped out beneath the freeway
waiting for change.

We got up early today.
We got up early to join hands.

2007-01-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

object, event and action

With a strap of his back pack,
a man sitting on BART flagellates his arm
until it dissolves into square pixels
large enough to be his father

2007-01-05T17:53:00.000-08:00

How I Came to Write "The CellPhone Poems"-- Particularly for KPFA Listeners

You can order your CD of “The CellPhone Poems” by sending $10.00 to Lenore Weiss / 645F Canyon Oaks Drive / Oakland, CA. 94605. She will be sure to respond.

My CD of the CellPhone Poems grew from a spec of annoyance within my consciousness, which started anywhere from five to 10 years ago. This was the time that cellphones were making a transition from the occasional specialty item carried by the dot.com rich to the ubiquitous item it has become today, a rite of passage into adulthood for the young. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Picture me commuting back home to Oakland from my job located in one of the Embarcadero Office buildings. As a young mother, I bounced between BART and AC Transit buses trying to cut the commute time down to a bare minimum. You know the drill: it’s 5 o’clock, you’ve worked all day, you’re tired, and you have to pick up the kids from childcare and go home and cook dinner-- as if public transportation weren’t enough of a challenge with its ongoing delays, crowds, purchase of tickets, and the occasional fight breaking out in an adjoining seat. Cellphones began to add yet another level of stress. Who the bling bling needed them?

Well, it seemed like a lot of people did. Everywhere I went, people had them. It was bad enough that my own day had been stressful, but suddenly I had to listen to someone else’s problems. Then there were calls to a girlfriend, or to the ticket agent for an upcoming concert, restaurant reservations, and all the business that decent people, I thought, should keep to themselves. Suddenly, the whole world was spilling out in places that had been normally reserved for relative quiet, reading a newspaper or a library book during commute time. It got worse. There were updates about a cancer diagnosis, a mental breakdown, and lovers splitting up with each other in real time while one of them waited in line at the bank.

For a long time, I attempted to turn a deaf ear. Of course, it was hopeless. Part of this had to do with my coming to terms with my new role. Now I was invited to serve as a witness to people’s lives, to take sides with feuding lovers, or to approve about food choices made in the supermarket aisle.

Somewhere in the quiet of my own home, I had an ah-ha (!) moment. I realized that I was living in a new age whereby the definitions between public and private space had dramatically shifted, and the previous boundaries regarding what was allowed in those spaces, no longer held sway. Thus, was born the CellPhone Poems. I approached a composer friend of mine, Paul Kirk, to work with me on the project.

After completing that work, I now realize that the world has been thrust into our laps in a way that it never was before. I feel that we have a decision to make regarding how we handle that responsibility. Do we resist listening, or do we choose to participate?

Currently, I have been invited by Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, a school that teaches young people hip-hop dancing, martial arts, and leadership skills, to work with a group of young people to develop their own cellphone poems. And so it continues…

You can order your CD of “The CellPhone Poems” by sending $10.00 to Lenore Weiss / 645F Canyon Oaks Drive / Oakland, CA. 94605. She will be sure to respond.

2007-01-01T18:24:00.000-08:00

Poem at Half-Time

Near the trailer park and graveyard markers
blaring above each alabaster stone
across the street from Albertson's
with cars carrying the day's appointment of diapers,

milk, and nonfilter cigarettes,
I'd said my good-byes, stopped at a red light
before getting on Hwy. 101 to Oakland,
and there they were

people in black robes, hands
with square fingernails edged in night
and for two straight seconds I didn't understand
how they'd escaped

into my living daylight
dancing around the parking lot,
nodding as though they were bobble heads
who'd grabbed the word Yes by the throat.

2006-12-29T19:31:00.000-08:00

A Poem in Two Mood Swings

1.

I am the daughter who came after
those who went to heaven
through the opening of a chimney at Auschwitz
or the lucky ones who sailed through a harbor
waving the torch of their hearts
at a statue
never mentioning
the two grandparents who remained

as life skipped a generation
and gravel filled my mouth
with uncomfortable silence.

I pick out stones now
and place them on graves
no, throw them at the pits of Hell.
Here's one, two, three, four...

a volley of stones
transporting me back
to when I ran
in fields
with my cousin, my sister, my uncle
looking for any hole
where we could bury ourselves
and never come out

2.

My parents spoke Hungarian,
not Yiddish.

They ate stuffed cabbage,
not lox and bagels.

On Yom Kippur
my sister's friends
came over the house
to stuff themselves.

We were a refuge
from being Jewish.

All my teachers
in the New York City school system
were Jewish.

When my father was growing up in Hungary
he use to protect the smaller boys
from getting beat up.

My father was a Communist
who sent my older sister out
to buy the Daily World.

Politics made people argue
or disappear underground.
Everything was hidden.

When my father was dying from cancer
my mother didn't want him to know what was wrong
because she was afraid he wouldn't fight it.

On his deathbed
he told us to never forget we were Jewish.

2006-11-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

When Bush Came to Shove
I was listening
to election results
on the couch
the cat's tail is tick-tocking
against the backdrop of my hair
a day after we'd turned tables
sent the bluecoats
back to the White House,
two days since I'd come down with a cold
stretched out beneath a fleece throw

smell car exhaust fumes drivers
tuned to their own 6 o'clock evening news
the kettle's on the stove
other life forms
wait 200 billion years
to get the picture.
I'm in the kitchen.
Tsk. Tsk. The past is not over yet.

2006-10-30T22:33:00.000-08:00

Introduction
I stand before you,
a woman with my roots exposed
to their silver baseline.

2006-10-29T19:38:00.000-08:00

Anselm Kiefer

show at MOMA SF

"All stories of heaven begin on earth"

"Each of these buildings has a history created by its own fiction...That fiction is part of the debris of human history."

"Our stories always begin in the forest."

Robert Fludd
wheat paste
gelatin print
Ha-Ha Club
Subduction zone
I stand here with my roots exposed before you

2006-10-28T22:40:00.000-07:00

Mayor-Elect Ron Dellums speaking at Oakland Task Rorce Meeting October 25

"In order to achieve consensus, there has to be a dialogue."

"I have an unwavering belief in the principle of democracy."

"This is not about Ron Dellums, but it's about this community coming together."

2006-09-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

Reincarnated Lenny Bruce Speaks of The Jewish Problem

“… Israel calls in public speeches and schoolbooks the Arab citizens of Israel a demographic nightmare and the enemy from within. As for the Palestinian refugees living under occupation, they are defined in Israeli History schoolbooks as a 'problem to be solved’. Not long ago the Jews were a problem to be solved.”

--Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Lecturer in Language Education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem anda member of Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved Families for Peace.

Before there was a Jewish Problem
there was a Jewish Question.
Maybe they were the same thing.

No one wanted the Jews to live in their country.
People hated them.
Why? Because they were different.

They wore yarmulkes,
striped shawls, and smelled of fish.
Fishy! Yech!

They spoke a different language,
and lived in filthy ghettos.

After years of being squashed
until their blood coated stones
along every road leading somewhere,

but not to the pub except
for the occasional schnopps on Shabbos,
no, they didn't traipse to the beer garden

where the National Socialists,
or Nazis as they later came to be called,
decided to solve the problem.

The Jewish Problem, was not as so many had said,
religious. It was racial, which gave the Nazis
a legal basis for everything. This was so brilliant.

Jews were now excluded from six branches of industry.
Properties were de-Jewdified.

Jews were prohibited from attending concerts, films, and theaters.
Jews were prohibited from attending German schools.
Jews were prohibited from bearing firearms.

You know what’s next.
We’ve all heard about the six million
who died in the ovens, and how the world

didn't want to know about anything
until it was too late, which is about when
the Jewish Question became the Jewish Problem.

Where do you stick the Jews
who survived the Holocaust?
You out there in the audience.
Where the fuck d'you put them?

There was a search party.
Everyone looked around.
Uganda was too far from where the Jews wanted to be.

The Jews became a People for a Land
for a Land without a People.
But that was a slogan, not the reality,

because it seems
there were many people
who lived in Palestine, the Palestinians,

primitive people, said the army men,
wild beasts with schmutzy teeth.

Fast forward to today when Israelis have a problem
with people who retain keys to houses
that are now occupied by families who light candles
and invite the Shekinah of peace into their homes on Shabbos,

while during the week Israeli soldiers order Palestinian women to strip in front
of their children for security reasons, and as jailers, torture and lock up young men without decent food or clean mattresses who run checkpoints that force old men to wait in line for hours without water.

Jewish life is filled with irony,
which some of you out there call a Jewish sense of humor,
but this is not funny.

And how can I, Lenny Bruce, who in my day
talked a lot of unfunny stuff,
not cry out as a Jew,
how can I not say that justice and mercy belong to us all?

2006-09-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

Sh’mah Yisra’el

Hear O Israel,
from a daughter
who can only read the alliterative text of Hebrew
with glasses that need a new prescription
and a mouth that gets filled with saliva
from a tongue that knows not how to deliver
two-dotted vowels—

Here O Israel
from your daughter
who was born in the same year
you were created,
after World War II had folded
its charred arms around
the only hope that was left—
Israel, the land of milk and honey—

You were the voice of my parent’s generation
who planted trees along new boulevards
and carried ashes sewed
inside the hem of their clothing
to cry along the wadis of your limestone beds,
hugging Exodus by Leon Uris.

You gave them a bright torch
to carry every high holyday
for all their days
raising money and donating shoes—

a reason to drink tea
in a glass mug with a lump of sugar
coating their tongues with sweetness
as they stamped letters,
made phone calls,
argued with each other in the accent
of wherever they’d come from.

Israel, my heart is heavy
with the dreams of my parents,
this second generation daughter
who wanted a lasting peace
to fill the crevices
of your Wailing Wall
with a light of its own creation.

Instead, only war and massacre,
dairy farms and steel plants
laid to rubble.
Twisted iron stabbing the earth.
And the sighs of the six million
each time another official
invokes their name.

2006-09-21T22:16:00.000-07:00

For Destiny Arts
There weren’t always cell phones.
People went home to make a call
or stopped in a telephone booth
to put in the right change.

People called long distance
or person-to-person
asked to reverse the charges
or to make a collect call

which meant whoever picked up the phone
had to foot the bill.
There weren’t always cell phones.
There were longer silences.

People rolled down car windows
and waited until they got
behind closed doors, which is not to say
those were the good old days.

They were just different,
with longer pauses.
Now we keep talking,
text messaging, I aMMing each other

we can hear each other think
we can hear each other think

Exercises:

Think of all the places you use your cellphone. Where are you?

I'm talking on my cellphone in the bus
I'm talking on my cellphone at the mall
I'm talking on my cellphone in the bathroom
I'm talking on my cellphone in the hospital

Think of all the places you hear other people talk on their cellphones. Where are they? Where are you?

I hear you talk on your cellphone when I'm at school
I hear you talk on your cellphone when I'm in the supermarket
I hear you talk on your cellphone when I'm waiting on line to buy lunch

Group work:
Team up. Pick one of the above scenarios and develop a conversation.

Individual work:
1. 9/11. You're in the Towers. You're calling who? What do you say?

2. You're on the street. There's an accident. Who do you call? What do you say?

3. You're an astronaut. There's another life form outside the spaceship. It's telepathic. You don't need a cellphone. What do you say?

4. Make up your own.

5. You're sending a text message to your boy/girl friend who just found out that a best friend was killed. What do you say?

2006-09-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Oakland is a Holy City
At the orientation this evening, the first of several for 40 transition task forces with a total of approximately 800 members, who are meeting over the course of the next six weeks to give Mayor-elect Ron Dellums five recommendations. A process "to bring the brilliance of the people of Oakland together," according to Kitty Epstein, a representative from Dellums' staff. She said this is "historic and unprecendented" in the way this is happening. I'm on the task force for Transparency and Ethics in Government.

2006-09-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

First Online Date, Background Check

So by no agenda do you mean you don’t care any number of California figs whether a said page turner wears poppy or propane blue nailpolish or doesn’t have hands altogether, but manages to turn turn turn through a suction device strapped to the top of his or her forehead, which leads to another question, do you have an agenda regarding the gender of the person who might join you for a latte on some semi-lit afternoon when the light filters in slanted Greek pillars across the city? Just wondering.

Or by no agenda do you imply that somebody somewhere did have an agenda and wrapped you hard around his or her bullet points until you started to bleed so badly you needed to tie a tourniquet along any number of pressure points to staunch what was rising up inside you like a revulsion washing away what some people might describe as a tender feeling? Just curious.

Or by no agenda do you mean you are open to the moment, to fill a container of whatever two people can become together and not have any preconceived notions regarding whether a container should come from Neiman Marcus, or Ross, or fed by streaming video? Because I think everyone has some kind of agenda even if it's a non-agenda except of course for moments when we're inside our own puzzle. A background is the hardest part.

Like times when I didn't know what or how to say something without an agenda, found hidden ones tucked inside other pant cuffs, pockets, velcro fasteners or zippers that were missing teeth and plain broken. Now my agenda has turned into a to-do list. I do, I do, said the Cowardly Lion. Keep going. Take a bus to North Beach. Walk home without an umbrella. Drive five hours to Disneyland just to give Mickey Mouse a hand.

2006-07-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

In the Shadow of the Middle East
A Spare the Air Day
when public transit
offered free rides
on the house
the ferry fuller
than it’d ever been
caps turned backward
orange hair braids
digital cameras snapping
waves mixed with exhaust
on the hottest day of the year
so packed to the gills
we tipped backward and water-skied,
but once we passed
beneath the shadow of the bridge,
there we were
on the other side
of something we didn't know yet.

2006-06-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

Release Party
You'd already left for Spanish immersion class,
I had my own baptism to take care of,
so I showered, but wanted

to lie on a bed of frozen raspberries,
each a clit pressed against my back.
Let's say I was motivated.

I walked outside the condo
with a bucket to go picking
when I heard the new neighbor say,

"You've got alot of duende
being out at night,"
and it wasn't even night,

tech vendors were on the march,
schools were wide open
everyone was driving carefully,

but from a car radio came a remix
of the Kurds and Rockefellers
pounding harder at every corner,

when a voice announced,
"Get the defibrillator." And I did.
And it was a good thing, too,

it brought me back
to my galvinized bucket,
filled with longing.

2006-05-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

Movie Review of X-Men: The Last Stand
A friend and I had tired of viewing Netflix DVDs on our 13-inch monitors and thought that over the Memorial Day Weekend, we'd treat ourselves to a visit to the big screen. The next question was what to see on the big screen. Oddly, it turned out that we were individuals who shunned fads. Both of us had neglected to read the Da Vinci Code and I myself had to admit to only knowing what "Sex in the City" was all about until several years after its debut on HBO when I was able to rent all the DVDs from Netflix and watch the smashing conclusion with Mikhail Baryshnikov, which is to say that we didn't want to see the Da Vinci Code.

I, instead, suggested that we see the third X-Men movie, having read positive reviews with intimations of a drug that had been found to cure the mutants of their weirdness. It offered the possibility of an intelligent movie that was fun at the same time: moral choices with character development and lots of computer animation.

I was game and so was my buddy. So despite the fact that I had confused the movie times with another theater, we found ourselves in front of the big screen, having missed all but one of the noisy trailers and quickly sitting down for a recap of the last two X-Men movies as Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) recruit young mutants from the sofa of their parents' living rooms. (This might be, I thought, a science fiction version of Harry Potter.)

Quick Disclosure: I am unfamiliar with the two other X-Men movies preceding this one, and score low on series trivia tests.

The movie was overall entertaining. Storm (Halle Berry) knows how to roll her eyes into her head until the pupils disappear better than anyone I know, if you go in for that sort of thing. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is hunky enough, but didn't have the real pathos of Lon Chaney's Wolf Man. (Is it wrong to ask for depth?) Mostly, as the movie ensued, I bemoaned all the lost opportunities to grapple with some tantilizing issues. For instance:

Why does Magneto flash his concentration camp tattooed numbers on his arm when some young mutant upstart insists on seeing his mark? (Forgive me if this is explained in previous episodes.) What I really want to know is how his experience has turned him into a sort of warped genius, in some ways not unlike parents who survived the Holocaust not ever discussing the pain of that experience with their offspring, but succeed in fucking them up nevertheless.

Why is the choice to take the drug and lose mutant individuality not a bigger moral question?

Only Rogue (Anna Paquin) grapples with the issue, if only for a few moments of screen time. Her special powers don't allow for physical contact with other human beings and she wants to get close, really close to the Iceman (Shawn Ashmore). But what about other more philosophical issues that could've been explored? Sure, a few of the characters proclaim, "There's nothing wrong with us," and in the end, regular hum-drum humanity gets to co-exist with the mutant population who now have a representative in the White House in the character of Hank "Beast" McCoy.

But what about examining parallels with the thousands of people in the United States who rely on mood-enhancing drugs to control their neurosis, which is not a judgment call, only a question. At what point does the quality of our lives become so terrible that we surrender ourselves to the cure or to the pill, or to an operation? The choice for HIV and AIDS patients is surely about life or death. But what about cases that are more subtle? What if someone doesn't want to be chosen by their special gift and grows tired of its demands?

Then I was confused by the internal "them" and "us" scenario -- the older more schooled X-Men who've benefitted by Professor Xavier's tutoring on how to use their gifts (don't let the power control you, something many of us learn in driving school), versus the younger tattooed and pierced hordes who team up with Magneto to kidnap and kill a bald boy who's hidden in a drug company's corporate headquarters on Alcatraz Island. His DNA is the source of this miracle drug.

As a group, Magneto's crew are a lot less sophisticated then Xavier's, who've had the benefits of a sort of ivy league education in the mansion. So what kind of comment is this upon public education as school becomes increasingly focused on passing tests and less upon critical thinking? Is our educational system producing unruly children who consider violence a viable solution?

A few other questions: Does it really take blowing up and moving the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz to accomodate one of the punky mutants, the Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), who's never learned how to swim? You'd think that an intelligent older guy like Magneto could come up with a more energy-saving solution.

Then what about the human population at large? How do they feel about the mutants merging back undetected into their ranks? Neighborhood populations always seem to be uneasy when child predators are paroled back into their communities.

And what about the nature of life once a grand mutant like Magneto, now stung with the drug's needle, is condemned to sit at a park bench, trying to stir the pieces of a chess board with his outstretched finger? How does it feel to be ordinary and to sit around remembering your old glory days?

I applauded for a moment where there's a scene with Patrick Stewart on the mansion's lawn, discussing the nature of violence. But it comes and goes too quickly.

I know. I'm too serious, and the film is based on a comic book. However, why not think graphic novel? I bemoan lost opportunities to explore provocative questions that the script raises. I refuse the notion that a sci-fi thriller can't do that. (What about 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick?)

Maybe I'm one of those mutants who expects more.

2006-05-21T23:48:00.000-07:00

Houdini's Cousin in the Storage Unit
She was moving from a 10 by 15 into a 5 by 9, downsizing whatever she'd packed into plastic boxes with seals that popped when I lifted them like they were filled with effervescent secrets, household remains, until she'd decided to make the pile smaller so she gave stuff away -- not the piano, it was her husband's, he played -- to people who kept driving up in cars until the pile was small enough to move to the second floor where we stacked her stuff, me and PeeWee who had a stroke six months before and Freddy who bought PeeWee $15.00 worth of gas that morning so he could get there. She said how I was a magician for getting her shit into one space, and I said that's why alot of people called me Houdini and I wondered how he did those tricks, and she said she knew. Really, I said. Really, she said, because she was Houdini's cousin her father use to tell her it was all muscle control, he'd expand his chest when they chained him up, and after they dropped him into the river, he'd let out his breath and escape from the slack.

2006-05-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

String Theory
A woman walks down a path in early spring,
a firetrail that runs along a creek,
bloated with the excess of winter.

But today golden poppies are arched to the sun,
as the woman spots a brown snake, new in length,
stretched across the road, its tongue

begging for hand-outs from every rustle.
She bends down to see the solicitor.
But seeing happens so quickly,

even if with her own two eyes,
as dragonflies piggyback around her,
she touches the string of snake with an outstretched finger.

Her act is an instinctual thing,
while observing is an acquired art.
Never mind. She's in the thick of it now,

follows the snake through water, to the other side
of the water's bank, until she turns into snake,
and twining around him, even his cold blood feels warm.

2006-05-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

Un Dia Sin Imigrantes
It happened in Spanish.
My father stood behind a kid wearing a T-shirt
printed with "Hecho in Mexico," and waved to me
from across the street pointing to a digital
camera like he knew how to use one.

I haven't seen him in years.
He didn't drive either, said he didn't have time
to learn, worked six days a week supporting three girls.
My mother was the one who drove.

She was there also, her arm chain-linked through his
like in the olden days when they were still alive,
watching from the stand as everyone marched up 14th Avenue--
grandparents, uncles, Moms, Dads,
kids stuffed inside strollers and backpacks.

They waved harder now,
began to chant "Si Se Puede" in a broken language,
and the sound of their letters
stamped through the air.

2006-04-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

Lost and Found Department
It's like I mean
I just didn't know

You know everyone tells you
you don't know
you don't know
you don't know
And the thing is you don't know
so you don't even know that you don't know
you know what I mean?

It's like-

I don't know.

2006-03-25T22:37:00.000-08:00

University Art Museum Berkeley
I enter the bathroom stall
of the museum

leave the door open
paint a Jackson Pollack

drip color everywhere
a work of art

in white porcelain
until gold flecks splinter sky

the energy of one man
bursting into dendrites

no one sees me pee
and I am a forest

2006-03-11T23:35:00.000-08:00

Dressed as a Wedding Guest
Riding on a bus, dressed in a black suit
with the dust of his travels
making a path across his buttoned jacket,
hair neatly trimmed into a gable
that points to a nose
that speaks nothing to his mouth,
but then,
a nose is for smelling danger.

The wedding guest feels
for a loose cord braided
beneath his jacket,
a loose cord that leads back
to where he came from,
a loose cord that is simple,
unlike his life that has no words,
so he waits

to deliver his gift
to the assembled party
riding with him on the bus,
heads pressed to glass,
when the man who is dressed
as a wedding guest,
pulls the cord,
and marries them all to the same thing.

2006-02-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

The Collapse
so buried inside sadness
dig to remove rubble
see who walks out

daffodils say
hide in the pampas grass
with the sparrows.

2006-01-28T15:01:00.000-08:00

Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island
Man, woman, and infant sit on a cliff with their backs
to stone statues. They pray for good luck
to enter through the wind, to hear

a yes spoken beneath the toromiro tree,
the last one standing since the giant palm
was tricked into falling all over itself.

He tells a story of how birds drop seeds,
and trees push back. The man begins to work.
She fastens the infant to her breast.

Frigates and storm petrels
serve melting sun to melting water.

The infant sucks.
The birds fly away.
Nothing enters through the wind.
The stone statues turn into more than stone.

2006-01-23T22:01:00.000-08:00

Horatio at Graveside
It falls to me, the last request of Hamlet,
Not so much lord as friend of my heart
Who was able to plot the way my eye followed a sparrow

Landing upon a tree for a moment’s respite,
While I saw how the wave in him crested
Into the sun’s shimmer on water,

Our minds were of such close hemispheres,
We could spot each other inside the juggle
of life’s changing fortune—

And so he asked me to serve as witness,
To speak of events even as my own bower
Of grief threatened to hurl me beyond hearing,

Knowing there was no way Hamlet could live,
Even as I throw rocks upon his grave,
A bedcover to warm his body,

Which is why I came from such a long way off,
Because I loved him more than any other man
Who stood on this earth and looked at the sun.

2006-01-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

I Have My Green Card Now
don't tell me how a people string together thoughts on a beach of content keeps washing up shells and seaweed and dead things they stay for easy pickings in sentence structures the caw caw caw of slang banging into rocks

when I lived in Hungarian my mother tongue more of a step-mother who was married to someone I never knew there were hundreds of words for horses their smell, color, earth at a certain time of day or after a rain I knew where my tongue wrapped around shaped language with loam and light but now I've hit everything the ground running with English how many times in one year malls coupons ATM's express accounts can one person open because I've loaned my soul to the devil and I'm getting no interest

2006-01-10T17:38:00.001-08:00

CellPhone Poem 17: Extra Minutes
Business centers confront
each continental shelf,
each wave of water
from my cubicle
to your global positioning device,
a world drawing in upon itself
tighter under pressure
as we turn
into carbon diamonds carbon
diamonds wearing headphones
speaking with instant translators
embedded on the edge of a bluetooth
look Mom no cavities
no more countries
everything a borderland
beneath the freeway
bordering on something else
on something else on something else
where time is a rerun
in a new slot game
and we apple and orange
through the bling bling of it all.

2006-01-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

Cannibal Memories
Where will I go to talk to you now that the house has closed and I no longer have the keys or can use the excuse of checking the mail to see if the honeysuckle has started to bloom or if daises are starting to grow after everything front and back yard was leveled?

Where will I go to speak your name now that there’s no place after you died in the front room of the house with glasses of soda, tissues, and a standing orchestra of pill bottles that did not cheer those itinerant trips between your room and the bathroom, your room and the kitchen?

How can I locate you in my cannibal memories and in the things I’ve carried to my next landing: candles, bells, necklaces, a file cabinet, me?

2006-01-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

TV Flash Fiction
The size of a 27" television set,
her life was compact, she heard voices

movie stars and their consorts
who stopped for a quick show of teeth

and laughter before taking their places
in the first row of the Grand Ballroom,

where she went remote,
reached for a cigarette, a glass of swollen ice.

2005-12-17T00:11:00.000-08:00

Contrary to Common Belief
Good guys don't always wear white
sometimes they shine leopard green
orange red even yellow

if you want to know a man
watch the way sinewy night
curves next to his sorry spine

why a man fights to wear black
along a taut stretch of hide
how he enters your brown eyes.

2005-12-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

CellPhone Poem 16: More Breaking Up
burned sage smudge sticks in the house
drank vodka & pomegranate juice
spliced my heart saw it beating
there was no getting past you
this number will always have static

2005-12-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

CellPhone Poem 15: Waiting for the Call
I'm waiting to get the call in the fumes of the Caldicott Tunnel
or along the MacArthur Maze where I'm queued up to pay the bridge toll,
in traffic listening to the radio CD player boom box in the car next to me,
cellphone ringing waiting for speakers to announce the doctor's diagnosis
if I need surgery got the job when I'll be moving need to pick her up
and what the hell I'm supposed to do now I have nothing
to remind me should've saved your messages
water under the bridge going over in a bucket
everything freezes until coffee spills. My head is hot.

Today I'm sitting in the back of the 72R bus
with a woman talking to her mother,
I know because she keeps saying, "Mom, I love you, Mom.
You have to believe in God and ask for help."
The good daughter of San Pablo with blonde highlights
gets off where I do, but jumps on another bus
spreading her message. The cellphone in my purse is ringing.
My mother died years ago.

2005-11-28T22:12:00.000-08:00

The News
it always takes longer than I want for anything to happen in direct proportion to the depth of my longing, which is not to suggest that if I stop insisting the world cough up what it owes me right now, it will happen; au contraire, the forces of watchfulness will be on to my game and make me wait, teach the lesson of submission to the one thing I care about, and just when I think I’ve finally got whatever it is I’ve been looking for, it turns into a squall of hummingbirds, disappears down the red throat of morning.

Braking News
while big cranes slip beneath the Bay Bridge, we two play hooky, out-of-practice after I don’t know how long of hurling Homeric epithets at each other, my green-eyed Econoline van, wearing sweats and peeling down quickly to basic moves that holler back to an earlier time when you weren’t taking pills to keep your heart going, and when I had a full set of lungs; I pedal with my tongue, you inside my mouth; we speed down the hill, brake for hesitation, come crashing into each other. On one side of the bed as you stretch out, I think you must be a cold black star, collapse, and leave me alone.

Bad News
and for years, I sat around believing you’d take action, that everything was going to change, but the exercise machine remained a clothes hanger, the goggles never made it to the pool, and I never made it to your bed, only the breathing machine that slept with you regulating each sigh while you waited for the father you never knew to come home.

Good News
there are always drugs: Lanoxin, Lasix, Carvedilol, Tolinase; your every day over-the-counter Tylenol Extra-Strength, Tylenol Migraine, Tylenol for Right Brain, Aspirin to take every day for the rest of your life, codeine, morphine if you're on a medical plan or have a good dentist, in-your-eye designer shots of Botox, pain-killers, depressants, uppers, downers, antihistamines, glazed maple donuts at two in the morning.

News Update
finished swearing up and down a Targét parking lot, phoned my friends and authored messages to an old e-mail list announcing how I’d decided to give up the whole damn thing forever, forget about whatever “it” happened to be at that particular moment, except whatever “it” was, bugged me to the height of my crotch; so I take a ride to the Wine Country. Stay in Calistoga where I soak in a heated pool, listen to frogs all night practice their croaking, and I realize they’re speaking my language (!) and I get everything they say, like love me, love me.

2005-11-28T21:43:00.000-08:00

Parking Karma
There's a single woman who reaches into her pocket to retrieve car keys, her head lifted slightly, the angle of her chin indicates how far down the street her car is parked. Sometimes I target a car on this side of the fire hydrant near the lamppost; sometimes in front of the bakery. Today the car is outside the pizza store. I see it.

Before she slides into the front seat, she checks the meter, just to know how closely she missed getting a ticket. The thrill. She presses the car remote and pops open the trunk, places two shopping bags next to each other. Straightens a box of tools in the back.

All this time, my right directional signal flashes red stakes out the spot, warning off all challengers who idle by and drive off. It must be my RayBans. I focus again on the owner who turns the key in her ignition and buckles her seat belt. The car hasn't been washed in weeks. A gray streak cascades down the trunk. By now, she knows I'm waiting as she continues her ritual, turns on the radio and adjusts the rear-view directional mirror.

Finally, there's nothing left to do and she pulls away. Now's my chance. I pull in. I'm parked outside the pizza store. A boy standing in the doorway drips a string of cheese from his slice. I think about getting a slice, too. I look at the clock. I need to get to my group.I've been a member for one month. We meet every weekend.

I'm working to extend my parking karma range from two blocks to three.There's someone in my group who's been coming to meetings for a whole year. He can do it from six blocks off.

2005-11-23T22:48:00.000-08:00

CellPhone Poem 14: Breaking Up Where XBox Marks the Spot
The day after Thanksgiving
I'll walk across the Great Mall,

and use a credit card with a revolving account
that turns pennies into gold and gold into health plans,

taller than I ever thought possible, slinky
with thighs like Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat,

living at the edge of a culvert
where security systems cook dinner for the homeless,

a member of my own Special Forces unit,
carrying a knapsack of turkey bones

wrapped in tinfoil, the power
to grow apartments from pizza crusts,

feeding a voice inside my computer
so I sound like Stephen Hawking on a good day

standing at midnight in the Garden of Eden
wondering what God was doing before he broke out the world.

2005-11-15T15:10:00.000-08:00

Cellphone Poem 13: Cancel Service
I robbed banks for two years straight
they never caught me except on camera.

I dressed up whenever I did a job,
the kids were in San Francisco with their grandmother.

Once they started school I'd hoped there'd be more time
for me to pull off the Big One,

wearing heels, a sheath, maybe a skirt.
I was working in the public sector so I had to dress the part,

because my kids needed things and I needed them,
so there you have it. Sure, I have skills.

I could've checked off a bunch of boxes,
but that'd be like sticking a pin up my pinata

on mornings when I walked to the window,
I was the leading lady instead of him giving me orders,

my husband with no hands in his heart,
a man who never got me except between a rock,

and a bed. After I went solo,
he starts calling on the cellphone

saying how much he loves me.
I didn't need to hear that. I was Number One,

but his calls turned me into the CellPhone Bandit,
and then all the law wanted a piece.

I'd become too good at my own game,
robbed more banks than I even had birthdays.

2005-11-03T10:54:00.000-08:00

Listening to a Funeral Oration for Rosa Parks
at the Gas Pump
And late enough for me to pull into the station
without queueing up, ignition off, radio on.
I was a pearl onion caught between the big toes of a gas pump,

my week'd been crazy with nothing going on,
a daughter who'd just passed her driving test,
now she's got a California license,

and I'm coming back from the DMV, running again,
slide my ATM card through the slot,
hear the Michigan Governor eulogize Citizen Rosa,

who sat down so that we could stand up,
when it seemed everyone got out of their cars,
filling up on all those free words.

2005-10-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

Seinfeld: The Broken Glass Episode
My elbow did it:
pushed a glass over the edge to the kitchen floor.
Suddenly,

the glass had become two-dimensional and garbage,
while I had become a person with one less glass,
but that's what happens when an elbow

starts making its own pointed remarks
(elbows are you listening?).
It was an asymmetry of the universe,

I was one glass down,
and something had to give.
I started sweeping.

I kept sweeping,
started to dream about pulling glass
from the bottom of my feet, saw blood streaming

chandeliers on the ground
crystals to light my way,
which is how I learned to walk on broken glass.

2005-10-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

Cingular Wireless: Raise Your Bar From the Basement
Doesn’t getting a promised rebate also constitute being able to use the rebate? I always thought so, but it seems that telephone companies, CingularWireless in particular, has found additional ways to squeeze more money from the consumers' pocket.

Here’s my story. I renewed my cellphone contract, formerly held with AT&T, which was recently bought out by Cingular. This simple act of renewal was its own nightmare, since for some legal or other convoluted reason, even though Cingular bought out AT&T, their data records and customer base aren’t a shared entity. But I digress.

After weeks of phone calling and speaking to innumerable cheery young customer service representatives reading from various scripts, I finally was able to order my phone, which came with a promised $50.00 rebate. However, when the phone itself arrived, it contained no rebate coupon so I needed to spend additional time on the phone. It turned out that this was a Cingular phone, but it had become tainted by my previous association with AT&T, so the coupon had to be ordered through a different path.

Cingular received my rebate request on 8/15/2005, processed the request on 9/07/2005 and I received the card in early November. I know because I kept the paperwork. It took about three months to get the rebate, but as a trained consumer, I was glad when it came. However, this was not a check, but a card, similar to a credit card. I used it to pay for a meal. But it was later rejected at most other places like supermarkets.

I got on the phone again. Through Cingular’s labyrinthine customer service center, I was able to find out that the balance on my card was $15.76. A cheery customer service representative advised me that I could use the remainder of the balance by “splitting the difference” with another card.

Really, should we have to go through all this trouble to use a promised rebate? I think not. Instead, I feel that this is simply a clever way for Cingular to collect some of that $50.00 multiplied by a lot of other frustrated consumers like myself, wearing down our resistance to corporate greed by making everything difficult.

I protest!

2005-10-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

No. 23
Mike dropped off a hundred t-shirts for me to sell in the lobby of the theater. I saw Lulu skulking around outside with her camera in one hand, and her bounty of t-shirts in the other. Don't ask me where Clyde was. Working some job, I guess.

So I had to decide how to balance my newspaper sales of "Homeless Security" with my new inventory item. Thank goodness the theater owner was some kind of weak-kneed liberal who didn't mind me setting up shop to the left of his ticket window. So many of these owners freak whenever they see a homeless person because they think it's going to drive away customers. As long as I keep myself relatively clean, I never find that I'm a scab on the general premises. Why on the contrary. I think I add an interesting mix to the general boring fare that passes by without so much as a look. In fact, that's what I like about selling newspapers.I play a game with myself about who's actually going to see me without storming by like I'm a piece of warmed over shit. Usually, I'm right. Every 20th person or so I can spot some one in the crowd. What do they have in common? Hard to say. I think it's a zig-zagging aura they've got coming off of their fontenelle's where their life spirit sits. Clyde told me that. But never mind. Time for me to get to work.

"Want a paper? He was relatively tall with cute dreads dangling around his face like a shower curtain.

"I bought one from you yesterday."

"What about a t-shirt?"

"I've got a million t-shirts at home."

"I bet you do. But not one like this." I held up Osama's name on the front.

"Is this for real?"

"Sure. This is a grassroots thing."

He shoved his hands into his pockets. "I don't know."

"What if I throw in something you've never seen before?"

"How much did you say it was?"

I knew I had him. I tied my tongue into a knot and his jaw dropped. "That'll be 10 dollars," I said.

2005-10-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

Rondeau for the Lost Lenore
Help me to look, for I lost her there
deep in a field, or on a burnt pier,
stuck between two rotten planks of wood,
not making noise, even if she could,
kicking around a shuttle of years.

Long ago I remember she stood
on a fire trail, wearing a fleece hood
loosely, without covering her hair.
Help me to look.

She's gone so long without eating food,
take-out on-the-run that tastes no good.
I'm not sure if I know how to clear
her heart's basement, look in the mirror
when she sang to the singing blood.
Help me to look, for I lost her there.

2005-10-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

Yizkor (Memorial) Service
Yom Kippur 2005

I'm watching darkness
embrace a glittering thumbnail
someone had trimmed and left years ago
for the cleaning lady as it rolled across the floor
into breadcrumbs, cat hair, a tissue blown by the opening door
into a tent of good-bye kisses, yet the nail,
painted glow-in-the-dark still blazing pink,
catches the light and is swept from the room
on a braided tassel,

as I follow the meditation,
but keep wandering to thoughts of my new vibrator,
a molded purple plastic water-proof super glide,
waiting for me at home tucked between my socks and panties,
which I bought the weekend before, while doing food shopping
and going for a walk with my friend and her dog,
the solemnity of making our days count,
well, I want to feel good and I need batteries.
That's how I entered the High Holydays. In a blaze.

2005-10-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

No.22
We decided to use our existing marketing channels. Granny had the movie theater crowd sewed up, Clyde was going to work the wash-and-dry crowd at the laundromat, and Lulu would concentrate on school cafeterias. But we weren't going to stop there. I was elected responsible for getting the model t-shirt produced, and for designing a Web site to help sell the shirts, and for the ultimate broadcast.

"If we get thousands of people coming out to hear Osama streaming over the web, how's he not going to show up?" I reasoned. Plus, he wouldn't necessarily have to divulge his location, which was key to the success of my plan. I gambled that the opportunity for Osama to speak to a ready-made audience of thousands would be as irresistible as a free-interest loan from the World Bank.

I got busy. I put down my water-bottle next to the computer. First I designed the t-shirt over the Internet, dragging and dropping text and pictures on a handy blank canvas of a white t-shirt. I choose colors, named my date, checking to make sure I wasn't setting a time during Ramadan, and gave the domain name of the site I was building to find more information. Since the domain hadn't been registered yet, I grabbed it: www.osamaspeaks.com. "Hear Osama on www.osamaspeaks.com, May 20, 2006."

Done. I had a highly satisfied sensation that was similar to winning a superbowl pool. I made a mental note to be sure to provide an audio file so whatever came together could be downloaded. Exhilerated, I took another swig of water. But suddenly, the light from my basement window shimmered before me in the shape of Lulu. Time slowed down. She touched my cheek with her hand. I can't remember anything else, except she set up my networks and made them run. Thank God I'm a geek.

2005-10-09T17:46:00.000-07:00

Notebook from the Year One
It's a small room I live in,
but the rent's okay,
a bedroom with two windows,
utilities paid.

I sleep on a couch,
I eat on a door,
when company comes,
they sit on the floor.

2005-10-08T09:31:00.000-07:00

No. 21
"It's the theory of market share pressure leading to groundswell," I explained. "We print up thousands of t-shirts announcing a meeting with Osama bin Laden at a certain time and place, say runs of 1,000 at a time and we finance more runs with the sales of previous t-shirts; sell 'em wherever we can, whenever we can, all we do for the next six months or so is sell t-shirts ; I'll build a web site to help us sell the t-shirts. As members of the t-shirt collective, all of you can pocket a certain percentage of the sales; say two percent."

"Five," said Clyde.

"Five," I said. "Then we take things from there. With millions of people publicizing the event and waiting to hear the biggest terrorist of all time speak to them over a public broadcasting system, how can we fail?"

"We need music," said Lulu.

"And to sell food," said Granny.

Then went out for another cup of coffee to discuss the details.

2005-10-03T21:50:00.000-07:00

Content Management System

And while I'm waiting for you in the car like an otter
floating beneath a hood of water watching the sky
pull itself into threads of orange taffy, I swam away
to Chicago and the punch press factory near O'Hare Airport,
where I met Johnnie with mahogany skin and red straightened hair
and Eola from New Orleans who said:
"Life's like powder on a powder puff, just ready to blow off;"
and a woman from Argentina who thought I was pretending
not to be Spanish so I wouldn't get deported,
a time in my life just before three-alarm fires

started to go off and I had to skate down the freeway,

when we ate three-course meals in 20 minutes
and heated food in a microwave that smelled like a roach coach.
I remember when the lugging machine punched a hole through my finger
and the foreman drove me to the hospital in his car where I spent the evening
filling out worker's compensation forms, and worked the next day
anyway and didn't make my quota; something about the thinness of the sky,
the way the airplane balances on a diagonal wire
the way Chow Yun Fat did in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
walking on tree tops,
which is a good trick if you know how to do it.

2005-10-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

No. 20
Clyde, Granny, and I walked the half mile from my apartment to the theater. People were queued up at the bank window. The street was filled with people sipping coffees, and I saw a hold-out with a cigarette who was blowing smoke. Clyde and Granny had fallen a few steps behind. I began looking around the corner for Lulu.

"She'll be there," said Granny.

"There's another one?" he asked.

"Yeah, and this one has a camera."

"Whoa, baby. We're making the papers."

"Only the ones you're smoking."

"I'm sorry, Miss. You can't take pictures without a permit," said an officer to Lulu who was standing in the middle of the street. "You'll have to move." Lulu kept her eyes buried in her frame. The youngish officer, who judging by the peach fuzz on his chin, might've been a rookie assigned to the school crossing on any another day, stepped closer to her side. "I'm sorry, Miss, you're not allowed to stop the traffic. Cars were queued up behind her, and they were honking their horns.

"Lulu, c'mon," I said, stepping into the street.

"D'you know this woman?" the officer asked. He looked a lot taller once I was standing next to him.

"Yes," I said, taking her arm. "Lulu, what are you doing?"

"Well, mostly waiting for you," she said picking her head up. "But I thought I'd get some footage of how we're supporting the oil companies by driving around at different times of the day, in different light. Great diminishing angles from the corner."

"Thanks, Miss," said the officer. "You can't stand here."

"Geez," she said. "You don't have to go ballistic."

"Thanks, Miss," he repeated, "I'm just doing my job." He stepped aside and started to wave traffic on.

"First you get a college education, then you can't get a decent job, and then they want to arrest you. I think the country is going down the tubes."

"Amen, to that said Granny," who'd finally caught up to us.

"Amen to that again," said Clyde.

Lulu put her camera back into her satchel. I introduced Lulu to Clyde. "Granny knows him. He wants to work with us."

"So, Thinktank," he said to me, rolling back on his heels and winking at Granny. "What's next?"

“T-shirts," I said. "We're going into merchandising."

2005-09-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

No. 19
[digression] Clyde wanted to join the party, so we head in the direction of the nearest live wire, which to my mind, was Lulu who had struck a chord within my shredded heart. I was hoping that she still planned to meet us in the lobby of the movie theater, whereupon I had a plan to start moving in the direction of Osama bin Laden. As crazy as it seemed, I think I'd fallen upon a foolproof idea. Because if you look at the history of programming languages, they don't last forever, since technology changes, programming styles change, and good languages last only 15 or 20 years; a man like Osama fell into the same category. Let's say he had shelf life, which was only a few years left until he became ho-hum on the international market.

Likewise, I reasoned, but actually, I lost my bookmark of reasoning. I was aware of being able to concentrate more and more less. Prowlie's glass and light was beginning to emerge again in my consciousness and I didn't know what that meant except I had to follow it to its ultimate logical conclusion.

"Paranoid schizophrenic," I'd heard someone once say of me.
[ / digression]

Back to the party.

2005-09-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

No. 18
For breakfast I rustled up two cups of coffee, brewed over a spoonful of instant, and two bowls of assorted dry cereal, poured out from the bottom of a bunch of almost empty cartons. Okay. The cereal was a little stale, but who cares if you've got milk. Right? Sometimes I can sound like a fucking commercial. So Granny stuffed her sleeping bag back into some expandable netting and then spent the rest of the morning in my bathroom cleaning herself up while I danced around waiting to take a piss.

"Come on in," she said. "I don't care."

"Don't look."

"Are you out of your mind? I'm behind a shower curtain."

I pissed, brushed my teeth, and washed up. By the time I got dressed, the water had stopped running, but she was still futzing around in the bathroom.

I decided to sit down at the computer balanced on a snack table outside the kitchen.

"You ready?" she asked after I had almost finished checking my email.

"Huh?" I couldn't believe it. Cleaning up had done things for Granny that I couldn't have imagined. While before she had been some indiscriminate age, a raunchy gnarly thing curled in upon itself, now she appeared radiant, a woman in her late thirties, and her light brown hair; well, it almost had sheen. I was glad to see she was no longer wearing several layers of multi-colored shorts, now dressed in a black shirt with a stained red top, clearly rescued from some Goodwill sale pile.

"Stop looking at me," she said, throwing her bag over her shoulder. "Let's get going. I'm not use to being in one place."

So we walked up the side of the house, past the recyling bins. I saw a man going through my bottles. He looked familiar. "Say, don't I know you from somewhere?" I asked. He was this black guy. All I knew was that he was built like a line-backer.

"I've never seen you before in my life," he said, holding up an aluminum orange soda can.

"Yes, now I know where I saw you. You were the ticket taker at the movies up the street the other night."

"Yeah, what of it?"

"Nothing much. I remember you bumped in to me."

"Hi, Clyde."

"Hi Granny."

"You two know each other?"

Granny nodded. "I know a lot of people."

"So you got yourself a place to stay last night," winked Clyde.

"You can think whatever you want to think."

"Say, you look good cleaned up," he laughed.

"Clyde and I have done street time together," she explained to me. "But right now he's holding down more jobs than you can count on two fingers."

"Three right now," he said. "Going through the recyling bins is a sideline. I work at the theater in the evening, the laundromat across the street in the afternoon, then I haul off the glass whenever I can, and get five cents a bottle."

"I'll probably see you in the theater lobby real soon," she said. "selling newspapers. But in the meantime, I'm going with a couple of these bums to build a mass movement."

"Anything I can make money at?" he asked. " I need time off from one of my jobs."

2005-09-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

No. 17
"I use to be pretty," said Granny, "not that you'd ever believe it," and she held up her hand in my face when I tried to protest. "You don't have to say anything. And my hair! I bet you wouldn't believe that I almost was hired for a shampoo commercial. The people said they'd never seen anyone with the kind of sheen I had in my hair, especially for someone with light brown hair. Light brown hair usually doesn't do much of anything. But I was eating back then. I think it was the nuts. They say peanut oil has a lot of vitamin E."

Was that so, I thought. My hair was starting to thin on top and I wasn't ready to reach for the Rogaine. Maybe I should eat more nuts. "So what happened?"

"I can't wash it, brush it, so I just keep it braided down my back. But it's so dirty, it weighs two tons. I can hardly hold my head up."

"No, I mean about the commercial. For shampoo."

"Oh, that," she laughed. "They hired someone else. And you know what? She scrunched up her face. "That girl hardly had any sheen. She and the photographer were sleeping together."

"Sometimes that happens," I began, wanting to say something to Granny about bum breaks. I kept feeling I had to be nice to her to help make up for society's injustices.

"But that's the way my luck has been. Never knew my father. My mother went crazy by the time I was ten. Not that I really could tell the difference. It was all crazy. I thought that was the way everything was. You could say that these past two years on the streets have been my most sane."

I could tell this was going to be an all-nighter. "What do you mean?"

"You're not interested."

"Why do you say that?"

"You're just being nice. I'm not going to sleep with you. Now don't think just because you're listening to me..."

"I'm not the least bit interested in sleeping with you. First of all, I've got at least four hours of work I still have to do. And second of all, we're on a project together, which means we can't sleep together."

"Why?"

I stumbled for an answer. "Because it's unethical."

"Oh," she said, folding her hands into a neat pile on her lap and looking more relaxed. "So what do you do?

"I'm a programmer," I said.

"TV? Radio?"

"No, I program languages. Like XML."

"What about XXL?"

"Do you program also?"

"That's my t-shirt size." Oh, by the way," she said, "I lied to you before. It wasn't peanuts that gave my hair that sheen. It was rosemary oil."

Rosemary oil. I made a note to ask her tomorrow where I could buy the stuff. If my hair had more sheen, it might help to make up for everything else it was missing. "Good night," I said.

"Good night," she chirped back, and shook out a sleeping bag from somewhere inside her shopping bag upon my old couch.

2005-09-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

No, 16
Granny was now a person with food in her stomach, a situation which definitely agreed with her. We sat on the living room couch; her feet rested on an an unread pile of InfoWorld magazines stacked on my coffee table. Granny didn't talk much. We stayed up for several hours and sat in front of the TV, until I couldn't stall the inevitable. I had to start programming and finance my mass movement {all bathroom jokes aside}.

I knew she was the lady in the house, but beats the hell out of me if I was going to let greasy Granny spend the night sleeping under my blankets. I didn't care how dirty they were {my blankets}, which as far as I was concerned, was nothing compared to eau de Granny. I just thought Lulu had been pretty slick to dump everything into my hands and run off with her video recorder.

"Uhh, I'll make a bed up for you on the couch," I said.

"You're gonna let me sleep here?" she said, startling herself back into a sitting position. "On your couch?"

"Where else? There's only one bed in the apartment."

"You really don't have to do that," she said.

Yeah, and didn't I know it, which is when Granny decided to tell me her life's story.

2005-09-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

No. 15 (continued from July)
We walked to my apartment that was a few blocks away. If this what it took make my life interesting once again, I thought, I was up for it. "So Granny," I asked. Do you like spaghetti?"

"Yes, indeedy, needy," she said. "I've got the sauce." She ransacked her black bag for a moment and pulled out a jar of Newman's Best. "I went shopping this morning," she said to me, and winked. "The trick is getting into the store."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you know diddley-squat? Granny's gonna teach you. In order to shop, you have to get in the store, and in order to get in the store, you have to get past security, and in order to get past security, it's important they don't know your face."

"So how'd you get past security?"

"A different guy was on duty this morning," she said. "I scored."

"Basil-garlic," I said. "My all-time favorite."

She smiled. "I figure you got a stove in your apartment."

"I even have a loaf of bread," I said and found the key. I jiggled the lock just the right way to open the door. Granny followed me to the refrigerator. "I forgot something." I said.

"Tell me."

I closed the refrigerator door and opened up a few cabinets, realizing that I didn't actually have spaghetti, just another jar of sauce.

Granny's face dropped, but then she recouped. "Heat them up," she said. "We'll have soup."

I did, and we had plenty of bread. But then there was all that Top-Ramen in the back of my closet, and who said you couldn't put sauce on a noodle that comes packaged as its own raft?

"Score," said Granny. "Totally score."

2005-09-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

CellPhone Poem 12
Calling to find out if I can go
pearl-diving this evening
inside your mouth,

as I sit on a chair that dreams
of becoming a crocodile
climbing the hills

that turns into a bridge
connecting two short points
to a distance

as I wrap my legs
around whatever it is
we can become.

*
Me? Fine. I know.
You? Okay. Great.
Just for today?

So I'll come over
maybe in a few hours.
Around dinner.

We'll stuff plastic bags
with clothes for people
in New Orleans.

Take them to the Grand Lake Theater
any time from the morning commute hour
all through the night.

2005-09-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

CellPhone Poem 11
It's me. All my important
numbers. Ring tones.
Daffy Duck & Pastures of Plenty.
Beseme Mucho & Beethoven.

All my significant others
gathered beneath one roof
a press away
distilling voices

into the daily grind
blinking when its cell
runneth over
with voice and text messages

video grabs
eyes closed shut
or an abandoned meth lab
there for all to see.

My whole life stripped down
to ankle bracelets
from single shining chip
to shining chip.

2005-08-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

CellPhone Poem 10
So on the day of your eviction
three blue sentinels stood
at the edge of a parking strip,

almost a year
since your father had died
on a Sunday that stretched into police reports,

when sunflowers in the backyard
spit their black and white seeds
into my face.

You hugged me then
mostly because you didn't know what else to do,
before you crawled beneath the linoleum and sub-flooring

and buried yourself hissing my name.
Go away. You are a mother
of Shit Heads.

You said other things to me
I can't repeat
because I am a mother,

and because I'm trying to remember
how you're my son,
who taught me the miracle that life is.

I'm not sure when you started to hate
with the green stare of a cat's eye marble,
who'd already dismissed me from my post.

I don't know how a child can even do that,
you who discovered pill bugs beneath every rock
and tamed snails,

always searching for more
through mint and calendulas,
maybe learning from them

how to hide your terror.
Are you listening?
Can you hear me?

2005-08-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

CellPhone Poem_WhatIs
A cellphone poem is music
how we sound

as we dial talk text message
and the breath between

the warm bath
of lymph nodes

that keeps lines open
in our groins back and forth

between listening
and expression

at right angles
broadcasting

I and Thou
me and you

perched on a molded cornice
where a voice speaks its essay:

Hold on, hold on
a soul shift does not occur

in the limelight,
it comes from shadow.

The planet will heat up,
species will die,

but when, and how many
and can we change?

2005-08-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

CellPhone Poem 8
I'm here
walking down the supermarket aisle
where the strawberry yogurt
meets the fish counter.

Why d'you think containers of yogurt
are near the fish counter?
Those two things don't go together.
Yogurt sauce over salmon

is the closest I've ever come
in my whole life to anything like that,
but I don't think it was yogurt,
maybe cream cheese.

I'm here
sitting on the bus counting my change.
The Queen is eating bread and honey.
I said that to be funny.

I'm here speaking to you from the dental chair
in the few minutes I have left to me
before the dental assistant
sticks blue goop in my mouth.

I'm here,
but I'm almost ready to leave.
I've been here all day
standing in line.

What do you mean what tickets?
They're the ones for Andy's birthday
this weekend he was coming in from Fresno
and we were going to take him out.

Remember? I'm sitting in traffic.
Actually, I'm sitting in my car
listening to the radio,
and all I can see are brake lights.

It'll be hours
until I can return
to my reality show. I'm here,
but I want to be home.

2005-08-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

CellPhone Poem 7
I'm repeating this again
because it needs to be repeated
like a bobble-head
that keeps waggling its eyes at me.

About time.
About him.
About me.
About place.

A woman warmed her nose
inside a tunnel of fingers. She saw:
eye-gougers, pliers for ripping ears,
a necklace of nails.

There was a small door
in a large wall
covering the spot
where something breathed.

On Hitler's birthday,
he'd served cup cakes
iced with red swastikas
to a guest with 1,000 eyes.

Now the interrogator gets close,
drenched in contempt.
The only thing protecting her
was his jet lag.

Later on, burning tires
floated down a river of oil.
Others sold images of the Virgin
on grilled cheese sandwiches.

About time.
About love.
About face.
About now.

It keeps coming up.
Memory extends my hair
to the next country.
Call me ASAP.

2005-08-21T20:16:00.000-07:00

CellPhone Poem 6
I don't get it.
Why'd he say he'd get in touch
when he didn't?

When the next set starts,
he said he'd call.
That was three weeks ago.

Sitting. I'm almost there.
I'm looking out the window.
Take-out.

You told me
you didn't want to cook.
I don't want to either.

Pick me up. No, rice.
A few minutes.
Stop screaming. I got it.