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.

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.

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

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.

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.

1. 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.

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.

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

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

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."

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.