In clear, blue space
a funnel cloud spins into its vortex
Flesh, form, custom and oaths
Country and possessions jettisoned
in one breath
And it is we, women, who suffer all
like nuns cloistered in shadows
under eaves and mangroves
our desires small and undecipherable
as dust motes

Genny Lim
Jan. 23, 2008
© 2008 by Genny Lim

EXILIO

En un espacio claro y azul
un nube de embudo gira
en su vórtice
La carne, la forma, la costumbre y los juramentos
El país y las posesiones echados por la borda
de un tirón
Y somos nosotras las mujeres quienes sufrimos todo
como monjas encerradas en las sombras
bajo los aleros y los mangles
nuestros deseos tan pequeños e indescifrables
como el polvo

Traducción de Toshiya Kamei
© 2008

for marianne broekmeijer

it’s the last day of spring
and the young girls smile
like the first day
high on the mountain
pockets of snow remain
in the shaded areas
at the edge of sun
above the highway where
summer is inviting
spring lovers with its call
for new romances
and unrelenting love
it’s the last day of spring
and the young girls smile
like the first day
the sun slowly sinks
away fondly into
an amber sunset
that will come down
from the blue mountain
with thousands of golden poppies
and smiling young girls
following its path
there is nothing quite like mountain love

Conyus
Copyright © 2004 and 2008 by Conyus

“Keeping track of the Iraqi death toll isn’t the job of the United States,” a student said, “and besides, how would we count the dead?”

Take their limbs strewn about the streets—
multiply by a thousand and one.

Ask everyone in Baghdad who has lost
a brother. Cousin. Sister. Child — to speak
their name in a recorder.

Go to every school, stand
at the front of the class, take roll;
for every empty desk, at least two dead.

Find every shop that sells cigarettes—
ask how many more cartons they’ve sold this year.

Go to the bus station and buy ten tickets –
offer them free to anyone who wants to leave.

Go see the coffin-maker. Ask how much
cedar and pine he’s ordered this month.

The dead don’t require much. They don’t speak
in numbers or tongues, they lie silent

waiting — to be counted

Persis Karim
Copyright © 2008 by Persis Karim

Frank Russell at home in his Tampa studio, 2004
Photo: Al Young

for Frank Russell
(a.k.a. Dr. Rocksteady,
1951-2008)
and Betty Moss

In the Imax picture of your lives, directed
by Hal Hartley, you survive everything,
even doubt, your own especially, on the way
out of all this to be or not to be, a distinction
Buddhists never cop to – ahhh, exhale bigtime
in this whopping world of motherless mutts.

Inhale. It’s happy hour at the oxygen bar
you favor, a dive that packs more punch
and flavor to every breath and step
you take than all the whipped foam of talk.
“Walk right in,“ you say to all the stunning,
unnumbered dimensions. Time and mind
conspire. Combined yet again, all ends
and beginnings equal all the journeys you take.

Dear Frank: Like a medieval monk, you copy
and lobby knowledge, know-how, info, data,
dada and consciousness – these keys to our species’
doorways duplicate and multiply. But, you, Betty,
hardly Heloise to some Abelard, you nurture
culture and acculturate. What mates you make!

Wherever time and mind go gung-ho, you go,
Should it surprise you or you or you or you
that consciousness rising can’t always recognize
the you you think is you as you-for-real?
In this sung deal, heart is all and everything.

The picture triumphs; love trumps despair.
Box office, be gone! From here we plow the field.

As for parallel universes, Dr. Rocksteady
and Betty — the surest seem the ones you share.

Al Young
Copyright © 2008 by Al Young

Betty Moss, Tampa 2004 | Al Young

Skippy | Al Young

John Lovas (1940-2006)

What journey is this?
I don’t know, John,
but I know you
have faced the world
openly,
inelegantly,
like almost every animal
I admire most.

Sorry, I can’t think
of a sophisticated
literary reference,
only a certain
strangeness,
like a poetry walk
without you in it.

Or shall we
shut up?
Not say we love you?
Not say you are laureate
of these green hills?
Not stand here
and be late for whatever’s
on the schedule?
Yeah, why not skip
everything,
just huddle together
as the sun moves
into twilight,
talk a little among
ourselves.

That’s the ticket,
isn’t it, John?
Say it: and even
after it dissolves
into song, pure sound,
into phatic
dust,
say it,
and mean it.

Ken Weisner
Copyright © 2008 by Ken Weisner

Ken Weisner’s Poetry Page
Ken Weisner’s Home Page

Frank Russell (1951-2008)

This is a kind of grieving, three days worth
late in the night the Sunday morning after:

Frank is gone, one of many pioneers
in the space time continuum, scholar
of oblivion, Blues lover of the evidences
within and without the fantastic, illusory
world. He rolled his wheels in the night
highway, and god only knows where
he was at the time, in addition to being
thrown out of the car, in his Father’s
old World is all I can say for sure,
living pointlessly to point far out
in all the particles of eternal night,
down in, let’s say for the Blues in it,
in Plato Beach, Florida, no zipcode.

He would laugh on his end of the phone
to see the joke of everything in that,
in how understanding ruins what it touches
and to poor mankind touching is everything,
so we invented language, but were stuck
with some lost perfection or just ahead
a spot where the facts don’t add up
but almost beautifully, as if language
really did precede the world in mirrors
of human seeing, apes their essences.
He’d call me at all hours once in a while
and I’d say, Man, the ideal and oblivion
are not that far apart, like the signs
“Welcome to…” and “Come back when
you can sit a spell,” and not even three
whole moments have passed. So we live
and so we die, too: we both knew it.
Ours is the age of pornography, all kinds.

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CARBON FUTURES

In tar beach tent towns roughnecks cast up,
climbing through muck like blackened grease monkeys
between sumps gummy with acrid crude.
Whole families broke down on the nuts and bolts of production,
earning poverty for their trouble and even
sleeping on ground the Company owned.

In heat that only a rattlesnake could love, and
breeze rank with petroleum funk, they stuck
tents and shanties on ditch backs
like burr scabs on a starving dog,
stalking that next whiskey dollar the way
a lover drinks in an embrace.

Oil owned my family.
Its flare-offs and blowouts they plowed
into a history of mud and fists and cable
song roaring through crops of derricks,
fields they planted for The Man, rigs
drilled like lightning bolts into the dirt.

Ruts and crushed rock fed acres of hulks
raised from dust devils like some hellish corn
grinding ground day and night for a promise
of moisture, the remembered curl of spring-sweet fiddleheads;
for the sound of ancient surf long fallen
into a slurry of shit-black dreams.

In sulphuric fury the tide turned,
gushing back in a rumble of carbon futures,
splits of gas, and diesel, and kerosene
oozing blood of machines,
banking the metallic stink of money into
the sweaty cents of escape.

8/2007

BLOWOUT

Centuries wax and wane above these damp will-o-the-wisps,
spirits, diatoms squeezed of soul by time’s closing fist.
Anticlines rise and rock their trillion skeletons to sleep.
Even Gaia’s hands close in one last amen over the salty dead.

Dark domes of decayed and deserted corpses drop
into secret amphora corked with stone.
Gathering a ghostly jewelry, a richness of
glassy stars, beads, circles, boats, and wings,

their silica bones crush and condense in
aromatic perfume impressed
and cradled inside the hoops of limestone.
Against all odds, one random

tremor expresses old genealogy the way
a fault line slips into the memory of movement.
The way feathers of carbon and oxygen unchained
at last hiss through dry seams of shale,

the dead erupt from that smoky crevasse between earth and sky.
Like angels the old ones soar into life
through tons of mud and midnight detritus on wings
flaring with the hellfire of a new star.

9/2007

Val Morehouse
Copyright © 2008

ValMorehouse.Com

KRAZY KAT KONSIDERS REINKARNATION AS A GOLF BALL

For those who don’t remember the great George Herriman comic strip: Krazy Kat (who is sometimes male and sometimes female) is madly in love with Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz regards Krazy as—crazy, and tosses bricks at him/her in anger. When these bricks connect, as they usually do, Krazy takes it as a token of Ignatz’s love and is in ecstasy. Offisa Pupp (a dog policeman) is in love with Krazy but never declares it. He tries (usually in vain) to prevent Ignatz from throwing a brick. Once the brick is thrown, Offisa Pupp hauls Ignatz to jail. Ignatz is a married mouse. Krazy often speaks in a kind of Yiddish accent: “ket” for “kat.”

Dearest Ignatz,

Think of me as a small
Round, white ball
Sitting on a little
White stick call-
Ed (I am ignerint why) a tee
Then you should SWING,
Little Dollink, and HIT ME
As if I suddenly got WINGS
I ZOOM into the skies
Dunt worry, you won’t flub,
Dearie, just hit me with d club
Lil Angil! Up to your old tricks
But with golf you dunt need bricks!
Up into the skies!
O Hippiness!
Sitting on d tee,
I’ll be d spouse
Of Swinging Sammy Tiger Ignatz Mouse!
(Lil Angil)
WHAM!

DJANGO

pluck image

Django Reinhardt

the illiterate
(the illiterate)
professor
(professor)
speaks with his guitar
(speaks with his guitar)
he is a dark gypsy
(he is a dark gypsy)
with mustache and sly smile
(with mustache and sly smile)
he is speaking farrrrum farrrrrum
(he is speaking farrrrum farrrrum)
on a subject of the most
(on a subject of the most)
immense, immediate, life-changing
(immense, immediate, life-changing)
interest
(interest)
and his chords tell us
(and his chords tell us)
what we can do
(what we can do)
what we can do
(what we can do)
Improv / improves sings the guitar
(Improv/ improves sings the guitar)
to a classroom masquerading
(to a classroom masquerading)
as a night club
(as a night club)
or a concert hall
(or a concert hall)
the professor
(the professor)
rat a tats & riddles
(rat a tats & riddles)
roars & rambles
(roars & rambles)
tells us with superb intelligence
(tells us with superb intelligence)
of Charlie Parker
(of Charlie Parker)
and of wild
(and of dark)
gypsy
(gypsy)
ways
(ways)

Jack Foley
Copyright © 2008

THE ART OF MIDNIGHT

for Raymond Chandler

Midnight here, and the fog is like a heavyweight boxer,
Knocking out weak street lights with one punch,
And moving on down the block to light poles.
The night is a long judgment of dark tomorrows,
And the fog, a champion of infinite sadness.
Sometimes, when midnight is near the horizon,
You can see a low light over the bay.
Most of the late hours now are a halo of blues,
Pushing east into the delta like a Muddy Waters song,
About old friends who come at you,
With open arms and heavy baggage;
None can sing, but they all have guitars
Without strings
And mud on their shoes.
I saw someone the other day,
I thought I knew, and then, they were gone,
Like your life, before you know it.
Not every warbler is a songbird,
And some songs are not songs at all.
Sometimes at night I cry.
Most times I cry and cry alone,
In the dark, near the ocean, and at midnight.
It’s called the Art of Midnight.
As the Japanese say,
” A Lone Crane Set Against the Sky.”

Conyus
September 20, 2001
San Francisco
Copyright © 2001 and 2008

DECEMBER 26, 2007

The truce now over
For the twenty-four hour period,
They begin to kill again in the Holy Land
And around the world.
Moslems against Jews,
Jew against Palestinians, Christians against Moslems,
People against people,
One minute after the day of the birth of Christ.
Young men die in the streets
Of Richmond, CA, Baghdad, and South Central L.A.
Over colors: crimson red, navy blue,
Camouflage and cotton white.
National flags make colorful decorations
Draped across coffins and wrapped around
Xmas trees atop with a bright shining cross
To point out chalk marks on the pavement.

Beneath the tree are body bags filled with gifts
From a world gone mad with killing
And stock market Santas still delivering oil
From the back of humvees to Wall Street merchants
Who watch the Pope (with huge HD TV’s)

On the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City

Bless the crowd of thousands below
With peace & love for another

364 days.

Conyus
Copyright © 2008

Frank Russell’s 1987 Dinner with Dr. Rocksteady

It’s harder than you know for you to be able to grok this.
Back before there was a “when” or some “place,”
we and the Beatles were created out of vacuum fluctuations,
born of an absolute nothingness that elaborated itself into hummingbirds and hurricanes in the time it takes to boil an egg.
Fourteen billion years ago, space-time and matter burst out of an invisible point somehow, and now here we are,
a consensus of atoms allowing you to sit in comfort
to the cosmic voudou drumbeat of the nation of your heart’s cells
keeping your neurons and dendrites mentating.

The Stones’ “Satisfaction” and your last lovemaking
were already composed in the first millionth of a second.
Even stranger is that there was an almost exact quantity of anti-matter particles produced by the Bang, and when these collide with matter, they cancel out into nothingness again.
Now hear this: the ratio of matter over anti-matter was so close that matter was only ONE particle more per billion than anti-matter particles!
This doesn’t mean that there is some sour-bearded god who sends us to hell for dancing or thinking, but Something sure as hell seems to be going on!
We are Simians-in-Wonderland, in an experiment
of which we can barely conceive.

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