all the odds and ends… scraps of scribbles and digressions, unfinished, almost forgotten and without a cycle to belong
wrote a poem (in reply to the great singer songwriter Hawksley Workman who’s playing in #Saskatoon tonight)
Saskatoon
I was born here
but
never lived there (left quickly on a 707)
but
obliged to print on application forms
since–
quite literally hundreds or possibly thousands
there’s never enough room
(especially in Japan)
to write:
b. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Aug, 16 1970
Sunday, Providence
grey like last week
with my bargain matinee cough syrup nod
candy coated
hold onto my thick head
next wave goes to mars
next even further
watch the clothes spin
in their fluff and dried
nebulae
i’ve tried it all on bended knees
but i’ll just think here and sit about
lost months and misplaced friends
haggard days and ice cream cones
i’ll stand here
holding nothing
try to think
how i got here
then figure where i am
i’ll stand a shady place
counting nickels
and happenstance
empty out my pockets
on the ground
you can’t trade lint
for bread and cheese
“it’s cloudier now than
its been for years”
i’ve spent days moving quickly
years dreaming loosely
and hours watching patiently
and weeks muddling and fidgeting
for the moment that is now
elsewhere
and sometime long before
Bend paper to find
Shortest distance between points
Or apply a stamp
{for Amber}
Often, a poem comes out fully-formed, fiddling and remixing only dulls the knife, sometimes however, variations are eager to come out to shine light in another corner: Lonely, Joyful, Melancholy, Mysterious.
In this case, (my) familiar themes of un-confidential love letters on postcards mailed from foreign places and glanced by – or maybe sadly not glanced – by personnel along the way who (may) add their pathos to the journey.
One version of this (do you care to guess which?) will go on the reverse of the post box at Farmer Mac’s goat farm – Perhaps another painting will follow… and then a postcard a photograph of the painting mailed to the post box and so on. Always be remixing.
No pardons for redundancies, variations on a theme require riffs on the same blues.
Do you care to posit which your prefer?
Consider the words
Write them once, only –
In a single inky sweep
On tactile paper
Then add a flower
Close the book
For now
&/or do none of the above
(from summer 2018 Moleskine accordion notebook “when everything changed”)
Post office closed
(again)
You’ll need another
day to know
you are loved
by a lost poet
without a watch
Lansing Michigan, 1973
eating macaroni & cheese
in a damp basement
while adults whispered
windows shivered
radio crackled
and i wondered why
the tornado was coming
and then my memory began
##
Note:
this is brother Bob’s (straight ahead) birthday March 1973 so i (front right) was 2.5 years old / for years i recalled this photo somehow and then going through my dear late Mom’s slides, found this and *knew it* instantly / that screened in porch, the sun, and everything.
Aside:
this memory was described elsewhere in a riff…
“A brief stint in Lansing Michigan is where I remember my first thoughts, hunkered in the basement easting macaroni and cheese during a tornado, sitting in a big screened-in porch eating birthday cake with my glasses on.”
The former child soldiers
Are now working in PR
Trying to convince foreigners
To come here anytime
(Sri Lanka, 2017)
From Prague to Irkutsk to Montevideo, shortwave radios broadcast voices, numbers and patterns. Origins (generally) unknown beyond speculators and bureaucratic engineers from ousted fiefdoms gone stale.
They found no benefit or public belief for revealing secrets, so no one did… Speculations generally drift towards messages to embedded agents of nefarious organizations.
Simply put, clandestine instructions need sending.
However the keys to transmitters were lost, floppy disks written in COBOL became unavailable, and handlers dead or confused – hence a new system was needed.
As such, the Bilderburgers got the Bohemian Grove on a conference call, patched in the Illuminati from a bunker in Cuba and raised the spectre of the global transmission – a single word – to begin The Operations.
The line was silent for a moment, then a proper but thin and reedy voice asked, “but tell me then, how can we release that one word in a manner that everyone will read it?”
To which another dis-intermediated voice confidently said, “I have just the right idea.” #covfefe
Related: ird059-conet-project-booklet (pdf)
No need to fit in a word
Said all of them, all at once
One stream or ocean
Of (un)consciousness
Neal Cassady is dead –
So who will spiel all of the words instead?
