fall-ing

For the time being, werdenfield will be very much on the d-l, an undercover agent with good dope but lacking any reliable connection or standard hours of operation. Your sporadic remembrance of the possibility of our future manifestings is much appreciated. We'll see you out there, margin-walking...

In a way the blog feels a somewhat disposable medium, i.e. its engagement with history is rather thin - the voluminous "archives" spelling a kiss of death for all but the most intrepid who care to dig around "back there". werdenfield has its share of "there", and its not all miscellanious errata about how my cat is refusing to eat his dinner that's out of date three posts down the line when he - in a big way - does. Its your place too: dig around.

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And on the wassup tip:

-Melissa Benham and Stephanie Young will be reading at SPT on Friday. I will be introducing Melissa. For those beyond the reach of that name, Small Press Traffic (SPT) is a venerable and tasty reading series at Calif. College of the Arts, hosted out of their Timkin Lecture Hall. Its a reliable venue to see top-notch experimental and innovative writers read.

-the innaugral Bay Area Writers Salon thingie is this Sunday @ 7PM, thats @ Sara Larsen's, 899 Oak #7 (top floor). I'll be giving a salon-kickoff presentation. Please bring work to read at the end, and wine or beer to drink throughout.

-On Saturday the 5th, Sara Larsen's new chapbook Doubly Circulatory will be being released on Artifact Press. This'll be Artifact's first book. There'll be a dance-dance-dance-party @ Sara's to celebrate, Nov. 5th. This is smackdab in the middle of our double rdng wknd too:

- On Friday the 4th at Poetry + Pizza (7:30 at Escape from New York Pizza, 333 Bush at Montgomery/ $5 at the door and all you can eat free pizza - a benefit for the Zen Hospice).

-On Monday the 7th, at All Poets Welcome (7:00pm to 8:30pm at the Gallery Cafe -- 1200 Mason at Washington in SF).

Rock Paper Sizz be all hoppety-hops.

mi pobre stare down

one last & final reminder. if you - fiendish scribbler - haven’t already sent el pobre Mouse work, please do. if you have, thank you. if you’ve never been an editor, you don't realize how tired of typing this stuff we get. are they sick of us? have they forgotten? did they simply decide to pass? we stick our lil mousey heads out into the gap, into the yawning, and try to sniff the breeze with our dastardly whiskers. we live in your garbage, we hide in your floorboards, we’re wise to that cheese shit, and the glue – we know who’s behind the glue. send your work here.

we love you all, even when we’re tearing holes in your precious cracker boxes,

kyle and sara (well, kyle)

full poem hands

Thanks for coming by, care for a chair?

Oh, you already have one.

This week I am back to work, and am also in full poetry swing. There are vents (and events) a planety (plenty) in the SF Bay this week, its chock full o readings, like some twisted litry pinata. Also, DJ Spooky will be playing/lecturing @ CCA on the 19th @ 7:30, and as a body interested in the intersection of art, theory, and rhythm i am there.

The other side of the full swing is the full rush of finishing my oral edit of bioautography. Whole thing read-thru, outloud, making my last revisions before i seek a few readers and start submiting this fucker for excerpt. 95 pages, at last count, 50 more to read thru. So attending to the oral element here in such a clearly written work is making for a rich intersection, one i can really wander around in and explore. The joy of a project I have become fully intimate with, its precious to me. The terror comes when I share it with others. As if I am doing it for them? As if I'm not. But if you've come to this site, you know that old ego trick... and we grow wiser.

So terror it will be. I will be performing slices of bioautography twice this November:

On Friday the 4th at Poetry + Pizza (7:30 at Escape from New York Pizza, 333 Bush at Montgomery/ $5 at the door and all you can eat free pizza - a benefit for the Zen Hospice).

On Monday the 7th, at All Poets Welcome (7:00pm to 8:30pm at the Gallery Cafe -- 1200 Mason at Washington in SF).

At both lineups I will represent with Naropa holmes Melissa Benham and Sara Larsen. The dream of a wider readership is in the inclusion of those last names, folks. But full respect to both... and even to that dream, which takes hard work to realize.

Also this week I will be drawing up mock layouts of two new subday books, Matt Langley's A Very Mild Eternity and Scott Inguito's lection. lection will kick-off the new subday mini-book series, dedicated to producing great work that is very, very small.

Blogger out-

taking the brim with the smooch

as if you need a lil more kyle in yr eye, i have been invited to join takingthebrim, an online writing community. Artaud and Deleuze and Guattari are prominently invoked, so it looks very much not a new formalist ting.

to celebrate, i posted a section of my long poem, b i o a u t o g r a p h y. which continues to surprise me and is moving towards an almost operatic delivery, if you will believe that. specifically the opera of klaus nomi, robert ashley and blue gene tyranny by way of leslie scalapino and philip whalen. it offers me a way to crack that foremost demon - the poet voice.

but check it out - its a piece from the middle third of that work, and there's a little intro to b i o a u t o g r a p h y there too. this project is rocking me - you know that feeling when your work starts kicking your butt? usually the same moment you've suceeded in taking the "me" out of it.

as subtle and misleading as that may be.

love to ya,

k

el pobre Mouse # 3

Just a reminder that work for el pobre Mouse #3 is due on October 15th. That's Saturday. Come on over and check out the newly redesigned site.

el pobre offers its pages as a site to showcase and build a diverse and vibrant community of engaged, literate and aware readers/writers. All genres and forms are welcome - with each issue we work to build a web, a commons in which each text is involved with all the others, and whose paths thru are numberless : please help us out - join in the exchange, send in yr work.

For more info, and for a more detailed aesthetics - check out our site.

naughtiness rhymes

When Robert Creeley came to Naropa in 2001, he proceeded to read to the hushed room a series of short little rhymey things that pissed me - earnest first sem grad student - off. Iwas like - rhyme, really? And not just any rhyme, but Seussian. (actually that part didn't so much rankle as confound and short-circuit) I wanted - expected - greatness. What an asshole I was.

Today's Sunday. In the Jew deal, God gives us the Sabbath off to play. Evidently he didnt nail down which day the seventh was too well, but whatev - its A Sabbath, at least, and if you go back far enough (to the 50s) both my parents went to goodie two shoes whitey-white churches of some northern european stripe.

Today's Sunday. Yesterday was Saturday. Saturday was Artifact. Here's mine:


it’s the glass that troubles her hand

clumsily, for tanya brolaski


fairies? fairies bright crossed night
glimpsed half-moon dulcimer light?
first put sense then shape with sound?
regular beats to make it round?

transparency, not as its seemed
a monstrous if for then to bring
closed in circles and spilling out
garnets, garters, hefeweisen, stout.

fairies sharp in tooth and claw
gnawing, spitting pun the maw
nasty short and pointy brutes
flitting, knitting charmed hirsute

most delicious, most depraved
fairie girls at café and rave
colored socks, magentas, blues,
cinder cones scenester girlies
wandering jews

lousy losers viewed in love
which sticky fairies doth loft above
like some gelding stallions proclaimed
a trinkets treasure cereal box game

demands avoiding superfluous gilding
supine and splayed such amorous trilling
so troubles sexperts in waning view
waxing so exactly the words fuck you

Points are beside the line : a review, flagrantly : Lyn and Paolo

Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes

Words are fundamentally inexhaustible in a way that human bodies are not. They may be returned to infinitely, so long as the word remains in print. In circulation. Human bodies are fundamentally inexhaustible in a way words are not. They live and pour off the page, across the mind and street, with a sensuality and a communicative power unheralded throughout the entire dictionary. The entire lexicon. A human body is a totipotent, incandescent, utterly obscure word. Its shelf life is limited. The word too will bend, melt, recycle, spawn, meet the abandon of the grave.

Relations – comparison – the in between. Here bodies, dictionaries, objects and states humble and unbowed, enter utter infinity not knowing what it isn’t and is. Between reader and writer, make no mistake, there is neither beginning nor end. And to point out that there is, THERE IS!, is to hold an incomplete and fragmentary view of reality, which is not the same as “to be wrong”. If done with a smile, this objection is a spring of joy, a box of tools, a bridge to Oakland. And I am pleasantly full of brilliantine shit.

For years I heard this song as a lovers cautionary tale. Then, this morning, still shocked by how Dylan sings “comes” as “cummmmzzzz” at the 66 Manchester live date, I enter the song differently. It’s about master/slave relations, it’s a song of a defeated, i.e. confirmed and then (to his horror) freed slave. So this freed slave’s tale is bitter, the master, of course, is both venerated and deplored. Despised. Does despising always come with an inverted erotic sheen?

Master/slave relations, then, and how they invade love, how they are a game we play with each other, those rotating empty slots we fill variously – until the game displaces reality, the actor becomes their role, and love has solidified, and broken into two. Listen to a love poem, a good one that arouses and sustains arousal, and the fluid yearning of love is exposed – the heart overflows, but doesn’t empty, refuses expectations of tiring – its vulnerability opens it, allows it to endlessly renew even as its appreciation and desire flow out. Love is this motionless flow. Almost a running-in-place on the treadmill or exercycle. Well, love has great stamina, we can salute that. I can. And of course punk rock starts with the deconstruction of this, with Richard Hell sneering that Love comes in spurts / Ohh it hurts and that’s sexy too (and sexy is to the side of love). Especially the sneer. Especially the spurts. Especially the hurts. And a negation of the love song, that’s a crucial part of the love song as tradition, as mode. It was fucking overlooked. Meaning it was there to be discovered. And it was a great discovery, because everyone had a ewww, why’d you pick that up? condescension and bafflement to this new shit. This is why we so love or loved punk rock. Its like, have you been there yet? Dumpster diving? Find a meal there, a torn skirt, but not a place to stay. Stay where? Where is?

The hint is that the writer and lover are homeless too, hence home-makers, our little beloved and discarded bound objects both. The hint is here. There are so many hints, and love is a hinting zone – take it, get it, got it, gone? Bend, break, bust, boom? Doesn’t the hint bend with supple flex? Doesn’t causality derail up close – turn mirage? A one way street so marked by its sign? A circus, an arousal, curiosity comes into play, acrobatic, but not of death, acrobatics of life, and so the clown shits, that's part of the play, someone steps on it, we laugh, been there, doing that. We get to madly careen, feel our own gravity, call into question our eyes, tricks are played on us - that wasn't shit, it was a little girl! - now she's taking photos, now I'm someone else, now - Hello there - we're gone. The mind cannot wrap around the show by trying, the tent is too big, there are several, we collide. Will the party pour out onto the streets?

The good game of slave and master, active and passive, stone and the ass that sits on it, when this displaces the infinite possibilities of the real – revealed in particular form as our cloud current desires (shift no matter how much the pattern is loved – loving the pattern itself a shift) – then love is reduced to the same hierarchical rigidity that determines so many work dynamics. my boss rides me. I do not ride my boss. Of course I do, I am a naughty boy. And its not the same, the distinction hinges on me recognizing, on her recognizing, its not the same. Me on top is driving the wrong way down the one-way. And one-way is only a fucking sign. So the game is a Foucault and Butler one – are there any cops around? But the cops go undercover, and if a car comes… its just like playing with metaphors – eventually someone gets hurt.

For years I’ve wondered when democracy, which I have been repeatedly told I live in – will invade the workplace. Fuck invade, I am ready for democracy to so much as knock on the door and be ignored by the receptionist.

This excessively set and untroubled sedimentation is why I don’t read most novels, don’t watch most films – the ossification of the narrative flow by the exclusionary and binding logic of plot, its incessant demand for investment, its vortex of winnowing, its fixation on hurrying the fuck up and “cum” – it can be interesting, but its tiring. It comes in spurts. Does our masturbatory, voyeur culture urge us to jack off culturally as much as possible, and pay for the tissue? How high is this throne, how easily can I – sipping chamomile tea at 11:11AM in the fucking morning, step off it?

Opinions too are noun states that pass. Judgments their own cloud current, until I seed the clouds. And seed the cows. And the serfs. Until I am so invested in snow I buy a snow-maker, and dancy dance my little god of enterprise dance on my own private Disneyland.

So, for me to add that plot is also richly revealing, that plot can slow down and ride you sweet between the nasty, can even up and leave but come running back before you feel too jilted and get cold, that plot is an endlessly inventive and impossible to ignore lover, that even identifying with plot, with its trap, with enjoying being trapped, and being free to spring the trap at any time during that enjoyment, is not only possible, but probably necessary strategy, that this pure outside itself is polarizing and reductive, is also besides the point, unless done with a smile, dropping the need to be right, dropping the need for others to be wrong, the fear and loathing and desire opinions birth, words birth – the whole sandcastle of…

Of what? It slipped away. Thief in the night. Proof in the pudding. Cuz there is no speaking of G_d? The whole’s habit of eliding its “w”?

a specific sonic signature of death

The United States Navy's Blue Angels, or Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, was formed at the end of World War II, by order of Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Chief of Naval Operations, to keep the public interested in naval aviation.

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Lookin' at the devil
Grinnin' at his gun
Fingers start shakin'
I begin to run
Bullets start chasin'
I begin to stop
We begin to wrestle
I was on the top

-

Today, as the Navy's Blue Angels stunt pilots roared above the city, I felt a vestigial alarm. Even once I remembered the Fleet Week, even after I verified it online, the roars and zoom and deafening boom of the planes sudden announcement criss-crossed my mind. And this safe in the arms of the superpower. Terror even there.

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2001: War on Terrorism: The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began at 16:30 UTC with an aerial bombing campaign targeting Taliban and Al-Qaida forces.

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On TV, Afghanistan reminds me of the most barren stretch of the US West - I have little else to compare it to. Outside Fallon NAFB, where Top Gun was filmed, the basin and range land of Nevada stretches its vast sagebrush fingers. There, on empty hillside trails, the only man or even mammal I'd seen in hours, I would encounter again this rush and crash as the void is shattered by such definite, screeching presence. "Metal hawks"? Certainly birds of prey, perhaps a demonic flying-too-close-to-the-sun. Hard to even see, the gap between the seen and the heard coming clear only later, in a contrail or sun-turning glint. One morning, near a hot spring, they woke Sarah and I up, and I exited my tent to witness three crossing the poet's rosy fingered dawn, shooting out of the snow capped Ruby Mountains on a crisp May morn. In formation.

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Such presence even when marked as "friend". Imagine the impact when "foe". And that gray area between, eating all. Could I talk to those pilots? What would we hear?

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The Blue Angels perform more than 70 shows at 34 different locations throughout the USA each year. Since 1946, they have flown for more than 260 million spectators.

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Peace to the Iraqi and Afghani children, parents, the old, murdered and unborn of this fucked-over world. And to those spreading Hell in name of Heaven, an active, strong, vigiliant peace mixed with sorrow and rage, no matter how desperate it turns, no matter how little our swords and arrows seem to dent the titanium. That my tax money goes to such obscene ends while my own fellow citizens are bankrupted by an unforseen illness, or a minor surgery.

We all know this prayer, and this plea. Its more a question of what we are going to do, how often we repeat it, how much of our life we give to realizing another way. What to add? I'm in. Call me on it when I am not, thats what friends and critics are for. I'm in.

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sonic boom. a bomb. to tear asunder. a 'deafening' scream. where i would like to hear. and death too is acrobatic, incendiary, leaves a trail... sneaks up, unexpected, and overpowers.

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Sly Stone wrestling with that devil, and getting on top of him.

while we are near the subject of bicycles

Another bike setback:

"In another technique, sensors are placed on the rider's penis to measure oxygen flowing through arteries beneath the skin. Blood flow is detected by other sensors that send a "swoosh" sound to a Doppler machine."

Intrigued? Without giving it away, let me just say you know that numb, sore feeling from riding on a hard bike seat? How well do you know it? Uh-huh, and how's your sex life? Read on...

werdenfield loves you and your perineum.

New links, long posts

Welcome to Sean MacInnes on the blogroll, and to Effing Press in the stage and page section. Bout time, yo. If you don't know Sean Mac, go trowling, and likewise for Effing, run by Scott Pierce down in Austin, TX, who has damn near brought down the term "ineffable" onto his head in countless reviews. I like the other sense added on ' fucking ineffable' - now that's descriptive prose.

And bout that triple decker beneath us... In blog fashion, its one essay, presented in reverse order. Essays are the new poems. Dig.

Essays are hard to write, prose can kick the reader out as effectively as any "what-i-did-yesterday" or "fuck bush, keine blud fur oil" poem out there. Essays push me in unexpected ways, and they ride me down. Like marathons. Can you see where I started to tire? And get the umpteenth wind? Tamales time, friends. Tomorrow, its back to work.

And those ridiculous SSSCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRs above my head must mean its effing Fleet Week. "Join now. "Daredevil prose, y'all. Free membership, too.

Tapping the Source

When I’m home from work, time is malleable, open, a bounty. I can become longwinded. What I meant to do here was offer a little context for Pema’s laying out of the teaching of the Three Lords of Materialism ( Lalos, in Tibetan Buddhism): “the three ways that we shield ourselves from the fluid, un-pin-downable world, three strategies we use to provide ourselves with the illusion of security. This teaching encourages us to become very familiar with these strategies of ego, to see clearly how we continue to seek comfort and ease in ways that only strengthen our fears”

The First Lord – the Lord of Form

“It represents how we look to externals to give us solid ground.” Faced with unease, its that familiar list – sex, drugs, drink, shopping, sports, travel, dancing, parties, nature, TV, internet, work and career, books, having written books. Not the activities themselves, but how we cling to them, how we use them as shields, how we addict ourselves to them to escape a reoccurring pain. Pema notes: “when we become addicted to the lord of form, we are creating the causes and conditions for suffering to escalate. We can’t get any lasting satisfaction no matter how hard we try. Instead the very feelings we’re trying to escape grow stronger.” Suggesting the Stones – they tried mighty fucking hard, but in all their later photos, they look a little sad, a little worn and pathetic (or maybe a lot?), a kind of still-here tired – made simulacrum small by their own (aging) legends. Survivors, sure, connoisseurs of women and rehab, yet financing this by endlessly threshing out diminishing versions of the old hits. Disney (or maybe Miramax) caricatures of their own myth. I Know I’ve felt the same, although been paid far less for it.

Pema adds “No matter how we get trapped, our usual reaction is not to become curious about what’s happening. We do not naturally investigate the strategies of ego.” She suggests that in bodhichitta (awakened heart) practice, the radical act is simply : “to pay attention to what we do.” From this acknowledgment without judging, “we might [eventually] decide to stop hurting ourselves in the same old ways.” I would be interested to know that the Stones were doing a tour with all new material, with none of the old hits, or re-treads of same. Actually, I would be a little more interested if it was Stereolab, but whatev…

The Second Lord – the Lord of Speech

“This lord represents how we use beliefs of all kinds to give us the illusion of certainty about the nature of reality. Any of the “isms” – political, ecological, philosophical, or spiritual [or certainly aesthetic, no?] – can be misused in this way.” And “The problem isn’t with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong, how we use them to avoid the feeling of uneasiness of not knowing what is going on.” Yet underneath that uneasiness, beside it, is our natural curiosity, our instinctive energy and attention which we can apply to the trouble at hand. Our discernment and practice can guide us, we can find ground without faking it through beliefs. This was the fierce, uncompromising, warrior quality that shown through in Derrida. An insistence on avoiding the easy, the obvious, the cheap offered way out – on rather investigating these outs, subjecting them to analytic scrutiny, in the name of seeing what the fuck is going on with all these ruses of power. Like Jacques says, its not so much that we emphasize that “I deconstruct x” as it is that “I note x’s deconstruction”.

Here the sense of always already, a certain timeless karma-in-motion, a sense that we make up in medias res, that there’s nowhere else but this big middle, and that even our best intentioned explanatory stories are just that, and somewhere, somewhere, a narrator is telling them, and that narrator has their reasons… often this very unease with not-knowing is among them. “Beliefs and ideals have become just another way to put up walls.” Who hasn’t been involved in some political crisis (whether domestic or academic or activist hardly matters) and experienced this reactive tendency, no matter how progressive our aim? What else to do again but note, but read, this tendency – chart it exhaustively, compassionately, learn from it? “if we find ourselves becoming righteously indignant, that’s a sure sign that we’ve gone too far and that our ability to effect change will be hindered.” Even in our opponents, even in the pro-life arena, in the Bush White House and their Corporate backers, even in the varying terror camps, their sense of struggle, however perverted, springs, at some obscured level, from a deeply and passionately felt conviction. Even if its only in their self, and its infallibility.

The Third Lord – the Lord of Mind

“the most subtle and seductive strategy of all.” “The lord of mind comes into play when we attempt to avoid uneasiness by seeking special states of mind… These special states are addictive. It feels so good to break free from our mundane experience. We want more.” Pema’s list of examples: LSD, sports – being “in the zone”, falling in love, spiritual practices… I’d add writing and performing. Wonderfully, I have dabbled in all of these zones addictively, or at least habitually. I have a real knack for this one. Faced with the relentless ordinary, doesn’t the extraordinary start to look sublimely good? “Even though peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us about why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. If we can’t integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us. We can trust our experiences as valid, but then we have to move on and learn to get along with our neighbors.” Once the applause at the big release reading ends, its back to the empty studio, to the blank screen. Once the insight is attained, it passes away, and you are hungry again, and the baby is too. “Since it is inevitable that what goes up must come down, when we take refuge in the lord of the mind we are doomed to disappointment.” So that’s what’s been going on. Literally every book, every movie, every reading, every charged conversation or long walk home in shifting light, and I am full of ideas, inspired, jazzed. And about ten minutes later it’s a puff of smoke, and what was that idea, that scene, that secret twist? I am left with questions, with the longing, which I recognize, I identify – as me. My plight. Fucked up again.

Pema, and I, move on. With one look back:

“Each of us has a variety of habitual tactics for avoiding life as it is. In a nutshell [and I actually trust this nutshell, and its meat too], that’s the message of the three lords of materialism. The simple teaching is, it seems, everyone’s autobiography.”

I could end my life on that quote.

I like my nutshells at the end of the meal, after we’ve been lost, we digress, and they come out with the cheese. Plant it in the ground, or in yr belly, watch it seed.

The text is not the book (C’est ne pas un blog)

This morning, reading Pema Chodron, I make no grand claims about her. We have never met, and I have no insights into her life or practice. She’s just the type on the page, and the photo on the back, a warm, wrinkly smile, with either inner glow or studio light reflection on her cheeks. What I can say is that she writes motherfucking incredibly well, and that it is a true pleasure to meet her texts. If reading is a performance, then this was an intimate, quiet, deliberately slow one, a neural unwinding neither hushed nor precious. I read slowly cuz her lines slip in and in and in.

This is my new mojo, to understand that the very real pleasures and profundities of a read text relate more to me, to my reading, than to any distant, other author. I don’t contest that she wrote this book – no doubt with help from others – but that its simply less relevant – is actually fundamentally suspect – for my reading to focus on an absent author that I must construe and conjecture on than on the present reading subject, and this undeniable, and immediate, and pressing, experience of reading. There is a real opportunity here, and a responsibility too, not just for/to the self, but also the world with which we share whatever it is we find in our readings. And we are always reading.

This also admits complexity, it allows for one to write deeply engaged and intimate and brilliant poems, and then behave like a monosyllabic ass at the next party. The contradiction is only juvenile, apparent, born of sloppy thinking. Still, my vestigial faith tells me that writing this gentle and incisive rather pushes the hog-wild party-wrecker archetype off the menu for Pema. No one’s mentioned that side of Gampo Abbey to me. Yet.

So a vital sense of complexity, and uncertainty. A tentativeness and humility in staking claims, even in my own mind. An ability to listen, to accept, to weigh. That’s what I was reading, and reading for, this morning. A way to proceed in a life marked by awkwardness, discomfort, confusion, forgetting, difficulty. In/Of’s Malcolm X quote was a small revelation – that one can embrace awkwardness, even see its necessity. And in the arts, how the writer can allow, see the wisdom of certain awkwardnesses of language and rhetoric, how beauty is diminished by aiming always for some transcendental luminosity and exactness, as if that precision and heat of soul is the only thing worth aiming for (well then, goodbye to farming, for one). And aiming at all, it is so easy to disappear into our aims, projects, goals. To what end? And with what (unsaid?) motivation?

And with practice, I as a reader-writer can become conscious of my effects, my textual traces, and conscious of how I feel around each, about what they are connected to – habits of abandonment, of verbiage, of examples, and rapidity, of repeating words, themes, forms, of avoidances and misgivings – watching it all like a movie on an endless –yet iterative – loop, until it all becomes familiar, even in each new crop of mutations. Knowing the terrain, can’t I chose how I move through it? – and its no dumb choice. Intimacy with my surroundings allows for great insight, for fluid and masterful motions. Or, at the least, to be at peace in the war of the heart – bravely in it, not fearfully apart from it. Selfless in the middle of chaos – on Monday, for me, the ER (well, working on that “selfless” part).

And if there is anything at stake in our work, then there is danger, and in danger, one must not only be a warrior, but a capable, a fearless one. If there’s nothing at stake, then hey, go do what you want. But isn’t this “nothing at stake” just another tourist excuse? A product of some invisible luxury which oppresses us, grinds us down to nothing and no one? It seems to me too big a negation – even in play, there are stakes, as in childhood: the stakes are as high and vast as we care to see them. Regardless, as I keep doing it, and keep asserting (largely in the face of my own opposition), writing matters. It is a matter of mine. I triumph it, share it, I trust in its revelations and obstructions. In its path. The bitch is a practice, and a damn good and uncompromising one.

Heartfelt i.e. trying

When I first started reading poetry and novels and essays in HS, I assumed, in a fairly uncomplicated fashion, that if you were an articulate and powerful writer, you led an articulate and powerful life. Since I was interested in liberation, in revolution, in all the good kicks a young punk rocker hungers for, I naively imagined my heroes, both on page and stage, to be champions – and models – of a better life. And I figured I knew just what that better meant.

Now I wouldn’t say that things were –as many nostalgic nee conservative accounts of childhood have it – less complicated, but that I was deliberately simplifying in order to make sense of it all, to have a fixed order, and a fixed position in that fixed order. At a moralistic and fiery 17, it is fairly easy to be a zealous deductive scientist, and write off any “bad data” that doesn’t confirm the initial hypothesis ( jocks are monsters, war is evil, the right doc martens are a sign of nobility, capitalism and money are the devil, Salvador Dali is awesome… etc.). These theses informed every aspect of my life, from what I thought of my parents to what records I listened to, which subjects I avoided in school as well as where I hung out, the girls I liked… ad nauseum. Yet I imagined myself a fiery rebel and apostle of freedom.

A few years later, having discovered how Nietzsche went insane and kissed a horse, how Hemmingway shot his brains out, how the issue of anarchy and the dream of the collective was a little different than the Ex and Crass records made out, how most of my Kerouac-kissing dreamer friends were well on the way to post-adolescent self-destruction, how Ian MacKaye was seen drinking a beer (! – I remember this one clearly, after a Fugazi show – and that it was a shock) how cynicism and careerist posturing were slipping in to the scene, how professors could spout great opinions and still lead dreary, uninspiring lives, how each high birthed a new, and greater, low, and, first but listed here last, how miserable I still was after all these adventures, I had the sense that there was nothing left, that nothing held true, I could rely on nothing, I was alone.

And with this first taste of basic freedom, I flipped out, and wanted none of it. But there was nowhere to go (thankfully). I didn’t want to get a job, just some job, and when I tried (my parents pushed) I failed. So I went into a monastery.

And there, in the Buddhist world, again I met teachers and read texts that felt purely enlightened, pristine and clear. Wisdom and insight untainted, boundless compassion, all that horseshit all over again. So after a few years my practice – or my dream of practice – ebbed. It was such hard work, it was such miserable hard work. I was still a completely unenlightened dweeb with grand delusions of enlightenment. My new crew of hero saviors was looking more like real people – wise, helpful, but limited, and even fallible, or should I say complicated? Where to go now?

probably not the post JWG is checking for (sorry JWG)

thanks all. i am healing away. or healing towards. i am a little like an old person - can't do so much, little things become adventures - the shower, putting on a shirt, feeding the cats. my body urges me to go slow, and i am trying to oblige, but the MTV generation has a tuff time with that, and i'm of it. i'm learning.

being confined to sickbed is a great time to catch up on old movies (to much head ache for reading) but the ones I picked out naively are in German, French and Danish, and the subtitles hurt. Still Herz Aus Glas is fucking incredible - the whole cast was filmed - save the lead - under hypnosis, and not only does my favorite Blondie song come out of it, but there are some drop dead gorgeous, and haunting, and disturbing, scenes in this lt. 70s Herzog flick. And Derrida is for me the perfect - and highly accessible, esp. to one dedicated to reading/writing in this culture - reintroduction to the man and his work. Derrida is a thinker that I wander away from but never want to escape, eclipse, or forget - his work is just too vital a surgery of the Western body. If I can get away with putting it that way. Derrida and I meet in our mutual concern with turning over the givens of our culture, examining them in the name of a greater freedom, a greater clarity of vision (and one which allows, can even appreciate, the peripheral and occasional blur and myopic blind). Plus, it was a film that made me reconsider the lady in the ER who was shouting repeatedly that "Its all a conspiracy" - there is definitely a place where the alliance of police, HMOs, social workers and doctors and staff does seem both unholy and definitely conspiratorial. I suppose I would really have wet my pants if it had been a film on Foucault.

Anyway, my poncey eyes are tired and I will wait to tomorrow to watch the Five Obstructions. Honestly, with Sarah off travelling and me all alone and weak/recovering, I'd be up for a good erotic film - the kind that gets the blood flowing. Not quite the genre exercise of porn, I really don't know what film it would be - but luscious, passionate, embodied, sensual, connected. Bodies not removed from hearts and minds. Cheesy? When I was in the ER, there was nothing better to have a nurse touch my shoulder and look into my eyes and hear - truly listening and allowing my words to enter - my heartfelt and roughly worded thanks. That was sensual, that was intimacy, that was connection. And is. As a sidenote, those fuckers were a little guarded, a little resistant to, at first, hearing this thanks - but as I told Ms. Sparks last night, if one holds eye contact while speaking - something I am gunshy of - you can see their pupils adjust, relax - is it dilate? - into the channel of communication between us. And their faces softened - men and women - and for a moment they stopped rushing around as caregivers, and let me reciprocate, and felt the joy of their work, making, as they do, such moments of healing, of life, possible. And after all the shitstorm of those last few hours at the hospital - as a patient, and as a body to be performed upon (and thank god, cuz i could barely talk at first let alone walk and i needed that performance) - it felt so GOOD to be able to give something back - a sense of gratitude, of play, of exchange, of communion even.

Am I preaching? Let's hope its an innocuous (innoculate) sermon. And now, again, writing this, I discover my own poverty of the sensual, of intimacy, always reducing connection, penetration, commingling, to cock-groans and cunt-moans and copping a nice hiney. Having written this, I could care less about consuming something erotic now... with Eros, one can make their own. And freely SHARE it. At least until Blogger flags me (Et tu, google?). So, again to Ms. Sparks, lets hold off on that "I'd be willing to spring for a hooker for ya" offer for awhile. It was tantalizing.

I didnt link those movies above. its gotten to the point where, in this format, that feels like a very shoddy performance of "blogging". While I'm at it, there's fascinating controversary around the so-called 10th planet and other TNO's (trans-Neptunian objects), and at the center of it again are words, their definitions, and the privleges of names and naming. Such contentions! And no, the 10th planet is not going to be called Xena, if its going to even be called anything. Still, if you want to strike a blow to the system, go ahead and write about Planet Xena, we'll know what you mean, geekette or nerd. Every once in awhile, its good to return to the realms where Kuiper, Oort, 51 Pegasi (where, 10 years ago Thurs., the first extrasolar planet was discovered) and other such phantoms (such as: Orcus, Ixion, 2002 UX25, Varuna, 2003 EL61... and that's just a sampling near Pluto...) of my far mind dwell. Reminds me so strongly of being 5 and imagining infinity until I raced off the edge of my mind into, namely, terror, realizing there was no edge, no limit, no end. I nearly wet the bed.

Planet, from the Greek πλανήτης, planētēs, for wanderer. The ancients didnt include Mama Earth as a planet, so ostenibly it was Galileo and Copernicus's crew who showed that we too weren't fixed, weren't flat, weren't immune - our home too a transient nomad good-for-naught floozy in some cheap sandwich between pagan Venus and Mars. How very SF.

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sara - know that your "its okay kyle, you're doing great kyle , it'll all be okay.. i think i am going to faint..." was a highlight of the ER experience, you and that stubborn artery that WOULD NOT stop bleeding (A truly Taurus vein runs through me).

JWG - some photos were taken, but I haven't seen anything. I am saving the bandages though. Don't ask. The hole was plum sized, and it filled with blood, and when the artery was struck, I heard (I wasnt looking then) that it spurted like a fountain. I could clearly see how this hole had been made by a car door corner, it looked like someone had chiseled a pyramid out of my chest - it was deep, or so it looked to me. The ER folk weren't impressed, as it didnt puncture my lung. But then one of their next patients had a sizable hole of his own - in the side of his head. I must've been stuck with needles over 2 dozen times. The IVs and one (unannounced) invasion in my lower gut were particularly memorable. That sense of invasion though, like, AAIIIEEEE! in come the aliens, with their own inhuman agenda.

Dylan - No I didnt. How did she know it was her?

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well, i'm sleeping a lot and not being too ambitious. thanks and love and prayers to all. i miss you and i am glad we are all here.

love
k

bike versus car

and bike lost.

five hours, and maybe 12 (can't count the internal ones) stitches later, hiya. nice big hole sealed up above my heart. hospital stories, ruminations, there is plenty to write bout this, but i am totally exhausted right now. no major organs fucked - sore muscles, torn skin ( my chest went INTO the corner of a car door), a better sense of what contemporary emergency care is... that kind of thing. i hope the woman who was shouting "its a conspiracy" is feeling better now. and i met kuan yin. but its san francisco, so he's this young guy who looked a little like talib kweli.

it will take a while to process having seen my very own (and very dear) "marbled fat". its actually kind of fun to write about this, but, LAT-R.

until then, know i am healing, my neck is super stiff, and the IVs they stick in your arms are plastic! who knew...

and share your sympathy. tanya brolaski, in berkeley, nearly got her finger cut off. its a rough week for bay area poets. shit be going down.

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"Traffic accidents kill an average of 728 cyclists each year, injuring 45,000 more. Cyclist's account for 13 percent of all non-motorist traffic, 2 percent of all traffic fatalities, and 1 percent of all traffic injuries. Roughly 40 percent of all bicycle fatalities occur in the states of California, Florida, New York and Texas." - RIP, dead cycle homies. KMalone, know I was thinking of you. Sorry I always stuck my tongue out at you in the end. What to say? Hope you made it past the confusion...