The Day on Fire

Walkthrough: Louis Jenkins

2012-01-23T12:52:00.000-08:00

I read Jenkins' collection "The Winter Road" and came up with this.

Another in the "Walkthrough" series.

Walkthrough: Louis Jenkins

In a small northern town the children hear the chain behind the windy trees behind the house. It takes them up in slow, chinking steps while the neon sinks around them. They laugh, sometimes alone, at the memory of the coaster making its way to the top. And while they recall that expectation like old men talking about wild women, their parents climb ladders to tie off tire swings. They have all but forgotten it, having descended so many times, the wide-eyed space of age all but overtaking them. They know that the view down is better than the ascent, that there is a consolation for age, thick laughter in the face of the night, the reward for a life of hands and feet inside at all times.

Push the Button, Frank

2011-12-22T09:05:00.000-08:00

We've all had the feeling. It's late. You need some rest. After all there's that thing and the one you forgot today and the person who has to know something asap or it will be too late. Okay. All lined up and ready for the morning. Your body is a mass of nervous tired. Covers up. Light off. You slowly close your eyes and

BOOM! Breasts! FIRE OH MY GOD FIRE! "Sure but what does he know? I mean..." DEATH! Indy 500 CLOSE UP! A Jetta commercial on speed. "It's the square root of EVIL!" Bodies writhing for the DANCE. Snakes DYING!

Open eyes.

Shit.

Is this what speed is like?

Shit.

You can't turn it off. Channel a big ball of light or a stream. Try to remember what silence sounds like. Tell the world to fuck off and hope it forgets you soon.

This is, I'm sorry to say, a regular occurrence with me. I wanted to attribute it to genius, but since I can't seem to find any empirical proof of that, I now call it overstimulation. It took a while to find the conscious relaxation technique for me. Here it is for your edification or entertainment.

It is pitch black. I walk forward, hand out. I touch a doorknob, cold brass and smooth. Turn and enter. A billion lights on a control panel. A plane or mad scientist playset. I move forward and begin slowly switching off the sharp points of light, feeling each move reducing power in the ship or machine or whatever. I do this systematically for about a minute. Each 'off' reduces the tension in another part of my body. Click. Left foot. Snick. Right hand. That's when I see it. A comically large, red button at the top right. How did I not see it before? Failsafe. Master Dead Switch. Yeah, like the one at the gas station. Hit the button, Frank. I palm it hard and it all goes down. Everything. Every light. Every sense of power. The hum I wasn't even aware of drops from tenor to bass and dissolves to nothing.

The Titanic. Night. April 14, 1912.

Suddenly I am in a lifeboat, safe and distant. All at once the massive liner goes dark, lifeless. I'm not cold as the hulk lurches to the left the moonlit water like a giant finally dying on the horizon. I've left the great vessel of life and am beginning to float further out into the darkness. It's not scary. I'm warm and the world's want gives me a bye. It's okay. Just go. You won't be missed. Everyone understands. You've done just fine. I stop worrying about every little thing I am expected to remember when I wake. Whom to love. The dates of war. mad motor skills. Whom to leave alone. I smile. I breathe. I leave behind even the darkness.

Goodnight.

Road Trip

2011-12-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

Half drunk on his own sad, he croons badly to his country. Salt on his tongue, he smiles, thinks about running away from statues and spotlights towards things hell bent in the wind. Hands and knees on dirt. Spanish spat in slurred anger. The rights of stars. Falling back in roadside bushes, tumbling the world down a thickened vision, it's due south and saying somethings are rightfully ignored. Forgotten on purpose.

In Superior

2011-11-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

What do you do when you are too sick to go out, clean house, or otherwise be helpful? Rework scraps you find in drawers, maybe remember very special nights up north.

In Superior

the nameless points on the horizon,

where sight surfs on white flashes

and into the black suede above,

show us everything we need to know.

I love how it makes me young, my eyes

suckling the full breast of moonlight.

I love how it makes us old, two smirking stars

who have watched it all come and go together.

In the morning it’s almost gone, just a glance

over breakfast and bloodies and the world’s tide rolling in.

So let’s not rush.

At the place where the night starts to see,

when the day closes down

I'll see you there.

Don’t say a word.

Get ready to jump.

Some Mondays Are Better Than Others

2011-11-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

Pushcart Prize Nomination

I'd like to thank words, without which this would not have been possible.

I post more regular updates over at Facebook. If you're not following me there, you're missing out my almost daily quips of pyrite and nickle.

2011-10-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

Multiple Choice

2011-10-21T13:56:00.000-07:00

The secret night opens six inches in front of your next step. It is exactly 12 years from your past and half that from your future. You have to enter it else be trapped forever. The solution is understanding:

a. Why
she feels slighted at the Oscars.
They don't know shit she says in the dark,
no make up and writing her own lines to boot.
No idea.
Weighted with bags enough, she practices with
couples in the park. They just smile and stroll on.
She doesn't hear cut and keeps talking until
the last bench, where she sits to smoke,
stretches her varicose legs until her bit part
in the next scene.

b.How
some people
are completely themselves in public,
as if the open air act of being noticed
enables their own private perfection.
For you, he laughed, its a gauntlet.
Just make it through and shut the door.
Exhale. Allow the closed world
to refill what keeps getting taken against
your will.

c. Where
the perfect blue is cut slant by architecture.
This sky so close above you,
Some worlds need pressure to form, you think.
Something about oysters and pearls and
small incisions that hurt now but help in the end.
Blue oblivion edging the relief.
But then there's the steady state view,
something says. An old man every night
outliving us all in a field
just outside the city.

Tunnel

2011-10-20T05:43:00.000-07:00

The strange chemicals in my brain have leveled out once again, and the world is no longer seen as a reddened singularity. It is fascinating to watch myself, as if from the outside, behaving like my father. Those times when he would implode and wend, with perfect subtlety, from stoic king to half-mad emperor. Kurtz ala Brando. The tribute to Hollow Men. A concrete weight is placed on the face and heart, the air you breathe rationed with sadistic measure and scented with bondage. The world you have created for yourself has been effortlessly assumed by sly raiders who have done nothing to earn it, save for their patience in waiting for you to drop your guard.

Fairness becomes an excuse for the beaten. Entreaties from everywhere like peels of sardonic laughter, masked just enough to keep you playing the game. It is not unlike dreaming, when the monster is upon you and you're slowly sprinting in quicksand. But here you're the monster and the horizon is teeming with hoards of decisions that have brought you here, to the place you cannot bear and cannot leave. So you rattle the cage, ironically impressed by its solid construction, by the beauty of light glinting off the life your very own hands have shaped.

Vacation in Catalan

2011-10-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

Finding yourself in Catalan
where the brave cliffs still tell stories and twist
winds through the minds of madmen.

In their cracks the plans of melted genius
have taken up hermitage, waiting for the world
once again to call for Roche.

Your group approaches the castle and whispers
its way up the winding stairs. It's dark, but from behind
you see the thin glowing line that connects, the one that
stops at you.

On the roof your friends veer right
to hear the new language of architecture,
see the lights of the city as they pop and start
the arousing work of night.

You wander left to a cannon,
hard and ready for a hundred years.
And as you load it with your clothes,
they don't notice that you're free,
that you're propositioning a whore to light the fuse.

Pan in the Cloister

2011-10-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

This weekend I decided to embrace my inner Pan, who breaks free of his provincial bonds every summer and fall, and return to the waters that sated and bathed me, those earliest years of my new life in Minnesota. I saw a faerie there (yeah, really) and the energy of that place helped ease the turbulent transition from my old life in TN to my new one so far north. It is a certain spot on the Mississippi, just west of where it joins the Minnesota. This space is a sacred cloister for me, a place to recharge the soul batteries and get perspective from the daily grind. It would be fifteen more years before I would discover that this area is also sacred to someone else, the local Dakota who consider the place where the two rivers join, the Bdote, nothing short of the center of the universe. The place of Dakota genesis. I'm telling you; you feel something here.

My spot is waiting for me, though the weather has transformed it from a hidden sanctuary to a pit stop on a well traveled path. I feel I have traveled sideways through time. Enormous puppets and madrigaled beauty surround me. Ren Fest made real. People of all ages in some kind of celebration. Seems like something to be imagined, but it is only good timing. Lovers holding hands. Feudal love, requited. How wonderful. I am passed without a glance, shielded by indifference or native glamour. The old driftwood tree, which has always centered my visits here, has somehow escaped the spring floods and glows in the afternoon sun. It is more beautiful in how less it has become. Once imposing, now a stark piece of art Zen against all thought it could be so. Its protective skin long gone, smooth grooves hardened perfectly by everything it has weathered.

There are still nymphs about. I can't see their ethereal curves; I feel them. They approach me, whisper in enticing breeze, giggle out of nostalgia. They ask me where the hell I've been. I try to respond, but have nothing. One pulls on my shirt and I smile. Pan, the wrong time, always the right place. And the old Pan simmers here in the light between the trees. Visions. Primordial drive and open sky. Earths moved by desire alone. I am shone fires that still burn beyond the day. A silent proposition. The sun laughs. Pan, too. He miles at the newness of everything. He wants to make long love to the modern world. Remind it through coarse sweat what it keeps leaving behind. He wants it to call him in the morning.

As I prepare to leave the modern self begins to take over. "Where am I?" The sand just laughs. It wonders why the question is always the same. A day trip to Fey, I tell myself. The rumored madness not a fear, but a blessing that prepares me for the return. The timeless clearing seems at odds with the world that waits. Come here at you become the thing that does not fit. Join them both inside you. Tighten the bands while opening the soul. Rectify infinity with the stone ticking of the clock.

~

Friday in America

2011-09-30T04:28:00.000-07:00

It is a very good morning

And all I want is more

A woman buys coffee she won’t drink
And somewhere a platoon of names
are suddenly homeless

As a blonde walks byA boy's brains

Leave his head
Like his last memory of spring

And here we sit worried
We can’t finish
More than names are lost

It is a very good morning
The sun is here
And all I want is more

Water and the Setting Sun

2011-09-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

Will you be my daisy passing, or be the grave I dig?

Bad questions fill the air until the night.

Ekphrasis: Real Man Retroscope

2011-09-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

Coffee and Cigarettes

2011-09-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

The final scene of Coffee and Cigarettes with Taylor Meade and Bill Rice just might be the best cinematic moment I've seen yet. I won't link to the scene, because it is more poignant if you watch the whole film.

On "A View of the Woods"

2011-09-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

"A View of the Woods" by Flannery O'Connor is perfectly typical for that author's style. The loved child, defiant - subtle but certain proof that the world is not aligned the way it should be, that this world is tainted with injustice fashioned by God for sins a life has worked itself against and, unknowingly, for.

Some have commented on a reflexive Oedipal-Elektra complex between the old man and the girl. (http://thistosay.blogspot.com/2004/12/view-of-woods-by-flannery-oconnor.html). It doesn't strike me as something intentional. This kind of relationship is reminiscent of the one between Francis Marion Tarwater and his great uncle in The Violent Bear it Away, O'Connor's great second and final novel. It is not about sex but about old and new, the past and the future's death grip on the present. I would contend that this is the same dynamic we find in "Woods." The blog above also mentions things such as how the natural world in the story is described in human terms, while people are done so in those more animalistic. The businessman's serpentine features fit cleanly into O'Connor's Christian ethos, and the clay motif also instills in the story a realism you can almost smell.

The ending is quintessential O'Connor, the imagery vague and haunting, recalling O'Connor's story "The River" and, to a lesser degree for me, "The Turkey." When I read "Woods" it did not matter to me the actual fate of the girl at the end. The author's deft craft conveys what the reader needs to know, that she has crossed to the other side, has left this world, entirely -- tainted and scarred as it is -- all chances for redemption, but Fortune's dream.

Transmission #260

2011-08-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

A woman enters the courtyard glances around in her subtle confusion. In distressed spandex, she knows what she hates body first, the rest of the world when she has time. She admires the strong, wide denim of a man to her left. Military. Sewn patches. Biker. She veers toward and sits at the table next to him. In space, a tepid light approaches a rock, which bends it so very slightly in its favor. Race.

Teens at the next table try to talk like adults. Their voices like two long poles in a crowded room.

The woman has switched seats now, the one watching the man. She's moved so she can better view of him. He now has a woman sitting with him. She effuses a spousal aroma. But that doesn't stop the other woman from watching intently. Some are to be admired for the tenacity of their hunger. Survivor

The servers across the court are having to gossip more quickly now with a steady increase of patrons. Loud cheers from down the block grow in timbre. I watch their allure, which seems to grow and darken like areolas. I take a deep draw and envelope my head in a concealing haze. That's when I hear the thing that ties it all together. Cancer

Suddenly. I'm aware. Runners slowing to a walk at the end of the courtyard, their matching pink shirts, the common goal. The no longer unconscious shifting in my chair. My smoking takes on an apologetic air, for no discernible reason. I find myself rehearsing answers to questions I will not be asked.

The runners end their trek and file into the other bar in spasms. Swarms of tanned arms taken up in solidarity. Cropped hair and looks of dogged gratitude. Hope against corrugated time. "Juicy's Juggs" on their shirts call forth no sexuality, but rays of sunshine and a clean bill. Families trundle by like nuclear caravans, wives smiling at the open display of womanhood. Children confused. Husbands adjust themselves in pastel Polos.

Servers are in high gear now, unsure how to temper their typical sexuality in this singular context of what is just beyond their lives. Till the end of their shift, they will pace the gray zone between them. Race.

Within the gathering crowd of runners, a teenage girl plays with her phone, looking up now and again to half-smile at the positive energy around her. It is the exact same look as the server orbiting her. The one with the Eastern Bloc lips and Allied hips. She maintains her pace, her eyes darting to the growing fervor of the crowd. Fleeting glimpses of a verified future, a road not yet traveled. She is drawn and repulsed. It's a conflict now a part of each fake smile she flashes.

The woman across the way gets up. She stands right in front of the man and his companion. She looks at them both likes she wants to speak, looks back at the runners instead, and absently walks away. Survivor.

Song to Myself

2011-08-16T05:25:00.000-07:00

I failed to update the Journal last week. Guilty. I was on the WTP (White Trash Patio) instead. Against my better judgment I transcribe from the night. I make no claims for coherence only melodrama. If you find meaning in it, let me know. To me it is only waves against the shore. Consider it a gift, a reason to point and laugh when we next meet.

THE OPENING PARAGRAPH of "The Night-Sea Journey" is designed, that is composed specifically, to be the very important-creating opening page of any future collection of self-referential writing. I will use it myself, I have no doubt, so perfectly laid out in literature English as it has been done. And I will do it

as others do, unabashedly, to add some arbitrary component of gravitas to my work. And all written work does strive to be important, most so by those who claim to want the exact opposite. The most grass-roots movement is, in fact, destined for momentary greatness. It has something

to do with the fire I'm trying to start. No. I'm not being metaphorical here like Jefferson Starship (why they had to move from an airplane to something grander had everything to do with their fall from grace) and Krispy Kreme. No

I am attempting, in vain it seems, to light a nice fire here on the patio. I should be inside composing my promised Thursday blog post. Who knows, perhaps the two will meet one day. I keep blowing the well placed embers in an attempt to breathe life into their potential. No. This sounds metaphorical again. I'm serious. Because it has to do with the way the almost flames almost catch the vertical log aflame. The approach licking it alive, but without the head needed to make the jump to full fire. Yes, that is metaphorical. The truth is that I. It licks in a sexual attempt to validate itself as agent of change. In truth. I want. I think

the wood is upset. Wet. Impotent even. There are those who may read this who know they could fix it. I'm sure you could. Sexual and energy morphed into Promethean skill sets. You'd think. You'd think I could, the way I like to ramble on. Something is amiss. it is because you. I'm certain it is because you are not here. There is but one person I hope reads this. They do not even know who they are. It is senseless. I know. But there

it is, redeemed by your strongest effort, but not your drive. The night is taking over. What strange lives we lead. What pleasures denied and deny. Things watch us and I turn away. But I see the power that instills those eyes. Do you want beyond subterranean consciousness, like the other I know like you? Alpha and Omega, once revered, now reduced to subsequence. How sad. To promote

life beyond the standard. What noble guesses glide to the edge of indiscretion?

Those who realize. Distant shores of knowing. Speeding caress that fuels them, but I want more. No. No and Gide's attic. I was there once. Parts of me never left. And it is in moments like these I try to go back and retrieve them. What fire. Strange the flame most deny even the notion of breath. I will no succumb, subscribe. Lead! What pleasures sustain beneath the lowest and basest of defined desire? To those. To those I secretly prostrate myself. Do you know? Do you adhere to the filament that has made me this? You. You do not answer. As if silence fulfills you more and places you beyond me. And suddenly. And suddenly

this becomes about the wave I wait for, as I float out beyond the breakers. It is dark now, and I fade with the final glow into the horizon. What wan filigree to which I am prematurely reduced. I imagine you evolving as I sit stuck in some phase between liquid and gas. A sad and quiet fate. Sad and sad again. Yet I rebel. I fight it. With these words I do not go gentle... I strive to set into motion what you leave to reverie. What means I have used to approach. Strange. Seems I should have progressed so much further. The Night. That Wanton. The Day. That Convener. The reason I cannot stop this

because I haven't the strength to do it myself. I rely. I rely on the will of the body of the soul of the corpus of the mind. But none of this will be the relief. Come morning it will stand, the Convener wins, stands outside all just knowing or execution. And so do I, jingling cap and dance, the innocent sin of this all.

###

Transmission from the Center of the Universe #259

2011-08-04T12:27:00.000-07:00

There is a subtle difference between the sports bars drinkers and the better off homeless who traverse the pathways here at the Center of the Universe, specifically the Infinite Courtyard. At first I believed. At first I believed it to be one single thing. While their attire is often remarkably similar in screaming color scheme, brand, and style, the former are lighter on their plodding heels. Drunk on booze rather than fatigue and dark brain hauntings, they transport themselves from table to street to wall to tab with a kinetic their counterparts don’t seem often to muster. It is an attempt at sobriety, this springy gait, an attempt at sobriety shoved into motion. They have plans and have every intention of wending their way to and through them. These plans, which grew shapely legs from bar napkins found at the base of their skulls, penned evenings facing endless times jukebox memorial and flags raised in a/c reverie. Plans now enacted, they are not more, but less real, vying for attention against the wind, breasts and the sweat of new laughters. And perhaps it is in the glow of this attention that the weight of their lives is lifted—if only the slightest—to keep them keeping on.

But their foils, equally aimless but without end of the trail abode. Their steps seem emptier but with more weight. Step. The earth around them bowing its head. A respect reserved for those having borne so much life discarded by the other side of luck. It is in them rivers empty, replete with detritus thought that genius could equal, yet rearranged. Step. The wraiths know which part of the food chain is proper, and it is against same they must defend themselves, turning the trip step corner for not home.

I have seen them collide on the street, these Doppelgängers. No, there. Just beyond the Great Arch of Eternity that bridges present and future. It is a rare and engaging encounter. An attempt at covalent bonding gone wrong. Watch the mirrored look that assumes both faces. Observe the connection, like a lightning or a sucker punch, as each countenance tries its best to deny the other and itself, attempts to negate time by reaching back, jumping forward through a tunnel created by the existence of the other. Sometimes it ends. Sometimes it ends with a voice from one or the other. A line cast through the haze of recognition. A line which never lands. An opportunity always lost to what is upon us. A scent. The hopeful spark of neon. Ass swing flower pendulum of the Holy Grail. Ascent.

Domestic

2011-07-27T19:31:00.000-07:00

in the key of Barth

If he is lucky, at some point the diligent writer finds himself at a crossroads, a great existential chasm like a decision or a doorjamb. One each side lies solid ground and in between yawns the deep known that will destroy him. He will have grown tired of the side on which he resides (else he will have set it ablaze, in an effort to get things going or instill his life with the fictional drama that arouses him). He will pick up the pen or the shotgun to find a way out. Searching the ground around him, he might fling debris into the gap in a vain attempt to fill it (see Midwest poetry ca. 2010). Or he may describe for the average reader the very average madness, about which we never speak. Especially at parties. He will pause to realize that this madness is or could be the abyss to be bridged and the means by which to do it. He decides on the latter and makes it the moving from the middle of the kitchen to the rusting patio furniture handed down by in-laws to purchase more, just as ugly. It the American way to. The writer would be quick to point out that it has nothing to do with the actual movement from inside to out - which is, as it happens, south, that is to imply down, as in Hell - which gives rise to the aforementioned mad. It has everything to do with the exchange which transpires just prior to this exit, which instigates it, galvanizes it, causing it to rise up from the caste of mere displacement from one locale to another, to the physical manifestation of the desire to flee the scene ultimately. Writers need to include a sense of the kinetic, sometimes subtle, sometimes involving helicopters. To flee the scene ultimately, the scene here being city, state, country, and domestic planet. But no protagonist has been established, but merely implied by all this directional garbage. Nonetheless, the aforementioned exchange which led to the exit onto bland patio begins actually ten years ago, pulling the rug from under no less than all of us. It isn't fair. Writers can't just do whatever they. Ten years ago this September and ends 2.5 seconds before the body is turned and marched doorward. Were the reader the researcher type (and some are), it could be conjectured that this act was foretold even further back, before the marriage. The early-to-mid twenties, when longing for both home and away undergoes a certain puberty, hair, stink, and mood and all. Every compound, does it not, allow itself to be broken down into its native constituents? Though here the exchange, we will call it an argument for the sake of it, is exactly that - a compound and heated at that. I would not call it a solution. The native constituents. Hers: the single mother crone who is to be revered, now broken, spoiled, and parading dour before everyone as if by penance. His: the early outcast complex made usable by pressure on all sides along with the discovery of the word in all its nefarious forms. Together, a joined quest for the new and need for the creation of the old within it. And so it happens, and with success, because time is a native constituent, too, and one which must be taken into the equation. We must not behave as amateurs. Time, the constituent with a timer, expending its own pressure with a slowly growing erection toward its death. The rack. Contractions. In imitation of a worthy narrative it builds to a point of change that must be logical and must contain within it a violence for flavor. So it happens five lines from the end. Her need for the security of the nest and his desire not be rendered insane by it. A door, south and east, slams. Vector forces, cut. A baby cries as it imagines a balloon floating off. A god somewhere in the woman turns away, as the man wanders outside, kicks chairs for looking at, wonders why, wonders how long it will take to write about changing places with time.

Respect

2011-07-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

The bartender was bleach dirty blonde, and I don't just mean her hair. Late 30's, she was still a player kept healthy by constant movement, gardening, engaging with the children in the back yard and on the other side of the bar. Knee-length, acid-washed shorts, tank top with the kind of rack you direct a buddy to. But with a matronly air, that said you talk with her about other women. Many a bartender can flash a smile for the win, but she was different. It. never. stopped. I watched closely as she restocked the rail, changed channels looking for the game, poured beers and shots. Her smile was the only constant. It was comforting to think she was having a good time, someone who was at the right place at the right time and getting a check to boot. Soon, because I can't leave a good thing alone, I started seeing it as a burden. Something she keeps up because she's being watched. A bad action-thriller plot point. I imagined a look powered by the steady flow of Red Bull, momentum, and a growing stack of damp singles. She called everyone darlin', smiled at the ways of men, and never batted an eye when the word pussy was crumpled and tossed to the floor. I decided she was just solid, the kind to keep her sanity in a routine anything but. The kind of solid that said though it was fun to try, there isn't an orgasm strong enough that could keep her down for long.

For One Day Michael is a Lonely Meme

2011-07-19T19:22:00.000-07:00

Lonely on a Tuesday, and all my metaphors are like similies. I find myself looking for new ways to spell my name, as though the words in themselves have meaning and will bring about some kind of change somewhere. Names are unique only in their definitions. To yourself, to family and loved ones, names are something wholly unique and more inextricably bound to emotion than the rest of the dictionary. On par with entries like rape and Heaven. But to others, to those who do not know you, they are like the names of colors, about which they know nothing, in whose beauty they may never invest themselves.

Bukowski Walkthrough

2011-07-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

Beginnings are clean, even when it's stink or hate. You laugh when smoke is blown
in your face. Inside you know a clear path has been cut through the socks and books
and condoms, because you're the pussy here and he's the dick.

Stage Two, but you're still on the outside pounding on the door.
It opens and the smell is on you. You stub your toe on a jagged
memory and you're all hair and coins at Billy's, where its all Heart
Magic Man or maybe Barracuda. You're aware of your crotch
for the first time today. And it makes you sad. You're too clean
to be here, but fact's fact and you can't wish away the touch.

It's usually somewhere in the middle, which can be just about
anywhere, depending on how long he is this time.
You start noticing wrinkles you can't smooth away,
the gut that won't suck in. It's the exact subject of the piece
or the slow reflection of it off the narrator, which
you think is the author because otherwise you're
lost. Maybe it's about a gash bleeding love into
the middle of second street. In another, a pause
after the troubled world has finally left him in peace.

And it is that moment which slides you to the end, a climax and denouement
holding hands, where his solitude shoves you out like an unwanted coda, while
his patience for you, Herculean, has brought him some invisible reward.

Standing the hall, you play your part as he plays his Mahler.
You imagine a fifth against his chest sinking into the chair,
only to rise against his own odds somewhere after you've gone,
forgetting you and taking his bow like a good long piss.

Px

2011-07-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

What do you do when things stop making sense, when the routine is suddenly spotlit with a broken vibe, an inanity that renders even tender moments devoid of love?

When you are Jack's life, and you are a small plastic box with sentimental value.

When, what, and how? Does you merely drink himself back into neutral once again?

Reset the amnesia?

You are afraid to enter the shadows. Not out of fear of what awaits,
but out of fear they will underwhelm you, subtracting yet another possible excitement.

Is there mystery which never ends, is never exhausted because it posses no center?
Even the bottomless pit eventually empties to some other side.

The secret then -- to maintain orbit and never land, bore through to the core.

There lies mystery in only the approach of the other.

On the other side, you're back to start.

Afterglow

2011-06-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

An ocean
Cream calm and wide
Tides that breathe with a secret pulse

One by one
We held you
Until the waters stirred
And sounds found and
Turned us depth and victim
Into something unfathomable

Watching now
I see the moonlight has you right
A scented vista fleshed by shadow
Dreaming of pure annihilation

Because Sometimes This Thing is Just a Diary...

2011-05-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

May 26, 2011

Sometimes it's all just too much. The routine and its ignorant constraint. The desired abandon - a childlike hunger for the open air and sultry breeze - whose adult consequence puts the rigors of virtue to shame. Second gear that refuses to be found when you are feeling good about yourself. How sometimes you just can't get the day off of you fast enough. Trying to lose your pants and the zipper just doesn't work.

Even the rusted gears of trying to make sense of all of the movement and haling. That, too, gets swallowed into a greater sphere that manifests right around daybreak. The lessons learned are not clean and only define themselves as such by virtue of their shadows cast upon your conscience. A firm, stray thought cast before you in the middle of nowhere. A declaration like a sentence. You alone to decide its fate. Poked and prodded into bona fide epiphany or left on the shoulder like once living road kill. To be carried away or abandoned to rot. A piece of something important now useless even to itself. ~

Excerpt from Unnamed Work in Progress...

2011-05-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

“You need to get laid, my friend.”

Peter had had enough of my wistful staring. He was not buying me drinks to have me sit out the game.

“You offerin’?”

“Shit, I would if I thought it would help.”

“Sorry, Just thinky.”

“Let me guess: art stuff, right? Man, why can’t you just worry about the same stuff the rest of us do? You don’t say a word when you’re selling CDs for gas money, but heaven forbid we get a new Poet Laurette you don’t like, and you’re depressed for a fucking week.”

“Laureate.”

“What?”

“It’s Poet Laureate.”

“See, who cares? I think you’re an alien from the planet Photon or something. That would explain it, except you never have goodies like lasers or anything. What good is an alien with nothing to offer the good people of earth?”

The best question I’d heard in a while. It’s not just the culture of this country, but the race of beings currently at the helm at the rock as a whole. Product is everything. Screw creation in the shadows, and forget the future. It’s production logged and measured in units available to the public. It’s black and white, over the tender shoulder head shots on double-glossy business cards. Bob Rauch – Novelist. Roberto Mist, Esq. – Poet. The thought made me queasy and the truth of it made me head for the men’s. I passed under the neon that buzzed the same whether the evening was shaping up to be a win or loss for the nighthawks at the diner, the same it had since that night Spider John got crazy after his set and nailed it with a lowball glass. He doesn’t play her anymore. Maybe he got queasy, too, fed up with the kids talking over his songs and not listening to anything an alien like him might have to offer. Maybe he’s been hiding out here in the stall. Maybe its his spaceship. No, not tonight. Nothing but errant piss and toilet tags. Post-modern literature as deemed by the Council on Reversed Baseball Caps. I find myself searching it for real bits of wisdom underneath the bogroll, like looking in the mirror for signs of a hand well played. But until they show up, I'll wait. I'm patient. Aliens are patient. I'll keep looking. And one day I'll show up and I'll have it tucked in the palm of my hand. I'll wait until the band takes a break, because aliens are considerate, then I'll buy the bar a round. Peter'll set in, and that's when I'll whip it out. He'll think it's a joke, try to knock it away, but I will hold it up and he will see it is for the good people of earth and it will be shiny and the future and I'll make sure everyone sees the look on his face. I'll make sure everyone sees the look on his face when he notices it's set to kill.

Robots of Hamm

2011-05-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Robots enter and exit the bar across the street. Their Cylon sunglasses make them invincible. As they approach, the bored servers seem surprised at the business. They say nothing but do not like that they are not human.

Teenagers gather in the center of the plaza. They are tight and lanky and they smoke and glance to ensure they are doing it correctly. They sway from side to side as if it warms them, as if a rhythmic movement will attract something for them, anything at all that will justify their collective unconscious.

A hiker zigzags slowly through the courtyard. He has climbed mountains you and I don't like to think about. Has cooked vicious meals by yon river. Ashcan to ashcan with a walking stick, looking for something important we idiots have left behind.

He Wasn't a Man

2011-05-16T11:57:00.000-07:00

He wasn't a man

if he didn't smoke in front of her.

Ike Reality Blues

2011-05-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

a spontaneous poem. Enjoy

Ike Reality Blues

I like Ike Reilly really
but I can't imagine his eggs
scrambled at noon, that gaunt Irish mouth
screaming all broken teeth
and car bombs. His love of pop tarts
going down with his toast

I know he belongs to the sweltering evening
and his hollowpoint eyes are hungry
for the moment the moment
will fill him just one more time
with enough to make it to the finish line

first Vica and plastic and hip hop thighs
shot up through the alleys
of veins each one searching the puddles of scum
for the fountain of youth
something you can drink while your on your knees
that doesn't taste like it was 62

But he keeps running off sleep
like it's the devil or a god you trick
skating through discretion
and salesmen and jokes
and racists calling the shots you have to down
for street cred cum the morning burn

I've wanted Ike's cool wanted it for years
I thought I'd get some one night at the Ave
But he just kept pissing
and reading the walls
acknowledging that he was
completely alone

Tennessee Memory

2011-04-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

When I visited my folks in TN this past March, I spent time on the porch with my Dad. He has emphysema, weighs about 130 pounds and still smokes Marlboros and drinks Diet Pepsi. He wanders the empty farm looking for projects to remind him he’s a man but that aren’t too strenuous for him. A few times he'd start something like fix a fence or clean the barn before exhaustion drove him back in the house to take a nap.

One night we sat on the porch and we talked about his younger days. He was a wild child motorcycle cop in El Paso, Texas who used to drag race with his partner while on duty with my mom on the back. He picked up Little Richard one night for vagrancy. He took no shit from anyone, wonders why I would. I watched him wince for minutes on end at his hands, clenching and unclenching them like pliers. He confessed he doesn’t miss much about his youth. He’d had a pretty good one compared to many. I told him I bet it he missed dancing with the women at the bar. It was nice to see him smile.

I wish I had written this for my father. I think he wishes he’d written it for his.

Whiskeytown beat us to it.

New Piece over at Berg-Gasse 19

2011-04-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

"Overtime."
A minimalist vignette.
Rejected as a bad poem at one journal.
Understood and published at this one.

http://berg-gasse19.com/2011/04/14/overtime/

A Question for You

2011-04-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

You could see it as a debilitating sickness. Or. You could see it as an opportunity to slow down and organize. This last week I contracted a bad cold or some such which has slowed my thinking and moving to a crawl. Very frustrating to someone who tends to ride the carousel of his artistic ADD like a manic 6-year old nature spirit. Part of this time has been spent looking at how I spend my time creating, the directions in which I expend this energy, and the deep, real reasons I create and share.

This is where you come in...

I have had this blog for some time. Initially it was used as an immediate venue for creative writing, not having the patience to submit, wait, file the rejection slip, and start over. I wanted to create and share, then move on to the next thing. As time has progressed, I am submitting more and getting published more, which has forced me to rethink the role of this blog.

So, I have decided to do what I haven't seen other bloggers do: Ask you, followers of this blog what YOU want to see. What would keep you coming back? In short, what would be worth your time to visit and read?

More introspection on the world around us?
Reviews of local lit, readings, publications, websites?
My own works, for critique before submitting them for publication?
Something completely different?

Post your suggestions as comments to this post, or feel free to email me at michael at thedayonfire dot com.

I will take your suggestions seriously and hopefully start soon with a new focus for this online journal of thoughts. I thank you for being interested in what I have to say, and appreciate your input on how it should look moving forward.

Cheers, Michael

Dear M. Star

2011-03-31T08:33:00.000-07:00

I know. I stopped. The sounds outside wouldn't and I grew tired of falling asleep, even in your arms. Deep as you were, the world changed as you rode your single wrenching wave. I remember the day I started walking, sad I could no longer fade into you.

I'm sorry.
Let's meet every fall by the water.
Let's say little
and drift off over and over again.

Yours,
m.

Green

2011-03-30T10:45:00.001-07:00

I pulled up alongside a kid at the light this morning. He was stomping the floor violently with his face craned up. In part, I figured, because his car had no bass. In another, because life just wouldn't turn green.

Movement in Movement

2011-02-17T05:10:00.001-08:00

Lots of good movement lately in new realms.

Sending out writing for publication

Meeting local filmmakers for possible collaboration

New artist collaboration web project moving forward. I believe I have found a web guy who will (at least) start it up gratis. This is the biggest thing on my plate right now. It will be a place for (again at least to start)local artist of all kinds to come together, create responses to works, connect with artists of other media for collaboration and more. I will try to get grants to get artists paid. I think it can be big. I will feed it good food, love it, and call it George.

If you haven't checked out my main website, you should. It has a new coat of paint: http://www.thedayonfire.com

Cheers,
Michael

Light Makes Shadow

2011-02-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

And I've seen talks of faith turn up
noses in the face of
abandon they don't understand

Hazel Motes
the man in the body
of the world

Feet full of stones
the harder path that knows nothing
of miracles conjured for the hope at home
of a laying of hands on your hard-earned
thoughts
the harder path that brings heaven down
to hold its own in the alleys paved
by what it was all sacrificed for
a thousand psalms ago when sand
was biblical and things that burn
were meant to burn when piety
was a harsh librarian who
had read all the pages
and could tell you how some were better
than others and how you could recombine
them depending on why you believed the sun
rose each and every
But in it all lies
the lie the truth
not marketed in the product
of ink
in the pulce before the tequila

You know what comes next
the idea before the reasons
to cast it in stone, in tablets
we carry and quote and that which
does not reside in the stone shall
not be embraced and if you reject
there will be no cookies or juice
or salvation after the keynote
speaker for you or your guests

I've seen the idea
living under the Hennepin Street
Bridge but he stinks and swears
and his grammar ain't so good
and well the last thing he thought
you'd do is sit and talk a while and
record everything he spit and say
goodbye and head straight for the
press to give birth to a bestseller
based on the words of a man mad
enough to believe in the peace and
clarity and absence of hate that
might make a place you won't want to leave
for Portland.

Love Note

2011-02-02T04:54:00.000-08:00

the point of love
is real and
rents under itself

a laughing keystone
to the outer and inner
rings of desire

but sex is the weak conceit
a child with a child with a child
with a heart

Short, Cute Little Thing in the Latest Riverbabble

2011-01-30T06:27:00.000-08:00

"The Work of Snow" in Riverbabble 18.

For a Friend

2011-01-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

you wax on the rise of falling
a black belt at mistaking
one for the other
no use for shadows the sun
sends you running to the other
the one who wanes for the senses
laughs at how crazy she makes you
basking half wild in her reflection

Blowing Kisses

2011-01-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

she started blowing kisses
everywhere she goes
said she was planting seeds
'cause you ne-ver know
no no no
you never know

Red Fez Wormhole

2011-01-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

Red Fez understands that you get to the center of anything and you come out the other side.

R.I.P. Trish Keenan of Broadcast

2011-01-14T08:28:00.000-08:00

And then one day you wake

To find all broken halls

And curved walls confine you

When you get close

They are everywhere with your voice

Leading you down decisions that have

And will turn you and end in silence

It all made sense before

But then one day you woke

A broken bell

And there is no way out

But sleep

Tonight

2010-12-08T19:41:00.000-08:00

Tonight for the first time
I looked at the horizon and
instead of stars I saw only
rows of lights strung in the trees
and for the first time I was scared
of what might be normal
to most people
~

Suggested track.

Facebook Collaboration

2010-11-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

A collaboration with imagewizard and bootist and my Facebook friend Leslie Miller. Check her out at http://www.lesliemiller.com

For Those Who Have Too Much

2010-11-23T12:51:00.000-08:00

Overstock

for Apotemnophilia

You are the owner
Of 50 beautiful acres
And all you think about
Are the taxes

The land is fertile and to the southeast
And there you are certain
You have murders and clouds
And sand the color of incest

And somehow it’s you who are out of place
You who never once asked
Why your dreams are a two-way street
Why that dotted line makes all the difference

Last Call

2010-10-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

The clouds stretched lean and pink on the skyline and looked like the last layer before blood. The sharp, cold sting found his big toe again. Fifteen years in Minnesota and you’d think you'd learn. He had some decent boots, but he always grabbed his old ones out of habit. Catch your death a cold, his mother always said. He smiled at the thought of defying her. Mother Nature, too. Even if it was in some small way neither would ever know.

“Well, looky’ here. Thought you died, man.”

Jimmy’s voice was like a poke in the ribs. A regular’s regular with the kind of face police stuck in line ups just to throw you off.

“Hey, Jimmy.”

“Heard you was in the hospital or something.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Well, Rick got jumped the other night on his way home. Freakin’ stabbed, dude. Pete’s back in Club Med after he started another fight at Frank’s. What else. Oh. Jen. Remember that actor guy she was dating? Well, he knocked her up then took off. She said he moved to Hollywood. She’s been closing this place down pretty regular since. You’d think it was her first abortion or something.” Something small in Jimmy’s laugh said she had it coming.

“Huh. Dave know about it?”

“Dave.” Jimmy’s smile went limp. “Shit. Nobody knows, man. After Jen got pregnant he kind of lost it. Last I heard he moved to Portland. Became a preacher or something. A preacher. You believe that? Mr. T & A, himself.”

Somewhere in their collective imagination, the hardest drinker around was screaming fire and brimstone from the hood of his Mustang with a bottle of Jack in his hand.

“C’mon man. You got some catchin’ up to do.” Jimmy already had him by the elbow.

Pete in the penalty box, courtesy of the state. Poor ol’ Rick taking a blade in the dark. Jen filling the blank space with bad gin and cheap promises. And from the direction of sunset, the sound of an empty heart slowly filling with the love of God.

“You go on, Jimmy. I ain't feelin' too good. Think I’m getting sick. These damn boots.”

Jimmy shook his head in disappointment and disappeared into the bar and he watched the door a full minute before turning and heading down the alley toward home.

Inside Jimmy took a long drink of his beer and of the soft glow and noise all around him. Over that crowd he wouldn’t hear the struggle and muffled scream in the alley, just on the other side of the wall. The sound of another story waiting to be told.

“Preacher.” He snorted, ordering another before it was too late.

Self-Portrait #284:

2010-10-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

The network of fine lines between his knuckles look thin and gray in the twilight. He opens and closes them and imagines dozens of tiny farmers working the barren fields in vain. A book falls shut. He tastes the smoke across the ridged roof of his mouth, trying to remember the first time. But it all blends like the shades of purple and red that have painted another October sky. Wonders why you would ever look back while falling. Cars and trucks heading south on the highway begin to turn on their lights in slow, random intervals. No new sounds. His mouth moves as he caresses his fingers, as if consoling them for the existence of time.

Night Trekking

2010-09-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

Have you ever found yourself walking your home at night?
Do you look at the shadows and let your mind wander
with you in the darkness, only to see that every thought,
every idea, every event for the calendar you've already done?

For a moment it's comforting, like that loved one sleeping.
But soon something begins, a feeling that you have moved on,
watching the things that remain slowly mature into stillness.

Charles

2010-09-01T08:46:00.000-07:00

I once knew a guy had the heart of a broken poet.
You mean the broken heart of a poet.
No, I don’t.
He would say weird shit that didn’t make sense,
but seemed like it should.
And it always made me smile.

Screw you
he’d say, and stop patronizing me.
You wait. One day it will come out
just right. That Poe or Rilke or whoever
would get his shit together inside him.
One day I'd hear it the way it was meant,
and when that happened, all the shadows
drinking at my broken bar
would finally pay their bill.
We'd all get it like a strong FM station.
I'd try not to roll my eyes,
but believed him a little more each time.

See if you smile then,
mother fucker.

Some Grumpy's Nordeast Haiku

2010-08-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

retro tee with vintage breasts
she slurs about carbon-based life
her jeans, the future of man

The next generation

denied at first becomes the future

old guard

father-son heart-to-heart
advice from the era of depression
save some for yourself

aging nordeast nights
seem like the tectonic version of fate
it is okay to change

on writing

2010-08-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

Lucidity vs. Sincerity

2010-08-05T08:53:00.000-07:00

"I'm interested in lucidity, not sincerity." ~Paul Valery to Andre Malraux (from Anti-Memoirs)

One immediately hears the record's hiss reading Valery's quote on Gide. This circular sarcasm lives just outside the music of his sentiment. For lucidity is the proposed aim of many a writer (and artist), though not at the vulgar expense of sincerity. They are not inviolate twins, but rather incestuous cousins who know all too well the circumstances of their bith. They do not show up randomly at the same parties, but rather find themselves drawn together by the nature of their features, however Photoshopped by semantics.

For me 'sincerity' speaks to a backhanded complement to the lucid. To see through the core yet present what is encountered within a soundtrack of earnestness. Translation for the naked truth. A marketing pitch to ensure the purchase is made and desired emotional investment is secured to reject the notion of return.

Sincerity, as Malraux goes on to comment, has taken a seat on the bridge of literature, as prose and poetry alike very often seem to require a caveat or affirmation of validity via the aura of good will, the assurance that the work in question is no accident and that any resulting consequences make the world a different, if not better, place.

The ambiance of Valery's remark must be enjoyed, as well. It is the kind of line one delivers in the presence of others. It resonates not in the head, not merely within the silent spaces we reserve for guilt, fear, the vagaries of love. It requires an echo off the culture at large, the individual to whom such a shot across the bow is launched for effect. Such a line is destined for memoirs and for random and invisible discussions such as this.

Just some thoughts on a line...

Enlightenment vs. Decay

2010-07-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Things that build up if left unattended. Books. Feelings. Chores. Fears. Dreams. Like stacks of produce that decay over time. But my fear of what they mean or bring is waning.

I am beginning to realize the strength of letting go and simply acting.

Appetites are in the hinterland, watching like cautious animals. Almost realizing incarceration as the world's response to abandon.

Letter Picked Up, Read, Shown

2010-07-23T06:06:00.000-07:00

http://clutchingatstraws.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/letter-to-you/

dis intega tion looped

2010-07-03T11:41:00.000-07:00

I imagined knocking over each of these facades, now cardboard and wood,
leaving me standing in a wide-open courtyard with no statues or objects
of any kind to consider or use to orient myself to size and
proximity. Judgment begins to flounder like the single pupil
determining distance without the aid of another. In this minimal
landscape I

am theonly point of ref

erencethe only point

to be

referenced. That's a tough role. I cannot help but think about the f
ace of my grandfather's horse
when you fed him. Like God somehow confident
in his sustainability through the small offerings
he knows will be given. I only
rode him once before we
both got old. In terms
of being broken, you could say we went our separate ways.

How wonderful this feeling, if it can be
called

that,
of power and freedom, and this is exactly what I tell
myself myself as fear starts to set in and
I drop to the level beneath me

to let all my
pieces go

dis integra tion

2010-06-30T10:14:00.001-07:00

It was while drinking an ice-cold glass of lemonade and staring out the open doorway into the street that I realized how easy it would be to just let go. Let go of everything and go crazy. I must have stared out that doorway ten minutes - listening to the crunchy ambiance of the winded leaves, the Brownian movement of birds on branches, ground and air - before the flash of a Caddy snapped me awake. Then. In that awkward moment of waking. The constructs of normalcy struck me, one by one, as strange props erected of math and color and idiomatic speech to lull me into acceptance. But now, with this dumbstruck state, I looked upon them anew, and they seemed nothing short of a malicious suitcase of lies.

I realized something else. In conjunction with this, I was suddenly floating in open water with no landmarks to guide me. Almost immediately I cycled through buoys of the old routine, the same old ciphers that reinforce the fundamental construct onto which the rest are placed like children's blocks. Now, however, they seemed like the cut-out dance steps of a ritual and stilted waltz. Frustration. Fear. I wanted to be dancing, not thinking. I tried to UNthink, to pretend I wasn't being carried down this current of disintegration. But all attempts found me carried faster, sinking deeper into the concentric spiral. They say quicksand takes you faster the more you struggle.

A Tale of Twin Cities: The Saga Continues

2010-06-25T06:08:00.000-07:00

A Tale of Twin Cities, a collaborative chapbook of poems about the Twin Cities was rejected by "Hot Off The" for the Soap Factory publishing initiative. The collection is still looking for a publisher.

More as the search continues...

The Strong Hands in Seat 4-C

2010-06-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

Last week I saw the race of man exposed in a casual gesture. It was like watching two maces tenderly wielded so you would forget what they're for. An athlete or a soldier, and I blushed at the way he used them to steel through the red hair of the woman beside him. Her eyes said clearly that she loved the suggestion of power they possessed. They were more than any of us, and I held them in a kind of bored contempt.

And, just like that, it was over. I felt it, even before the plane lurched into a dramatic pause, then into a future full of terrifying poetry. When the masks dropped from their holes like an toy accident, I couldn't help but laugh, because every part of this was together we were suddenly the same scared flesh with a common goal that would never be realized. And as I watched those strong hands in seat 4-C shake the air like dizzy maracas, the race of man changed inside me. Even now I am convinced they could have done more to save us.

The Sound of Crickets Chirping

2010-05-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

"Handed Down", an ambient piece of short fiction, has been published at Dew on the Kudzu.

2 Poems Published

2010-05-06T05:28:00.000-07:00

A couple of pieces published over at Poem2Day.

http://poem2day.blogspot.com/2010/05/2-poems-by-michael-k-gause.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Poem2day+%28Poem2day%29

Reading Carson McCullers and realizing what I don't like about her writing is what I don't like about my own.

Submitting more work lately. Prose.

If you are on Facebook, feel free to Friend me. I update my status with any new publication more often than I do here.

Cheers,
Michael

Two-Thirds

2010-04-20T05:46:00.000-07:00

The woman at the table was about two-thirds.

With that I mean to indicate her place in the social order of table #8 in the restaurant. Directly before her sat all that stood in her way between her and prime matriarch status. One could easily discern her place through the hairstyles which were clear descendants of one another, as well as the very specific look she used against her elder when she spoke.
We're no stranger to it.
A mix of pained devotion and weedlike envy. It speaks of many things the tree of life lets you grow untended without question. Two-Thirds, in reply, idles at her awkward pole position. First attendant at the suspended casket not yet upon them. She rations respect and rebellion in measures dictated by convention. Mouth full, she offers value-added statements to meant complement the mother tongue. She is afforded a number of practiced motions that imply her place in line.

The cut-off:

by reason of youthful insanity in the presence of the crone

The addition:

empirical proof that education is not always laid to waste against the rigors of real life.

The dismissal:

risking disrespect, this tactic leverages familial closeness and the playful dynamic that speaks to the former this late in the game

Seated some feet away behind the elder, I have a clear view of Two-Thirds. Her face reveals everything by necessity. It smiles and winces with grey adjectives rooted deep in the lines that make her face 'complex' in the light of my simplistic Gestalt understanding. Some forms are blessed with large eyes and a supporting cast of minimal features. Together they offer the viewer an easily digestible set of shapes to engender closeness. Think babies. Think Bugs Bunny. Think any one of a million Anime hotties. Eyes, lips, nose. These intentially basic features are often used in film to depict beauty and, thereby, goodness. There is nothing complext about the visage of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, Bambi for that matter. Complexity, on the other hand, is the domain of darkness, as if only the simple shall win or be saved. However, Two-Thirds is beset with a number of unfortunate equations. The distance between eyes and nose, divided by the circumfrance of the cheek, multiplied by a lip-chin metric that makes me uneasy about life. Her head metronomes at even left and right angles of 45 degrees of understanding, with all horizontals of her face seemingly elongated. Think artificial horizon. Think overcompensation. Think early figure sketches to illustrate perspective. They are all here fully manifest and sharp enough to slice through the years left before she takes her place on the other side of the table, watching her own daughter's face lose its virginity to the passage of the torch.

Hard Pressed Colors

2010-04-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

He slumped into the water a couple of inches and let his lids fall shut. He felt the heat of the water suffuse his legs and the water itself cool in response. He drew his hands up and onto his closed eyes and enjoyed the sensation of wet heat on his cheeks and checked vision. He pressed, and the day began to lose credibility. He pressed, and blues, reds, and yellows exploded like Dr. Seuss dandelions before a dark tan backdrop. It was small, but it was his. He pressed so the heat would crawl from the legs up to his head and into his brain, warming all thoughts moving forward. He pressed until he was sure he controlled the the sound of colors all over the world, save for the shade of sorrow he knew to be but one room over.

A Tale of Twin Cities and More

2010-03-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Local poet Alex Stolis and I are finishing up a chapbook of poems on Minneapolis and St. Paul

A Tale of Twin Cities, Vol. I

Here's a sneak peak:

Walker Art Center

all that matters is that you’re okay baby

The gallery will close soon; its cold and our coats need to be rescued
from the coat check. Her hand slides into my back pocket, as our hips
sway together, she turns her head to kiss me. She’s a wanna be lover,
nobody’s child, an artist who don’t look back. Her smile reminds me
of the time we spent at Aqua City. I was out of cigarettes, flat broke
and blinded by a charred sun. We were hypnotized by the slow ballet
of our bodies. Left the room before shadows could lengthen and stretch
the story into third person versions of bleeding. The sculptured garden
offers a view of the downtown skyline. We are bound and determined
but too far apart to be together.

Working on putting together a release event, finding a publisher, and ways to make it value added. Check back here for more information. We expect it to be available...somewhere...by May.

Other News:

"Song of the Alley", a short nonfiction piece of mine will be featured in the April issue of Eclectic Flash (http://www.eclecticflash.com/).

A chapter of my work-in-progress, Still Life, will be submitted to a Barry Hannah short story competition ending March 31.

I leave you with a line from Robert Green Ingersoll, Civil War Veteran and noted orator in the Golden Age of Freethought.

“Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day… It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress…Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.”

—Robert Green Ingersoll

On Fiction and Reality

2010-02-09T06:03:00.000-08:00

The reason I have trouble crafting stories is simple. I have little concept of how people react in a given situation. This is key in creating meaningful stories with believable characters. To do this one needs to do what seems almost impossible: fully live in the world while having the cognitive distance to observe and retain the nature and form of its machinations. My attempts have manifested as false reality or, at best, experimental.

I want to whisper this to strangers on a train. I want them to understand without pity. I want to feel something other than egoism for worrying about it so much. I've always thought treated field recordings possess a certain breath that overly produced songs do not. White noise that improves. It should be a balance. I've no desire to sit and warble in the kudzu. Nature does that well enough already.

I want to see a light somewhere up the far end of the street, a light that shows me exactly the new form this work should take. It has to be a new form that fits, not a consolation for inability. I want this form to be so perfectly timed that the whole of me can gush forth in fearless orgasm that wants to beget, validate all hidden explorations, actively seek out hand-crafted effigies and take them to town as proof that the hills are good for more than just retiring.

Score

2010-02-05T09:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.paperdarts.org/flashes/

Paper Darts Writing Contest...Not too Late

2010-02-04T05:31:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to let my few blog followers know about a writing contest I enter occassionally over at Paper Darts Magazine's Facebook page. They provide a prompt and conestants submit an entry up to 1000 characters on the page's wall.

This time the prompt is to write an obit for an inanimate object. Those who know me well could see the wheels clunking in my brain. Yes, I wrote about killing a beer.

There is still time to vote on my or any of the other entries. The voting stops at 11:59 p.m. CST today, Feb. 4, so head on over now. Here's what you need to do to vote:

1. Go to the magazine's Facebook page: http://tiny.cc/ZJGZL .
2. Become a fan of the page (required to vote).
3. Scroll down the page's wall and read the entries.
4. Vote at will.
5. Mine is entitled "Local Beer Killed", and is located about halfway down the page.

Thanks for your consideration. I hope you find it enjoyable. More next week.

Best,
m.

New, Leafy Vignette Published at Paper Darts

2010-02-02T10:19:00.001-08:00

Newish local literary magazine.

http://www.paperdarts.org/fiction/

New Year. New Energy. New Focus.

2010-02-01T05:55:00.000-08:00

Truth: I had meant to write a long piece here on January 1 on my new sense of direction, of energy. I blinked and January is gone. I see. That's how it is going to be. Okay, I'll just have to pay closer attention.

I will not bore you with the activities of the previous year. Suffice it to say that ducks were aligned, energies stoked and stored away. Muscles stretched and warmed appropriately.

This year is the important thing, is the year of doing. I have plans and am taking steps to make these plans come to fruition. No excuses. No fear. One of these plans is to maintain this venue of writing more committedly. I write by hand nearly every day, however, so little finds its way here. I want to share my thoughts and creative works with you, and I need to show it.

Starting today, I will update this journal every week with new material. Flash fiction, poetry, essay, meandering thoughts. It will all be here. It will be the best illustration of what is going through the errant circuitry upstairs. I will update on publication and on insights. Should I manage to chat with Buddha, I'll pass along his best wishes.

That said, Happy New Year. Let's make this the best one so far.

Happy Holidays, People

2009-12-25T11:05:00.000-08:00

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P37xPiRz1sg

"The Edge of the World"

2009-12-23T11:41:00.000-08:00

by Jack Gilbert

I light the lamp and look at my watch.
Four-thirty. Tap out my shoes
because of the scorpions, and go out
into the field. Such a sweet night.
No moon, but urgent stars. Go back inside
and make hot chocolate on my butane burner.
I search around with the radio through
the skirl of the Levant. "Tea for Two"
in German. Finally, Cleveland playing
the Rams in the rain. It makes me feel
acutely here and everybody somewhere else.

The Work of Snow

2009-12-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's the snow. Maybe it is because the snow, more than any recollection, reminds me of the solitude of my childhood. When school and home were too overwhelming for my delicate sensibilities, I would retreat into the woods behind our house, and I would sit on a hill beside the stream. I imagined myself a monk, I suppose, communing with nature. It was calming to be in the presence of something that did not want. As if this cloister were not peaceful enough, there was winter. The snow did there what it does up here. It mutes the insect buzz of the world. It forces you not to listen, but to watch. Watch the water flow beneath the ice ten feet below. Watch the bird alight on a branch, shaking free a puff of snow. Once you get seeing down, only then can you start to listen. Align yourself with the stillness and you will hear what is not to be heard. That secret water sounds like whispering. That snow likes to mimic the wind through hollow oak. All of this built in me a foundation of stillness that helped me through it all. It sharpened the senses we don't think much about. However, sensitivity has its cons. I haven't harmonized with that environment for over twenty five years, and yet I still often find myself overwhelmed by even the most simple of urban life. It is unsettling to think I trained myself out of being functional in the world.

So the snow is here, and there's more on the way. It knows its work. It stands for an elusive stillness. It recalls troubled times. It is the nagging reminder that I have always felt ill-prepared for what I entered the day I left it all behind.

Fortune

2009-11-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

We have everything we need, she says
in a voice that verges on truth.

But I know Angels
are not meant to live so low

So I kiss her long, for this we do not ration,
and swear to make her an honest woman

And as I close the door behind me
I can hear her soft singing, searching the cupboards,
dividing even the dust by two

The Knowledge of Bombs

2009-11-17T06:19:00.000-08:00

Once in a while creators of art, those who attempt to bring the thoughts and images to the light of day, stop. They look at themselves and their processes. They see the whole of it like an exploded diagram of the atomic bomb. They can see the arming mechanism, the casing, Fig. 3: the vital pin. If they are truly fortunate, they are able to see, as well, the context in which it all tries to exist. The culture. The composition of the air through which said bomb will plummet toward its target. Sometimes this knowledge stops the creator in her tracks. Sometimes it lights a fuse otherwise never seen.

For me, it has taken me years to realize the value of two important things:

1. trusting myself
2. caring less

These two notions have only recently shown themselves, their evil twins having postponed many a bomb waiting to create life.

Next up: The Nature of the Bomb and How Let It Go

New Writing Contest on Facebook Keeps Michael Writing!

2009-11-06T06:24:00.000-08:00

Paper Darts Magazine is featuring a monthly micro flash fiction contest on Facebook. Up to 1000 characters on a given prompt, entrants can win around 100 bucks if they get enough votes (in the form of "likes"). It is brillian marketing really. If a Facebook group wants a high member count, you host a contest where all entrants (and voters!) must become members of the group, then you can rest assured that your entrants will be recruiting new members just to vote for them. Brilliant.

Anyway, the latest contest ended at midnight last night, and I was fortunate enough to receive 13 votes. I liked the piece myself and had fun writing it. My thanks to Flannery O'Connor for her wonderful prose which inspired the dark foliage of my submission. "The Dark Foliage of My Submission." The title of an imaginary book by George Bataille and Gary Snyder.

I'll be entering this contest monthly as writing practice. If you are on Facebook, I invite you to "friend" me and check out my submissions to the contest. If you like them, leave a like, won't you?

Best as winter comes,
m.

2 Polaroids of the South, 2009

2009-10-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

The sun hunches itself elderly over a line of oak trees behind the old storefront, while a man watches shadows grow sleepy and yawn themselves into the dirt. Neon stutters, abetting the twilight. Bats, like the dead of summer, dart above cricket drones from the darkening wild wood.

He stares at the Coke machine, at the cloud of insects around the bulb overhead. Not even they, in their heated electron swarm, can make movement on an evening like this. Resolute in its stillness, the air is a statue in the park, parting words you can't take back.

But in his head there are explosions in the sky, soundless and unseen and worlds beyond it with no idea what they have coming.

The Double Complaint (Laforgue Remix)

2009-10-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

I.

"What comes, when all else fails?"

I thought it would be me you would come for. Instead, you tempted. Sure, Death. Ahead of your grainy caravan you sent your damaged angels in reconaissance. But you never asked them what they wanted. Seems they had grown tired of brittle hues, longed to embrace the defiance they sold. They found me waiting. I, so full of wet life. Of course they stayed.

In truth I never knew
Death needed needed so many.

So now you arrive, but you've wasted your time.
Your data is corrupt. I'm not fit.
Keep banging.
Hammer out your first complaint.

II.

"The dead are discreet. They sleep in a cool a place."

You had too much to do. I understand. Sure, Life. Before the heated angels' mutiny, I was also too cold. Perhaps I was too still for you to notice. I must have been nesting. Huddled beneath the racing level of the world, digging a little deeper for gold, I found sharp stone. I bled myself into a divine recepticle.

Sure, Life
I hated.
Unnamed objects and sections of time
reached for me. I felt my first friendship
with the nothing that lies beneath the lie
of the world.
We played elaborate games.
We both lost.

But that's old news.
One learns.
I heat it up.
I wrestle the sweaty bodies you abandoned, which now
abandon death. Now this is no cool place.
You are present only in the refraction of laughter.

Death has come for me.
Everyone here laughs,
moves closer. I tell him I'm coming
and we depart.

He complains I've no right to do this.
We just laugh louder as we sneak out the back.

We, his Angels, never told him.

The dead?
They travel.

P.S. Pic by Kristel Schneider (http://kristelschneiderphotographyblog.blogspot.com)

The Source

2009-09-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

He wiped his brow with the back of his greasy hand before continuing his
walk up the hill. His feet throbbed inside his dress shoes, but the music coming from behind the wall of trees ahead pulled him. Slow and warped it sounded like melting glass. A redding sunset on the tide. A snake decided against him and slid toward a nearby tree stump.

When he exited the thicket he saw the house, a shack really, complete with rocking chair yokel on the porch. The music which had drawn him here was emanating from beneath a pair of glassy eyes staring ahead. A teen, by the look. There were no instruments he was surprised to discover, just a voice which stretched and shook and trebeled as if it came from an old '78 through bad speakers. The man stopped just to hear him better.

A large woman emerged from behind the slapping screen door.

"And what can I do for you?" She asked, half hospitable and half in warning.

"Afternoon. My car broke down on the road down below. I heard someone singing and headed this way."

"Well, we ain't no garage, but you can use the phone if you like."

Continuing to allow the boy's hypnosis to affect him, he had almost forgotten the reason for his trek.

"I gotta' tell you, ma'am. That boy has got a set of pipes on him. I ain't heard nothin' that sweet in years. You should get him into the city and cut a record or something."

While the boy continued to sing, staring off into the tops of the trees behind the man, the woman replied.

"Bobbie? Lawd, he ain't no musician. He's just singin' th' blues."

*

Toward the River

2009-08-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

What is it that we can become
Allowing ourselves the long hours
Of the years?...

How small and sweet I was. At 10, a true maple leaf with feet and a tousle of blonde curls. Going to school was just a stayover. I would soon begin to shake my head at the madness of the world, but for now things made sense, and everything you needed to know could be found in a long walk in the woods toward the river.

My imagination could not have been legally separated from the fantastic, simple universe of nature. In private I always wondered why such a big deal was made out of leaving one to enter the other. To me each was merely an extension into a complimentary realm. Inside my most shadowed scenarios and personal fairy tales lay a dimension green with gold, where trees were to be felled or climbed, and bodies of water were sensual without being sexy. That was enough for the man inside waiting to be born. In turn -- a trek down familiar paths, past charmed stones initialed with secrets and following a small brook that emptied its fill daily into the mighty Mississippi. This pilgrimage was a regular one, but by no means common. It was an active meditation of movement within the cloister of the wood. With a grin I would navigate my thoughts, my distant and strange dreams, with a respect the forest deserved, a joy-filled reverence for the infrastructure of Eden. Looking back I realize that here the young heart was as it is modeled in Heaven. Love here is the kind that does not fade. Hope is made of something for which we have not yet created a word. This place is a takeoff ramp. It is a wondrous world in which to mold the things that sustain you for the rest of your life. It is unnatural anywhere to remain in the womb. If we are fortunate, we receive here the vitamins needed, absorbing the deep, invisible love of the mother, vital to our emergence into the harsher air as man and woman.

At 41 I have come so far from that dreamtime, only to feel the road begin to wend and the air start to arc back while still emptying out in the future. The path of life is not circular, as the adage goes, but spiral, placing us regularly on the same axis but on another plane. I have come to believe this is so we may repeatedly regard the pivotal moments in our lives from multiple perspectives.

Should we succeed in this, we may just piece together enough to understand the whole of our journeys and laugh as we each make our own way toward the river.

Flesh Out

2009-08-03T09:51:00.000-07:00

Her hips navigated the crowded formica deftly, banking high at the turn and counter-balanced by three or more bowls of the vicious-looking stew they served. Rare brisket floating face down in the deep end of something eternally referred to as "the special." The rest he could handle, double-barreled egg rolls steaming atop rice noodles, green onions and cilantro.

His eyes held her a little longer than usual in his sleepy gaze, giving anyone watching a hint as to his next pleasant dream. A regular who ate everything on the menu with a fork, he'd awkwardly strike up conversation with Gina whenever possible. She'd learned his preference for S151 over S150 and why. She'd heard bits of his life story between the holy basil and the fortune cookie. The fact was she felt she had probably gleaned more about him in the last six months than his own mother knew about her boy now. She feels him watching her even when she is preparing the Cafe Sua Da behind the counter, her ego waffling between flattered and disturbed.

He'd spend countless meals downing Asian Fusion and working out why her lower back hides behind what will eventually turn out to be a Rohrschak dragon. At $7.25 a pop he gleans everything he can about her. He'll use up all the rules he ever learned in bars from Frogtown to Uptown, from the failed parties that never stood a chance; and not once will he see that here a whole different set were in play. It's like war. Each side throwing down not the best card, but the next one, either to be taken prisoner or to prove that the value of what you have is wrapped up somewhere between chance and timing.

With her it wasn't so linear. With Gina it was a complex network of connections, visible and opaque, which branch out and double over like the family tree hand-drawn in her uncle's room. Rules of clan and color-schemed bloodlines. Infinite walls to keep the in in and deviations of body logic outside, out in the world better left to its own.

Great Experience and the Next

2009-07-31T08:42:00.001-07:00

The Vita.mn Summer Fiction Contest reading event at the Brave New Workshop in Uptown on July 29 was a great experience. I met Christian, the host along with other local figures in the local lit scene. The cafe area was teeming with small cliques, darting eyes taking mental notes. I half expected to see Capote in a corner holding a group of fans hostage with his effortless tales of the scene.

The top ten finalists read their pieces throughout the evening, and they were all enjoyable in their diversity: from dour and earnest to laugh-out-loud funny. I was in extremely good company.

Yesterday the new issue of Vita.mn was published. I was the 2nd runner up, and my story was published along with four others. You can read them here.

The whole experience, a rare one for me, has been heartening. I feel I have the confidence to put my work out there the way I should have been doing all along.

What's next? Walrus Magazine's "Guilty Pleasures" writing contest. Participants are encouraged to write a gripping/titillating/action-packed first paragraph of a novel in one of a list of genres. I submitted something last night. The genre? Western! More here.

VI. Cirrus

2009-07-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

On the side street to my left, Locust Avenue, I see passing thoughts gather in corners to be swept away by street cleaners and the violent storms Autumn has coming.

A group of teenagers approach with the scowl typical to those who know how much life hates them. They look cirrus, stopping when they reach me, and their communal angst recedes into comical interest. A small victory is needed and making a stranger uncomfortable is as good a win as any. I do not fault them for this. It is a trait I can almost remember.

"What's your deal, dude?"

"You. All of you. The street you're walking down."

A look of confusion crosses them, except the speaker - the apparent alpha - who tries another tack.

"Reading books, huh? Let's see one."

I can see it in his eyes. Rumors that smell of arson. Dogs kicked in face of defiance.

"I can't." I reply ruefully. "It is not the way."

He pauses, silently finding his way between my clear refusal and the notion it might be for good reason.

"These are the words you may read, but this is not how you are to encounter them. This is the short cut in the woods best left untaken. You are the future, the whole future, and you have to come upon these things at the right time or not at all. We can't fast forward the natural progression. Us meeting, right now, is the clue you have to make due with. It may be three, seve, or even ten years before you discover the connection. But if there is any hope for us at all, you have to be the ones to figure them out. It is a slow riddle told over the course of time and only as a result of your own actions. I just figured out one meant for me, just now, before you walked up. I discovered the last part here on page 73. Let me show you..."

With that I read them the passage aloud, ensuring they understood all the words and the meaning of the word 'coda' before closing the book.

"I first discovered this notion when I was 8, while on the playground. It stood, as it were, on the other side of the street, and I could barely make out the colors of its clothes. It wasn't my time to understand, just start the process. Only today, today, do I make the connection meant for me. You look at me now the same way. You see my suspenders, my linen pants. I look like I'm from another time. It bothers you, ever so lightly. But now the connection has been made. Now your fuse has been lit. Now you are to walk to the end of the street, take a left or a right and continue to countless more years before the circuit completes itself. Only then will the light catch and shine for what you have been waiting to see. Thank you, and good luck."

With my monologue finally over, the lanky leader laughed a single breath before ushering his platoon further down the strip. With bravado and headshaking I watch as they catch themselves in each storefront window they pass, checking for biceps warped in the hope of glass, a carriage rooted in backbone, wondering perhaps if in the next or the next they might grow older or at least a find themselves little closer to becoming.

Pome for Liam

2009-07-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

hot saturday
oblique lemonade laughter

smiles in place of words as water hoses
feed insect tributaries, cities
whose future is up for grabs
in the afternoon sun

mud pie appetizer
picnic reveries

deep breath my boy
summer begins

Good Week

2009-07-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

I am in the top 10.

More information here:

http://www.vita.mn/event_detail.php?event_id=78723

Maybe I'll see you there.

V. Nimbostratus

2009-07-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Motorcycles blast by an older

Norwegian couple, who squint
their eyes at 2009

Red clay and stone

a husband can manage, he is built

of hard things, but here

How can a man gather the harvest

in the face of madness?

He trots across the street at the sight

of another bad dream on its way

The Ducati growls as it passes

hoping to see the past show its fear

IV. Altocumulus

2009-07-07T05:47:00.000-07:00

IF YOU CATCH IT AT THE RIGHT TIME IT'S LIKE A DREAM,

not necessarily a pleasant one. An entire town made up of Laura Ashley

virgins and their more fortunate counterparts.

Heat waves rise from the roofs

of parked cars turning them

and passing bored faces

into active mirage

The whole place is hungry

like the summer that stifles it.

The heat and bodies and faces

suffer it with a pleasure rooted in

the pain of old men.

Motorcycles roar past small children

growing accustomed to the sounds

to which they will contribute as fully

licensed voters, fists and all.

Their faces contain the mix of innocence

and toughened flesh needed for their future here.

Somewhere secret plans are already being made

to join its ranks.

What must be purchased and paraded aloud

begins to take up the space left vacant by lilacs

and fading wishes. It is too much.

As it has always been.

Blood itself is maturing here.

The asphalt sees to that -

its reason for being.

III. Altostratus

2009-07-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

I BELIEVE MY FAVORITE SIGHTS are those which take place around The Tree of Life store- "gifts for those who are about something." It pulls on the women here. In groups they each tug on the arms of their friends to go in, explore, care about something. The look on their faces are a mix of excitement -- there is scarce else to do in this town they haven't done a thousand times here or in their own private Hudson's -- and self-righteous action right with the Lord. And in the most enjoyable way. A small breeze stops and a group bursts forth from the Tree with bags and trinkets and proof they have parted with their copper for a bit of fashionable social responsibility. Off to drinks to celebrate their proven piety their husbands allow out of good judgement. Should their husbands have the great fortune to be in tow, the advantage is often theirs. An eye roll and a tog of the arm, at once, acknowledges the wife's desire to save the planet and enforces their position of perceived power in the relationship. Unless they have apologies to make, submitting time and patience here is not likely. The wife, in response, is disappointed but comforted too, down deep, at the simple hierarchy a forceful husband provides with a selfishness she understands. It is a curious dynamic, with more layers than I mention here, and one better left to sociologists with better funding than mine.

II. Stratus

2009-06-28T08:08:00.000-07:00

OLDER WOMEN ENTER AND EXIT dressed for a night on the town, despite the noonday hour. Their animal print motifs and put upon hair speak of things they prefer to ignore, like using a vibrator regularly does not constitute being sexually active. In this climate the urge is to focus on whatever can bring some semblance of life, of activity, into one's world. The pull otherwise, if only because of its stealth, is a dangerous tide. The arms of men erupt in this vacuum, the same way as women's breasts. From nothing, suddenly screams menacing ink flexing from shirtsleeves. Venomous biceps like a rattler gorging on a junkyard rat. Trimmed patches of what its all looking for. A roar, then silence that weights us down. An ass saunters by that, like a dense crag of rock in space, bends the gravity around it. No one is immune to this juicy fact, this heart-shaped proof that, come night, life is something only the strongest enjoy.

The Clouds of Hudson

2009-06-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

IV'E BEEN SPENDING SOME TIME IN HUDSON LATELY. For those who aren't from around here, Hudson is just across the border. It's downtown is on a body of water littered with boats and fake bikini lines. The accent is the same as ours, just about, but you can buy beer on Sundays. For those of you who are local, you know exactly what Hudson is.

I. Cumulus

I think it's somehow fitting that the main drag in Hudson is on Second Street, not first. The air is thick and wet the way summer ought to be, yet one can depend on Hudson to fulfill every sad little wish. It's starting to drizzle again, which stops the wind from blowing. On days like this the main corridor becomes a vacuum, giving any movement or sound which erupts from within it a seemingly great significance, as if the Dalai Lama is about to ask you for a light. The roar of overhead cams down Second turns the heads of even the deaf, who feel the vibrations through the poorly constructed street. The women - and one can witness this easily - all take note and try not to smile. Young and old, married or free, all cock an ear at this age-old blast of virility. In the otherwise pointless air a part of them, the women here, latches onto that sound and rides it down the torso. An instinctual recognition of power translates it without effort for the sexual organs who don't need it spelled out, and from there into questions about what they themselves do not have and why.

Becoming

2009-06-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

Up and somehow in
on steps of one's own carving

The echo
a hollow soundtrack to becoming

Find again
the quiet left behind

Fearing it meant you were not
for this world

Four Crossroads in Hudson, WI

2009-06-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

1.
An aging athlete, well into his hundredth race, begins
to slow his pace from a pained gallop to a trot. His smile
broadens to satisfaction as the stampede thunders by.
He makes his way to the sidelines, through the crowd
looking past him. He eyes the hills. Realizes it's time
for a new track.

2.
2.3 miles toward downtown a vigorous pimp disappears
from a one bedroom apartment, awakens in a quaint
and charming European village circa 1951. It takes
him a whole year to decide how to behave.

3.
As this happens a woman rises from her chair
and walks down three flights of stairs to the cafeteria.
She chooses the chicken, a small salad, and jello.
Seating herself by the vending machine against
the wall, she tastes the chicken looking out the
large window. A bird leaves a branch and dives
straight into the glass before her. She rises to
look out and down at the fragile feathers and feet,
almost invisible in the grass and butts and candy
wrappers. She feels nothing just before feeling the
wind in her veins, climbing out the window, and
losing her 401(k).

4.
A poet, in a room once occupied by a pimp, looks up
to see a woman wandering up the hill behind the factory.
He slowly removes his shirt, pants, and the rest.
Decides to up his game and start submitting poems
to his favorite phases of the moon.

Goin' On

2009-06-07T11:26:00.000-07:00

"I got things goin' on, see?"

Here any loud remark would have broken the fragile bond between me and my reading matter. Some days you can blaze through scores of pages, literally feasting on invisible rhyme and metre, while others you're a moron incablable of tasing even the barest morsel of a line. Today I am such a moron. It is not an altogether negative state, but I am unable to sail through tunnels of words and actions and their formidible web connections. I am, however, capable of something on another level. Today I am able to look beyond the deep buzz of all those bonds forming and breaking to see the outline, the silhouette, of something larger. It is like being still in the forest and consciously toggling your attention between noises in the fore- and backgrounds. Except today there is no conscious control. Today you just take it. You take it and try.

"'Cause I got things goin' on, see?"

That's what I hear today. That's all I hear. I look up to see him standing at the counter, unable to stop shifting his weight from foot to foot and fumbling with the large rings on his chubby fingers. Now the person on the other end of his cell phone knows what we know. He has things goin' on. Bobbing left to right and back again he was a tiny, one-man amusement park. Blue neon from his cell, golden fingers moving up and down at his side to some inaudible tune, and the dizzying splat of colors that made up his running suit. It was hard too look at, harder to look away.

The short Latina behind the counter was more patient than I would have been. Which special and what drink, that's all. She'd asked it fifteen times already, and it wasn't even noon. Fact is, she didn't speak much more English than that. Thanks to her uncle who got her the job and a cheap apartment in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, she really didn't need to. She had plans, though, to learn this strange tongue. If she ever wanted to do something else, she would have to stretch herself, contort her mind in a new way around this language built more, it seemed on slang and exception than to any rules you could hold onto. Like trying to figure out some rhythm or cadance of a busy convention center. But she would try, she would work at training her mind to be an acróbata. She was was unaware of her jealousy of the clown in front of her. Ridiculous to see and hear, he could still bob and weave his way through the language. You could almost see it in her eyes, the way she held her anger back with both arms, kissing its head, saying it's okay, it's okay.

So she would wait. She would let him flirt and stall and make sure all four people scarfing down bugers knew he was something special because of his clothes, those rings, and the countless unseen things he clearly had "goin' on."

Remembrance Published

2009-06-02T06:15:00.000-07:00

A spot of remembrance in the latest Carte Blanche. Nonfiction.

Issue 9 is now online at www.carte-blanche.org

Thanks for listening.

m.

The Color of Spring

2009-05-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

photo by Shaddam IV http://www.flickr.com/photos/41457884@N00/

Forcing the edge
is a silly thing to do

Fear of slowing down
of tumors in the cadance...

We need but stop
and see the voices here
have always rung out
in countless starry halls

And on clear summer nights
we add to them
our own left-handed
echo

for the Warrior

2009-05-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

"Battles you win....wars, less so."

This line is for a warrior who may never see it. She is a silhouette on the hill, lightning flashing behind her in a Frazetta painting forced to life. She is a bona fide, sword-wielding fighter of the tide. Again and again she has proven herself in battles you have never seen, nor will ever read about. They are not the sort that are recorded for study or reflection. Our recorders of history do not believe there are things to learn from them. They are wrong.

I know what you are thinking. But do not for a moment think these are figurative, bloodless battles. There is blood and on both sides. She has killed and died many times over in the name of what matters. At the time of this writing she is down for the count, her vitals - negligible - and no one is betting on a comeback.

But they are wrong. She's got a backup plan, an auxiliary system kicking in as the crowd starts to disperse. Some call is a failsafe, as if failing were the endgame. No, she's failed before, but knows its all Nietzschian process through and through.

I'm kind of a fan. Win or lose, the battle is fought, and its very undertaking is the thing. Each brave stance against the All is no fools chance, but an empirical proof of life.

I will not hold her up as Hero. I refuse to do that to her. I have no need to commit her to that binary. Each time she wins, she is not elevated to some higher order, but rather is placed - like a suddenly more precious stone - deeper in the setting of the ring.

We've all had our Waterloos. We've lost innocences we can't keep track of. Entire species inside us have fallen or mutated, as needed. But in each of these trials there is a moment that defines not us, but the moment itself.

"Behind nothing, before nothing, worship it the zero."

It is an instant within which intersects victory, loss, and the dare. It is in this vital moment that life - its conscious enactment - is the thing. It is the difference between lying down your arms and the impossible leap forward that constitutes true courage.

I write this now not to spur her on, not to slap her back into consciousness. She does not need that. Though I have never spent a day in her shoes, I know the places over which she has tread. I write this to record a fraction, in infinitesimal cross-section our history books would otherwise leave fade in the horizon.

Do not pity her or worry. That will do no good. She will rise again or die a warrior's death. Either is acceptable to her. Better to put your energy into your own moments and move your own forward. This, this is what will help the whole of us. This is the moment which , in the end, is the difference between an honorable conclusion to our days and a forfeit truly worth lamenting.

National Poetry Month

2009-04-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

Did you know April is National Poetry Month? That time of year when we stop for a moment and think about poetry, something most of us don't do. We think "Huh. Poetry. Yeah, I've read some." or "Poetry...yeesh. No thanks." or even "Pretentious poets. I'll go listen to Radio K instead."

I have been called a poet; sometimes I think I am, and I can be heard mumbling any of these on any given day.

The truth is, I find better poetry in the songs I hear on college radio than in the books of so-called popular poetry. Popular poetry seems so desparate in its attempt to be considered important or Poetic (in Zapf Chancery script) that it loses the balance needed to be...well, needed. It's like a friend who actually does pretty cool things, but is overshadowed by his incessant need to tell everyone that he does cool things, that he thinks deeply...a LOT.

This is what usually comes to mind when April rolls around.

Usually.

But this year I'm trying something different. While I refuse to ignore the less palatable parts, I'm going to look on the sunny side. I'm going to look for what's good about poetry. I'm going to pitch in and try to do my part.

I was tapped at my place of employ, The Minnesota Humanities Center, to post on their blog on poetry for the month of April. Once a week I'll post something on some aspect of poetry, giving proper nods to the locals, in hopes of helping others get past the stereotypes (which are, indeed, rooted in reality) and find something about poetry that connects with them. The first post went up last week: http://blog.minnesotahumanities.org/2009/04/02/poetry-month-with-humanities-guest-blogger-michael-gause/. I encourage you to read it and leave a comment about what poetry means to you, about how you plan to celebrate National Poetry Month, or just about how you think its cool that your local humanities organization is featuring poetry on its blog. The second post should go up before week's end. Feel free to comment on all posts. If there is enough reaction, I may just get to keep doing it.

As the weather warms, let's take off our coats and do some stretches. Let's make things happen we've talked about forever. Let's do things we can raise a glass to this winter, when we're huddled around fires cursing the weather through chattering teeth.

Let's at least be smiling through them.

for Spring

2009-03-11T05:12:00.000-07:00

If late autumn
pulls his eyes across sun rusted hills,
spring always returns him to the color of women.

Like now.
In the café a stranger's gaze moves slowly
above him to something he suddenly
wishes he were.

But turning he sees it is only the hills reborn,
so he smiles,
allows himself to begin,

Lucidity and Desire

2009-03-04T06:08:00.000-08:00

"A.'s lucidity depends on a lack of desire. Mine is the result of an excess-undoubtedly it is also the only true lucidity. If it is only the negation of delerium, lucidity is not completely lucid, is still a bitt of the fear of going all the way-transposed into boredom, that is, into contempt for the object of an excessive desire. We reason with ourselves and we tell ourselves: this object doesn't have in itself the value that desire gives it. We don't see that mere lucidity, which we also attain, is still blind. We must see at the same time the delusion and the truth of the object. No doubt we have to know that we are deluding ourselves, that the object is first of all what is perceived by a desireless being, but it is also what a desire perceives in it. B. is also what is only attained by the extremity of delirium an dmy lucidity would not exist if my delirium were not so great. Just as it would not exist if the other, ridiculous sides of B. escaped me."

Georges Bataille
from The Impossible

On What Makes a Writer

2009-03-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

In all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little of reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artist’s loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures, the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They have all been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist. Rather it is the use of the things extracted from their context in such a way that they have become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind.

Loren Eiseley
from All The Strange Hours

This Morning I Feel Like The Love Child of Stars of the Lid and Leon-Paul Fargue

2009-02-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

..and now you can, too.

Listen to this: http://www.last.fm/listen/artist/Stars%2520of%2520the%2520Lid/similarartists

and read this poem by Fargue. I have yet to meet someone who has not had a night like this one.

"Romance"
by Leon-Paul Fargue (1876-1947)
translated from the French by Louis Simpson

We certainly loved you,
Marie. You knew,
Didn't you? Do you remember?

One evening
We set off at night,
Artheme and I, going quietly to see you
Beneath the apse of the summer sky, as at church.

There was a light and you were reading.

We kept the drawings
With three crayons, and the birds in blue ink
That you make.

Ah, Marie, you sang so well!
It was during the time
When you were happy, at the Sisters' school,
When the procession of pale flowers
Sang in the desert of Sunday.
Trembling
I was near you, who were all in white.

The organ spoke of shadows...
On the altar the blue day hung.
Through wounds in stained glass, the call of the breeze
Fused with a loud hum of onyx, drove the fire
Of the candles toward you, tipsy
With light and sacred songs.

The Barrel Roller

2009-02-18T11:03:00.000-08:00

The Barrel Roller*
for Buford Counts

The young ones try
it with numbers,

count revolutions across
yards of old and lofted planks until

the room is done
and the cork faces out.

But the old ones just laugh at the science,
know that there are no equations
for art.

You just get by doing,
the way knives are sharpened to put
chickens out of your misery.

But their time'll come.
We forget we used
to count the rings, too,
wasted good time looking for short cuts
to the future.

*Buford Counts was a barrel roller at Jack Daniel's Distillery for over 30 years. His ability to get filled barrels of whiskey from one end of the floor to the other without machinery is well documented by his few living peers. He was also my grandfather.