post #212

and I hate elevator music.


    Fragrant cyclamen
line the walk, pointing
        toward the sun.

 - Hoc Scripsi


I drink from a coffee cup that I bought while vacationing in the Outer Banks, North Carolina - fittingly, imprinted on the mug is - "North Carolina".
life changes so quickly and every morning I think that if I don't get out of bed it will cease to change at all. Of course I am incorrect, of course I eventually get up, get dressed and enter a day already begun, of course I've missed breakfast.
I love breakfast as I usually eat it with my son who lately has been unable to rouse me from my morning delusion. If only I could get to the mind correcting coffee before I flail about in fantasy land where things only make sense the more schizophrenic it is.


'Frank and Earnest' and "The Other Coast" comic strips have spider punchlines today.

nights and weekends

I just can't get this post finished.

so fuck it.




Killed a bug: my
life should be
so important.

________

   Tulips blooming
already have no place
               to go

________

  It's a small talent;
     sweeping pine cones
   off the driveway.

_______

open windows
cat meows ever loudly
caught a mouse


 - Hoc Scripsi

mondaymorningnotenoughcoffee yetandthecomputerisbroken

Just a note this morning as I must run out to bring the iMac to the doctor and I have to leave in about fifteen minutes.
Tainted Love Poems has kindly appointed me an Officer Poet in their FB organization. now I have Officer Poet and the Buddha with Bullets as monikers. I like them both as my appointed titles in the wider world of the internet.
I wish I had more to say this morning and that there isn't more is okay.
My tiredness (each blink lasts several seconds) withstanding this mornings strong elixer regardless of the fact that I have to leave in about fifteen minutes.




 These are not-haiku

1
stepping over fallen leaves
and dismantled watches
making sure not to stumble

2
night and day
     arrive then depart
each casually



3
softened voices,
      wind travels easily  
through old trees

 - Hoc Scripsi

Later may grant me more to say. Later may have the main computer repaired without erasing the volume structure. Later may contain the multitudes of universe. Later is time ad infinitum. I always know that later will have poetry in it if I can only find a way in.

Later        Later        Later       Later       Later       Later

UPDATE on the main computer and the volume structure. Total failure and fatal errors... a new hard drive is in order. Luckily I have everything backed up on an external hard drive, luckily this went correct or mostly correct today.

I didn't know that later I was going to have to shoot a dying animal. I didn't know that later would contain these multitudes.
Later still my water will be shut off for 12 hours, later I will be applying for a job after not working for almost 4 years. It's part time and will help pay for my obsessions - no obsessions and no job, how else am I suppose to stay engaged?

coming, going, what difference?

morning came more quickly than I imagined. Hard time falling off to sleep, woke up a few times to wander aimlessly around the house, and a hard time awakening finally. Yesterday, after the second post I had found my way in and wrote eight poems, all 10 lines or under for a specific submission but I was proud of them all.

I need to thank Troy Ygnacio Soriano. Thank you, I apparently needed what you said, stole part of it and turned it into an extension of myself.



here is my tip of the hat.


blue rusted wheelbarrows

a quietness of living space
is required at 5 a.m.
at least around here.
only Jose, who mows the lawn,

is allowed to interrupt.

I have trouble recognizing
daffodils on early mornings.
Mornings so full of cool air
& blue rusted wheelbarrows
with flattened tires.

I think you like me most
when I am tired from
waking early, worn out from
a nights occupations or mornings sight of daffodils.

- Hoc Scripsi


That's all I got this morning. It fails at being much but succeeds at being.

how am I different.

I am sitting at my IBM Selectric with a loaded .45 wondering about the sounds in the house and the absence of anyone else, wife at the store with her mother and my son in school.

The writing is not going well and I stop after a little bit as I can see that I am not going to find the way in no matter how often I play with the safety, no matter how sharply I push my fingers into my forehead, wouldn't a smarter man simply walk away?
I don't know what a smarter man would do as I am not that smarter man but I think it is time to stop stop stop.
Lie down and try to get the headache gone.
I have decided this weekend to cold turkey narcotics. Don't be concerned - I have prescriptions and have them for the chronic pain but I am so tired of taking them and everything else that I need one gone - the narcotics make me irritable I think so they go.

this should be an interesting weekend.


shade of white!
              you took me by
         surprise.

Picasso, Buddha, Bach vs. Back and sadness.

Dear reader,

in 1973, Picasso dies on the Buddha's birthday which all is recognized as having had happen on the eighth of April. This also happens to be today, and probably not by coincidence or design it is Kofi Annan's birthday as well.
Today my wife goes grocery shopping, today she restocks us on sympathy cards because it has been a tough year and we've run short by one. My good friends mother passed suddenly and she is now going home. Today is a grieving day for many I know and I think deeply, meditate on what has happened, there is nothing I can do for my friend, there is nothing he has asked so I wait for further instruction. My thoughts are with him and his wife and his departed Mother. She was a good woman I hear, I was not of her company, and if you are the praying sort, pray for her now. If you are the meditating sort, meditate on the swiftness of death and the suddenness of her departure for her final, our final home.
Noah, I am with you where you are where you must be surrounded by love. Our hands are offered if you need but I doubt you will read this today.


I've discovered a poem amongst the completed poems of 2009 that had a word misspelled that completely altered the meaning and readability. So much so I couldn't figure out the word and had to refer to the original draft. Sometimes MS Word auto corrects Bach to be back without due consideration for the content of the phrasing. The alteration did not improve the whole but destroyed it. Now even with the word corrected the whole is a loss and needs to be taken down to the studs and begun again.

the last three lines (containing the error now rectified) go thus:

the radio switches to Bach;

I make leave to

urinate.

as a haiku it would suck - as the ending of a poem it is decent but now needs a poem in front of it. Speaking of Haiku, here is some - not-haiku. I don't write haiku, I used to but got tired of arguing with people stuck of the 5-7-5 but more than willing to ignore the necessary line references - Tomorrow I will excerpt my treatise on Haiku as today I talk about not-haiku.

Falling leaves:
      Magnificent!
Whose illusion?

____________________________

Killed a bug: my
life should be
so important.

___________________________

                     Melting snow.
The sounds of lovemaking
are infinitely brutal.

- Hoc Scripsi

There are dozens of these in my folders and binders. I really like to write them as an exercise in the correct words as they are meant to be painfully concise, and vividly detailed. I think each one goes through at least a weeks worth of revision and often ends nearer to the first draft than the seventh or seventeenth depending on how far I take it. Some - like the second were there immediately and took no revision. It was a moment when I had smashed some poor creature who was part of a greater whole, killed while performing some unknown vital task, and I took it's life instantly filling with regret at the realization of the enormity and importance of such small beings. It was a satori moment for me.

next I thought of David Ignatow and how he captured a similar experience in a poem about killing a fly. that can be found here and here is a page of the book it is from, scanned by Google.




my auto correct knows to capitalize Google but not how to spell Bach. humph.

The Mad Road

"the mad road
     driving men ahead

The raw cut,
the drag,
the butte,
the star,
he draw,
the sunflower in the grass...

ditches by the side of the road
O can se a bug playing in the grass

The crazed voyageur
of the lone automobile
presses forth his eager insignificance
in noseplates and licenses
into the vast promise of life -
the choice of tragic wives.


telephone poles
toothpick time

the mad road
     driving men ahead
the mad road"

All those words are Jack Kerouac's. I claim none of them, I choose these from The Book, for their match to my trip the closest and most poetic when together. So the arrangement is mine and it belongs here but know that these are not mine and they belong to my hero, Jack Kerouac.

we leave now and didn't sleep enough last night. We should have made love but we allowed tiredness and the unceasing need of sleep to dissuade us.
bad decision.


today's meditation is this. All religion lends itself to leaders more bent of terror than love and peace. My belief is no different.
1995: AUM subway attack
Top leaders of AUM Shinrikyo (Japanese: “AUM Supreme Truth”), a Japanese Buddhist sect founded in 1987 by Asahara Shoko, released nerve gas into a Tokyo subway this day in 1995, killing 12 people and injuring thousands.

This ignores all the precepts. This ignores everything I've ever read. This isn't what I practice.
I practice poetry. I study to be a buddha and know how imperfect I am. I am a terrible example.

now two non-haiku -


The great Zen patriarchs are
     painted with beards;
Whether they are frozen in snow
     or begging for alms.

- I wrote this


     Always time, all
illusion, a phantom or dream
      already passing.

- this one too.


Have a great weekend.
- Jhon