Last night, Ammie and I...

Last night, Ammie and I went to the Acme Bar in Berkeley to have a drink and support a local tattoo artist, and friend of friends, D. The Acme was having an art show/raffle to raise money for D.'s hospital and recuperation expenses. You see, less than a week ago, he sustained a shot from a pistol through his head during a home invasion. 'Cause he's a tattoo artist, I suspect he doesn't have any insurance, but already close to $10,000 has been raised. Now, this amount is small compared to his hospital bills, but luckily he was helped by an awesome organization Victim Witness Assistance Center. This is a stellar organization that provides vital services to those in moments of immense need.

The event was fun, drinks were imbibed, raffles were had, and everyone came together and had a wonderfully fun night--I suspect that this tide of affection,concern, and empathy will help D. in his recovery. Once, very long ago, something similar occurred to me, and I am certain that a very similar tide crashed on me and somehow renewed and helped fill me energy and life. I believe that events like last night's will help re-vitalize D. as well.

And you, dear reader, if you would like to make a donation:

Devon Get Better Fund
c/o Sacred Tattoo
707 Broadway
Oakland, CA 94607

Too late for a good title, or too early

Okay, it's almost 4:00 in the morning, and I was going to post tonight, but instead got involved in re-vamping the ol' digs. I think it looks better now, and I've decided to expand the living space: no longer just musings narrowly poetic; now we consider poetry expansive enough to encompass myriad insights,experiences, writings, and life,life,life! I think that poetry is happier, now.

To celebrate and begin this new largesse, and to add some elegance to the new room, here are some lovely blue flowers that grow next door to my apartment-building.

let’s not dismiss our distance as easily conquered

(for Michael Roberson in Maine)

No one ever should
do anything.

Let’s be plants.
No modalities just
insistence and the soak
of light.

I’ll sit here.
You’ll sit there.
The soil between
expanding, collapsing.

Liz Willis' Meteoric Flowers

Just bought Liz Willis' new book, Meteoric Flowers, and it was as good, if not better, than my high expectations. Meteoric Flowers is part Baudelaire, part natural history, and part oracular verse. Reading these prose poems is like wandering through a forest when every sensation carries with it a vivid recollection of yet another forest. That said, the brevity of the book is deceptive—like Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, we can easily become lost. Each poem invites (or pehaps mesmerizes) us to look in new directions and, like the best poetry, allows us discover new correspondences in the world around us. One should, perhaps, read a few, and then make to take a long walk and let the poems work their magic.

Eugene Ostashevsky's Iterature

Here's an unabashed plug for a book I recently very much enjoyed:

Eugene Ostashevsky
Iterature
Ugly Duckling Press
$12


Right from the start, Ostashevsky’s Iterature declares itself: the cover shows, apropos, the headless horseman rearing up, the wind blasting behind him. And, indeed, we’re in for quite a chase through Romania, Coke ads, Spinoza, safaris, and rhyming, rhyming, rhyming!

Ostashevsky plays with language and narrative as if they were taffy:

Do-ra-me-fa-so-la-ti-do
We did what we had to do

We rhymed pillage with village
The responsibility rests with language.

We had nothing to do with it
We’re just a bunch of fictional characters

We don’t have any other characters
Except for out letters, that is our characters

Iterature is so rad: it moves a whopping pace and, believe me, it’s a pleasant sort of work keeping up with the layered references, entendres, and linguistic gymnastics. Honestly, and strangely enough, despite the suffused wit throughout, Iterature is very nearly mythic.

ideas of falling unfold methodically

Ideas of falling unfold methodically.

In the city, a system enacts itself, cleverly without language.
Crows gash the aggressive air, unrelenting fabric.

High flat sun. Their shadows create Venn diagrams of something
best left unspoken. When they falter, the world breaks in.

I keep my cursive longingly to my heart; my caesuras barren. We
distract ourselves, and play coy with slicing poor fingers as
markers of progress, insight.

Crows beat against the hordes of clouds. This elemental rejection
enlivens them, quickens their elegance.

Soon a copse of elms peels itself upward. Wearily you might sit,
desiccated rubble sharp beneath your heels. Narrow leaves
present an index of the city.

Searing sweet irruption, our city lights itself at night—neon sign tumescent.
Pulsing with. They twist their reflections, their images in televisions.

Subcelestial-Ecchymosis

Subcelestial—Ecchymosis

I have heard “mourir c’est facile.”
That, really, we’re about specificity, relevance.

But tonight, as usual, we’ve become
diffused: nothing held long & tender.

Quite honestly, I am not sure where
this will go, to what quiet wrecked end

or crowded edge it will find itself.
Technically, thoughts are subcutaneous,

so I’ve read. “Actually, even astronomical
systems suffer drag and tidal friction.”

Nobody feels this, so why say “suffer”?
Perhaps it’s a caress.