Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Art Deco, cities, city life, God, Hobbes, inauthenticity, Merleau-Ponty, overcrowding, Portland, technology, the 1920s, urbanization
The girls
of the 1920s were
little more than willow wisps;
all legs, arms, and torsos,
only a motion of limbs and
pale thin embodiment.
Bowlers,
and short hair,
flapper dresses,
boys at their sides,
neon, satin, sequins, and utopian
Art Deco lives.
They were all too young to realize the horrors
the technologies
they invested with messianic robes,
too old to hear their parents’ cries.
From farmsteads,
they came to the big from
the small, never understanding they only ever traded
one enclosure for another.
Anyone who has tried to live in a big city –
now or then –
knows what I mean.
My limbs move in ever-narrowing
circles,
squeezed in on all sides by an
amalgamated mass of
bodies.
This is my salvation and my
poison.
The city is my God.
His angels are a host of automobiles,
carrying the living dead
from neighborhood to neighborhood,
but anyone can see there’s no space
for anyone anymore: the cities
are filling up, the graveyards
are filling up,
Hell is filling up.
But I’m not different:
another pretender in a city of fakes,
you the flighty flapper
I followed here from parts unknown,
shuffling the same worn deck of cards and wishing for
that lucky hand to play, thinking of
the girls of the 1920s,
and the cities that will be
our graves.
A row,
your interrogator face and
walk therapy.
Too cold for massages and too
dry
for rain.
Your excuses pile up;
my excuses pile up.
We’ve finished with this city
before we’ve started.
Sometimes I think about
other girls.
Sometimes
I dream of places
where it rains
more.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bukowski, obliteration, Portland, snow, Zen
A man has to have snow
to write great things.
His soul must be still, white,
unmoving,
must cover over every part of his existence
like a great snowy blanket.
Like the icy, unforgiving fingers of the Muse.
On snowy days, I’ve heard
not even the wind
moves, afraid of disturbing the poetic stillness.
Even the writers who never had snow
were great snowy figures apt to chill readers to the bone
with white expanses of clarity,
cooped up like children on a snow day
in L.A., in the deep South,
on a beach in Mexico.
Great words
obliterate.
Snow obliterates.
May snow
or great words come
to obliterate
me.
Filed under: poems | Tags: abandonment, Camus, death, fallenness, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Orpheus, philosophy, Portland, San José, the Columbia, The fall, the Willamette
The Columbia has abandoned us,
the Willamette, too; and the Guadalupe; and
San Jose. And Portland. We’re
abandoned into history. We’re run aground on
a little island,
but it isn’t really a little island — it’s
a sea monster.
Verily.
The sea monster doesn’t want to drink tea
with us; it doesn’t want
to play tennis. In fact the sea monster seems to have no
interest in anything about us, what we do or whatever happiness we’ve managed
to scrape together in this small insignificance we call existence.
In fact the sea monster seems to want us for
lunch. This sea
monster is life.
Heidegger said
we’ve been abandoned into the world.
We’ve fallen
into it.
Does this sound familiar?
We’re falling together.
I smell the concrete
who knows how far down.
“La chute” Camus called it. “The fall.”
I can’t even turn my head to look.
It
doesn’t matter.
You are here
and
it’s wonderful.
We were told the Northwest is a big foolish beast,
no sea monster: a Cerberus
for we sweet Orpheuses
to blanket with sound.
We’ll smile as we play
our lyres. We’ll sing in
harsh voices.
We’ll pluck the breath from each other’s chests
while there’s still breath left to draw.
We’ll live breathless.
Au bout de soufflé.
Is there concrete below?
Has the war started?
I don’t care.
I’m happiest when I’m with you.
You wrote in a little card,
“Coup dedans là. Tout sera OK.“
Hang in there. All will be OK.
Come sea monsters. Come Cerberus. Come fools.
Come fall.
