Dispatched From The Lounge #3
I'd like to start this dispatch by commemorating my personal hero and idol, Lawrence Ferlighetti, who turns 87 today. Ferlinghetti recently advised an interviewer to be ready for when the electricity goes out, and that now may be the time to stock up on pot cookies. Sage advice indeed. I saw the man once (in physical form, though I've seen him in my mind a million times), and simply lost my voice as he walked by en route to his office through the poetry room at City Lights. I'll never forget what it was like to be in the presence of Him, truly with the capital H. I didn't know then what to say, and wouldn't know now. All that comes to mind is 'thank you'. I recommend "A Coney Island of the Mind" for everyone, and if you've already read it, read it again. It's a true portrait of a (the) human condition.
Inspired by Ferlinghetti, as always, I'm starting to think about doing some translations of Italian poetry.
------------------
The difference between sanity and schizophrenia is self-awareness.
Remember, you know something that no one else does. It may be a deep secret, something that happened, it may be a way of looking at the world, it may be a connection you've seen and never told anyone about. You, and everyone else, knows one or many things that nobody else knows. That knowledge is always in your eyes, but does anyone else ever see it?
------------------
Enough amateur philosophizing. On to the main event. The first poem came from a chance meeting last week. The second one was written exactly two years earlier, and started off a journal that I just filled up last week and I don't understand it the way I must have when I wrote it. I always get the insatiable urge to fry in the desert this time of year.
--------------------
3/23/2006
Good afternoon, miss. This is my card.
Yes, I'm in the destruction business.
The mind-blowing business, that is.
I sneak into your little hidden homes all
over the towns and cities and forests
of this world and worlds like it,
and I set off explosives in your walls,
and I run away wild as you realize
what's starting to happen.
No, it certainly doesn't pay much. In fact,
like any business, it's been tough
to get it started,
and you end up doing the first handful
for free anyhow
But I'm in this for the long haul.
It could be quite profitable, once
I've done enough of them,
you'll all be running around happy naked
singing forgetting you lived in those death-traps
and who'll need your movies, who'll need
internet and television and the rest of the
mind-junk you eat and vomit today,
when you'll be so exposed amused by
each other, by the millions of
mysteries everyone secretly unknowingly shares,
and while you won't find any true answers,
you'll pay me again and again
with more questions.
-----------------------------------
3/23/2004
Vegas
Las Vegas is the beautifully disgusting
heartcenter of whatever there exists
of 21st century American art
as it is only in the commercial
absurdity where excess has destroyed
the decaying mind that the true
center can shine through in all
its depraved unnatural misguided
sensation as only in Las Vegas
does the person cease to be
and only in Las Vegas does
the universal guilt ignore itself
in a microcosm of excitement pretended
sin and it is here that we
so love and loathe ourselves
and what we dream of never becoming
that all that is human can once
again thaw like iced cave
paintings and fossils of those
before us who know much more
than we ever will.
-----------------------------------------
Free your mind, as in free beer and freedom.
I lie. This isn't from the lounge today. Conceived there, born elsewhere in Portland.
And welcome to any new passengers on this ride. Those of you who'd like, feel free to throw open the exit door here at cruising altitude and step out quietly. I'll tell the pilot, if he ever comes aboard.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Dispatched From The Lounge #2
As my first dispatch seemed to float off into the ether without making a sound or an imprint, I'll blow some more hot air into the atmosphere and proudly contribute to the global warming of the shared consciousness.
As anyone who has spent much time with me knows, I seem to have a divining rod for finding coincidences. I therefore was not too startled when, the morning after sending the last dispatch, my long-lost first page of written poetry, from 10/16/1990, appeared in a binder I was throwing out. This page had fallen off the spiral notebook many, many years ago, and I'd assumed it was lost. Should my lifelong dream of being van Gogh or Dickinson pan out, perhaps that piece of paper will end up somewhere. More likely, it'll just be thrown away with the rest of my possessions upon my death. More proof that there's more than money to this life.
Vitamin D + St. John's Wort may be the best cure for that uniquely Portland affliction, Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Poetry is the real news. I think we should start a poetry daily to be sold alongside The Times, The Post, and the Weekly World News as a source of real and authentic information about the world around us.
On to the main event. One random poem from my recent scribbles, and then at the end, I will print my re-discovered first poem.
----------------------------------------
I don't know what it would be like
to be a victim of this, bombarded by
strange thoughts and a phantasm of a man
who slithers by on the edge of your dreams,
but he's not as sly as he thinks, you know
him every time he peeks, every time he pretends
to pass you by anonymously,
and I don't know what it would be like
to be simultaneously fascinated and scared,
to feel this pouring out of someone
who can't be everything he pretends to
be but he certainly believes that he is
and you don't know if you're a fantasy,
a game, a coveted object of desire. the
first, the last, the only, the primary,
you're not sure you even want to know
(the truth is you are all and none and neither)
I've always been the author of these strange
books where the ending is never anything
but a bizarre awkward drop
I've never read one of those books,
never been a real character, just a
delusional omniscient narrator
who ends up not knowing what you
ever thought at all.
--------------------------------------------------
Below is the first poem, from a sheet out of a notebook I carried with me to the Stanford Coffee House on October 16, 1990, and wrote poetry with Melind John. The next day would be the one-year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I'm sure that was on my mind at least as much as the Sappho and Lao Tzu that I was reading for the first time.
The wise man said to me,
"Why?"
And I replied,
"O Wise Man,
I do not know."
--------------------------------------------------
I encourage you to rediscover the physical feeling of ink on paper. When was the last time you wrote a real letter? And I encourage you to rediscover the value of eye contact, of looking into people's eyes and seeing windows into universes existing only in other minds. We've become too trained too the rapid-eye darting of a world we see through video screens. Slow your eyes down and look at your world, and look at each other. You're missing a lot of the tricky and inspiring details of the world.
As my first dispatch seemed to float off into the ether without making a sound or an imprint, I'll blow some more hot air into the atmosphere and proudly contribute to the global warming of the shared consciousness.
As anyone who has spent much time with me knows, I seem to have a divining rod for finding coincidences. I therefore was not too startled when, the morning after sending the last dispatch, my long-lost first page of written poetry, from 10/16/1990, appeared in a binder I was throwing out. This page had fallen off the spiral notebook many, many years ago, and I'd assumed it was lost. Should my lifelong dream of being van Gogh or Dickinson pan out, perhaps that piece of paper will end up somewhere. More likely, it'll just be thrown away with the rest of my possessions upon my death. More proof that there's more than money to this life.
Vitamin D + St. John's Wort may be the best cure for that uniquely Portland affliction, Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Poetry is the real news. I think we should start a poetry daily to be sold alongside The Times, The Post, and the Weekly World News as a source of real and authentic information about the world around us.
On to the main event. One random poem from my recent scribbles, and then at the end, I will print my re-discovered first poem.
----------------------------------------
I don't know what it would be like
to be a victim of this, bombarded by
strange thoughts and a phantasm of a man
who slithers by on the edge of your dreams,
but he's not as sly as he thinks, you know
him every time he peeks, every time he pretends
to pass you by anonymously,
and I don't know what it would be like
to be simultaneously fascinated and scared,
to feel this pouring out of someone
who can't be everything he pretends to
be but he certainly believes that he is
and you don't know if you're a fantasy,
a game, a coveted object of desire. the
first, the last, the only, the primary,
you're not sure you even want to know
(the truth is you are all and none and neither)
I've always been the author of these strange
books where the ending is never anything
but a bizarre awkward drop
I've never read one of those books,
never been a real character, just a
delusional omniscient narrator
who ends up not knowing what you
ever thought at all.
--------------------------------------------------
Below is the first poem, from a sheet out of a notebook I carried with me to the Stanford Coffee House on October 16, 1990, and wrote poetry with Melind John. The next day would be the one-year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I'm sure that was on my mind at least as much as the Sappho and Lao Tzu that I was reading for the first time.
The wise man said to me,
"Why?"
And I replied,
"O Wise Man,
I do not know."
--------------------------------------------------
I encourage you to rediscover the physical feeling of ink on paper. When was the last time you wrote a real letter? And I encourage you to rediscover the value of eye contact, of looking into people's eyes and seeing windows into universes existing only in other minds. We've become too trained too the rapid-eye darting of a world we see through video screens. Slow your eyes down and look at your world, and look at each other. You're missing a lot of the tricky and inspiring details of the world.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Dispatched From The Lounge #1
Many of you receiving this email know that I sometimes mumble something in passing about poetry. Consider this my little flash to you of what goes on under the overcoat. Hide your eyes and look away, or stare and enjoy. If it doesn't affect me noticeably, I might write another of these. I'll just be picking random selections and passing them on.
That's enough introduction. Just like Mayor Bud many years ago, I'm exposing myself for art's sake.
-MVK
---------------------------------------------------
You got there too late, and the town
had gone, the bar closed, the last
failed settlers moved on in their
tattered wagons, with so much left
behind,
baby pictures left on the muddy floor of
the shed, baby pictures taken when there was
a dream, an idea about how life
slowly gets better over the years,
But you've learned better, and they've
all gone, and you're there to find
a ticket back to the stomach-turning
hopes shattered in younger years,
you thought this all would grow into
a real home, a place both comfortable
and crazy, a place where you
could drink like mad and howl at
a blind moon, then wake up and
slowly warm in the autumn sun.
But you got impatient. You left it when
you thought you knew every board,
every pothole, every face.
You went away- you'd lied to yourself
and the now-impossible truth leaves
you lonelier than ever, choking on
the dust of a summer wind.
(written 12/11/2005)
----------------------------------------------
This giant steam locomotive gasped its last
oil-powered breath nearly fifty years
ago, its brute strength inert against
the will of industry and the crushing
assault of soulless technology,
And yet it still smells of oil, the
strong, sweet, acrid smell of a steam-driven
monster, lying dead in the museum,
scaring children in its immobility,
children who have no sensation of
what the heat in the firebox felt like,
the small earthquakes at each pounding of
the cylinders, the shrill whistle piercing
the snowbound silence of the Sierra
Nevada mountains.
The black metal beast slumbers, history
travels by outside the museum
and it still smells of oil.
(written at the California State RR Museum, 8/5/2005)
Many of you receiving this email know that I sometimes mumble something in passing about poetry. Consider this my little flash to you of what goes on under the overcoat. Hide your eyes and look away, or stare and enjoy. If it doesn't affect me noticeably, I might write another of these. I'll just be picking random selections and passing them on.
That's enough introduction. Just like Mayor Bud many years ago, I'm exposing myself for art's sake.
-MVK
---------------------------------------------------
You got there too late, and the town
had gone, the bar closed, the last
failed settlers moved on in their
tattered wagons, with so much left
behind,
baby pictures left on the muddy floor of
the shed, baby pictures taken when there was
a dream, an idea about how life
slowly gets better over the years,
But you've learned better, and they've
all gone, and you're there to find
a ticket back to the stomach-turning
hopes shattered in younger years,
you thought this all would grow into
a real home, a place both comfortable
and crazy, a place where you
could drink like mad and howl at
a blind moon, then wake up and
slowly warm in the autumn sun.
But you got impatient. You left it when
you thought you knew every board,
every pothole, every face.
You went away- you'd lied to yourself
and the now-impossible truth leaves
you lonelier than ever, choking on
the dust of a summer wind.
(written 12/11/2005)
----------------------------------------------
This giant steam locomotive gasped its last
oil-powered breath nearly fifty years
ago, its brute strength inert against
the will of industry and the crushing
assault of soulless technology,
And yet it still smells of oil, the
strong, sweet, acrid smell of a steam-driven
monster, lying dead in the museum,
scaring children in its immobility,
children who have no sensation of
what the heat in the firebox felt like,
the small earthquakes at each pounding of
the cylinders, the shrill whistle piercing
the snowbound silence of the Sierra
Nevada mountains.
The black metal beast slumbers, history
travels by outside the museum
and it still smells of oil.
(written at the California State RR Museum, 8/5/2005)
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