Buddha as Christian Saint

Christianity has a long and glorious history of appropriation of other cultures, Jewish deity, pagan holidays. Why not get Buddhism in the mix, too?

Bliss

I must have short-circuited the neurotic in me because I have been feeling pretty good lately. It really began with getting the call on Sunday that the synonymUS jam was cancelled. I had spent the afternoon cleaning and watching movies with Stephanie and suddenly, my day opened up. I realized in my bones that it was summertime, and I decided to get out. I drank a couple of gourds of yerba maté and, properly stimulated, I jumped on my bike and rode out to Willow Lake, near Corona Park. Now, normally when I ride, I push myself, raging to “get in shape” (for what?) or “beat my time” (what “time”?). Instead, this time, I just slowed down and enjoyed the day.

And the day was beautiful, right at my favorite time, blessed with the sinking light of the sun and a cool breeze. It reminded me of Sunday afternoons in Tucson, playing outside, riding my bike around the neighborhood before dinner. Sunday evening at the Williams house meant dad grilling steaks (or, later on, chicken breasts for my mom) and me swimming in the pool, imagining that there were monsters down in the drain at the bottom of the deep end. In the present, riding my bike through Briarwood, Queens, past the houses with sprinklers in the front yard and the “hissing of summer lawns”, I was suddenly overcome, not with nostalgia, but with a deep and humbling gratitude. The world was quiet, and safe, and actually quite simple. For a moment, I was complete.

I rode this wave of good feeling down to the lake (more a pond, really). Hundreds of families encircled the water, with their coolers and their grills and their Frisbees and their kites. Oblivious children wove in and out of pedestrian traffic on the paths, and boats floated out on the water. The smell of charcoal and meat grilling filled my nostrils; rock music and hip-hop and soca music twisted together between parties with competing sound systems to form complex poly-rhythms in the air (the only thing that would have made it more complete for me would have been the polka rhythms and ass-quake bass of norteno music). I loved them all. All these people and their families and their friends and their lovers and their children and their quarrels and their trash and their beer and their cigarettes and their pork or beef or chicken grilling. All of them suffused in this holy light of a sunset gently putting the day to bed – they were beautiful.

I rode home, took a walk with Steph around the neighborhood (still too early in the day for the fireflies to be out, but the gloss of loving memory puts them in anyway), went home, watched an episode of Deadwood. Lovely.

Got together with Ray last night to play music and made some interesting and occasionally pretty sounds, even though my guitar chops are no where near what I’d like. It was nice to play without expectations or even hope of a “product.” The body and mind and heart enjoy play for its own sake.

That’s all, I’m just blessed. Thanks.

Southern Discomfort

Yeah, Janis Joplin obviously had a masochistic streak. I drank one (and a half) fucking Southern Comfort Old Fashioned and felt like I'd been poisoned. I'm guessing it was some combination of what ever it is that is constantly brewing up in these cesspools I call sinuses and insulin shock from all the sugar in that vile, reprehensible concoction. Cramps, hot flashes, stupor. Steph came home from a party I was supposed to join her at and put cold towels on my forehead as I was burning up. Woke up this morning digusted and exhausted, eyes bloodshot and body aching.

My poor father drank these on the weekends. He must have had an extraordinary tolerance for discomfort and delerium.

All experiments end with information gathered. Sometimes the information is simply a resolve to never repeat the experiment. I mentioned this to Chad and he said, "Well, Newton poisoned himself with his alchemy experiments. Madame Curie, you know. You're in good company."

Rainy day post

If they didn’t have cameras in my office, I’d take off all my clothes and dance around naked, as the place is as ghost-empty as any NY office you could find on an average Friday at quarter-to-five in July. Alas, I am still here, watching the phones on the possibility that the other guy working after 5 on Friday in July in New York might call.

I don’t have a whole lot to say, except that I really needed to bump the self-pitying whiny post from the top of the page.

It’s been mentioned on other blogs and other bios, but perhaps you’ve heard of the newest sensation to hit the NY poetry scene: PARSE. We are in the final stages of putting it together, and damn if it don’t look purty. Anyway, there’s lots of stuff in my head right now, potential projects brewing and stewing, and we’re gonna have us a party in September to celebrate PARSE and the official release, so look out for it.

Currently I’m:
Paying close attention to my dreams
Feeling my feet when I walk
Checking my breathing, to see when I stop
Listening to hip-hop
Watching Deadwood Season 1, you limber-dicked cocksuckers
Trying to find Angostura bitters.

The story behind that is: when I was a child, my dad’s favorite drink was Southern Comfort Old Fashioned. Old Fashioned’s are made thus: take one sugar cube and a little bit of branch (bottled) water. Muddle it together in a highball glass with about 3 dashes of Angostura bitters. Add ice and enough SoCo to fill the glass along with one maraschino cherry. Dad would let me eat the cherry, and I loved the taste (of the cherry, not the drink). Fun facts: SoCo is actually bourbon and a peach liqueur. Yummy! Janis Joplin drank a lot of it. Anyway. So I’m having some difficulty finding Angostura bitters and it’s making me a little cranky. It’s not like I’m looking for Root Beer Schnapps or some crazy shit like that!

All else is well. I haven’t been writing much (poetry) lately, just getting stuff ready for the big release. For all the wonderful people who came out and made my birthday such an amazing night, and all the great folks who told me they loved me after reading my (whiny) birthday entry – I love you, too.

I'm 34 today...

and melancholy. No not one of those typical late-early-middle-age "what does it all mean, what have I accomplished" moments. Fuck that. I gave that one over years ago. No, just sort of a gentle, "God, I wish I still did drugs" day where I feel like the world isn't worth the effort. It comes and goes with me. Mostly goes, of late, thank God. The only thing for it is to do something. Get the routine going just to get moving. I'm supposed to see a movie with Steph tonight, Batman or Land of the Dead (I'm leaning toward Batman, as post-zombie-apocalyptic nihilism, given my mood, seems like bringing coals to Newcastle, as nobody really says anymore). The plan was to go to the beach and hang out watching the sea. Turns out its going to be cloudy and rainy most of the day, "with potential for inland flooding." Lovely.

Did the form slam on Monday, and didn't win, as per usual. Not that I blame the judges. Abena was great, Samantha had some really terrific poems (though not necessarily to my tastes, but that's neither here nor there). My stuff tends to be a little less visceral, and sometimes I have trouble really grabbing the judges. All the people who mattered to me gave me kudos for the sestina, and really, that's all I cared about. Every 2 or 3 months I get a good poem that has both the craft and the inspiration. The rest of the time I just slog through, tightening the screws and polishing the brass, as it were. Occasionally, lightning strikes, and I guess that's about all I can ask for.

During the "Haiku Deathmatch", Abena did a bunch of very erotic haiku (haikus? haikai?) that really got the crowd going. Mine tended to be much more imagistic, but I thought about the possibility of doing an erotic poem. So little in my life is erotic per se and my relationship to sex is so sketchy anyway, that erotic poems seem a little out of reach for me. It would be like making a bulimic a food critic: "The meal was an orgy of flavors and texture, exquisitely prepared and lovingly presented. It tasted almost exactly like battery acid when I forced myself to regurgitate it approximately 15 minutes later in a frenzy of disgust and self-loathing." Yeah, that's sexy.

Anyway. I'm gonna go do yoga, that'll probably relax me and get me out of this funk. Thanks for reading!

Me and Mia

So there’s this song, right? Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, off the album “Shake the Sheets”. It’s called “Me and Mia”. After I got it, I listened to it over and over, dancing in place on the subway with the iPod blasting. At first, the lyrics seemed to me to be some sort of “don’t lose heart” encouragement song:

Fighting for the smallest goal to
gain a little self-control. I
know how hard you try.
I see it your eyes.

If you believe in something beautiful then
Get up and be it!

I was fighting some battles of my own at the time, and I really needed to hear something like this. It was a blessing to feel understood.

I started listening a little closer, though, and some things started to make me feel a little confused. The opening lyrics made sense, and reminded me of finally giving up drugs:

I was walking through a life one morning
The sun was out the air was warm but, oh
I was cold.
and though I must have looked a half-a-person
to tell the tale in my own version
it was only then that I felt whole.

but there were other things happening here. The song mentioned Mia, and also Anna. Who’s Anna? And what’s this about “fighting food to find transcendence”? What’s going on here? Following a hunch, I started looking up the lyrics online. Ted didn’t spell it Anna. He spelled it Ana. I then found out that Mia and Ana are short for bulimia and anorexia. The rest of the lyrics fell into place. Here they are:

As I was walking through a life one morning
the sun was out, the air was warm, but
Oh, I was cold
And though I must have looked half a person,
to tell the tale, in my own version,
It was only then that I felt whole

But do you believe in something beautiful?
Then get up and be it

Fighting for the smallest goal: to get a little self-contol
I know how hard you try. I see it in your eyes
But call your friends, 'cause we've forgotten what it's like to eat what's rotten
And what's eating you alive might help you to survive.
We went on as we were on a mission, latest in a Grand Tradition
And oh, what did we find?
It was Ego who was flying the banner, and me and Mia, Ann and Ana
Oh, we'd been unkind

But do you believe in something beautiful?
Then get up and be it

Fighting for the smallest goal: to get a little self-control
I see it in your eyes, I see it in your spine.
But call your friends,
'cause we've forgotten what it's like to eat what's rotten
And what's eating you alive, might help you to survive.

And even the nights, they could get better
And even the days ain't all that bad
And after a week of fighting, as more and more it seems the right thing

But do you believe in something beautiful?
Then get up and be it

Fighting for the smallest goal: to gain a little self-control
Won't anybody here just let you disappear?
Not doctors, nor your mom nor dad, but me and Mia, Ann and Ana
Know how hard you try. Don't you see it in my eyes?
Sick to death of my dependence, fighting food to find transcendence
Fighting to survive, more dead but more alive
Cigarettes and speed to live, and sleeping pills to feel forgiven
All that you contrive, and all that you're deprived
All the bourgeois social angels telling you you've got to change
Don't have any idea. They'll never see so clear.
But don't forget what it really means to hunger strike
when you don't really need to
Some are dying for a cause, but that don't make it yours.

And even the nights, they can get better.

So then I found out about a whole group of people who call themselves pro-ana or pro-mia. Go ahead, google it. They have websites and communities and livejournals and blogs and… and let me tell you, those websites are NSFW, or anywhere else for that matter, some of them. Pictures of anorexic women and razor thin models as “encouragement”, tips and tricks for keeping your friends and family in the dark, a whole ideology built up around the concept of eating-disorder-as-lifestyle-choice. Wow. I sort of became a little obsessed.

Now, I had been struggling to find the subject for a sestina I’d been hoping to write (sestinas have a repetitive, almost hypnotic quality well suited to obsessive contemplation and to the voice of the monomaniac). I had almost settled on writing a persona poem from the point of view of Iggy Pop (I may still, if my heart is in it), but this blew me away. Here was obsession, a voice, a whole set of images, all just waiting for me, based on the research I had done (and my understanding of addictive/obsessive behavior from the inside). Anyway, here’s what came out.

Sestina
for Ana

I know my mother lies,
when she tells me I am beautiful.
The pain of hunger
is only ugliness melting from my bones;
in this body I will fall asleep
and awaken, a delicate dragonfly.

I will molt, from nymph into dragonfly
and shed the blubbery carcass that now lies
upon me like a heavy sleep.
I must peel this flesh to find a beautiful
white cage made from my bones.
It cradles my heart, a prisoner of hunger.

My parents try to infect me with their vacuous hunger
and I dart into hiding like a dragonfly.
They note with fear my growing bones
so I blunt my angularity with heavy coats and thin lies.
They cannot bear my becoming beautiful
because their hearts are flabby and thick with sleep.

Sometimes, I have trouble falling asleep
and I bustle about in the small hours to soothe my hunger.
I clean and scrub and make my world beautiful
until it shines like the iridescent wings of a dragonfly.
Afterwards, I stare at the ceiling above the bed where I lie
all night fingering the delicate points of my bones.

How I long for a world of bones,
clean and slender, far from the feverish sleep
of my parents and friends and the larded lies
they vomit and swallow and still they hunger.
They would pull the wings from a dragonfly,
fat-slick eyes hating everything beautiful,

and I am so close to being beautiful,
so close to exposing the strong purity of bone
like the shiny carapace of a dragonfly
the armor of grace that does not sleep.
I will soon be shut of their mindless hunger,
purging the lonely weakness of comforting lies.

I will charm a dragonfly to sew shut my mouth while I sleep
using a needle of bone, and I will embrace my lover, hunger.
This body will fall away like a cocoon. Leave it where it lies.

------------

Let me know what you think.

Kids, Don't Blog Drunk

Seriously. I almost posted this weird little rant after reading Roger Bonair-Agard's blog entry from Jamaica. Somehow I got in my head that racial tension could actually be a good thing, that somehow that tension created some of the most fruitful and amazing hybrids (rock and roll, the current New York poetry scene, hip-hop). I also managed to tie it all together with references to Mars, the God of War, and the concept of sacrifice and blood (all Gods demand sacrifices, but if you give them the right sacrifice, all Gods come bearing gifts). I think, with a little bit of effort and a good bit of time to meditate, I could have had a pretty good entry, but drunk? Fuhgedaboudit. I sounded like a racist nutjob with a hard-on for Roman Mythology.

Maybe some other time.

I'll be in Chicago next week. My company thinks I'm responsible enough to send there to help open up a new office. Amazing. Anyway, they'll put me up in hotel, and that'll be fun. But what will I do when I'm not at work? Write, read, walk, drink, visit some friends and family, eat some food, and think about Home (specifically, my wife, my friends, my band, my cat - and somehow, my city of New York).

BTW the magazine proceeds apace. We should have the first draft out to the poets soon! You'll love it, I promise. Subscriptions are available. Just leave a comment, or email me.