November 23, 2012

a love story

Gregory Vogel
6:56 PM (18 minutes ago)

to me
O.K.  here it goes...The ONLY thing I would like for my big birthday is a card or wish from Charles Krauthammer.  I think he is the smartest man that is on the news.  So, for me, if you could, could you get Charles to say "Happy birthday to Diane" or to come to your house for cake or to sign a card, you could go and pick it up, or???????  That is what I wish for my birthday.  He is marvelous....that is who, if I were dying, I would want in my hospital room reading or talking, just his voice and his knowledge, ....along with fresh ground coffee beans and classical music....o.k. that's the deal, kiddo.  xoxo mom 
Suzanne Stratmann sstratmann@gmail.com
7:12 PM (2 minutes ago)

to Gregory
god you are getting more and more difficult. 
i have to just tell you this, because at first, it was all:  "when i am dying in my hospital room all i want is an opened bag of coffee beans."  now the beans have to be ground.  i'm sure a pretty bowl will be appeciated, and so i've got money running on how long it takes you to mention that part of the All-Your-Dying-Mother-Wants-Is scenario.  and then you added sibelius.  then you added coop.  now, no more coop, now it's krauthammer, and i have to get him to talk to you or read to you, let alone sit with you in your starbucks-smelling hospital room/deathbed. what am i supposed to do with coop now?  how do i break it to him that his presence is no longer desired?  does this have to do with his coming out?  god mom.  if that is why you've thrown coop out, that is really shocking and maybe your personality is changing and something really is wrong with your brain.  anyway,  i really hope sibelius is dead, otherwise a cd wouldn't be enough, even on a bose, i'd need to be buying up plane tickets for him as well. 

is rubbing your most-likely cramping feet going to be part of what i should let kraut know about the activities to occur during his presence? cause this seems like it could be a deal breaker. 

mom.  don't get me wrong.  i do take this seriously and am trying to please you.  we've talked about this:  i see deaths as marriages, but in reverse and more honest, and as for your consciousness, it really does only happen once as far as we know, (unlike weddings), and so i do want it to be your Dream Death and will do all i can to make it so.  i just fear you are spending too much time creating this whispy event that in actuality, will be in many many years, and will never live up to your fantasies.  half the fun of any event is afterward, reliving it moment-by-moment with someone else who was there, right?  you see the rub, here?

**as an aside, i think we have just created a cottage industry.  we could become death planners. 





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Gregory Vogel
7:18 PM (46 minutes ago)

to me
Wno is coop?   It used to be Shep......but now it's Krauthammer all the way...  and beans....and Sibelius.......I think Charles lives in your area.....in my opinion, this is doable......xoxox mom
Suzanne Stratmann sstratmann@gmail.com
7:24 PM (39 minutes ago)

to Gregory
it was never shep.  it was coop.  anderson cooper. 
you think i forget these things?
you think i CONFUSE coop and shep??  !!! 
Gregory Vogel
7:48 PM (16 minutes ago)

to me
I am so thankful you are my daughter.....so very thankful.... a gift from God.....xoxo mom


Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:24:32 -0500
Gregory Vogel
7:47 PM (16 minutes ago)

to me
No, no never Coop,,,,,,Shep,...but now neither....Charles......He is the best of the best.....in my personal opinion..... xoxo mom


Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:24:32 -0500
Suzanne Stratmann sstratmann@gmail.com
8:03 PM (0 minutes ago)

to Gregory
it WAS coop, thank god i missed the shep phase, and now yes...krauthammer.  i'll get right on it.

you are a fickle fickle woman.  which makes it mean all the more to me that you are still, after woe these 29 long years, glad that i am your daughter.   i am still very glad you are my mother.  and friend.  i love you too! 
























September 12, 2012

and articulate shows itself like this:

understand hell.  sartre style.

this link is to "No Exit" , an hour and 23 minutes of really amazing writing.  


no exit works, but so too would perhaps this:
...Hell is Other People...





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mshvqdva0vYhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mshvqdva0vY

September 9, 2012

What do we become

Hello Readers in the Distant Future, again...

I'm back.  I was thinking about you today, and wondering about your intelligence--is it "artificial", or "natural"?  Mostly again, I'm wondering how it is we have evolved, and what, as you read this, we are like:  Do we focus only on efficiency, and production outcomes, or do we spend some of our time wondering interesting things?  Do we have imagination, and creativity? Do we toy with questions when there may not be one answer, but shades of speculation and opinion?

I wish I could have the answers to these questions--because in some sense, the answers would provide clues about how to live today. 

In our future, is it all about the moment that is, or do we seek some sort of greater overarching truth, or purpose to existing?  We have a mix of approaches around here, now.  But regardless of which attitude a person takes in life, it is this questioning, this seeking, that distinguishes the human race from "lesser" species.  People are understood to have the ability to reason in their decision making, through the use of logic to map their thinking.  Economists may say that people do not act rationally, but that is a different discussion.  Reason and rationality are not interchangeable. 

Merged with that questioning is the fact that we raise our children to the extreme--we do not toss them from their nests (birds) or spawn and swim (fish)--our babies are born completely incapable of doing much of anything, and must be cared for by their parents until they are presumed capable of using their innate ability to reason.  (Our babies have been known to rely upon their mothers until they are in their 50's.)   In our prolonged raising of our kids, we have a lot of time to think about what we want them to come away with, and in this context many parents try to think about and distill and make manifest the very essence of some theory of "upbringing".  And I read something recently along these lines, which made me happy and sad--and made me think of you, Future Me. 

The article had been sparked by a conversation the writer had had, in which was discussed what the group anticipated would be the wisdom that they, in their ripe old ages, would wish could actually have been passed down to their children, and been accepted.  The writer outlining some of his response to the question is one I consider to be an absolute power-thinker.  He possesses a stellar intellect and a curiosity the magnitude of which cannot be adjectivized (by the time you are reading this that may actually be a word.  Here and now, I just made it up.)  He is burst open to questions and seeks answers, on a massive scale.  And he is an extremely driven person, and the drive is: question.  go past the common boundaries.

As one of the three things he discussed, he stated, (and I paraphrase), that though the young may believe that life is not valuable without preferred features such as geographic location, life partner, or career, he would like his children to know that they will in fact adapt to situations poorer than they had hoped for, and without most of what the now-young person treasures. 

I respect him so...ah the pain!  This perspective is very upsetting.  I often find him not just right, but profoundly and deeply right--, and in this case, I either disagree, or I want to disagree.  I haven't decided which, yet.  Any response to this question is completely subjective, and there is no one right answer--but still, it was crushing to me: the surprising amount of acceptance of, and resignation to the sometimes less than satisfactory outcomes of important individual decisions--the ones that each of us make in our lifetimes.  And that he would advocate the transmission of an understanding that, even when it is obvious that a decision is no longer the best choice, a person can and will adapt to the situation, and be OK, and one need not seek change, because good enough is good enough... . ugh.  I may be wrong but I read this as his wanting his children to learn to accept the choices that they at one point made, for all of their time, and learn to live with OK and be OK with it.

I hope I misunderstood.  

Because I think this is fine for some people to say, but not him.  He and his questions simply breathe potential, and so why does he admit stuntedness into his perspective, as natural, or acceptable, or fine.  Of course we can adapt.  But should we, really?  Is it a more noble or cleaner course of a life lived?  Is it better somehow, easier or smoother, and then if he thinks yes to any of these, how does that work--perhaps less external turmoil, but what happens to a person inside?  Accepting OK rather than striving for better than that...and why, again? I suppose his answer is that what happens to a person inside is that they adapt.  I do not like this answer. 

(This is almost un-American!, I say, half in jest.  But, it is rather German, in my experience.  We'll save that--another day, another missive from me.)

Because he is writing, in his article, about ideas that he considers both wise and of such import that he wishes it were possible that his children actually learn them, I have to conclude that this belief is a product of his reasoning, and not just a flash of momentary defeat.  In fact, he does not see it as defeat.  He sees it as a fact.  Just:  that.  And again:  oh no!   (Of three points he made, I should say, only one was upsetting--and another one contradicted it, which causes in me a slim glimmer of relaxed muscles: that his argument was rather more sophistry than not).  In thinking about it, Future Beings, Future Me, the post was pretty much a poem.  It was beautiful, painful, and answered fewer questions than it raised--at least in me. 

But... what does it mean for us?  In the end, did we adapt?...and why did we adapt, when there were options, and adaptation was not really a matter of environmental pressure?... In that market, in our long lives, did we stop taking each choice and deciding along the way if it was working or not, and then acting on the considered answer? Did we eventually accept status quo?  How do you all live; what is going on?! Do you even experience dissatisfaction, and if so, is it considered OK?!?

These are questions with no answer right now.  Was he on the right track, as was so often the case?  Oh.  This is what I wish I knew about our future.

But he asked that question later, in a different article altogether.


September 6, 2012

nonautobiography part 3

At the very moment that I was born, four minutes past Sagittarius,  they discovered I had no penis.  They had always wanted a girl, but didn't think it would happen, and then there I was:  the first girl in the family in 50 years, the youngest of five brothers before me.  The whole of my extended family came by my father, who had eleven brothers.  And no sisters. Though no one knew it then,  I was also to be the last person at all to be born into the clan. To the displeasure of my father,  my mother, exhausted and sweaty and with blood on her socks, (but lucid and able to boast of not using pain medication for my birth), ever planning ahead, snarled from the stirrups that if she got pregnant again it would kill her, and for her doctor to go out there to the waiting room and tell her husband that fact right now.  He frowned while he stitched her up, but finally consented:  and that was the moment she became what she considered to be liberated.  For the rest of her life, when she would have more than two glasses of wine,  she would tell the story of how she would, and still did, thank God for the pill.  She was a very devout woman, who liked to say that she never wanted children in the first place, and could have lived happily without any, but there was nothing to do for it.  She also was very permissive with my brothers, saying, as they were heading out on some adventure, that the loss of one wouldn't matter, there were plenty more at home. My mother was delighted to have a girl, but let's be realistic.  She was one of the 13 adults in a close knit family living near one another in the suburbs, who would in many senses jointly parent my siblings and I, and she was often universally overruled with her opinions.  From the beginning, in their understandingly limited comprehension of female, the family in general held on to one great fear:  that I would become impregnated by age 16.  This fear was struck through with a thick vein of anticipatory schadenfreude, and his brothers began teasing my father.  And so when I was four days old they placed a bet, eleven against one I would get knocked up, to be called on my sixteenth birthday.   I didn't know this until much later.

When it was haircut time, we all marched down to Mr. Sid's barber shop, with his travel posters of Greece and his suspect magazine selection, and we were given identical styling, which happened to be one or the other of the two styles Mr. Sid knew.  We were buzz cut in summer, and given a slightly longer side part in the school year. Mr.Sid would always ask me if I wanted a shave too, noting the darkish hair that downed my upper lip.  "A moment with the blade and you can have it made", and I would scarlet as his belly roiled with convulsive laughter.  My mother sat there and didn't remark the incident, until we left, and she would hiss as we walked down the sidewalk that I had to have thicker skin; I had to stop letting other people hurt me, and that in the end, I should buck up because it was not going to change until I was a teenager and could take care of my own hair.  My mother prized simplicity, and that was the bottom line.  It didn't matter that people mistook me for a boy.  It didn't matter that I hated Mr. Sid.  Hate was just a feeling.  I realize now that I hated Mr. Sid instead of hating my mother.

So, for thirteen years, during the school year, every six weeks I would ride home on the floor of the car, crying, wetting my root beer flavored sucker with drool, tears, and snot.  I derived pleasure in pressing that lollipop into the carpet of the car, then smashing it and grinding it in.  When it hardened again, and my mother found it, she would be furious.  Every six weeks.  I'm not sure why my wailing didn't move her, but I am sure it had absolutely no effect upon her need to streamline, and run a tight ship.  This desire for order shows in the photos of my childhood: six kids in lederhosen shorts, bump bump bump down the line from tallest to shortest, or six little ones in footed pjs holding their favorite present and sitting around the Christmas tree.  I remember my favorite gift was the dump truck I received the year I was eight.  It came unpainted and with a set of paints so I could decorate it as I wanted.  I covered it in pictures of flowers, and girls wearing dresses, and holding hands.


It is a dubious fortune, at best, to be a first and a last. 

September 5, 2012

nonautobiography (2)




understand hell.


we've all heard about that hot inferno red poker spiked middle earth torture chamber, so let's offer that description as one possible image of hell, but add as variants, for this thought experiment, the following:

a)  hell is the current world, but with no coffee and no music or cinema and definitely no wine,  a place where one is constantly running late, and and wearing too-tight shoes, without end 

b)  hell is the current world, except that every time anyone's mouth moves all that comes out of it is of diaper rash, politics, the cost of gasoline, the random activities of second-cousins, odd weather patterns, previous ski vacations, cable company "issues", and high school pranks, without end

c)  hell is the current world, but a world with only bad writing and one is being constantly bored, or the opposite, ---to be condemned to only reading a stream of beautiful writing that makes one wish to kerosene one's own keyboard and throw away the pen

d)  hell is here and now, and is such that one can confidently state that on average, its normal is "good enough".

***

choose one hell.  got it? 

now picture deciding to walk away.  picture deciding, and executing. 


how'd that work out for you?

yeah. the utter panic and vision of walking away is easier to imagine with some definitions than with others:  for example, departure from the middle earth would definitely be difficult, even with a shovel or an accommodating and discrete elevator man, i'll give on that.  look at what happened to orpheus and eurydice.  we can't even rely upon our surface earth peeps--our most devoted of still-living lovers willing to gamble their very souls for us, to be secure in us---try finding one reliable stranger guy in hell to help out.  i imagine that the hedonistic, greedy for instant gratification, pleasure seeking sensualists working there are Pretty Crabby, and not big into conversation or deal making with those who have nothing of consequence to offer up.  in hell one is deprived of bargaining chits.

and i think everyone could agree that options a, b, and c are all nightmares that would be difficult to leave because implied in the statement itself is that the entire world is like that, so where would you go?  those were trick options.  and you thought d was the trick option, didn't you?  because of those words, "good enough".  

perhaps because of the five options given, in which only one can, in reality, loom as a threat--(i have no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that lead me to believe any of the first four variables could even be)--my mind dismisses the other four rather efficiently.  but that aside, i do find that the good enough life, the one many don't even consider at all when asked to imagine unpleasantness in extreme, is the slipperiest, stickiest, most trappifying Hell of them all.  remember that there is no way out at all of the first four hells.  but this good enough thing...this trumps them all, for me.

and this is the wine-dark, the mystery dust or poem inside of us, the thing we don't or can't articulate to anyone.  this tiny "ok" hairball is swallowed, accidentally hidden by us, and most dangerously, it is secreted away from ourselves. 

so there is nothing to tell, really.  no words for no thing to say--it's all fine.

but at some point, our consent or no, words and definitions come together to describe.  and it all comes down to which story one wants to tell, really.

pity us. 

September 4, 2012

dad

it is so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk

on some dry scorching day
fry an egg on a sidewalk and remember


                    sitting at the table being fed the daily feast
                    of flared nostrils and obey and
                    that his, his was the way.


                   but later,  listening to his music, his plunging 
                   the rod through the barrel
                   with clean cotton pieces
                   schwut scweescht schwut tk tk tk  pause.  tk


                  remember
                  the cologne of gun oil and crisp
                  fresh cold broken twigs fresh clean ruin
                  clinging to stubble and red wool.  tender skin and

                  (he really did have the softest, silkiest)
 
                  tender skin and stories.  this was
                  the scent this was the sound of him. 


                 his hands scarred and strong.  foreign.
                 they moved in old ways  and the
                 things he knew.       he spoke exotic.
                 forests    blinds   iron sights.   bullets and buckshot 
                 and why. 

                 decoys  and calls and antlers with points 
                 and once.   and once when he was young
                 there was that hole shot through the floor
                 at his feet.  to the dining room table below.  


                 now he wasn't table he.
                 pulling the luster of early morning 
                 to himself    focused on now and then.  
                 this morning he spent in his
                 now and then.
                 
                 a silver afternoon by the fire 
                 breathing crackle and spark and watching him. 
                 expanded   uncompromised    young and   
                 in those moments     the him of him.  seeing
                 the now and then. 


               
on some dry scorching day
fry an egg on a sidewalk and remember


words and meaning are not the same.

nonautobiography (1)

There are things you never tell anyone.  It's not that they are dark wine secret, but that they are central, and difficult to see.  And more difficult to articulate.  Listen:  put your head on the cool side of the pillow and Hear: the stories in the blues, the ache, the boozy smoke--you hear the same themes over and over again, and these are the themes of this story, too.  These are the themes of Bukowski, Nabokov, Kundera, and grit.  This is a story about the dust-to-mud side of the street.  You know of it even if you haven't walked it, because by now you've certainly heard the music--swelling rainstorms of love, scorn, and lonely nights when you feel as significant as a figment of imagination.  This is that. 

This is a story of growing up. 

Some people imagine growing up to be something that occurs between the ages of 0 and 18, say...though we are keeping our kids 'Kids" longer and longer now.  At any rate, growing up is supposed to be a phenomenon that happens to us and ends sometime shortly after puberty, when we stop growing physically.  And that is growing up; true.  But I didn't grow up, then.  I grew up when I realized that I'd literally sold myself into slavery, and at such a low price, for just the promise of white respectability.  Well, even that didn't cause me to grow up--that happened when I realized I had a choice right now:  stay in hell, or start walking.  I chose walking.  I'm still walking.  It's a long, hot, fucking armpit of a miserable walk out of this joint, let me tell you.  My name is Irrelevant.  I am you--the good choice girl, or the bad choice girl.  The one a mama invited to dinner, or snapped at on the telephone. 

Who decides who is good choice and who is bad?  Ah.  Thars the rub, as they say.  "They" are pirates.  An honest lot, pirates.   With a pirate, you know where you stand.

August 25, 2012

and this is nico


i am having a nico evening.  one of many saturday nights which happen in life, shot through with hope and ache and adoration, and edges of anger, and awareness of the carnival of it all--of being fenced in and seeking, of the splashes of laughter spurting all around, of the blinking and bright lights against starless black above, and my cotton candied and sticky fingers, and then: spying that one small and neglected tent off in the way back of the circus which suddenly pulls me closer.  and then to step inside.

this song "the falconer",  from her album desertshore, is the perfect thin twist of pray and circus, despair and rapture, birdsong and baroque.   her music is hers, and it is raw inviting to me.  to glory in it is all i can do.  

spend 6 minutes with your eyes closed and come in that tiny tent with me. 





August 24, 2012

was is

i don't want to remember.          
      
                                  but
this vanished us
spectral us
flamed solid torch of us
weight of and waiting for what? of us
are too much
to carry along with will and
wishing and neutral can't lift the
vast verse of you   drag you and
falling down now i want
not a heavy memory
                            
                                we
are gravity trampled
joy and was is
the most constant verb of all

******

i hate this poem with every gut in my guts.

August 23, 2012

a poem for two voices. maybe.

we wrote this yesterday morning, line by line and one plus one is two.  came to 8.   we played this:



a)                    Smooth jazz and serrated cutlery
b)                    Jagged wounds and swelling strings
a)                    Cross my mind with other things
b)                    And these things may not be denied

a)                     I’m tiptoeing through the flood:
b)                     Of ennui and disaster
a)                     And 40 days til noon
b)                     Is too long to wait to see your eyes.

 ***


oh morning man, you were a doozy!  and the coffee had just come. 


the surrealists had so much right, and i will, little poem, to play with you some more--you have great promise, to amuse-moi,  at the least.  

 

August 22, 2012

i like bukowski.

and as i was drinking my first cup of coffee this morning, i had a great conversation which reminded me to go read more bukowski. ( i would be remiss if i failed to mention that i was told few women like the man, because of his perceived misogyny.)  and as the conversations with this person tend to end, so ended today's:  i began to think about new stuff.  

which i like, a lot.  

this time i was thinking:  can my identification as a feminist, and my being completely turned on by bukowski's writing be in agreement, when he is largely viewed as, with great dedication and ferocious glee, spitting routinely into Eye of Woman?

well, to start with, in considering this question, i have to underscore to myself that in fact i am not a slave to agreement--- am not overly concerned with or expectant of consistency, since that just seems stupid--we are complex beings, after all, why not roll with it.  also, and along that line, (so, you know, somewhat consistently...), i am not particularly intimidated by the act of dissent--even within my clan--and for another, i am greedy and reserve for myself the right to determine what i like and eventually, maybe even to understand why.  but let's look a wee bit deeper into the bukowski attraction/his bukowski magnetism. 

i love bukowski because he spoke of the it of it, shamelessly, fearlessly, and (his) truly.  these are things i admire.  i think he spoke of love and pretty things with equal bluntness and appreciation--it wasn't that his slant was on the ugly, vulgar or savage nature of things only--or even that he was vulgar and savage only--it's that he took the noose and tried it on, and then stared right at a person and described the sensation.  and maybe with equal veracity of style he would stare right at a person and describe why he didn't kick the chair out from under himself.  it's the staring right a a person and saying it that people dislike.  i do like.   just tell me how it is, tell me what you really think.  then we're in the clear.  

so i was looking at some of his letters, and look:  this is why i like bukowski.   the motherfucker sings, is why.  


==

To William Packard, Editor of New York Quarterly

4/17/92 12:15 AM Hello Wm Packard:
Huh. Listen, I know that you can never print all the accepted poems on your backlog. First, it would freak all the good souls of the universe. And, second, there are other writers. Huh.
Yet, I can't resist, in spite of knowing all this, sending you a shit-balloon poem that might explode into the multi-faced reign of ultimate godliness. Huh. Huh, huh?
Still, some concern on "dumb night", for such a poem is considered anti-social enlightenment . . . such as a drunk vapid woman? Impossible and unfair. There are no longer any drunken sluts. There are only stupid, mean white men. There are no vicious homosexuals or lesbians or bisexuals. And there are no longer any stupid, mean black men. Although there might be some stupid, mean yellow men or brown men, depending upon the political climate and the local of the moment. Each only deserves attack and derision in direct relationship to any force they might apply to our survival. Most successful commercial writers know what to attack and when. And even the Artsy-Fartsies who are touched upon with the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, they too are screened for any dangerous signals of individuality. But how about . . . ? you say. How about them? They too sucked to the signal of the moment, the edict, the on-coming demand of thought control. They were only the forerunners of the obvious.
But getting back to small matters, it has always been curious to me that my writing has been attacked for portraying others as I have seen them, but my writing has never been criticized when I ended up as the jacknape. This could be art, they say, he is calling himself a fucking fool. They like that, it takes the heat off of their frightened asses.
We are living in a terrible climate now. Everybody is waiting to be insulted. I think that I believe more than almost anybody in the right to be whatever you want to be. In fact, I have probably worked more directly from that premise than most and have en ded up in any number of hells for doing so. But I did this from a singular stance, most alone, and not buddied up by a jolly group in safe chorus.
So often now, it is not so much a group demanding their rights as it is a group wanting more than their rights, it is almost a tribal on-surging, subconsciously or perhaps even consciously wanting to be top dog and screw all else. Also, there are those within each group who are simply psychotics who want to be seen and heard in parades or any other damned place or time.
As a writer, one must write what one sees and feels regardless of the consequences. In fact, the more the consequences the more one is goaded into going for it. Some call it madness, I call it near-truth. You know, there is nothing more entertaining, funnier than near-truth because you see it, read it so seldom. It hits you with a refreshing blast, it runs up the arms, into the head, it gets giddy, god damn, god damn, so rare, so lovely. I saw some of it in Celine, in Dostoevsky, in Hamsun, I started laughing as I read them, it was such a joy
In our age, the only safe target for the writer is the white heterosexual male. You can make him a murderer, a child-rapist, a motherfucker. Nobody protests. Not even the white heterosexual male. He's used to it. Also, things like "White men can't dance," "White men can't jump," "White men have no sense of rhythm", etc.. What is happening here might be a near-truth, still it is mostly mouthed by white women and promoted by white men in the media. Am I racist? Tell me, how many non-whites have you had in your home or in your room lately?
Well, we go on and on. Probably a certain psychosis working here. I hope so. It seems to give one an edge in the working place. Still the poem "dumb night' got me to thinking about this and about the reaction you'd get if you published it. Yet, many of us have had nights like this one. It's just a place within a place, something that explodes into the air, and for all its grossness there is a certain demented glamour of two people trapped together in a world that has never worked for them and never will. There is no insult to man or woman intended but if there is some insult there, then fine, it belongs.
Well, I'm drinking, have been or wouldn't have gone on so long. Basically, only want to say that at this time it is tough for the writer who wants to put it down as it is, or was. The 90's have far more strictures than the 50's ever had. We've gone back, not so much in how we think but in what we can say. Each Age has borne its own contriticions [?contradictions] but the end of the 20th century is a particularly sad one. We've lost our guts, our gamble, our heart. Listen, believe me, when we say it and say it true, the women will love it, the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the greens, the reds and the purples will love it, and the homosexuals and the lesbians and all the in between will love it. Let's not crap ourselves, we are different but we are one. We bring death to each other and death brings it to us. Did you ever see that flattened cat on the freeway as you drove by at 70 m.p.h.? That's us, baby. And I scream to the skies that there should be no way, no word, no limit. Just a roll of the dice, the tilting of the dark white light and the ability to laugh, a few times, at what has trapped us like this.

Buk


[This letter is included in the third volume of the letters of Charles Bukowski, edited by Seamus Cooney, from Black Sparrow Press, 1999.]

August 20, 2012

schadenfreude

schadenfreude pie, yes
schadenfreude pie.
i would so enjoy a slender slice
if someone would just die.

scadenfreude pie. yes.
schadenfreude pie. 
i want to whip up,  want to smile
in someone's tear-filled eye.

that murky juice delicious "why?"
slides sticky sweet goodbye
across my tongue and down my throat
oh! schadenfreude pie!  


August 14, 2012

the pulse

in august my fingers traced your wrist and
awakened globe and glow
crouching copper
crouching flame.

recalling:

that horizon was
a sunspill veil over hills
of naked plain.  hips and waists
pale   gold spun
  
and rolling.
rolling land and rolling.  and
it was heats crested
under cover of fire opal and flashing light.

under coral breeze.
that scape was sunset moonrise and
now you.  curving calves and shoulders
back alive and open space and

in august we were close.
then dusk.     trace us and
that wheat-scented sky

pretty words of trauma

I am divorcing right now.  Soon I will be a divorcee.  Being a word freak, I do think the word divorcee is pretty, kind of like the word nee, but the fact is, being one or the other isn't exotic.  It is like saying you lived through being run over by a semi-truck and are prettier and healthier for it.  It really can't be polished up.  So lately the writing I do does not often find it's way to this place, and when it does, it isn't overtly about "me":  I don't usually post about divorce, per se.  Or parenting, really.  Or deciding to live and then living in a way that is speakable, say-it-to-their-faceable, conscious (as conscious as we can be, we humans with our tricky slippery brains).  But lately the lawn has grown thick with weeds, and the daisies are few and wilting, and if I don't purge the soil of these unwanted things their presence may calcify and then I fear no hammock or trellis or other small edens can possibly arrive, because I will have dry dirt with only the hardiest of invasives thriving.  A place where nutrients and lush can't be, a place hard-packed.  Everything bad will flow off, and too everything good that I want to absorb, and relish.  And I don't want that.

So during the long and in my case hideous process of divorce I have discovered a few things about myself, some of which have been surprising and not in a good way, and other things have been discovered about others, sometimes too surprising, and not in a good way.  There have been realizations about friends and family and estranged partners, and so on and so forth (it is a long process), but the thing that has come clear throughout all this and that I wish to write about today is what I have discovered about having small people live with you who originally came from you, but aren't you, and what it means to parent through.

I've always thought about parenting.  There were never assumptions on my part that I would either be married or have children.  In fact, for the majority of my life I didn't think I would ever do either.  And then I changed my mind--but it wasn't without deliberation.  I had thought about it.  For myself, I can't imagine not thinking about it.  It is a funny thing to believe in self-determination:  is it a deceit?  Is it smoke and mirrors to believe that we have full power over ourselves if we are active in making choices, given we can never really calculate ahead of time or understand deeply after the fact the meaning of the choices others are making, and that will influence us?  Or if we wish to go further-meta, we must see that we cannot really calculate ahead of time or understand deeply the meaning of the choices we ourselves are making, or the nature of our own motivation.  At what point are we in fact simply reacting?  Is this a different conversation?  Is this the same conversation?

But I remember asking friends at some gathering or another how their feminism informed their parenting, and being met with universally blank stares.  I didn't know at the time--or even now--if members of the group were stunned (but it did look like it and responses did not come forth, even eventually, as the conversation shifted almost instantly--but to me not imperceptibly--to potty training or snack-time or the woes of napless days) and if they were, was it more by my assumption that they were feminists, or by my assumption that their parenting was informed by anything at all?  It was a disappointing and obviously unforgettable non-conversation, for me.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  It was 11 years ago. I knew I did not want to just bounce along, I wanted to steer my own craft, in parenting, as much as could be done.  I felt alone in this desire for determination.

So one thing we do not get to predict as we are getting married and having babies is how exactly it will all unfold with all the new x-factors, and how we will manage to parent through it all--even when it is done/over/finito.  What is correct?  What is traumatizing?  It isn't like I can turn to my partner--though perhaps some can--to agree on a way we feel is best, as a "we", because in fact we never did have that joint we-platform from which to spring.  But, conveniently since we can't predict everything, and in fact as it turns out, reacting in this situation and then self-reflecting can be very informative.  The parallel is of the mother who lifts the truck off her baby, or pulls the buggy off the tracks only seconds before the train screams past, or whatever it was--and then thinks.  That superhuman power that comes to us in defense of our children (a daisy, by the way) first, followed by thought, comes in to full play during a divorce, and is manifested in my case at least partially by having to protect my children by protecting myself.  To protect oneself in this circumstance means to understand and be able to tell oneself.  This may not make sense.  But it does.

There is an ongoing discussion, clearly, in a custody battle, about parenting (which turns out to be an umbrella term for every breath any person in the family dares in- or ex-hale---it's a catch-all.  Really.)  If there is a philosophy buried somewhere deep inside a parent, it will come out.  If there is anything informing the decisions that a parent is making at any time of day or night ("...and why did you let your children walk home from school?),  that informing thing will be demanded by others and will be scratched from the subterranean and articulated by oneself, and made official and put down on the record and used forevermore against (or for) one.  It is a fraught time.

So the other day I cried in front of my children.  And I was chastised for this doing.  At which point, being me, I felt the need to examine my behavior and figure out if I had in fact done wrong.  (It's possible.)  Now, going back to the previous paragraph wherein I say that we cannot honestly understand our motives, as human beings, we are going to skip that part for now and just stipulate that examination is going to help as much as it possibly can, and that that help may be somewhat limited.  But it's all we've got.

There is the school of thought on the matter of emoting negatively in front of children which says it scares them, it makes them feel they have no protector, it causes them to feel sympathy or the need to take care of the care-giver who is upset and/or crying, it is not the children's place to see a parent feeling vulnerable, as it exacerbates their own natural sense of vulnerability.  It places the children in the middle of what they perceive to be "sides".  Arguing in front of children is seen as similarly irresponsible--it is frightening, exposes them to ugly, teaches poor conflict resolution (if the conflicts in the argument are being resolved poorly, then I agree), etc. 

And I am of a different bent altogether.  While I do not choose for my children to see as much ugly as there is in this world, also I do not believe that all conflict or sadness or difficulties that adults (or children) experience is unhealthy to witness, and in fact, that the lack of witnessing these parts of reality is potentially very, very harmful.  What kid needs to grow up thinking every garden has daisies, and that they just grow that way, without any struggle?  A kid who grows up that way grows up delusional.  It seems to me that raising a delusional kid is the worst wrongdoing of all.

So I was accused of damaging behavior, and had to think about it.  I chose not to focus on the evolutionary purposes of crying, and to focus instead on this tiny thing:  at that time, I was So Sad.  I was profoundly, unspeakably, gut-twistingly sad.  and: What then?   If it were that I could calmly think at that moment (which I argue that I could not), and decide, "hm...how shall I react to this new kick-in-the-gut?"...perhaps I could have chosen to leave the house, leave the room, suck it up.   I think I would have reasoned "to be", but the truth is I did not reason, I just was. That is the verb.  To be.  Not "to do".  To be.  The difference between "to be" and "to do" has become distorted,  in English, which is too bad on many levels, and right now I want to lodge my complaint of that fact and clarify that "to be" is the verb I choose for describing myself the other night in that situation.  That's the difference between some and some others--there are be-ers and do-ers.  I'm a be-er.  And so the question flips to what we show our children of ourselves.  Some would say I was selfish, and should have thought of the children at that moment.  At some level maybe I did, but really, I am a be-er. 

And I think that is OK.  Even in retrospect and even with reasoning.   In this situation we are talking about my having been sad, and what I did with it.  It may be my left brain speaking, but here is what I have come up with:

That I cried in front of the children was not cruel, was not a mistake, and was not even regrettable.  I was showing "human" during a shitty piece of what it is like to be human.  A few moments later I was not crying.  And the next day I was not crying, and then was showing another part of "human".   We cry.  We have shitty moments.  We have euphoric moments.  Unless we are robots, it is ok to feel, and then what do we do with it?  Happy or sad, we call on friends.  We call on family.  And guess what?  They are there for us.  We ask for help where we can get help.  And help is there, we do get help.  We are not alone.  We are disconsolate for awhile and then consolation comes:  we accept hugs from our children and we tell them yes, we are sad, but it is just a moment, it will pass, and all will be OK.  We remind our children that everyone feels, and this includes feeling good and bad.  We tell them that as the good passes, so does the bad, and it all comes around again.  Emoting is not impugning, and that night it was certainly not planned, certainly was genuine, and was not placing anyone anywhere except smack in the middle of living. 

Absolute Truth:  My children are compassionate people, with universally high emotional intelligence.  I do my very best and am vigilant about teaching them that as they are not responsible for the moods or happiness of other people, others are not responsible for their happiness or moods--and I do this as a way to scaffold their entry into a world which will push things upon them and add emotional pressure and will be ruthless to their individual wellbeing.  I do this so that they do not look at the face of someone who is important to them and see disappointment when they express their preferences, and have that disappointment control them.  I do this so that when they are asked to do something they do not wish to do, they can refrain and feel good about themselves.  I do this so that they do not always feel that their value comes from someone else saying that they have value.  They must learn where their skin ends and that of others begins.  (Maybe I should draw them a vividly colored Venn.) They must. 

And so I cried and they saw sadness and because they are intuitive, but also because they are children, they do worry.  They are children.  They have no idea what is going on.  They have questions.  They have desires.  They want this to be over with.  It is taking forever.  It is the proverbial car ride with no end in sight.  They worry about each other, themselves, us, the dog, everything.  Nothing will stop that except answers, and an end to this.  My laughter does not cause them to feel hilarity, and nor should my crying cause them to worry about me.  But I do know it is a process. 

Absolute Truth:  They see me picking myself up off the ground and they see me get knocked down again.  They see me get up again.  They see me getting up again--this should cause, and eventually will cause--them to worry less, and to see that human beings--themselves--are resilient, and strong, and dignified.  I will never cause my children harm knowingly, and think about it a lot.  For all the good that does.  But as well, I cannot and will not and would not put them in cotton batting, in order to remove that one central lesson that we each need to learn--!!Get Back Up!!  !!Get Up Again!!-- in order to bleach and pad their lives today.

But our children--They see us.  They hear us.  They watch us.  None of us need interpretation or amplification of our qualities to be seen by these small people.  The are sentient and intelligent and discerning and do in fact have opinions and souls of their own, they are in fact people of their own, they make decisions and choices on their own, and they are not just clay to be molded or paper to be written upon.  This viewpoint is fundamentally different from that of others, I know--to me this instance of my crying having supposedly directly traumatized the children illustrates a quite limited understanding of the personhood of children.  But this point goes back to self-determination and will be lost on those who see themselves as at the mercy of the elements around:  as they see themselves the result of everything and everyone else, so do they see their children.

And I don't buy it.   We have to be ourselves as much as we can, and live in a way in which we can be OK with that.  Because it is all OK.






June 28, 2012

p.s. and also i miss you

i want you to come to me and press against my ceiling and i want to press against yours and i want your mouth on me and exploring and finding me and filling me in all the hollows and all the gaps and wants and your hands follow behind and taking up all my spaces and i want you hungry and i want you demanding and i want you accepting and i want you soft.  i want to feel your edges and the between velvet and rigid and the straight lines and the curves, and i want to cup you and taste you and i want you to insist.  and i want you to take and i want to hear you breathe and feel you expand and retract and i want to know your eyelids and your teeth with my tongue and i want your droplets one two three on me from above and i want to bury myself in your icewater hair and to twist our hands together in a body kiss and i want your massive and i want your thighs on mine and want you slow and kind.  and i want to run myself over the map of you and then tangle in your fine and tangle in the body of your mind and i want to find your empty and i want you to find my empty and i want us to go away.  i want you next to me.  in me. on me. i want to go places with you i have never been and i want you to go places with me you have never been and i want your wet heat and your breeze.  i want your imagination and your wonder and your skin against mine and you i want you to see my desire for you and my plain plaintive want of you.  i want you to come to me. soon.  again.  and soon.

i want this every day and i want this today.





-----

published in Poetry Quarterly Winter/Summer Tricky Edition, 2012

March 26, 2012

for stardust and rust, excerpted from

 The Drink: Your Winter into Spring transitional cocktail

March can be an odd month for drinking.  Unless you have this.

.
By Dappered Drinks Correspondent and Official Bartender Michael Bowers



...But what to drink as the weather turns again to tolerable?  50 degrees and drizzling isn’t weather for a dry gin martini, nor does it require the same fortifications as 10 degrees and snowing.  During the months on either side of winter, I often find myself still drinking cocktails based on brown, brooding spirits, but mixed with lighter accompaniments.  My favorite example is the Brooklyn...  Light, herbal and a little bit floral, it’s the ideal cocktail for March—equal parts lion and lamb.
Brooklyn
  • 2 oz.  Rye Whiskey (preferably 100 proof)
  • 1 oz.  Dry vermouth
  • .25 oz  Luxardo Maraschino
  • .25 oz  Amer Picon (unless you live in France, you’ll have to sub Torani Amer or make your own)
Stir over ice for 45 seconds.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish a real preserved cherry.  As I’ve noted before, good, fresh vermouth is essential.

======

i don't know.  just for fun.  yesterday was in the high 70's, today we have a freeze warning.  at least i'd like some lion and lamb in my pretty glass, please.  please?

March 20, 2012

anyway & though

anyway.

though


i speak of our wine

and you speak of the characteristics of the soil and the weather that year, the variety of grapes,  the mood of the pickers and the stainless steel or the oak, the cellaring conditions and the cork, the number of bottles produced in this lot, the reputation of the vintner and the price to personal taste ratio, and how long this particular bottle had to breathe upon our counter and the temperature at pouring and the shape of the glass and the food with which it was served and the relationship between the people drinking 

and i speak of our love.

you speak of biological drive, the urge to one another and the evolutionary imperative for progeny, and of cultures which name this magnetism emotionally, weakly, and the blur between attraction and affection and the relevance thereof, and of complex variations within human experience, of liking and fondness, and associations--positive and negative, some of which do not conflict much with the commonly understood notion of "love", and of risk:  the repercussion of the intended and unintended connotations of this word in use.  


anyway.  and

though.

March 19, 2012

to be. march 19, 2012

brush me breeze and hyacinth,
scent me spring and rye,
cherry blossom tangerine,
seersucker glide.  paint me.

brush me buds and genuflect,
scent me charmed goodbye,
candyapple vinyl spin,
copper cabled wire.  paint me.

brush me boozy bossa nova
paint me here on fire.  brush me.

blue electric.  and gardens.

February 28, 2012

Note to self: giving thanks, even anonymously, makes a difference.

----------

... What I found on your blog resonated very deeply with me so I assume that was the reason I found myself pulled in that direction. Your open letter might as well have been written by me or about me- mother of two children with a marriage full of cracks that neither of us can seem to pull the plug on or breathe life back into. Your writing is beautiful, poetic, tragic, and full of life. Thank you for touching this life this morning.


----------


months of writing on scraps of paper, my hands, calling my answering machine with words, creating in my head then losing it again as the sun rises or the child cries or a phone call makes me lurch.  nothing coming but scraps, dirty hands, full mailbox, frustration, and lurching.  and then this arrived for me, this note above, and something inside me broke.  and it helps.


thank you, you you who wrote me that note above.  i hope you read this, back at you.

contradiction

love is love and
lover is lover.
and you wake in some other, your bed.

i say:  good morning, sunshine
to the light of a certain star.

and think of sighs, poems
of breakbone fever, of cold.
you found shelley's "good-night" silly. 

alone at dawn and
i bid some beam good morning.
silence softly returns.  how can it be?   

February 27, 2012

untitled.

in draperies of saudades
drawn. 

mirage

rawhide and barb wire
tumbleweed ride.
creosote, sagebrush.
red hawk cries

so long as the sun is
keep on

through desert and
rattlesnake.  there is
wet tar shine.