Zelda's Inferno exercise from September 30th: tell an event backwards. Writing this was a little bit cathartic.
it ended with me walking down the sidewalk in front of her house
back to my car
not sure if I had freed myself or
if I wanted to die right there
before that was my attempt to leave as a friend
or at least not an enemy
to tell her I still cared
before that was her throwing back every gift I'd given her
Our good friend Brian Jefferson turned me on the TV series Heroes last year, and I was looking forward to last night's season premier.
I was not disappointed. But the part that really made me cheer probably doesn't mean anything to 99.9% of viewers. One of our heroes, Hiro Nakamura, has been thrown back in time to 1600s Japan - and ends up in Otsu, a small city outside Kyoto that I visited this spring. (The famous haiku poet Basho is buried there.)
Sometimes it's the little things that draw you in to a work.
I'll definitely be playing this at the Poems Against War / Poetry In Baltimore event October 19 at Load of Fun Gallerie. Meanwhile, if you play guitar, spread the meme.
I heard a little bit of the buzz going around about Sally Field getting censored by Fox for saying during the Emmys that "If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn't be any goddamn wars in the first place." It bounced around my brain a bit, stuck on to some other stuff, and this is what came out.
Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Soldiers
words by Tom Swiss
to the tune of "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys", by
Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce
guitar chords: D - G - A7 - D
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers
Don't let 'em be fooled by the masters of war
Teach 'em that peace is what to work for
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers
They can die all alone
A long way from from home
Giving their life for a lie
Young boys play war with toy guns and they always pretend
Someday that they'll grow up and be brave and fight like real men
Marching to death at the orders of generals,
all for the U. S. of A.
But war ain't a game, there's no glory in killing,
old soldiers fade away
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers
Just went to see Telesma over at the ESPN Zone. Sort of a funny combination, psychedelic world music band at a sports bar; joking with one of the guys in the band, I said it was a sort of outreach program. Yes, he said; save the meatheads from themselves...
Interesting week last week. Our server developed disk problems, and we had to switch over to our backup. Fortunately, I'd been working on a "hot spare" setup; unfortunately, the work is not complete. I worked 16 hours last Thursday on the changeover (plus a session at the Well and teaching karate). So much for taking the day off to clean the house and get ready for Saturday's Emperor Norton party.
Getting dinner at Donna's before Zeldas. Three college girls at the next table, talking non-stop about who's drunk, who's a slut, dresses, who's a natural blond...do my conversations ever sound so inane? Well, probably so. But that's my inanity...
Had about a dozen people over last night for the second annual Emperor Norton celebration, a nice little party. Think I'm going to try to spread to meme of making September 17 a holiday.
writing exercise: poem from details of experience
1) write about a pivotal experience, with as much concrete as possible:
The silence of a snowy day as I lie on my back, looking at the clouds. I've just made a snow angel and the chill of the ground seeps into my back. My friends, on the ground nearby, are silent; maybe some vague road noise from Greenbelt road in the background, but the breeze in the tall dried grass stalks and the scrub trees is louder here in the middle of this empty field. The LSD vibrates my body like almost too many cups of coffee, my bodymind rings like a bell. The sky is bright cerulean with white frosting, a party cake, when the dragon forms from the clouds and smiles on me, a bright hexagonal rainbow tunnel connecting us, a blessing.
2) collect the images and make a poem
Now I'm on the way back from Boston, where I just attended the AOBTA conference. Always a good time, just some of the best people, plus great leaning opportunities.
Just before I left I got a message from Robin on my answering machine. She had been mugged! She wasn't hurt, but her computer was stolen, her cell phone too. It was after midnight when I checked the machine, so I didn't call back until I was up here, and it took me a few days to be able to reach her. But it looks like they've caught the thieves (they used her cell phone to make a call - not the brightest crooks), so it seems to be resolving as well as it possibly could.
Friday I took a great class in "Tai Chi Easy", a well-constructed simple set of qi gong exercises from the 108 move Tai Chi form. Just what I needed to get my stuck energy moving. There was a class on marketing your practice, that I got a few good ideas from, and a neat class on doing research that talked about a statistical method that I think could be a good alternative to the double-blind clinical study (hard to do in bodywork, or psychotherapy, or surgery...).
last night I kissed an old girlfriend
last night I kissed an old girlfriend, and that got me wondering about things that might have been
for me, for her
thirteen years gone by now
in some parallel universe where the symmetry of love broke differently
I
could be a husband
a father
can you believe it?
She
maybe didn't meet and marry that abusive asshole she started dating after me
years of pain that didn't happen
sometimes I wonder about the karmic backsplash of that one
last night I kissed an old girlfriend
wondered all these things
said goodnight, got into my car, and drove off
Came down to the Judge's Bench for the open mic. Just hanging out now,
finished reading and taking notes from the Alan Watts book (Zen and the
Beat Way) I borrowed from Robin.
I was in here Saturday night when I ran into a friend of mine. No names, to
protect the innocent, so let's call her X. X is a lovely lady whom I've
known for several years, almost hooked up with when we first met but she
changed her mind, and we've had this ongoing friends - maybe more? no -
well, maybe yes after all - thing going on ever since.
Friday, I was hanging out at Bean Hollow for a while, had lunch and was
getting some work done on the book (making notes from Watt's Zen and the
Beat Way, working on my own first chapter - I've decided the "I love being
religious!" story is perfect). Over two hours, I saw four or five couples
with young children come through, and in all but the last, the man seemed
miserable, the couple bickering.
In a strange, almost schadenfreude, way, it was heartening. Lamenting being
single? Look at how many people in relationships are absolutely miserable,
and remember that being alone and being lonely are two different things.
But it was also heartening to see that one non-bickering, indeed maybe even
happy, couple, with their baby. So much so that I had to speak to the
woman, give her my thanks. (It's interesting that when they walked in, the
man was carrying the baby - no stroller, no car seat/baby basket, just a
guy carrying his kid.)
the lies we tell the children about love
"and they lived happily ever after"
but no one lives for ever after
"when true love comes your way, you'll just know"
but tales of divorce and heartbreak put the lie to that...
Zelda's exercise:
make up your own mythological god/goddess/creature, and write a poem
about them or from their point of view
that goddess of unrequited love, Saphira
Aphrodite's lesser known, but much busier, half-sister
sits on a stool in a singles bar
and smites poor innocents with unrealistic crushes
Times of transition...I feel - just a gut feeling - that one phase is ending for me, starting to roll into something else.
Of course a big part of that is the end of my relationship with Cathy,
but more than that, now I think I will start to see the fruition of the
career shift into shiatsu, with my work with The Well; now my karate
program is established, if not yet thriving; now I have changed my
relationship with place, become a traveler, "always roaming with a hungry
heart." Of course the whole balancing and self-knowledge from acupuncture
and my study and practice of shiatsu. Now the book is underway, starting to
gel - which means my ideas of a whole approach to life, a whole philosophy,
are starting to crystallize.