The Memento Mori poetry reading tomorrow. Going through a old notebook to find pieces to read, found two that could be salvaged to make a something:

1. I look down at you, unconscious, dying, slipping away from this life
And I don't know what to feel

I don't know who you were

Angelic bastard, why'd you have to be complicated?
Why couldn't you give me the clarity
of only loving or only hating?

I don't know if you can hear me
I hold your hand and say goodbye

I speak only of the good things
That's how I would want it if it were my time

We are all angelic bastards

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem

1) using computer terms: firewall, magic cookie, Beowulf cluster, net, ping, socket, port, cloud, hard drive, nesting, software, connection, memory, icon, wallpaper, screensaver, virtual, avatar, pornography, instant messenger, e-mail, web, online, link, recursion, motherboard, chip, trace, echo, print, read, write, compress, crash

2) in a poem referring to physical or mental place

3) using the ten-three line

when I am thinking of magic I think
modern technology incantations:

Sometimes its a burden being one of the most interesting people someone has met...I just want to have a beer and write and hear some tunes, and somebody sits down and asks what I'm writing about, and then wants to talk all about far-out ideas, because they don't have anyone else to discuss them with...

A bit cynical perhaps, but an honest thought sometimes.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: supported free write on the phrase, "I was drifting naked on a sea of clothes"

I was drifting naked on a sea of clothes
t-shirt and jockey shorts and bra and tangled sheets under my back as I
lay back contented with her head on my chest and my
fingers stroking down her spine
drifting on a sea of liberated energy
drifting on a river whose dam has burst and now flows free
drifting on an ocean of annihilation

Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: writing from a wordlist, generates around the word "fear". No, I don't know how "fear" led someone to say "hot dog", that's the beauty of the workshop...

Our words: catchup, hot dog, wraith, adequate, mortality, strangle, loathing, claustrophobia, monotony, phantom, Monsanto, foolhardy, viscous, blatant, clusterbomb, waterboarding

please, lord, anything but the viscous monotony of a normal regular day job

I fear that more that I fear my own mortality -

to end and have my flesh rot in a hole, or be burned, fine, sure, resolved and resigned to it long ago

but
the slow strangulation of all in me that does not conform to Management's whim
until I am another commuter-wraith taking to the highway at 7 am each morning
heading for cubical claustrophobia and office politics straight out of the hierarchical primitive mammalian brain...

Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about an experience of feeling foreign; include a cultural tradition, a food, place, or holiday, or phrase in another language

I just wanted a beer but I found a foreign land

Now I've drunk sake in a yakusa bar in Manhattan, where Japanese gangsters with missing fingers would walk in and out of the back room
and I've been the only white man in a bar full of Latino workers, not understanding the flood of Spanish around me except "cervesa por favor" and "gringo"
and I've been the closest thing to a working-class hero in the room at a party at the yacht club, certainly the only one there whose grandfather was a union organizer
and I've wandered the streets of Tokyo during the weeks before Christmas, seen incomprehensible displays mixed in with familiar seasonal decorations

and I've always felt at home

This week's Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a character sketch. I've always wondered about the backstory of the guys I see selling roses around Fell's Point, so I made one up:

once he was a freedom fighter
twenty years ago he and his
Mujahideen warrior-brothers
were the fear in the night for
the soldiers of the Red Army
the fear that drove the
invaders out of their country

in one bad firefight, his unit cornered
he snuck up behind the Russian platoon and
leaping from the shadows
stabbed three men in their throats, one at a time
their blood covering him
straining his arms and chest a deep red

he thinks on this only occasionally, now
sometimes the red of the roses he sells reminds him of how the warm blood of the men he killed
cooled and dried on his skin

the red of the roses he sells to young men in
the bars of Fells Point
the roses he sells to the men to give to the women they're seducing

in the rain, in the heat, in the cold, he walks the streets

"Roses", "Roses for the pretty lady"

he makes just enough to live on
just enough to pay his share on the apartment he shares with three cousins but
he does not mind

it is luxury
just to be alive

he remembers the rocky hills
nights in the freezing rain with withering machinegun fire cutting into the bodies of friends
and he will never complain about anything

once in a while, a drunken young man insults him
or some bigot sticks a foot out to trip him, or pushes him, as he walks by

these men do not know how close
they have come to fast death

they do not know how
roses are the color of blood

Our good friend Mike Gurklis sends in this link to an interview with Vincent Bugliosi. In a new book the former LA County Assistant District Attorney lays out the case for prosecuting George W. Bush for murder:

You’ve got to realize, there’s no statute of limitations for the crime of murder. So this could very well happen. At this stage of my life, I cannot engage in fanciful reveries. This is a very real thing that we’re talking about here. I’ve established jurisdiction on a federal and state level for the prosecution of Bush for two crimes: conspiracy to commit murder and murder. On a federal level, we’re really only talking about the Attorney General in Washington, D.C., operating through his Department of Justice. But on a state level, I’ve established jurisdiction for the attorney general in each of the fifty states, plus the hundreds of district attorneys in counties within those states, to prosecute George Bush for the murder of any soldier or soldiers from their state or county who died fighting his war in Iraq.

Zelda's Inferno writing exercise: "connect those lines". I received the lines "Don't look," that truck is about to hit you" (sic) and "And that was how the Milky Way crumbled"

"Don't look!" she yelled "that truck is about to it you"
Dionysus in the driver's seat
One hand on the wheel
A bottle of retsina in the other
"Goin' a thousand miles an hour /
With the radio on"
Pulling an out-of-control load of industrial-strength creation
Bearing right down on me

I jumped to the right
He swerved to the left
Jackknifed, the rolled over, skidded fifty yards
Fell off the side of Mt. Olympus
(It's a good thing for him he is a dying-and-reborn sort of god)

Laded in the middle of the galaxy below
And that was how the Milky Way crumbled.

I do this run once a week but today I feel like I am running away from something. But as I run I don't feel I'm getting away from anything.

Yesterday my acupuncturist told me that my allergies are due to a confusion in my body between the internal and the external.

I guess you can't run away from what's internal, that's the difference. But if they are confused, then am I carrying what's outside, inside?

A monk had come to visit a master and spent some time studying Zen. When he was preparing to leave, the master asked, "See that boulder? Is it inside our outside your mind?" The monk has learned the Buddha's doctrine that everything is a creation of the mind, so he said, "Inside my mind." "Well then," said the master, "I don't envy you on your journey, carrying that big rock in your head!"

I keep running, trusting to the alchemy of motion.