Music creates order out of chaos:
for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent,
melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed,
and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
– Yehudi Menuhin

we writhe with words a space
within each letter, between each word
a kern to
our ken, an inpouring an
imploding, our voices warp
and weft of moebius
meaning, a chattered orbit
in which even interstitials
cave in
our flood-filled mouths

we sink
together, a tidal
pooling, taste of your
voice in my
throat, a blood
and salt amalgam, we eat
     of our speech, we
     swallow our shared
     tongues, speak
     the same
     voice,
walk backwards
into our future

something like
prophecy

Many years ago, I read an article about a professor who ran a summer poetry program for high school students. One of the things they ended up doing was camping out in the town and writing impromptu poems for strangers/passerby. I wish I could find the article. I’m sure it took place on the East Coast, and I keep thinking Jersey. (Help.) I told my friend RA Washington about appropriating this idea around the same time, and, true to form, he’d already been there. Chopping out poems for fivers in Public Square. (My details may be a bit hazy here as well.) When I decided to finally get rolling with it, quite recently, I mentioned the project to my friend Kevin and he immediately brought up Abigail Mott, who has, and perhaps still is, doing basically the same thing.

So this idea isn’t even remotely original, but I’m doing it and here’s why.

Because I’m arrogant

I have extremely high self-esteem. I think that folks might actually be interested in having a complete stranger write them a poem, on the spot. I think that I can do it, and be good at it.

To practice humility

I need to keep my ego reined, so I am giving the poetry away; the only copy. If it’s the best poem I’ll ever write, I’ll be letting it go with whomever requested it. I’ll be letting go of control for a change. I’m not asking for money, I’m not even promoting myself. I’m still going back and forth on putting my name on the poems I produce.

Because I’m a coward

I rarely do any thing publicly because I’m afraid of sucking, being ignored, or being dismissed. This should help me sack up a bit.

To practice writing

I need to write more, and having someone else give me a topic means that I get to practice without feeling the guilt that I’m just ego tripping. Even though, in most ways, I still think I am.

Hopefully I’ll see you out there.

Along the way, different priorities asserted themselves and I became more interested in practical action than cyber-noodling. The frequency of posts dropped off as my focus became centered on my meat-space life. A few years ago this post would have been filled with detailed links to the archives, and much more omphaloskepsis. I have a confidence now that I didn’t have then, and part of the reason I have it is due to this site.

Here’s to another 10 years.

I’m calling my newest recurring dream the Groundhog Dream, because it’s a bit like Groundhog Day, in that the general mechanics stay the same while the specifics alter with each repetition. First the dream, then the interpretation.

The dream always starts out in a place like Whiskey Island but much larger in scale, with many other people. We all travel to the shore to hear a rousing speech about fighting some kind of Evil. The Evil causes a shift, or glitch, in reality and everything is chaos. In the first instances of the dream, I was always in a wasteland without food and with companions who were just as confused as I was. The rest of the dreams would consist of wandering around looking for sustenance. Kinda OT Biblical.

In this latest version, my lucid dreaming kicked in a bit and I made sure to pack some food before going to the speech. This time the glitch still affected me, but Neil Gaiman was also aware that it was going to happen and had me and a few others fall into an alternate reality only tangentially like the Harry Potter universe. It was more like Harry Potter by P.G. Wodehouse. We ended up in this orrery where Neil Gaiman explained what the Evil had done, if not why (no one really knows why). The solving of the glitch involves helping as many people as possible find their way back to their proper place and doing it yourself in a certain amount of time. This is a bit like a video game.

We go to a train station where the only way to summon a train is to lie down on the tracks (kind of like how the easiest way to get sick is to mention how you’ve not been sick) Tootle the train shows up and hauls us to another station, where, in previous recurrences, I know that we’ll learn that one of my companions will die. So does Neil Gaiman, so we all take a bathroom break before walking past the mural that depicts this death.

Meanwhile, I find a pile of colorful construction paper cards and deflated latex balloons, and excitedly call everyone over to eat. These are sort of like the cards we’d have to make to send to nursing homes when I was in grade school, but were sent to us as support instead. We have to eat them because the longer we’re away from our rightful world, the more pale and lifeless we get, and the more we hunger for color and joy. We’d become unwitting joy vampires. When we eat these brightly colored stuff we become more human for awhile.

Paper and latex aren’t easy to eat though, and I find the balloons too hard to chew and get nauseated. At this time a new group shows up and joins in our feast. A girl I had a crush on in college appears, obviously with another man, who turns out to be an alternate universe version of me (though we look nothing alike), which is confirmed by the fact that he had the same website URL. This makes me feel lonely and I realize that my son Abraham has been affected by the glitch too, that he’s out there alone and needs me, and I realize just as there are multiple versions of me, there are multiple versions of Abraham and even if I can’t find my particular son, maybe I can find an alternate universe version to care for.

That’s it. I woke up and it was time to get ready for work.

There’s all kinds of stuff going on here, and I feel that I can identify both the foundational feeling and real world references to explain most of it. The foundational feeling is one of searching for a place I belong and be, in confidence and stillness. The train stuff is because Abraham talks about trains constantly, but it’s got a little bit of Stephen King Dark Tower going on as well. I can’t identify the reason for Neil Gaiman’s presence, but the balloons and construction paper is related to Abraham again. Alternate reality stuff is due to The Man From Primrose Lane. The game-like nature of avoiding impending traps and the recurrence are probably related to the fact I’ve been replaying Dragon Age 2. The crush is due to a crush.

I think this dream could be turned into a fairly good tale, but I’m certainly not the one to write it.

There are, specifically, two things I want to write about in regard to this film. The first one is the acting of Joan Fontaine. It was no surprise to me that she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, as this was an extremely difficult part to play. She’s a nameless protagonist (seriously, she is never addressed by name in the film), a shrinking violet weighted down by the shadow cast by the film’s absent-due-to-death main character, Rebecca. The pressures on her character are manifold, and all that she is not is reflected in what others tell her Rebecca was. Fontaine does an amazing job molding her posture, facial reactions and behavior to emphasize this dramatic tension. At heart though, her character is happy and eager to please, and each blow to her self-esteem so obviously wears down this basic goodness that the film becomes emotionally torturous in the style of the gothic novel. She walks to the very precipice of madness.

Secondly, I want to talk about the ways that Hitchcock thwarts the Hays Code; something he was apparently very fond of doing. The Hays Code (or Production Code) were basically a set of censorship rules about things you were allowed or not allowed to depict when making a movie. If you do show something like a murder, the murderers must be punished by the end of the film. Hitchcock manages to use the narrative structure of the mystery to hint at things that he can’t actually show. It’s an amazing use of psychology; viewers will try to figure out how the pieces fit together and reach conclusions based on the cues Hitchcock provides that are both incorrect and in violation of the Hays Code. If you read between the lines, there are implications of marital infidelity, suicide, homicide, homosexuality and incest. They mostly all evaporate by the denouement.

This, the first of Hitchcock’s American-made films, is a very good movie, It’s no surprise that it was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and picked up two of ‘em, including Best Picture. Like most Hitchcock films, there are a lot of balls in the air, but he’s a masterful juggler and ensure that each ball comes down at the right time, and in the right order.

(9 line poem written in 9 minutes at SPIT open mic)