“I think we have wandered.”
*
There’s nothing else.
Old pine again, pinon, old friend with gnarly bark a little flaked off and quill tufts of yellowed pins,
morphed desire and the billowed surf, phosphors and rolled night sky through chainlink), lolling or roiled up dogs, heavy slosh of more surf now, moon buoyed on the ocean’s edge, bobbed, squooshed to a flattened disk, then dropped down under the verge. Bonaire green flash I salute you, a great career.
The sweet is sweet, the bitter is bitter says Mr. X : flamingos
pink line of flight a little schizy
What do I say?
The bull snake traction-tacked across the road till virtually de-vertebrated I did it with my little hatchet
spellchecker amulet gone bust
I was trying to swerve not enough to flip us, doubled back, a beetle disgorged its Samaritan who canted it onto the grassy road edge like propped but dangling braided challa
to die I vow not to kill I vow not to be stingy
six feet plus of muscle slack, but a little wriggly in spot spasms
riptide sucks under and the rocks clatter back a few feet, God’s watery abacus
the sea grows old in it
: if you get this, there’s something in it so scary that even knowing how to beat a drum you still get the shivers yrs Mr H
say what?
floated up or whomped into dawn, you can count on him every time (“this statement is terrifying”), bright daylight: off to get designer coffee and some pastries for nine, then back to the bluffs and waves (“of course it’s not a desert!”)
the French call it camping sauvage
when the rocks rolled down into surf they came back up one morning as 1978 in Auverne, a passel of pines, shushed green as far as we could see, HD was on to something after all,
for a long time you don’t see the forest for the trees, then you don’t see the trees for the forest, then . . .
what a tight pair of jeans that was
longing for Kyoto in Kyoto (cuckoo)
scenes of life at the capitol
haunt it in recapitulatory mode, fend off capitulatory:
many lifetimes ago: that was in another country and besides
: soft bite of September air the ghost of pinecones in it a dreamlike trace what is it a Sound the the Fury re-run? the one way side street the parked cars (like sleepers, unquote)
the genius loci is a rust brown water tower (like a portable iHome speaker tuned up by BALCO) fifteen floors up,
no one in particular, Sandy Hughes actually who was to gaffe me at the wedding, but really the street and the soft autumn, sharp, the not quite smoky smell
the god of these rocks, this invisible harbor (spellchecker be still)
: the koan suggests there’s autumn in the midst of summer so here comes Norman haunting it again right on cue saying the same thing once: “we’re alive and we’re dead. we think we’re alive now and we’ll dead later but that’s baloney.” or words to that effect. “we don’t know that and that’s why we’re suffering.”
through which the same pale brick wall (not quite) looms forward to help again, whomping on up, an inexorable function no longer coplanar with the pale blue sky, what is the variable, lie quiet Divus,
it’s always right now, how strange, and dogs (always), and the grinding of truck gears, omnivorous garbage trucks, O City, and the trashmen (no trashpeople yet) heaving the dented cans against the bent iron railings as loud as they could at five a.m., blam, whenever you look at your stomach there’s a bellybutton there to greet you, and one whole summer the crews chewed up second avenue at the rate of a block a month while I read Ulysses Molloy Malone Dies and The Unnamable up on the roof : next summer they came back and filled it back in, like the copper mines in Morenci there’s supposedly a whole city down there, subterranean shopping malls filled with water awaiting the resurrection Pax OPEC Americana : the only place I know : I paean Manhattan and bless the spellchecker, flung hand of wind, the tiny applauding waves by Battery then all the way out where thought goes (it’s not Staten Island)(performative/constative muddle, you de Man, sorry) , and all those boats, urban regatta brought to you by Chance and Causality in Modern Physics, where you just have to wish to make it so, but the plane almost crashed an hour out over the Atlantic so they brought us back to squabble for seats and kept changing the rules, and . . .
had the twin towers been built yet? yeah
this hand holds spring, this hand holds autumn, this one holds this memory and that one holds desire
oops really big maples leaves whomped up suddenly out of nowhere fill everything, thought after thought rises in the mind, where the fuck from, flopping or tossing around, in scuds, gone tidal
: ok then : what’s the sound of one hand after all? no now
N’s knocking, knock off.
8/30/12 – 11/30/12
*
thought after thought is the mind
11/30/12
*
AIG’s share prices had fallen over 95% to just $1.25 by September 16, 2008, from a 52-week high of $70.13.[citation needed] The company reported over $13.2 billion in losses in the first six months of the year.[30][31] After an attempted coup d’état against him in 1958, Duvalier disbanded the army and all law enforcement agencies in Haiti, and executed all high-ranking generals. The Tontons Macoutes wore straw hats, blue denim shirts and dark glasses, and were armed with machetes and guns. Those who spoke out against Duvalier would disappear at night, or were sometimes attacked in broad daylight. Tontons Macoutes often stoned and burned people alive. Many times the corpses were put on display, often hung in trees for everyone to see. Family members who tried to remove the bodies for proper burial often disappeared themselves, never to be seen again. They were believed to have been abducted and killed by the MVSN, who were called the “Tontons Macoutes” as a result. The AIG Financial Products division headed by Joseph Cassano, in London, had entered into credit default swaps to insure $441 billion worth of securities originally rated AAA. Of those securities, $57.8 billion were structured debt securities backed by subprime loans.[32] CNN named Cassano as one of the “Ten Most Wanted: Culprits” of the 2008 financial collapse in the United States.[33] The Haitians nicknamed this warlord-led goon squad the “Tonton Macoutes,” after the Creole translation of a common myth, about an “uncle” (Tonton) who kidnaps and punishes obstreperous kids by snaring them in a gunnysack (Macoute) and carrying them off to be consumed at breakfast. . . . As Lehman Brothers (the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at that time) suffered a catastrophic decline in share price, investors began comparing the types of securities held by AIG and Lehman, and found that AIG had valued its Alt-A and sub-prime mortgage-backed securities at 1.7 to 2 times the values used by Lehman which weakened investors’ confidence in AIG.[30] On September 14, 2008, AIG announced it was considering selling its aircraft leasing division, International Lease Finance Corporation, to raise cash.[30] The Federal Reserve hired Morgan Stanley to determine if there are systemic risks to a financial failure of AIG, and asked private entities to supply short-term bridge loans to the company. In the meantime, New York regulators allowed AIG to borrow $20 billion from its subsidiaries.[34][35] Luckner Cambronne was a particularly fierce head of the Tonton Macoute throughout the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. His cruelty earned him the nickname “Vampire of the Caribbean”. He profited by extortion carried out by his henchmen and by supplying corpses and blood to universities and hospitals in the United States. At the stock market’s opening on September 16, 2008, AIG’s stock dropped 60 percent.[36] The Federal Reserve continued to meet that day with major Wall Street investment firms, hoping to broker a deal for a non-governmental $75 billion line of credit to the company.[37] The Tontons Macoutes were a ubiquitous presence in a rigged 1961 election in which Duvalier was unanimously reelected to another term, and once again in 1964 when Duvalier held a rigged referendum that declared him President for Life. Tontons Macoutes murdered more than 60,000 Haitians. The most feared paramilitary group during the 1990s was the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haïti
11/30/12 – 10/15/12
*
I’m not certain through this tear
the world comes pouring in lumpy mountains blurred at the gauzed horizon gouached clouds riding them lightly
the chihuaha wheezing and grunting his way through dreams
turquoise t-shirt full of bb holes & sagged like a potato sack
not bbs when day eructed over the valley and chunked some desert foliage into place for one more work day—palo verdes, mesquites, sand and ersatz driftwood, fuzzed up creosote—
the sun went whack whack whack on the palm fronds
but the drizzled brown drooped ones under the spiny green ones erupted birdcalls then birds who caromed off plateglass air
then sheered off to divebomb mesquites, then settle in again
old Ez folded his blankets, yeah: the artist formerly known as Tenney (known as Tenney now) went forth to walk his dogs
but encountered the autumnal summer air of last month’s koan : followed the fragrant grasses out and the falling flowers back while Norman keeps saying we think we’re alive now and we’ll be dead later but that’s baloney not unhinged by grasses played by sunbleached sticks and scrub sand, wash, or the falling flowers appearing as palo verdes blooms vanished where did they go (down the koan’s throat) but the pins still very much perked up thank you
and autumn is the summer sun still thwacking your face. dead man. Mountains up ahead look huge, unmoving, self-assured, and happy as clams
in wet sand; but rhyme with the Alps now : Simplon Pass seemed softer in summer and no more august or Wordsworthian than this, but back behind these now the scratched cold hieroglyphs of Gondo Gorge bask waiting, lurking, holding the spirit of ice:
it spreads out like sound in dreams, untunneled and in flat thin sheets like slowed down wind
time spins the silence threading time
10/16/12 – 12/6/12
*
Washington, DC, March 17, 2009 – Following a stunning breakthrough in a 25-year-old case of political terror in Guatemala, the National Security Archive today is posting declassified U.S. documents about the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984.The documents show that García’s capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government. Declassified U.S. records indicate that the United States was well-aware of the government campaign to kidnap, torture and kill Guatemalan labor leaders grassroots and revolutionary leadership was eliminated from the urban centers through assassinations committed by “Death Squads.” nearly thirty thousand people were murdered from 1963 to 1969, and thousands more were disappeared or sent into exile In his teisho on this case, Yasutani Roshi would cleverly mime the act of slicing at the hapless animal while at the same time releasing it. Perhaps that’s the way it happened. One of the most famous was the exiled high-ranking macoute under Papa Doc Duvalier, Luckner Cambronne, who recently passed away in Miami, FL. Because of his bloody and barbaric acts Luckner was called the, “Vampire of The Caribbean.” He would snatch people and sell their blood, plasma and corpses to Medical facilities and schools in the USA. In the fun and adventurous film “The Serpent And The Rainbow” starring Bill Pullman, Luckner inspired the character for the movie, The priest Nanquan found monks of the eastern and western halls arguing about a cat. He held up the cat and said, “Everyone! If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” The Serpent and the Rainbow is a 1987 American voodoo-horror film directed by Wes Craven and starring Bill Pullman. The film is very loosely based on the non-fiction book of the same name by ethnobotanist Wade Davis, wherein Davis recounted his experiences in Haiti investigating the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was allegedly poisoned and buried alive; and who, when released from the grave, purportedly received an herbal brew whose effects produced what was called a zombie.
Obstacles to Achieving Mental Health in Post-War Guatemala:
“If you had been here, the cat would have been spared.”
11/30/12 – 10/18/12 – 10/25/12
*
The Guatemalan death squads went astray.
He holds the cat and lifts his sword and cuts.
I wake to feel the fell of dark not day.
The rapt monks gaped like mummers in a play.
The mouth that starts to open simply shuts.
I wake to feel the fell of dark not day.
The dawn broke and the sky turned slated gray,
The street festooned with pink and purple guts.
The Guatemalan death squads went astray.
They bowed before the spitting popinjay
and called the ones they murdered pimps and sluts.
I wake to feel the fell of dark not day.
The monks slunk off then bowed their heads to pray.
the soldiers torched the people’s ragged huts.
The Guatemalan death squads went astray.
The cat hissed in the chasm of delay;
time disemboweled all ifs and ands and buts.
The Guatemalan death squads went astray.
I wake and feel the fell of dark not day.
10/26/12 (?) – 11/14/12
*
Nansen, holding up the cat, said “Monks, if you can say a word of Zen, I will spare the cat. If you cannot, I will kill it!” No monk could answer. Nansen finally killed the cat. Joshu took off his sandal, put it on his head, and walked off. Nansen said, “If you had been here, I could have saved the cat!”
*
In traditional Voodoo belief, in order to get back to lan guinée, one must be transported there by Baron Samedi. More manpower could always be imported from the Middle Passage. Haiti’s notorious dictator François Duvalier known as I placed a jar in Tennessee Papa Doc, who controlled Haiti with a viselike grip, And round it was upon a hill, from 1957 until his death in 1971 well understood the Baron’s role He dressed like Baron, in a black fedora, it made the slovenly wilderness , business suit and heavy glasses surround that hill, or sunglasses. The wilderness rose up to it
Like Baron at a ceremony, when Duvalier spoke publicly and sprawled around, no longer wild, it was often in a near whisper and The jar was round upon the ground. His secret police, the Tontons Macoutes behaved with the complete immorality and obedience of the undead, And were tall, and of a port in air, and sometimes assumed to be zombies
under the dictator’s control. It took dominion everywhere. I once heard a Haitian radio announcer describe Klaus Barbie, a Nazi known as The jar was gray and bare or the Butcher of Lyon, as “youn ansyen Tonton Makout Hitler,” – one of Hitler’s Tontons Macoutes, It did not give of bird or bush: a zombie of the Reich.
In traditional Voodoo belief, in order to get back to lan guinée, one must be transported there Like nothing else in Tennessee by Four Trees—Baron Samedi, the lord of the cemetery upon a solitary Acre—
and one of the darkest and Without Design /Or Order or most complicated Apparent Action—of the religion’s many—Maintain—
complicated gods,
. Baron is customarily dressed upon a Morning in a business jacket, a top hat and The Sun—dark glasses; he’s foul-mouthed and meets them—comic in The Wind—a low, vicious way.
No nearer Neighbor—have they—. One of Baron’s spiritual functions , his most important, is to dig a person’s grave But God—The Acre gives them
and welcome him to the other —Place—side.
If for some reason a person has thwarted or offended Baron, or They—Him—the god will not allow that person attention of Passer by—upon his death, to reach guinée
Then you’re a zombie Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply—
Some other lucky mortal can control you, it is believed. Or Boy—
You’ll do the bidding of your master without question.
What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature—
What Plan
They severally—retard—or further—
Unknown—
10/31/12 – 11/20/12
*
In the third month of the tenth year of Koān (1287) Master Bukkaku built the Eshunan sub-temple in the place called Hell Valley. It had been the execution ground when the Minamoto shogun Yorimoto founded his government, and the people had a deep dread of the place, as haunted by lost spirits of the executed. Neither Martin Sullivan, who ran the company from 2005 to 2008, nor Robert Willumstad, his successor who was fired a week before AIG’s government bailout, admitted any misjudgment or apologized for any company decision. These included giving a $1-million-a-month consulting job to the executive most responsible for the company’s collapse. After the sub-temple had been built there, the presence of the lost spirits manifested as an appearance of blue flame coming from under the floor of the kitchen. The teacher was therefore asked to hold a memorial service for them. Asked how AIG got into such dire financial straits, Sullivan and Willumstad both blamed a “financial tsunami” beyond their control. When questioned about the company’s decision to rely so heavily on the secondary mortgage market, the source of AIG’s principal troubles, each CEO pointed the finger at the other. That evening he bent double and crept under the floor, pissed on the herd of demons who were visible in the flame, and came out. The magic flame was put out, and never appeared again, and the local people called this the Pissing Memorial Service of Eshunan. G. Gordon Liddy first gained attention for his involvement in the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation. He was convicted and spent several years in jail. Afterwards, he wrote an autobiography, Will, and served as a technical consultant when it was filmed. He first appeared as an actor in the made-for-TV thriller The Highwayman (1987), after which he gained substantial popularity as a guest star on the hit series Miami Vice. For several years, Liddy hosted a Washington, D.C.-based radio talk show on station WJFK. Tests: 1) The blue flame of Eshunan was put out a long time ago, but right now, under my stove here, a crowd of lost spirits has appeared. What will you do as a memorial service for them, and what will you do to save them? Say!
Q. Are Edward Liddy and G Gordon Liddy related?
A: No.
*
Japan’s post-quake tsunami warning lifted
The 7.3 quake hit the same region ravaged by last year’s major quake. Little damage is reported, but coastal areas are evacuated. After two hours, the tsunami warning ends.
*
A great horned owl’s moved into the neighborhood. It WHOOs right around dawn
And then seems to go to sleep. What do I know?
Very low cloud layer going late impressionist twenty miles to the west where the Tucson Mountains hump up softly to bump them up a bit
Wash trees foreground gone softer green in hazy mid-November light
please pass the koan
a stuffed monkey lies tipped over at my feet looking ebullient, drunk, and possibly dead
what’s it like when time sits in the low branches still as an owl?
dunno man, what’s it like for you?
it’s good. earth’s motor hums softly then they turn the ignition off and it’s still as cotton candy in February—i.e., pretty darn still. I want you to be serious.
Death eructed the rabbit.
The desert’s critter ecosystem might be said to be crenellated, by someone : Paul thinks we say that too often : rabbit, snake, rock, book of public cases, creosote, car keys, please pass the barbecue gravy, rattlesnake, bullsnake, rabbit, kingsnake, “at just such a time,” owl. He’s sleeping it “off.”
I wrote it, therefore you exist. When they say there’s no self they mean something else:
Gone to pee: back in five minutes.
Imagine, even such a trivial thing as that I have to do for myself. Thanks
again Norman. But yesterday’s was
the shifty dose-e-dow of guest and host, this time (70) done softly with aplomb (next time use a pineapple): “Please, teacher, you speak instead.” Room temperature potato, which Mr B held comfortably in the hand. Foxy Lady : 10,000 happy lives as Jimi Hendrix. Dosey Doe, check.
“Hundreds and thousands of regrets” : that’s the form our happiness takes said Mr T : O clouds, be soft as milk, spilt slowly, be soft as floaty—
Your Name Here. I’m putting the word in your hand, that’s my response, yes. “With your throat, mouth, and lips shut, how will you speak?” dandle that flower now, break into that big old smile, it can’t be transmitted, there you have it. bone breath. you have to meet another before you’re through
a calm darkens among water lights, you can count on it.
Thank you for the daylight, Max.
You’re welcome. “When the bough breaks, the raptor will fall.”
Hence the decapitated rabbit lying still and stunned, preternaturally calm, six inches behind the Odyssey’s rear axle, in the driveway at dawn:
yes they do do that, if the prey’s too heavy to rapture. Small white tail like a useless cotton ball, a cloud by Joseph Cornell.
B saw it through the plateglass and asked a couple slightly troubled questions about it, and how I’d dispose of it—white garbage bag from Costco, small gassho like we used to say
Then off to, hi-ho, third grade.
And with your beads on, because it rains.
11/16/12 – 12/17/12
*
The Last Wave (1977) is an Australian film directed by Peter Weir.[3] It is about a white lawyer in Sydney whose seemingly normal life is disrupted after he takes on a murder case and discovers that he shares a strange, mystical connection with the small group of local Australian Aborigines accused of the crime.
12/12/12
No Frito pies will be served tomorrow. Service will resume next week, November 28th. Thank you for the support!
The film opens with a montage of scenes of daily life in Australia in the 1970s: a rural school in the desert, the main street of an outback town, a traffic jam in the city, all being affected by unusually adverse weather conditions that suddenly appear. Only the local Aboriginals seem to recognize the cosmological significance of these weather phenomena.
*
My period had come for prayer—
*