the meaning you make

the poets.org poem of the day

That Everything’s Inevitable
by Katy Lederer

That everything’s inevitable.
That fate is whatever has already happened.
The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.
In this world, I am the surest thing.
Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.
Please insert your spare coins.
I am filling them up.
Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.
But yet, I am a vatic one.
As vatic as the Vatican.
In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum
I am waiting, like an animal,
For poetry.

some friends and i have started a writing group we have thus far referred to as “english club” because, i suppose, several of us were english majors and we write and speak in english. we had our first official meeting last friday and the colonel was in charge of finding a writing exercise.

this is what she brought us:

you meet a man in a bar in a strange town. he has a cat on his lap and orders a cup of coffee, slowly spooning sugar. he strokes the cat’s back and says “this contact is illusory. the cat and i are separated by a pane of glass because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the animal lives in the present and the instant.”

what conversation would you have with this man?

what does the cat do?

what happened to the man before he came into the bar?

we wrote for 20 minutes and each came up with vastly different results. we are going to work on our rough scribblings for the next meeting and see what we can make of them.

this is what i wrote:

> When you say illusory, what exactly do you mean?

> The cat and I, in this moment together, are produced by an illusion of what one thinks should happen between a cat and a person, of what we might wish would happen, both the cat and I.

> Are you not here petting the cat, though?

> I am here, but I am also there, then, before and later. But the cat, the cat is only here, now, here, now; each movement a new one with nothing to do with the previous or the upcoming.

> But I see you petting the cat. Where is the separation?

> The cat and I could never really be in the same moment together. We approach our realities separately and we cannot connect. I am in time, in the moments strung together. The cat is in one moment. I am on a speeding train, the cat is at a stop. I pass the stop, I may even stop at the stop, but I keep going, always, on to the next and I know that more stops are coming, that I can get off, get back on, get in a car; I keep going. The cat is at the stop, or it is on the train, or it is at a stop, it cannot see the connection, the getting on or off.

The cat jumps onto the table knocking over the man’s coffee. It spills on him, he yells.

In Knowledge of Young Boys
by Toi Derricotte

i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming,
a horrible brain in water.
i knew you when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle,
when you had no sustenance of metal
when you had no boat to travel
when you stayed in the same
place, treading the question;
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning, and the stars
blinked like a cat. we swam
in the last trickle of champagne
before we knew breastmilk—we
shared the night of the closet,
the parasitic
closing on our thumbprint,
we were smudged in a yellow book.

son, we were oak without
mouth, uncut, we were
brave before memory.

in the fall 2008 issue of the paris review i first came upon paul guest in the form of his poems “invitation” (which now hangs on my wall) and “user’s guide to physical debilitation” (below). he makes recognizable and tangible things which i can only feel or think.

from Invitation
by Paul Guest

What will you say Paul Guest?
No one knows. No one ever has
spoken the right thing
or walked away not hating
his mouth for the sake of the air
that was in it, that wouldn’t
take shape, keep it, or at least fall into quiet,
which is an endless water.

poets.org’s poem of the day:

User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation
by Paul Guest

Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart
or the culture of death, which really has it out
for whoever has seen better days
but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,
you, or your beleaguered caregiver
stirring dark witch’s brews of resentment
inside what had been her happy life,
should turn to page seven where you can learn,
assuming higher cognitive functions
were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,
how to leave the house for the first time in two years.
An important first step,
with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor.
When not an outright impossibility
or form of neurological science fiction,
sexual congress will either be with
tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,
performing an act of sadistic charity;
with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas;
or with someone blindly feeling their way
through an extended power outage
caused by summer storms you once thought romantic.
Page twelve instructs you how best
to be inspiring to Magnus next door
as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit
above Alberta. And to Betty
in her dark charm confiding a misery,
whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours.
The curl of her hair that her finger knows
better and beyond what you will,
even in the hypothesis of heaven
when you sleep. This guide is intended
to prepare you for falling down
and declaring détente with gravity,
else you reach the inevitable end
of scaring small children by your presence alone.
Someone once said of crushing
helplessness: it is a good idea to avoid that.
We agree with that wisdom
but gleaming motorcycles are hard
to turn down or safely stop
at speeds which melt aluminum. Of special note
are sections regarding faith
healing, self-loathing, abstract hobbies
like theoretical spelunking and extreme atrophy,
and what to say to loved ones
who won’t stop shrieking
at Christmas dinner. New to this edition
is an index of important terms
such as catheter, pain, blackout,
pathological deltoid obsession, escort service,
magnetic resonance imaging,
loss of friends due to superstitious fear,
and, of course, amputation
above the knee due to pernicious gangrene.
It is our hope that this guide
will be a valuable resource
during this long stretch of boredom and dread
and that it may be of some help,
however small, to cope with your new life
and the gradual, bittersweet loss
of every God damned thing you ever loved.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense. 

– Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

johnny depp reads “mexico city blues chorus: 113″ by jack kerouac.

the first line is from “america” by allen ginsberg: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”

Mexico City Blues
Chorus 113
by Jack Kerouac

Got up and dressed up
and went out & got laid
Then died and got buried
in a coffin in the grave,
Man –

Yet everything is perfect,
Because it is empty,
Because it is perfect
with emptiness,
Because it’s not even happening.

Everything
Is Ignorant of its own emptiness–
Anger
Doesn’t like to be reminded of fits–

You start with the Teaching
Inscrutable of the Diamond
And end with it, your goal
is your startingplace,
No race was run, no walk
of prophetic toenails
Across Arabies of hot
meaning you just–
numbly don’t get there

this poem was one of the first i ever read of bukowski’s and very different from what i had already come across. i find it gut wrenching because of how vivid, devastating and beautifully emotive it is. his words are simple yet his arrangement of them results in something powerful.

For Jane

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

Another member of this group, his date and I went to Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica on Saturday night and freaked out on the art and photographs. 

Here’s a video from our collective journey…part 2 is coming soon. The guy talking is poet Neeli Cherkovski, Sam Cherry’s son (Sam Cherry is the guy who took the photos of Bukowski). 

Note: this is not an exciting video but is cool information so watch it while you’re eating dinner or something.

embedded by Embedded Video

Untitled [This is what was bequeathed us]
by Gregory Orr

An excerpt from How Beautiful the Beloved

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.

No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

Goldfish Are Ordinary
by Stacie Cassarino

At the pet store on Court Street,
I search for the perfect fish.
The black moor, the blue damsel,
cichlids and neons. Something
to distract your sadness, something
you don’t need to love you back.
Maybe a goldfish, the flaring tail,
orange, red-capped, pearled body,
the darting translucence? Goldfish
are ordinary, the boy selling fish
says to me. I turn back to the tank,
all of this grace and brilliance,
such simplicity the self could fail
to see. In three months I’ll leave
this city. Today, a chill in the air,
you’re reading Beckett fifty blocks
away, I’m looking at the orphaned
bodies of fish, undulant and gold fervor.
Do you want to see aggression?
the boy asks, holding a purple beta fish
to the light while dropping handfuls
of minnows into the bowl. He says,
I know you’re a girl and all
but sometimes it’s good to see.
Outside, in the rain, we love
with our hands tied,
while things tear away at us.

From Zero at the Bone by Stacie Cassarino. Copyright © 2009 by Stacie Cassarino.