Poems That Are Good For You

Selenium. It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head.Selenium. It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancerThe mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head.It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancerIt has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancerThe mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the headSelenium. It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancerThe mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancerThe mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancerThe mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer The mineral selenium when ingested beyond normal levels is said to increase the capacity to hear voices in the head It has long been known that severe selenium deficiency increases the risk of cancer Though certain races have a higher hearing threshold and are able to pick up synthetic telepathy sent through the atmosphere more than others, Allah Kareem

The Divers, the Drowned, the Delivered

We landed on the beach in Bahia Kino
with our best memories and war stories,
monitoring time by watching shadows.

Simplicity is complex nowdays, so many gadgets.

There was a fire ring for instance,
and burning lanterns but no candles.
And diving birds, there were three kinds and their bones.

An old friend caught trigger and hoped for flounder.

After he had too much to drink
he resembled a demon but his hands trembled.
Near the fire at night his eyes glistened.

Don's wife likes Miami, she drinks there.

In the morning there was contrition
and there were flies to spread contagion
by thieving sugar and contempt, a diligent crew.

How many times have I seen this before?

Insects and yeasts take people apart
one piece at a time. We collect wood
to burn, it holds us together as it consumes.

Tayammum, sand ablutions are called Tayammum.

At dawn the sea leaves her glass behind,
ceramic prisons free for the taking.
I couldn't get enough, the sea is so generous.

I was questioned thoroughly, my fingerprints in sand are still there.

Don left so early Sunday, he left cans
and rope, he left precious amounts
of bile in shade trees, he left our rake unattended.

We come from a family of campers, we are honor bound.

Ours tell quiet stories of blindness all the time,
we frequent several places, the animals know
when we are there. Lizards aren't so cautious.

Aztec traders brought handmade trinkets on the last day.

Grandfather, father and two boys. Bedou salesmen
from the pagan interior. His son told me this, he knew why I asked.
He had assimilated over time using a small TV. His eyes said so.

There are rituals and there are habits. These are facts.

Yes I said, yes, there is only one.
He nodded when I spoke of the Arabs.
Vaya con dios I said. He liked that. He smiled.

The Paths of the Righteous

Hi Meg,

Yes, I also received a letter from one bartelby schrivener mobonuga,
financial exchequer of the belgian ist national bank in Lagos where
funds
are secreted for one Narimbo Danatarr of whom i am told from whom I
have
utterly no pun intended decended. so be it. I am to act as a
facilitator in
abeyance and absentee exchequer for transmittal electronically to my
bank of
the tidy sum of 3 million nachorenias, nigerian money printed in lagos
before BEFORE 1989 and therefor inflation proof . huzza, shit such
wealth
and tomorrow or mwhen ever it arrives I will go out a buy some friends.

back from east coast and worn down a lot of difficulty with this
account and
smarmie attitude from chaos management neus zeigeist wannabees. thenold
game
of young bucks with computers whippin up on old drivers. If we stop the
wheels turning this beaucoup account goes under so they eat at the
edges of
our reality and I unfortunately am spending afar too much time thinking
about getting even. but that's fred. maturity takes more energy than I
want
to expend. or arriving at maturity, but then trucks go over hills and
mountains at 65 mph and with 10 speeds and all the truckin' bozo's are
into
550 CAT's and 13 apeeds and 74 mph whatever. I am about two miles an
hour
faster than some of rest of swtr drivers so I am having fun.

letter from pat Connor at WVU press sez they aren';t considering any
new
writers there in posey or poetry as demand is down quite a bit . I am
encouraged he liked my work I sent last year so i will have to get a
secnd
edition of radio room out sans Joe dong mao references and w' a
stronger
edit. may ghost press it and print and read aroundplaces when I get
time and
sell a little.haven't made it to NYC Open City at all and I am in
Newark
during the days but tied up loading. I will try tomorrow to look up
Open
City press. a viable readers market and tied in with other small
presses in
and around NYC, very viable and may be a home for you? I will get
together
some stuff on City Lights in Berkerly as that may be the only press I
can
feel comfortable with. theyare heavy on local presence and who has
spent
time there in Azuza street , paid their dues,and all the local stuff
but
they might be interested in what I have. will be february before I can
mount
an attack. are U counting the daze unti dismebarkation? fromm the great
desert ship Bisbee? Get me a French national passport and I will come
and
help you clean up and rebuild?



heap o' affection,



Fred








Fred:

Ah yes there it is and they are so beayootiful aren't they, one has to open them up for a while for the wonder potential. Glad to hear you'll have the ghosts do the printing for you but do they know how to read, can they fly? You Fred and sometimes I know all about the flying...on and on but when I mentioned it to the two babies in my care, they seemed not to remember that they could fly. Why do human beings do that you know, forget how to fly in their dreams? Is it because they forget about the abstraction of merely being awake or they just don't know how to say it? Once they learn how to say it they keep it to themselves, the babies. It is a dream of escape really but no one knows the difference anymore...they know it, the kids. One is only one year thus and the other a bit further along the way....we go to the parks to use our mouth parts to taste the swings. Hopefully, they will remember their great aunt Meggie as the one who would swing when they refused. Too much risk of going away completely forever to the sky.
The worst of it is, they will have been validated in their beliefs when I finally do swing away forever. They will remember it that way and then she will somewhere be and not come. Never. For now we just go in between spells and eat from the same bowls and fall on the same stairs. For now.

Tomorrow, it is to the great Bahia Kino with Radi Ann Porter at the helm. We've got the castle all folded together, full of cords and tarps, shovels and pesto.
One week on her favorite beach where she has always wanted to share with us there, the water. She thinks it belongs to her and is so tired of the individual partaking of it....so we go. With cameras and books...for me it is the Cantos, Gravity's Rainbow and the Quran. Cannot go without that you know and the rugs so that I can pray to the Creator near the Mexican sea that he left there for Radi. Saying, here it is...enjoy it for a while. Two dogs will be our gargoyles for the federales and gypsies. My mate is so very jealous of it all as he is stuck in the prison of Riyadh but I told him I'd miss him more because he is less there than he is here. At least here he has a voice on the phone or a smiley on the internet, but there he is just a constant dream and reminder to protect them. Protect them all he says to me as if I am some kind of demon warning system (he knows that I am). The demons down there though are afraid of the Virgin of Magdalena and those in Santa Ana. I cannot wait to be there again in the dusty gas and a taco towns of Sonora. Only Sonora but is there really anything beyond Sonora? You fall to sleep and cannot leave the state of it. That is what the beach is for Radi tells me..for the sleeping. The eating is only for the continuity of the sleeping. At least there we are closer to our hopes of one day seeing the Aztecs. This, we have promised to do if death does not intervene with one of us...and doing these things at our age has become a terminal diagnosis...maybe this will be the last time. We always think of that and then remember the swings that swing aunties away forever. We live in a countdown you know. The darkest star on the brink of radiation over a graveyard of the living...from that short on the view from 16th. Did I tell you?

I live in a Masonic house. Oh it is like driving into a mausoleum...two obelisks at the foot of the driveway...must have been a very big boss indeed to put on such airs. I wonder what kind of sacrifices were practiced here in this house you know, what meetings and organizational endeavors...you see? How the ratings of dingdong have gone down? Nothing is left to say without a confirmation from me that the missive was received. A complete blank save for the few stragglers there hoping he can muster an army against me. I left the Death of Merat taken by Radi Ann on the door and said, see here? Oh..I know the artworks and have seen the paintings in the Louvre ...the Degas are my favorite...his sketches on the corners of his backstages. And I've seen the horses with human faces in the Topkapi. I know what they were saying. They said, you know what we are saying. Simple messages. Things aren't as complicated as they seem you know but there goes the inherent complications...a man named Curtis Faville...somehow famous and I don't really know how..some books perhaps on criticism and then he called me babe. Oh no. Do not call me such a thing and complain about the Tehranians who have banned the Da Vinci Code (which he called an embarrassment when I told him it was not about the sex and murder but what you call, a trade embargo of the highest order..the slap in the face of your dignity kind of thing when the Tehranians say: we do not need to learn how to kill kids in math class you know...we already have had enough of the real deal..you brought it to us, remember)....I might stop by and tell him a thing or two before I do the Up and Adam type of things with the kids in a few hours...drag their drowsy selves out of bed so that we can gettyup and go with Radi Ann to the Sonora...who wants to stop off for some home made lunch at a place she has already earmarked for success. We'll have our cameras and there will be no option but for some picture TAKING. You have to be fast when you steal those or they'll get you, the ghosts. The demons will persue you all the way down to the shores.

All for now...I'll write you from there if I can...she says they have a dinghy internet shop there in Kino just like back home in Haris where we used to sit for hours on lazy Saturdays and swat at the flies in order to read what must be read: the mail.

Meg

View From 16th

There is a sense of not wanting to be here on 16th and Center, address 319 North, some awful transposition of 19 squared there, in the Masonic house. Two small, concrete obelisks are on either side of the driveway and it ought to be pleasant to look out onto the hills from the large, clean windows of this house, the natural hills and those which are man-made and called slag; the way the sun and the iron play off of each other to create lavender vistas all around is very lovely. There isn't though any solace in the view or on the roofs of so many quaint houses staggered around the smallish valley nor any charm in the massive structure sitting directly across from here just under a natural incline where the cliffs contain whole dynasties of evolution in fossils. It is right at the base of dump number seven. That would be the old hospital which is now a boarding house for the indigent and elderly. It is a handsome building, particularly in the afternoon when the light sculpts the art deco facades into crisp shapes. The place is charming the way things like that are, irresistable to people used to the less than Byzantine. It is mostly brick and wood laid against timber, all quite flammable and impermanent. The only solid structures in sight are the several frames of shaft elevators that dot the hills in seemingly arbitrary places that mark areas where minerals are easy to find and extract by those who, in the past descended to mine the rock walls for a variety of things like copper and silver and sometimes, a bit of gold. It ought to be pleasant, but it isn't.

The best part of being in a catastrophe is actually being in one. There is nothing anyone can really say about that sort of thing, there is no choice within the boundaries of it, no conclusions and nothing which resembles remorse. It just is. It is a case that one does what one is compelled to do and that would be, to move along with it as if in a river, just glide along and look at things as they pass by or remain motionless at various points along the way.

Waking up in a large hall prepared in advance for the arrival of so many souls (on the run) after one has slept what seemed like several lifetimes contained in a few seconds, is the material of which epiphanies are made, the kind of thing a person only gets to do once, like everything else in the scheme of things. Ship load after ship load, ours was the fourteenth wave. When a person arrives in such a hall, the rest have already disappeared to wherever it is they ship people like us, refugees. There are lines and lines of open cots with one blanket each and a brand new pillow or a slightly more used one, depending on the invasion and the invader. In this particular case, it could be said of it, "it was well appointed" and the pillows were better than the ones I sleep on now in a fairly comfortable home. Those in the refugee center were objects of the war trade and quite comfortable. There are boxes full of food and the essentials, foot powder and sanitary napkins and one bathroom with three stalls and three sinks for the women and probably, about the same for the men. It is an exhibition hall on the Turkish side of the island. It is prearranged for cataclysm.

I lay down after spending several hours settling in to the camp by organizing and reorganizing my few possessions but could not sleep because I was still bleeding and felt unclean. I didn't want to shower out in the open with the other women. The children were sleeping on and off and our traveling companions with whom we had left the city two days before were actively moving about and making phone calls to Kabul and Boston. They seemed very busy. Jessica, the mother, was worried about her diet, she could not be around people who had eaten carbohydrates within the previous 24 hours, it was very important to her that we respect this. We had no phone though and there wasn't really anything any of us wanted to say, my children and I, to anyone we knew. We felt very far away, so far that no phone could ever span the distance we felt.

Night began to fall and the hall was still empty. The few stragglers from the boat before ours had departed at one, just after we arrived. We were absolutely alone with thousands of empty cots and all sorts of personal expectations that we knew could never be fufilled. We did not know how we felt yet, not really and somehow, I knew we wouldn't really know how we would feel for a very long time to come. Perhaps forever. We might never recover, I knew that much but also knew that recovery isn't always the best thing if it means there isn't a lesson learned or a price paid. We were paying dearly for something but didn't quite understand what or when the debt we had incurred would finally be paid in full. The numbness was profound.

I spent a few hours walking around the fairgrounds looking for others like myself or those even worse off, those in shock or perhaps even ill. I looked for tears and slouching and found a woman on a bench sitting all alone. I tried to comfort her with talk of God and she appreciated it even though we were of different sects entirely, whole different ballparks of understanding about our status and the cause of the invasion. The woman sobbed as we compared what we'd seen so far and how we feared what else it might be that we would see. She spoke of the sister she'd left behind. It was a kind of sad excitement that allowed the closeness to exist between us for nearly a half hour. I finally got up, held her her for a moment and said goodbye to her. I can remember her face as one of average intellect, average sadness and a complete sense of loss and frustration that aggravated the tiny lines around her eyes. Her face was already anemic from several days living under seige in the south of our country. She could have been a woman in a painting.

When I returned to the hall, everyone in my group, my children and my friend and her two daughters were already asleep or resting with their eyes half closed. No one seemed to have anything left to say even though we'd not spoken more than a few words to each other since the early afternoon. I hadn't slept for nearly a week. The last time I had slept I awoke to a thunderous explosion above our building which lit the sky like a match suddenly lights a dark room. No one moved or said anything as I prepared to lay down, not even a goodnight let alone, an I love you. Then I fell without even a pause to observe my last deep sigh into a dark and immense sleep.

I woke up suddenly but without being startled or disoriented. I had no idea how much time had passed but if time were to be measured as change it must have been years that I had slept because what I saw as I opened my eyes was a world which had completely changed.

The cavernous hall which had been so empty was now filled, every cot in it had a sleeping body there and some held two. None of them moved. I cannot imagine how they settled so close to us in such silence, the way an army of butterflies must arrive in a tree. Thousands more had arrived in those hours or moments of sleep of which I have no real record to refer to. They appeared to be dead rather than exhausted. There was only one soldier walking out of the hall who looked back over his shoulder briefly before disappearing and I sat alone looking over the great event horizon. I sat and waited for things to begin moving again, I was frozen in pain and wonder at the company of souls in which I was immersed as if in the clearest water on the highest mountain, a place where no one had ever been before or would ever go again. Here it was at last, Nirvana, wildly unstable and utterly somnolent. The darkest star on the brink of radiation over a graveyard of the living.

The two obelisks mark the driveway but I do not want to know what they mean. I only know that I exist on the corner of 16th and Central, 319 North.

Chapter from This Purgatory

Her mother noticed the vague intensity Sally expressed in the diner. As a mother leaning slightly toward the east in those days, it was quite difficult to manage a smile for her own daughter. A fight erupted over the tardiness of the waiter and she said, "He is such a loser." This caused Sally to launch into one of her popular digressions about being thankful for being in a diner and awaiting a bit of food.

"Oh for crying out loud Sally," was all her mother could say. For crying out loud. How does one explain to a Sally what is going on in the late night of a diner except in a story and so she did. She began:

"You know, I used to work in one of these, they're awful..." as if the children hadn't heard it ten times before or a hundred. "Your father would be feeding you as I left and my heart would just sink. In fact, I paid for your sister's homebirth by collecting just the coins in a coffee can. I saved all my coin tips and paid for the midwife myself because really, he wanted nothing to do with it all...before you were born that is," Ruth added in a conscientious way.

Sally just pursed her lips tighter and kept looking around, not realizing that she was even worse off than her mother who knew what it was all about now. Kids always think they know so much.

"But you know, it was also one of the best times in my life. I met people in the diner. All those old guys at the counter and Ultra, who thought he was Jesus. He didn't say so but it was pretty obvious that he looked like him and anyways, he didn't talk alot."

Still, Sally didn't budge. She felt sorry for the waiter. Her mother kept an uneasy eye on the food window and felt certain that their order was just sitting there and getting cold. Oddly enough, she didn't usually care this much about a slow order but for some reason, this time, she did. She didn't want her children to suffer so much. She'd been watching too much news and for crying out loud, had even ordered a collection of Carol Burnett shows from an early morning advertisement there. She just wanted a little "pick me up" as in the way her own mother used to "put on her face" to go out back in the old days when her mother was actually alive.

Ruth was born weighing only five pounds and was put directly into an icubator. This fact somehow made her feel very special throughout her life but she didn't think about it often, just once or twice in twenty years but when she thought of it, Ruth's special nature just seemed to crystalize completely in her own mind. I was in an incubator! Like an egg, like a very precious egg. The reason she was such a lightweight however was because her mom was such a heavy smoker and the fact was in one of her most coveted photographs in which her mother sat slouched and very pregnant on the tattered couch with a menthol held delicately between the tips of her fingers. She'd tried to abort Ruth with a certain drug that gave Ruth cervical problems when she was only fifteen but always held that she had taken it to prevent another stillbirth. Her mother had had two of them and would talk about those once in a while. The only one Ruth really remembered though was the one that fell out at the breakfast table, a little boy. She had lost two brothers! And one of them literally fell out at the breakfast table and for whatever reason, Ruth believed it happened in a diner. It provided so much evidence to Ruth that, yes, she was supposed to be born and she was very, very special.

When the food finally arrived, Josh the waiter begged the pardon of his “clients” as Ruth liked to think of herself when in any service situation, obviously worried about his tip in light of the fact that he’d read Ruth’s look as well as Ruth had read Sally’s and Sally had read her mother’s. Sally’s brother Joseph hadn’t really said a thing about it all because he was just trapped, entirely trapped by two females whom he knew only too well, or so he thought. His mother contemplated the irony of their relationships as all mothers do and often told him, “You were in my uterus you know, I know everything about you.”

Sally still looked distressed. She said, “This place is so scary.”

“There you go again! What do you want me to do about it Sally?” Ruth couldn’t explain what she knew, it was entirely too frightening to let on what it was she knew very well. Sally got even more agitated and pursed her lips even tighter and barely touched the food which looked quite delicious to Ruth who had ordered her usual eggs and biscuits instead of what she really wanted.

“Do you want some mom?” Sally couldn’t resist making a point of offering it to her mom.

“Oh no sweetie, you eat it. If there’s any left I’ll take a bite later.” Ruth’s eggs drooped in front of her on her plate and she slid them around in a puddle of fat, they were half done and the hashed browns were a sorry sight. The biscuit was pretty good and she used it to sop up the luke warm watery eggs. Joseph shoved his food down as fast as usual and Ruth couldn’t help but notice he didn’t know how to cut his baked potato so that he could eat it without messing around with the peel.

“You do it like this son,” she said in a matter of fact tone. He rolled his eyes and just looked helpless. “Your fingers are too long you know, it isn’t really your fault," she tried to make him laugh but it wasn’t really very funny. He’d heard it so many times before and pretty much, resented it.

“Oh well, what can I say?” was the only thing she could think of to make it all better, this situation in a cruddy diner in a city that existed mainly to serve the needs of the US military. Everyone in the diner looked the same and outside, just about every car had a bumper sticker on it with the American Flag.

Ruth thought once again how hard it is to live in purgatory without being able to tell anyone about it. It was her secret although she knew that there were others who knew it too. People like Ultra who instead of talking, just imitated and tried to look real.