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Harrison
& the Newark-Jersey City Road: O! Paens to
the Polluted Passaic Poetic!
In anticipation of the launching of the guerilla
scat mecca --- a
daily poem exercise
in emergence,
spontaneity and improvisation. In the dharma art
lineage of Ginsberg transmission.
Take the quotidian paradox, select for vivid. The birth of an Axinthean
aesthetic.
Harrisonian poetics.
Dancing on the shoulders of Jersey poet elders, Whitman, C.W. Williams,
and cool Joel Lewis.
Free form mavericks, American outriders, jazz poets.
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The
Marsh at Rosh Hashanah Storm (10 October 2008)
The landfill hills sing golden illuminated, vivid complement
Against the purple bruised storm clouds.
I hardly notice the gas pipe necklaces embedded.
The choreography of power towers gilded
Gyre past in a man-made geology
Shaping the immediacy of my horizon.
The phragmites fuzzy now in September glow doubly
And the poison ivy and poison sumac vie
First to declare their red ochre ascendance.
There is painterly wisdom here in the Marsh.
I strain to study and memorize its aesthetic promise,
Just as when I visit the Caravaggios at the Met.
How to paint the intensity of its living swath.
Martin Johnson Heade, Hudson school romantic luminist,
Captured the storm over the Marsh hay.
We no longer bail hay here in the Meadowlands Wilderness.
Our bails now trucked in by rumbling belching garbage trucks
Are tightly compressed detritus of Jersey effluents/affluence.
But still the luminance remains to be captured, translated
Just as when I visit the Carvaggios at the Met.
A South African artist sent me an email,
What are the pigments of Caravaggio
Which triggered a conversation of landscape
In my brain, my eye and my heart.
A NKS’cape of man meeting/defeating, though
The chapter is not out yet, nature.
Simple rules at exingent initial conditions,
A nexus of unexpected luminance.
That rocks my neurons and propels
Me into the 21st century.
A paradoxical Jersey gift,
One of many.
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Educing
Quiddities
“Where be his quiddities now, his quillets,
his cases, his tenures” --- Shakespeare, Hamlet
Educing information, we are told,
Is both a science and an art. Interrogation.
Too intense, too much pain, too much human shame,
And we get psychological breaks.
As well as scarred genitals.
Water under the bridge. Or board.
Rape as computational torture. Simple rules.
Ah, but we’re up against the ticking time bomb
Conundrum – and so a
Salient of attorney generals sharpened their pencils,
Though they probably wrote with indelible ink,
Certainty coarsed through their veins, patriots all.
Age old customary and international law
Did not apply,
Guantanamo was not US soil, but Cuban,
And that was the solution. QED. (Underlined twice)
US courts do not recognize Cuban law.
Is that science or art?
High science of toxic reason
An art form so pure in lucidity
As to educe snot-vomit quiddity.
And then we try them. Or not.
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Right
here, right now on Harrison Avenue
Dance me a yowling growl of King Lear upwelling before the Marsh.
Dance me a human rights tango.
Dance me a chromate bloom of yellow electric.
A Van Gogh’s “I drank all summer for that
yellow!”
Draw me in with spun tales of Duchampian secession,
Draw me in with unfoldings of process grammars galactic.
Draw me in with hang-fired glass towers sprouting from chromium ore
slag.
Sing me, O oracle composer of this Adventure,
Multilayered cantatas punkified, trampified
Millenial puck chutzpah redemptive co-conspirator.
Right here, right now on Harrison Avenue.
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Daughters
of Persephone, My Hair is On Fire
I called my classmate during the high school football game
As a proud, albeit enduring band mother ----
I hate football --- have since I had to stand during
Losing Army games, forced to participate in
Pomp and hypocrisy ---- Should a raped woman cheer
On the Army Team? No choice.
Oh, she ripped off the decades within minutes of salutations ---
A roommate’s stepdaughter’s NCO leadership was
working
To keep her from being deployed to Afghanistan in ----
A rape brigade.
Daughters of Persephone, my hair is on fire ----
We have borne –
(Strange language when it finally breaks free and hits the air) ----
The hell of rape, the PTSD normality crazed.
And now you, glorious strong youth, go forth into combat ----
With statistics that show you will be
Raped by your fellow soldiers,
More than you will be killed by bullets, mortars or IEDs.
Raped!
And then she shared my old roommate’s concern
That the star LAX man, newly minted 2LT artillery pig,
Might have raped me during that party
Because he could not find her! (I never use exclamation points!)
I had blocked that one out --- never even shared it
With the spectrum of shrinks ---- it was only a minor rape.
A minor rape! (As compared with a gang rape!
As compared to a rape by a tactical officer!
Set to the Sunday morning chapel bells!)
A classmate one star now horrified by the issue –
Helped perhaps by the Sec Army’s lit fire ---
Now gives the training himself.
Men stand up.
An honorable man does not rape his sister warrior.
Daughters of Persephone, my hair is on fire!
“If I’m going to die, I want to fuck the first
thing beside me.”
There it is. Raw. Primal.
Combat, compulsion to murder trained supreme,
Are those woman duly cited for valor
Now collateral damage?
Is it an acceptable price to the military brass?
To our society?
In 2 losing wars.
1500 men were brought up on charges for 90,000 women served
New combat vets --- and those were the reported rapes!
Her NCO leadership did not want to send her
To a Rape Brigade! --- Put that on the flag standard! Unit Motto!
Campaign colors! Unit coin! --- A Rape Brigade!
Daughters of Persephone, my hair is on fire!
Come join me in the patients’ garden at the VA hospital,
We will weep – and plant and paint ---
Along with the aging Vietnam vet grandfathers,
And turn our faces to the sun, hands in the earth,
Joining the long line of generations of War Gardeners.
We who were once superwomen,
Daughters of Persephone.
In the earth, and herbs and vegetables we pick and take home ---
And perfumed roses too that we gather ---
We will reclaim our humanity,
Daughters of Persephone.
Diminished perhaps from our former selves,
We are enriched in the fertile healing Of our Patients’ War
Garden.
Smell the rose geraniums and lavender,
Hold them – no, clutch them against all odds ---
In posies of neurochemicals awakening To your breasts ---
Let us unlock the shame,
The degradation endured,
The brain injury exacted.
Let us feed the hungry ghosts ---
All the names of the Rape Brigade,
And sow, in the blessings of our War Garden,
New neural networks of peace.
Come, my daughters of Persephone,
Join your mothers
in the humus, Warm fertile compost,
And grow vibrant rewarding shoots
In tending a new song of narrative.
The earth endures.
Can we transcend this travesty?
Daughters of Persephone, my hair is on fire!
Come join me in the patients’ garden at the VA hospital,
We will weep – and plant and paint ---
Along with the aging Vietnam grandfathers,
And turn our faces to the sun, hands in the earth,
Joining the long line of generations of War Gardeners.
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Hunter Moon at the East Orange VA
Hunter moon first full moon
After harvest moon,
And I on the 12th floor PTSD flight deck,
One corridor away from the lock down ward,
Am pumped full of anti-psychotics.
CNN screeches in my head
To the Greek chorus of my neurons.
Sweat drenched in full trigger.
[“To save the free market!”]
[“The blue chips are up!”]
[“Within 30 seconds of the bell opening!”]
The resident, with whom I
Don’t have an appointment, he’s sure,
Fusses about the toxicity of the drugs.
[“Never in a million years!”]
[“Financial Armageddon, now nirvana!”]
The 3 AM shortgun rider of
Nightmare panic attacks
Transmutes to diurnal holograms.
I am left with my agoraphobe
Shadow daemon not housebroken,
Huddled under duvet defilade,
Sennelier burnt umber pigments
Under my nails mixed with dog shit.
[“Taking stock of the battlefield states!”]
Trembling, vomiting. Bile of my soul.
Feel fear, pick up the phone.
I can’t pick up.
[“Get results from Nutrasystem for men!”]
Fear is only a biological signal,
My roulette brain wheel plucks a meaning,
Random sense memory firing jagged.
Danger. Something bad –
[“The biggest point gain in history!”]
Is going to happen.
[“What are people in Ohio talking about!”]
But it’s not going to happen.
Someone please tell my brain,
The signal is stuck.
Just as the waiting room of Vietnam grandfathers
Locks on the CNN shrills.
Stuck on stuck. Crawling out of my skin.
One more resident, long line of many,
This one with mother of pearl cufflinks,
Jots down the recited shopping list of traumas.
[“No, sir, I did not see mutilated bodies or
Civilian casualties. I bombed Baghdad a continent away.”]
[“Rape as computational torture.”]
He raises an eyebrow,
And you have an MBA.
To whit, my Goddess of the Markets, cracks:
[“Take an enema and call me in the morning!”]
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Not the norm of my normal now
I want to be normal
Whatever that is
Not the norm of my normal now
They’re titrating down,
Titrating up, nothing so addictive, mind you. Or toxic.
Cut down the wine no longer scotch,
We know it is to numb,
FDA only approves one glass.
Keep the bone-crushing depression at bay,
Give me dreamless dead sleep.
And can someone dial down the panic,
Dial it down.
I must summon the heavens,
I’ve already got the hells,
To break free of my PTSD prison.
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Uxorious Antimacassars
(For a John le Carre wordlist, while listening to WBGO jazz)
Uxorious
antimacassars
invigilate
the tumbrel
in an act of self-transposition.
The Five Excellences (music, literature, physics)
cavort in the oubliette
with “that vibrant, sovereign young woman
on a bicycle, who was not dependent on
social occasions for her identity.”
Mute in a classless accent,
Ernst Barlach sculpts his cry of
both pleasure and pain.
On our filial watch,
we make the weather.
I would like the opportunity to serve the [random radio signals]
‘regeneration through the myth of redemptive violence”
“A violence redeemed by the sense of wonder,
The capacity intertwined with a love of
The landscape in a moral sense”
To ritualize it
As bellweathers of an environmental vision.
But for the abonnements,
a figure of grim artitude
It is all threatened violence.
These are the stories
we should be telling.
A sublimity
spoiled for choice.
Bullocks.
Arrant,
fully attested ordure.
“How do you ever count the unkilled?”
The pantechnion belches
a testudo.
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To risk the intrepid
The postdawn commuter sunrise jams my nerve circuitry
A meeting of old friends back to the future
I am trapped in frozen frenzy.
All it would take is a shower and PATH metrocard swipe
To wrench the twisted frame of animated suspension
To plunder the gap of abdication.
And yet
And yet
And yet
I offer once again a glacial excuse in the white heat glare of opportunity
To velvet cloak the impotence of fear
To carve the gourd mask of arthritic will.
I disembody the negative capacity of asymmetric momentum
To atlas a two block grid of putative self denial
To risk the intrepid reversal irrevocable.
Yet
Yet
Yet
Yet.
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A Sestina and One Sixth
(brake accentuator, mother, marsh, mango, lobster [Dali’s], jury-rig)
To mother the marsh, I must jury-rig the To mother the marsh, I must jury-rig the
Mango on the lobster’s brake accentuator.
The brake accentuator is puncture failed, service novate Irminda lovingly tells me.
For two grand, and change as a mother, the minor Hackensack Toyota deities will
Chant incantations of resurrection, or mango reincarnation with sales tax, it depends.
Do the magic markers of Camden smell like those of our marsh?
The stray dog hair in my hard drive composes the Lobster Contrata.
I remain to jury-rig my obscurity.
It is the mother in constant motion that mans the secret prisons’ sidewalks.
In the mangoes of perspective, time runs constant.
The effluents ebb in the marsh of reality.
A sole lobster feasts bibless in denial,
While the periwinkles strike, refusing to jury-rig the starter course.
The brake accentuator is ahistoric in its untimeless death.
Out on the marsh, blue crabs swim to bosa nova.
Sweat sticky mango juice trickles down my chin.
Elsewhere, the lobster conjugates verbs in classical dative.
Is the illness of robustness about to jury-rig the present?
What exactly is the foresworn destiny of the brake accentuator?
Yet a mother boneweary, we always sense.
Molting the carapace of hope, we find a mango of dissention, now fueled by famished avarice.
The psychiatric inpatient once biologist cuts bait for the lobster traps of our childhoods.
The chopped garlic sieves lavender glaze to jury-rig my cervix of hunger.
And again, the magician technician waltzes the brake accentuator in his alchemical heart.
To mother a poem, we write our progenied sons.
Marsh strong the hounds bay under the rusted iron drawbridge raised up.
Cicada brigades mass to sing the ode of the brake accentuator.
Some Japanese mother technical writer channeled its haikued user manual in a lovelorn cubicle.
Festive yellow chromate blooms beribbon the marsh, heralding sanctuary.
Rock of desire, we have struck the mango of our being.
The lobster migration to the shelf depths sparks a hedgefund sell off in madras shorts.
To jury-rig our dream probabilities remains to be seen.
In stealth profligacy, we jury-rig the future of our grandchildren.
Is this the damn brake accentuator that gossips heat waves with the mechanics’ go-dude.
But do we hear the gasp for mother upon the dying breathes of boy soldiers.
A marsh that silts the cosmos also births the stiped bass eggs.
The promise of mango martinis lit up the Huntington Beach boardwalk.
Young scrubby surfers half wetsuited scarf lobster tacos at sunset a continent away.
To mother the marsh, I must jury-rig the
Mango on the lobster’s brake accentuator.
Plus one sixth, an extra firing, for the hell of it:
A mango of constancy doubts its thick skinned persuasion.
They scream to bring back the dancing lobster, now foreclosed.
Duct tape and saran wrap are the integral tools of the jury-rig.
In brake accentuators we trust a warranty of moral hazard.
While the milkless mother still proffers her breast
To the pilgrim who walks the marsh.
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To our apple
An apple rolled into the bathroom today.
Quite purposeful, there was a trace of lilt in its bounce.
Maybe New York needs its psychotic poet artists ---
I had not thought of it before ---
But that the intensity of the eight mile island
DEMANDS its psychotic poet artists
Who naked to their bones surge at the mood moon
And from their energized (nondrugged?)
Seed syllables of their rabid lips
Unleash art, that gap of sanity so insane
As to electrify the norm of aggression and ignorance
So as to tantrify the brilliant humanity of the moment,
That gasped glimpse.
When we are all psychotically sane
The ground of our normal ever shifting
As we slide towards our death,
New York’s psychotic poet artists dance
The thrill of the primordial
And plant a sloppy kiss of forgiveness for the Mazel Ghazal.
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A Room of My Own
I had a room of my own on Nordstrasse 14
The penthouse atop a daringly renovated building
In Muenster, Germany.
I even set myself a desk, vanished smooth pine desk,
So sensual to smooth my palms on.
I was too frightened to enter that room.
By day an artillery captain, by night a paralyzed artist poet.
Barking orders that choked my muse unspoken gagged.
I did not have the language for my dialect,
though a trained linguist of 6 others.
Drowning in my frozen terror of the darkened room
Joni Mitchell soothing the jarring dance of my still born seed syllables.
That room of my own with its trepidation,
A neural Do Not Enter sign engraved upon my flashback etchings.
The room, as well as the penthouse,
Soon grew mold --- an amazing three dimensional, multicolored colony of spores
Grown amuck nuclear release codes, abusive men and mysogynist colonels,
Counterterrorism paranoia (duct tape and saran wrap came two generations of war later)
Sealed that room of my own.
Sitting in that penthouse of mold with all my pots upon the 180 degree balcony,
Abandoned in the grey snow because I had not installed the kitchen,
Could not, would not bring myself to wash them in the bathtub,
A sangha sister discovered me and over that day plus two decades
Fetched a hot bucket of water and bleach and
Wiped those walls to eradicate the mold colony to
Enter that room of my own to instead
Mine the palette of that colonized colony of mine mind.
Could mad poets guard those nukes?
Maybe we should have mad poets do that
In the multispectrum of rampant fungus –
Check the missiles for “champignons”
As the Belgians used to called the mildew.
How much better than serious thoroughly investigated young boys
Who, on my order, chambered rounds, locked and loaded,
lokapalis of priests and grandmothers, flowers and cheery handpainted sheets
in their aimed/maimed sights/site.
The fence. Defense. We were guarding topped with
The concertina wire – thirty years on I can’t fix it in my mind’s eye –
Was it curved inward or outward?
The riot police dragged the protestors away
Only to leave us to our nuclear weapons ---
Was it curved inward or outward?
The three dimensional multicolored mold colony
Now spreads with each spore my pen lays down.
In the room of my own,
I now dance the vibrancy of its palette.
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The Marsh Stalks Me
I stalk this Marsh
in a hunt for a poetics electric
To fry the nocturnal
And spark the unsaid.
This Marsh stalks me
In an ebb of its tides
To filter the clog
And emerge submerge the inevitable.
The hunt stalks me
In a fey terrifying promise
To jolt the synapse
And bay the dam.
The filter stalks me
In a constricting vacuum
To rob the seed syllapse
And suck the marrow.
The promise stalks me
In an ear splitting echo gnawed on silence
To beckon the present
And forsake the wind.
The dam stalks me
In an unruly unpressure pressing
To build the momentum
And swell the moment.
The marrow stalks me
In a crux of flashed insight
To render the schmaltz
And fortify the verb.
The wind stalks me
In a battering buffet of now
To whip up the furies
And let fly the unwrote.
The moment stalks me
In a welling defiance
To burst the veil
And provoke the act.
The verb stalks me
In a circling salient
To assert the premise
And riot the gag.
The unwrote stalks me
In a relentless hunger
To people the page
And throw out the map.
The act stalks me --- now, now, now
In its cross hairs of what is to be manifested
Painted
Written
And served upon the winds and tides of this Marsh.
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Come,Let us ingest more complexity
Come,
Let us ingest more complexity,
And spit out the seeds of non-memory
And savor the bliss of asymmetric nuance.
Come quick –
Deliver your powerpoint on use and reuse
Either they get it or not,
There will always be souls in the back of the room
Who will mutter, what is the definition,
These are the ones who will get it, and spread it,
And likely so will the others in due time
Be persuaded by the influence of your brilliance.
Come quick, rush to the bus station ---
Let’s board a greyhound
Somewhere headed west,
How about the Lightning Rod Project
Out past Marfa, Texas,
Middle of absolute no where,
Center of the universe.
We’ll sit hundled through the night,
In the back of that rolling bus.
I’ll feed you sandwiches of pesto and
Grilled turnkey breasts on a bed of
Hand plucked dawn greens.
And somewhere due east of Witchita, Kansas
You can whisper me your theories of the cosmos,
Spin me your unfoldings.
Until bleary eyed and road dusted,
The bus will dump us miles from mediocrity,
Middle of absolute no where,
Our center of the universe.
And we shall dance in the lightning strikes,
Our art, music and poetry.
And generate this new Universe.
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O!
Goddess of the Markets!
I come to Her in verklempft supplication,
The Clausewitzian laws of strategy awry,
"O, Goddess of the Markets,
Give me a divination."
Two war fronts and a bailout, gravity gravitus asserts,
500 trades to meltdown, a future in yurts,
Ethical questions, resplendent Avatar,
I do not bring, for momentum is all
In this meltdown freefall.
A recession or depression, we deal
Several years or a decade,
Hangs a Damoclesed forged steel.
My grandmother, the Duchess fashion designer,
Who dreamed herself ascendent at
The dashing globe in the Daily Planet building,
Saw men jump in the crash of 1929.
What say, Goddess, their value to their families
Greater in death than paperless in life.
She declared the party over, eloped with a Naval Officer,
And strove out to China for the last of the American Raj,
Amahs at her beck and call.
Another grandfather lost his hat factory,
Off Jerome Avenue in the Bronx,
Never again to asset his automony,
Always ever a cog in the manufacturing shifts.
Wild Turkey and tea in a glass,
For medicinal purposes only,
Tending his Wandering Jew plants,
Tinctures of cigar butts, coffee grounds and egg shells.
Always multiplying, he specialized in the
Futures of Wandering Jews.
Another grandfather voted with his fellow
Blacksmith forgers cum aircraft designers
To take half time at the plant.
And worked a subsistence farm, stubbornly self-reliant.
He beat my grandmother into submission
When there were no jobs.
A recession or depression, we
deal
Several years or a decade,
Hangs a Damoclesed forged steel.
Recessions we've lived several,
Starting with oil shocks as a kid,
Gas lines, plasticed windows, no winter heating fuel,
Down sleeping bags and hand knit caps.
Neighborhood fathers surf fishing stripers for protein.
Later the '87 crash and the dot com burst.
Always the same stories. Higher up the food chain,
Baby bankers exit with one sole bankerbox of deal scalped trophies,
How the Harvard investment analyst loses her job,
And now wields the commodities of cupcake baking
To the privileged child survivors.
How the trophy wife packs off, later winning
What is left of a margin called empire,
Only to reinvent herself in the next boom
As a real estate agent selling weekend/weakened
Shares at the Lake Mohawk Country Club.
Always the same stories. Lower down the food chain,
Layoffs and retirement funds evaporated,
Foreclosures, bankrupted credit card balances,
And a spider thin silk thread of safety net.
These people disappeared desparacidos
Off the radar screen, closed behind
The screen door in Barkalounged shame.
A recession or depression, we
deal
Several years or a decade,
Hangs a Damoclesed forged steel.
So I chart my strategies while betting on gold:
Either wildcrafting subsistence,
Or go feudal.
Either way I shall squat in the old mill stone ruins
Down the road from your farm, O Goddess of the Market.
And forage the woods, titrating herbal tinctures
And incantations of mystical identity,
To salve the fears of bleeding people
Who will set off to find me,
Bringing a chicken to barter
For my balm of existential hope,
Salve of primal human needs.
Or more ambitious, I will venture forth,
In the last of my stilletos and reptiled clutch,
The pashmina shawl brazenly swooped threadbare
From my mill stone squat to the faded feudal fiefdoms
Of the Masters of the Universe still standing.
There are always some.
And bring them the layered jeweled expressions
of Culture and Art, to witness for them
Deeper truths and beauty in
The pre-dawn hours of stark terror.
A recession or depression, we
deal
Several years or a decade,
Hangs a Damoclesed forged steel.
So sing me a divination, O Deity of Your Golden Technicals,
On this Odysseyed dawn of Doom.
Last standing are always the forest poet prophet
Or court artist.
Either way, several years or a decade,
The way is muddilied clear.
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Kearny
Marsh at the Magic Hour
Make love to me on the
banks of this superfund site.
Caress my body as the wind does the phragmite.
Kiss me until I arch my back with the swollen tides of need.
Fill me until I moan with carp exploding the wet surface
Of this sacred cove in a frenzy of feed.
Bring me with post-industrial certainty
To that transliminal zone of [re]generativity.
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Dispatches
from the Riverkeepers' Dogged War
I read the scrappy eco-guerilla/environmental war hero
Hackensack Tidelines. Dispatches from the riverkeepers'
dogged war,
Taking the front to the courtroom.
Hundreds of millions of tons of chromium waste
Lie buried throughout Hudson County,
But most on the banks of Hackensack.
My metaphors shocked slag indeterminate, is truth a language game.
Honeywell International --- Hexavalent Chromium (Cr(VI)) nastiests of
the nasties,
Merely capping the 50 million tons of contaminated soil is
not deminimous ---
Looked up the word, slung forth in remediation circles and developer
lawsuits.
Complete excavation and clean up to residential site standards,
The good Judge Cavanaugh's declared ruling, historic good faith
negotiation,
Faith in technology, remedial redemption. Or the uncertainty
principle.
Remove the sediment from the riverbed, sand cap the lesser worrisome
Honeyed Wells,
Create wetlands, abate the sewage outfalls north and south of Area 6
and 7,
And then fund eco-access and affordable housing, in the shadowed
horizon of Xanadoo.
Another dispatch: the seemingly-endless battle for
The cleanup of the Passaic severe dioxin massacre site
Won new ground against Repsol YPF (Spain and Argentina)
Through the ruling of the sage Judge Goldman.
For twenty years, Diamond Shamrock Chemical Company
Deliberately, unequivalently, dumped dioxin,
Waste product of Agent Orange, defoliator of nature and humans.
Just as Agent Orange still kills the soldiers and civilians of
Both sides of the Vietnam War presumptive,
So too does the dioxin migrating, settling, poisoning
The lower 17 miles of the Passaic River ---
Is there a crueler verb for poisoning.
To aspirate the rage of the earth ravaged.
Stuck on the Stickle Bridge in traffic,
I peer down at the brown dying river ----
THE WORLD'S MOST CONTAMINATED REGION,
DO NOT CATCH --- DO NOT EAT.
Direct sucessors to Diamond Shamrock,
Maxus Energy Corporation and Tierra Solutions
Schemed to rend their Passaic assets insolvent.
But the sage Judge Goldman ruled that
All seven defendants ere subject to Jersey jurisdiction,
Slurry walls and cement caps not withstanding.
But the sage Judge Goldman sliced through
The Gordian Knot of dioxined criminality,
Scorched earth legacy of Agent Oranged war crimes.
I stand on the north bank of the Harrison Reach,
At the south end of our square mile town.
The September storm encroaching whips up
Ominous silver Novemberish light.
The giant cranes of Red Bull Stadium
Unioned men weld steel flag flying girders.
Why am I left uneasy,
Legacied poisons of industrialized war.
My sons skips with the ballet shoed Brazilian girls
Into his pre-WPA school house. |
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Sunday Morning, Castle Point
Skate Park, Hoboken
Young skate warriors bent on
defying gravity.
Run after run, Manhattan skyline rocketing up, exhorting.
Perfect Labor Day weekend.
Why then am I Jewish single mother
Pleading with son,
to get into the game?
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Harrison Avenue on the first
day of school
A burnt page of molecular
thermodynamics
Followed me home down
Harrison Avenue.
I saw it first on the
sanitized strip of the Riverwalk,
Clustered as the remains of
torched love letters.
Then again this morning,
A single singed page outside
my gentrifying luxury juggernaut.
The sycamores of Harrison
boundary conditions have not yet
Yielded their leaves.
Yet on this first day of
school of 4th grade uniforms,
New Walmart backpacks
smelling of sweatshop democracy, and
Statistical mechanics of
developers reaching buyout prices of the last holdouts,
The soul burnt page of
molecular thermodynamics wafts future forward.
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Spurt scat firings of random
Shabbat morning neural networks
I plucked Queen Anne’s Lace, that noble punk daucus carotus,
as the official flower of the mythic nation Axinthe ---
hardy but
delicate weed that spurts
up defiant in its lacey beauty amidst the rusting ruins in
bespoke [re]generativity, wild carrot
contraceptive since the Middle Ages.
For the mile square cellular automata grid that inhabits the
Harrisonian banks of the poisoned Passaic
and the
wilderness of Meadowlands --- just keep riding, and plucking, from
Stickle Bridge
going east into
the sunrise that fires the Drawbridge sign on Exit 16 of 280W brilliant
gold,
if you hit the
marsh you’ve
gone to far --- or going west from the iron behemoth Witpenn Bridge
into the
sunset that swaths the NJ
Transit doubledeckered commuter chariots as illuminated mid-evil texts
----
We hold our total irrelevance to that rocketing skyline due west across
the Hudson as liberating.
We rashly
improvise a PATH train symphony orchestra of self-organized crazy
wisdom.
We ride out our
thundering windhorse tribe of artist-scientists for an aesthetic
ascendant,
a sensuous
cognition to monkeywrench
that sweet frame of your/our/hours anxious complicit complacency.
My mother -- my father revealed one night as I ran the Garden State in
blizzarded white out ---
dropped acid in
Washington Square park,
where three decades later I sat pregnant
ax-murdering New York NYU summer humidity,
where almost two
decades still later I now ape Duchamp atop the Washington Square
monument,
But from Harrison Bridge Plaza now --- and proclaim to the galaxy
blinkered by ambient light
pollution
secession from fetid and moribund conformist stricture,
THE INDEPENDENCE
OF THE NATION OF AXINTHE. Baroque burlap Revolution,
grounded
in ritual pigments and smeared meanings of our Upper Paleolithic
forelders,
dedicated to the
raucous pursuit and
celebration of truth, “sight, creativity,and sex”
---
and
other Wreath groups of Super Local Unfolding!
Howling on the banks of the Poisoned Passaic at the Jersey Harvest Moon
aborted in mid guttoral thrawl --
what
is my manifesto for this mythic nation of Axinthe?
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Reported
in the Observer, 10 September 2008
The marsh claimed the man child, boy man, 17,
of Little Falls last
Thursday.
A quartermile east of Jerome Avenue off of Schuyler, right at dusk.
The police reported they had to use a heavy four wheel drive to get to
the scene.
There was no cell phone signal out there. Out There.
Green algae covered the water off the 6 foot embankment,
Already closing in dark and murky,
Only because the soles of his books stuck out of the water,
Could they find him.
The dense viscous marsh water flooded his lungs
Until his body no longer struggled trapped under his ATV quad,
370-pound Suzuki LTZ 450R designed for professional tracks.
17 the height of daring, off to ride the marshes, on illegal cut paths
The 16 year old female friend, unnamed in the article, his designated
oracle, traumatized witness.
God rest/wrest his soul. And hers.
The old timers were heard to talk of trappers who left out to the
marshes,
Only their half frozen bodies to be found the next spring.
Our marsh looms sensationally from the blurred whirred turnpiked
commute,
Projected wastelands of cadmium leachate and dead dumped bodies.
But from the embankment in the textured silence of its natural state,
Sans the road of ATV hormonally drenched adolescence adventure,
Sans
the overhead roar of Newark Airport dragonflies,
It’s a force in and of itself, a teeming system, vital
ecotone.
Long after we pass peak oil, the turnpike, runways and ATVs silenced,
The marsh green algae will still close in dark and murky.
The soles of his boots like the cornithianed urban legends of the Penn
Station columns.
The ATV rusted alongside the abandoned telephone poles and muskrat
hovels.
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Ace Hardware Heralds, 2nd Street
“Tubular P Traps!” he
cried out with glee.
Nothing could tickle a fourth grader’s reality more.
I cringed, trying on the mask of the proper-mother-in-a-small town,
Lest Saint Mar’, the stooped sweet crossing guard lady,
Who knows by the way, when the rain always begins, 5 to 3,
Hear this revelation.
As we hit the 280 underpass,
Where we swear there live night birds that squawk over the roar of
downshifting semis,
But may in fact be a warning for blind pedestrians crossing,
Yet is actually an screaming avian alarm to scare away
shitting pigeons,
There it was ---
Lit up on the Ace Hardware digital herald: “Tubular P
Traps!”
And even better: “Ball sweat valves!”
“1/2 and 3/4s!”
For all to see in broad daylight on 2nd Street.
Like if you bought 25, would they throw in a discounted grill?
Only the pack of fourth graders know.
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Our
Ladies of Harrison
Each morning and afternoon, the battalion
Of sworn-in and rightfully deputized crossing guards
Man/woman up their designated posts on each street corner of Harrison.
Saints medals, gold angels and badges
Upon post-menopausal neon vested bosoms,
And all, with the expection of one token gentleman
Who conducts his corner as a courtly matador,
Wear perky makeup and dress earrings.
Where else in the 21st century urban ecology,
Can a child and a mother receive the blessings and protection
Of the town matriarchs at each crosswalk,
Both ways to and fro, two times a day?
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An
Arlo's movement moment
I did my Bush years in the mean suburbs of Orange County, SoCal.
9-11 blew me out to do time behind the Orange Curtain,
In the desert of civilization fried consumption.
I opened a box and my grandfather's Naval Academy alumni book emerged.
There I was the nude bottomed oneyearold looking out to sea
With the chivalrous attribution: "The Third Generation Takes
Over the Watch."
Not enough, then 10 years later, I stand in a photo update,
Not naked assed this time, but bikinied on a frozen February beach,
To make the alumni rag deadline of course,
A young woman child co-modified no less
By the women who were to send me off to serve,
All ready conditioned to be subserviently lady polite.
This week, a woman veteran espoused a stand:
If they try to rape you, you are a soldier taught to kill,
Not a cunt to defile ---
Fight them to death.
Let them courtmartial you for murder in self defense.
A helluva, fuck yeah, better option than
PTSD madness for the rest of your life.
The first girl might get screwed by the jury of her peers, but
Imagine the impact of --- choose whichever statistic works for you ---
Thousands of dead attackers, senior, junior, known and unknown,
Murdered in self defense.
And this was in a veterans' peace forum.
Imagine an Arlo's movement moment. |
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Half
Blossom
Unfolding impinged
You sent me away half blossom.
Dressed in bows to my toes
Yielding yea yearning to be untied.
Life trauma all to be defied
In the renewable capacity of Heart
To Unfurl its flag petals of love.
So the Axinthe nation moves on,
Heart not broken, but bruised.
You sent me away in half blossom. |
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The
Second Gilded Age
They pancaked, the floors
Melting in the fired contagion of JP4.
And blew out the dust cloud of abestos
And broken pulverized remaindered souls
To the Jersey City waterfront Wall Street West.
And blew me out to Disney-fried suburbs of SoCal conservative leachate.
For a 6 year walkabout, Faulkner's Babylon line "I lost everything I
wanted in the boom."
Sanity, supposed reality, and the ability to add numbers in my head.
I painted the palette of madness through the Second Gilded Age
As my uncle's tract house doubled up in the boom
And Macho Comacho's property value lawn patrol ticketed
My organic native garden for maintaining a public nuisance.
Then having arrived at my nautilused internal destination,
I sold it in blood bathed freefall,
People SUV'd families with W04 bumper stickers disappearing in the
night,
Fleeing culdesacked balooning bubbling ARMs.
And decamped back just in time
To catch the contagion of this next mushrooming cloud.
Bet big in gold, papered value already a lesson.
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A
Riot of Art
I want to incite a riot of art,
A frame smashing, life torching, heart braking frenzy of poetry.
As the punks, campesinos and farmers did with WTO Geneva.
My cunt yearns to sing.
With a wombed spinnbarkeit insouciance,
No fear of having it suck, just scat jazzed hunger,
I'll smear it as a Harrisonian badge of courage,
Drying blood of meno-paused carmine.
Just an explosion of famished creativity.
My labia sat on those warm cosmic atom coarsing tactical nukes,
Redolent as an empress LT to captain of death.
Later my velvet vulval vestibule pulsed airstrikes
Down on the Air Force command complex of Baghdad.
My cunt yearns to sing.
Has it forgotten the lyrics,
Struck dumb by slurb violence sprawled, screaming market meltdown,
But not the primordial rhythm, no.
I squat down, not daintily but greedy, in the marsh water of the
superfund,
At the banks of Meadowlanded remediating beauty,
Attended by the bluecrabs and falcon,
In a mikvah of cadmium, chromium and PCB'd ablution.
My cunt yearns to sing. |
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Come
Sit With Me in the Harrison PATH Station
Come sit with me in the Harrison PATH station,
I'll bring artisanal food offerings, perhaps as temptation.
You need only budget twenty minutes more into your commute,
Knowing full weel your empire unfoldings of world class repute.
We'll light upon a bench on the North track side,
For those moments all time and demands be defied.
We'll dream of venues of redemptive aesthetics to weave
And manifest our aesthetic redemptions to achieve.
You'll play for me your Tramp symphony,
I'll spin festivals to experimental infinity.
You'll structure the future decoded abstract expression,
I'll fuse the gestural with Baroque secession.
You'll people your PATH Train Symphony Orchestra,
I'll magnetize my guerilla scat mecca.
Come sit with me in the Harrison PATH station,
Here at the birth of the Axinthe nation. |
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Processes
at Discontinuities
Teach me tonight,
The process grammars of unfolding.
The intensity of your mind
Melting the walls of my resistances.
Stretching -- liberation
Overcoming rigidity
Breaking through durchbrueck
Pulling open
Yielding
A contagion of asymmetry. |
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I
Have Been Granted Back
I have granted back the secret life of my girlhood.
That aspect of myself, my inner life of a girl, was smashed.
They aimed at all costs to destroy it,
Extinguish it with impunity.
Lest its vitality, source of life, threaten, destroy the mandate of
violence.
And I in my survival locked it away, deep desperate within my inner
resolve.
Imprisoned in my bleeding resistance, blocking the traumatic recall.
A dam frenzilied defended, force of my being.
Terrified at the potential break down, break through, the raging flood.
I could never look at the Balthi, frozen in midflash on the precipice
of violation.
In my metabolizing of those neural barriers, courage, vomit, an ocean
of tears,
The shredding barbed wire and flaming parapets,
I mourned its loss.
Yet in this precious gift, I discover it was never lost, never
destroyed,
It is my own fuel of my sight, my creativity, my sex.
It is my own. |
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Talisman
I reread my paper.
In the future research section, at the very end of the paper,
Right before my return in depth to the traditions and secrets of craft,
I wrested the jewel unconscious from my heart, my art, my eye:
"The brush-stoked shapes in the complex paintings
Seem to resemble some of ML's shapes."
At the very end of the paper,
One small sentence, held like a talisman
In the forces of scientific jockeying.
The demand for more math and less poetry.
Like a whispered yearning to the universe.
More as a trembling assetion, a daring willing it to be manifested.
A small prayer of perturbation in the network of haikued code. |
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Reflecting
the Illusive Nature of Love
May I revel in, drink deeply of, this sunlight,
To grow and blossom, unfurl before and of it,
Such that my gifted radiance reflects back to the mirror,
The blazing light inherent, a recursive infinity of grace. |
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The
Dance of the Racehorse Balking
I spooked myself. The racehorse balking, eyes roiling
confused.
My 12 year old blaze of creativity, and wonder, and sexual hunger.
Messy, raw, spontaneous, dancing fully in the light
Giggling with delight. Ferally curious, wild exalting.
There exposed. Offered up in the moment of play and grace.
Amichai's open plain and me searching
Clamoring for an exit, an escape.
But also for the courage to dare.
I sit now and just watch the fear, and watch the dance.
For if they did not kill it, and I did not lose it,
It is mine. To be fully lived and honored.
And gifted. |
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Tara
Krause Visual
Artist