Email to the Buffalo
07/20/08 6:43 AM Bersone:
Buffalo
I heard an interesting interview on http://www.ttbook.org/ with d j spooky, who just wrote a book called Journal Unbound and has
a latest cd out, Rebel Creation -- influenced by Cage and into the digital collage world we live in where people rip, mix and remix: plagarism displacing individual conceptual genius into a mix -- more like how it was in Shakespeare's day actually. Very confirming of your work. MIT press issued book. I attach poem I mentioned this morning, re: global warming circa mid seventies. Mucho Mulato adiamente quel que fois!Attachment:
(oneski)
geno-cide
brown smoghaze fades into the infinite today
smothering the hills of Marin from view
dead starfish roll onto the beach in small
sick waves
another weird
dry winter
where is the lyric poet
without clear air?
we eat mushrooms & run around Point Reyes naked
the deer don’t mind us & we hear the wings of crows
breaking overhead, as we lie still in the gray grass
back in the city
we eat pizza & pass out
exhausted, having wrestled another physical day
from the death going on all around
everybody working too goddamned hard for the wrong things
we’re at the top of the seashell: the spirals going faster & faster
we’re at the top & all about to crash & even that’s no news:
what the fuck are we going to do?
how can you not follow your nose?
(twoski)
eleven convicts escaped city jail
A snitch tipped the cops that one
was holed up in a hotel downtown.
They surrounded the place, broke
down doors & windows, shot teargas
into his room: waited. He didn’t come out.
Finally they busted in only to find him sleeping.
“didn’t the teargas bother you?” they asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “I just
thought it was a little smoggier than usual.”
We breathe the same air, convicts & I.
We have many similar convictions.
SF, 1977
07/21/08 6:55 AM Buff:
I like the Oneski, Twoski rhythms. The piece is like brilliant shards of glass glimmering in the morning sun - each shard complete within its shattered self. A few shards that caught my eye immediately: "we hear the wings of crows" "the spirals going faster & faster" "We breathe the same air, convicts & I" Your eye in the center of your humor brings a pleasing depth. You said that Valline didn't respond to this. Again, I think she may be taking herself way too seriously, looking for something "epic" and missing the jewels you expose right there in the gravel of our daily lives. I'd like to see Threeski, Fourski, etc. Perhaps the driving poems could be added in this sequence. However they are organized isn't all that important. Each is a little peek at the truth; the delightful truth of this marvelously absurd life.
07/21/08 5:50 AM Bersone:
thank you for your cherished and respected responses to my poems, which I rarely acknowledge but which mean so much to me. I must share a little thing I observed/overheard this evening, as I approached the BART stairs on Market and fourth in the cold summer fog of the city: a middle aged black man was retrieving, unexpectedly it seemed, an almost unsmoked cigarette from the pebbled trash receptacle, and almost absent-mindedly remarked to himself quietly as I passed hurriedly by, "You can pretty much give up the chastity pose." obviously an educated man down on his luck. I wished I'd had the presence of mind to slip him a twenty, but the rush swept me by as he dropped his pearl into my ear, completely free and dearly earned
07/22/08 5:53 AM Buff:
Wow! What a gift.
I heard this one recently from a black man talking in a loud voice on his cell phone as he passed through a small crowd of us waiting for access to the sidewalk ATMs:
"Girlfriend? Girlfriend! The only girlfriend that nigger ever had was his right hand!" None of us so much as flinched, stoic and hardened as we are.
:)
07/25/08 6:33 AM Bersone:
Man I wish I was up there; I'm in uncharted territory here, on about my seventeenth or eighteenth day. El bizarro not zorro: attaching a little thing I've been plucking at for a couple of days before work, it's turned into something of a hodgepodge but it'll sort itself out. Different ways to get a sense of the whole hanging together, sometimes the structure and sound of the words, sometimes the theme and content, sometimes a voice, sometimes trying to connect dots in the chaos like seeing leo in the stars. So many people agree that three stars are Orion's belt you've got to wonder if its mass hypnosis. Hope you're refreshing yourself. No emotion's pure but only emotion endures.
Attachment:
This Acoustic World
The snarl of Hell’s Angels’ Harleys
comforts me, as their bikes land
and take off through the night,
giving a little vibrato to the cello
playing Brahms on the radio.
I think this is because the universe is so deep
at this time of night -- the sound
of the threat
seems to stretch and
bend until it is finally
absorbed into the resolving silence.
And yet we’re so afraid to let ourselves out!
In a world that can take everything you’ve got!
I think of you in our house in the foothills
and wonder what you hear –
maybe rain
on the ivy outside the window or
deer delicately stepping between sticks,
as if trying to avoid walking on the dead
who are everywhere in the living ground.
I am listening to you listening far away
just that much extension
of whatever I am makes me
sense possibilities beyond myself, and I
battling for a buck in the bay area
am an exile
from a promising dimension
where all my real responsibilities lie hapless
abandoned as my grandfather’s tools
after a stroke paralyzed his left side.
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