From a Recent OxfordSEO Literary Representation Press Release:09/23/2022.
A lot of people don’t like our resident unarmed poet Igor Goldkind. Although hard pressed to detail exactly what the source of their antipathy is, when asked most people who’ve met or know him agree on one thing:
Igor is a pain in the ass.
Some would go as far as to say a Royal Pain in the Ass; although any association with the recent demise of Queen Elizabeth or the Royal family in general, is merely conjecture.
When asked about his reaction to this near universal judgement, Igor Goldkind tends to shrug his shoulders and agree:
“Sure, I’m a pain in the ass, especially to anyone wedded to static protocols, conformist mediocrity and any rule that should be followed blindly because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it'”.
Let’s look at a recent example of his ass-painery. Due to enormous stress and harrassment inflicted by certain individuals (to remain nameless until the court dates), Igor was recently diagnosed with a minor heart failure. After initial panic and a visit to the ER, the initial diagnosis, although precluding an imminent heart attack did necessitate a referral to both cardiology and vascular specialists to eliminate possible causes.
Both were seen and a routine series of tests were scheduled for this week including a Stress Echo Heart test, a heart monitor and a spectogram. Igor called his daughter and without freaking her out, brought her up to date and then gladly picked up the dice to his destiny and gave them a roll.
3 tests were scheduled for this past Monday, Tuesday and then tomorrow. A hectic week to put one’s heart through the paces.
On his way to his first appointment for the monitor last Monday, Igor was surprised to receive a text cancelling the appointment 45 minutes before hand. This was followed by two more text messages cancelling all of his heart monitoring tests without explanation apart from the fact that his insurance provider Molina Healthcare had denied them. Pulling his Thunderbird to the side of the road in Mission Bay, Igor proceeded to telephone his consultant and then his insurance provider to determine the cause of the cancellations.
As light transpired the insurance company’s independent arbitrator had determined that the tests were unnecessary as Igor had never had a pacemaker or open heart surgery. An insurance company administrator who had never even met Igor Goldkind, much less examined him, could overrule the expertise of his health provider and two consultants he was referred to who had examined him.
Hours of being placed on hold, waiting for supervisors, lodging complaints, grievances and appeals, Igor was able to get a call back from a Molina administrator who apologized for the last minute cancellations and reinstated the tests, albeit now delayed by two weeks.
However, our resident pain-in-the-ass wasn’t satisfied with his own private victory. Now that he has a member of the insurance company’s management on the phone, he demanded to know why Molina could adopt this absurd and potentially life threatening policy of over ruling of health specialists by a bureaucrat intent only on saving money?
A grievance was filed on his behalf and this morning he received a telephone call from an executive VP of Molina, once again apologizing for his treatment and then assuring him that based on his complaint, Molina had reviewed its approval policy and would from now on no longer deny a test recommendation without first consulting with the specialist who had recommended the test in the first place….across the board for all members!
This is the benefit of being a pain-in-the-ass, when you’re acting not solely out of personal interest but out of precedent and principle.
So like him or not, Igor Goldkind leads his life based on George Bernard Shaw’s Maxim:
“A reasonable man expects to adapt to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore, all human progress is made by unreasonable men”.
NOTHING
of the memorable crisis
or might
the event have been accomplished in view of all results null
human
WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE
an ordinary elevation pours out absence
BUT THE PLACE
some splashing below of water as if to disperse the empty act
abruptly which otherwise
by its falsehood
would have founded
perdition
in these latitudes
of indeterminate
waves
in which all reality dissolves
EXCEPT
on high
PERHAPS
as far as place can fuse with the beyond
aside from the interest
marked out to it
in general
by a certain obliquity through a certain declivity
of fires
toward
what must be
the Septentrion as well as North
A CONSTELLATION
cold from forgetfulness and desuetude
not so much
that it doesn't number
on some vacant and superior surface
the successive shock
in the way of stars
of a total account in the making
keeping vigil
doubting
rolling
shining and meditating
before coming to a halt
at some terminus that sanctifies it
All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice.
From Collected Poems (University of California Press, 1994) by Stéphane Mallarmé. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people love their dogs more than they love you.
Doggy dog people think that four feet are better than two. Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Can’t go out without a leash in their hand They just can’t interact with their fellow man. Without a doggy dog.
Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people do pick up their doggy’s dog poo in little plastic bags But sure don’t like being called out for what their woof-woofs do do.
Doggy dog people Doggy dog people Doggy dog people don’t have a clue. That they’re accountable for the things their doggy dogs do. Like beg food from your bowel when what you need is some peace in your soul. Doggy people won’t leave you alone. They need you to ask them what…
Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people love their dogs more than they love you.
Doggy dog people think that four feet are better than two. Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Can’t go out without a leash in their hand They just can’t interact with their fellow man. Without a doggy dog.
Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people do pick up their doggy’s dog poo in little plastic bags But sure don’t like being called out for what their woof-woofs do do.
Doggy dog people Doggy dog people Doggy dog people don’t have a clue. That they’re accountable for the things their doggy dogs do. Like beg food from your bowel when what you need is some peace in your soul. Doggy people won’t leave you alone. They need you to ask them what kind of a cute doggy dog they own.
Doggy-dog people, Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do. Doggy dog people don’t have a clue That they’re accountable for all the things their dogs do. Doggy-dog people have no sense of esteem that doesn’t come with a leash wrapped round its throat and spleen.
Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people, Doggy dog people have no sense of their own So they sniff each others butts as its safer than being on their own. Doggy-dog people Doggy-dog people
Doggy dog people got nothing to say They just walk their dogs all over my day And look for other doggy dog people to cross their way. Doggy dog people won’t answer for the things their dogs do Because they’re Doggy-dog people and haven’t got a clue.
Doggy People got no love for mankind They can’t stand themselves or the friends that they have So they put their ids on a leash, follow their slave surrogate friends and Hope that petting a dog will somehow make amends.
Doggy-dog people, Doggy-dog people get on my nerves with the things they make their dogs do. Doggy-dog people don’t have a clue Doggy dog people never answer for the things their dogs do Doggy-dog people can’t talk to boys or girls on their own They need a doggy-dog to break out of being alone
So If you see a doggy person walking down the street just throw them a bone. And hope that they take their doggy dog home.and leave the unleashed people alone. Doggy-dog people Doggy dog people. Doggy dog people, Please leave me alone!
I’m a Poet, a Producer and lately a Publisher of aesthetic, sometimes eclectic content that speaks to the truth of living your life in today’s moment of existence. Beyond the Real World is the Actual World, which I prefer to inhabit. There really is only one world but social delusions, language and mathematics make us concoct a duality between the “Real” and the “Actual”. It’s just a trick of the light on our senses.
Oddly and recently, I’ve received a lot of flak and unarticulated hostility from people who just like the way things are. Either they get some advantage out of our current state of disconnect or they’ve become so habituated to futilely struggling, to being dehumanized that they prefer what they’re familiar with rather than facing the unknown of change.
Having a back ground in ‘technology’ I do know one universal truth about ‘systems’ and that is ‘systems’ can always be improved upon. In fact if ‘systems’ aren’t being perpetually improved, they fall by the way side and become impediments to useful change.
As is with technology, so it is true of the human community and its social structures. My father was an anthropologist and a sociologist at a time when the very word ‘society’ was being challenged as having no meaning.
My work is about returning meaning to the term “society”. to the set of complex interactions we consider collectively as the norm and worth compromising our individuality for. Society is us and what we make of it, every day of every interaction you have with another human, either well known or a stranger to you. How you treat others out of fear or openness is multiplied by millions and the sum total consists the society we are all part of and are all living in.
No man is an island and no woman can be exiled to one.
This is not about politics or ideology, this is about awareness and mindfulness as to how each of us is as part of a whole. There’s only one race, the human race and you are part of it. The only question is with what degree of awareness are you running in the human race?
Looking backwards, in hindsight, I now realize the the steady stream of anonymous antagonism and threats I’ve received over the past year all started when my album BREATHLESS – A nostalgia for Oxygen was released last year on Bandcamp by my spoken word producer Frédéric Iriarte and largely composed by my art brother Jair-Rohm Parker Wells.
I believe it is the most popular track from the album, I CAN’T BREATH, the last words of George Floyds recited as a spoken word, ‘found’ poem by a ‘white’ voice that triggered the attention that all to soon became menacing and I have had to take unprecedented steps to protect myself from.
It is a tremendous album and well worth the free fee by which you can listen to it. I assure you that you’ve never heard anything like it before although I’m sure you’ve heard Ornette Coleman, Laurie Anderson, Willian Burroughs, David Byrne and Anthony Braxton. If not, you should listen to them too as they are the inspirations for our album.
Thank you for your attention, it’s the most precious commodity in the universe: your attention.
Take these seeds And thrust them deep inside your pockets So that when you die and your body becomes the earth Sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.
Ballerinas and camouflaged beauty queens will greet you in the streets With pirouettes of spinning bullets behind barricades of sheets. My grandmother will serve you up Molotov’s cocktails. The orphans you murdered will dance around you sleepless until dawn So that sunflowers will grow once again from the land you killed to claim.
Do you fear for war? Ask of the stillness evermore, Ask of the field, or ask the breeze, and ask the birch and poplar trees. Ask of the children who now lie beneath the birch trees and the sky, and let their mothers tell you once more Whether or not you should fear for war.
They died so that the children from ev’ry shore might live without your fear of war. Ask those who fought, and those erased, ask those planted in the rubble of Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast Ask the women you embrace. ask your mother –ask my wife–, So that you will wonder never more Whether you have cause to fear for war.
Who longs for war? Who longs for war? No one but those who are no more. No one living longs for war But war cares not for your longing or yearning for living. Or your fears for war War will always arrive uninvited to your door.
When war comes calling to your front door. You cannot lock the war outdoors. You cannot run and hide behind your chair Or bury your head under the covers of your bed.
When war comes to your front door There is nowhere to run, nowhere to go The corpses of your neighbors will hinder your flight You cannot let fear become your general To give up the fight To surrender to might.
Instead, you must stand with the sunflowers in the golden fields Stand with our heads facing the sun. Pour your bravery into an empty coke bottle And pick up a gun. Stand for freedom, for the children we have lost Stand up for liberty, against the tide of tyranny. Stand up for yourself as much as any other.
Summon your courage to stand like man, Like a like a clown, like a woman, like a child. The cries of their answer rises loud and clear for all people, ev’rywhere, to hear. The message now is as before: Do not fear, Do not fear, Do not fear for war,
In La Jolla, California there is a holy cove Hiding beneath the palm-tree hotel lawns That match the pacific blue hues with emerald park greens, In La Jolla there’s a holy cove where my childhood still lies sheltering, Down the stairs below. Beneath the seagull soiled sand stone, the slapping sounds of flip-flop-feet, the pelican congregations and the belching, barking mad seals who think that they are lions.
La holy cove is a tiny sand-globe of cave and rock and Frolicking white puppy waves. A shelter for children learning how to swim Within reach of their parents’ gaze La holy cove stretches her arms out yearning for La Jolla Shores Across the underwater canyon, beyond the curvature of her embrace.
I jump in to swim through the open canyon, towards adventure, towards the churning waves beyond me. No longer confined by her protection, I am a wild, happy seal with a snorkel to breath and fins to fly. Swimming free, through the miniature underwater circus of la holy cove Past the orange Garibaldi clowns, the spotted leopard sharks, the casually waving anemones. Overhead, trapeze-less gulls are calling out, reminding me to come up for air.
La Holy Cove – Margarita Zuniga
Now I am beyond the cove Beyond the underwater canyon, beyond the shoreline caves Beyond the reach of Sunny Jim and the White Lady’s grin. Beyond the Tombstone markers Where there are no bodies, just the memories of long gone Bottom Scratchers, Ancient Greek fishermen, fallen on their spears.
I swim deep inside the Clam’s open cave Where I first saw the world’s sunlight bouncing off an ocean mirror, To dance on the walls of my darkness. Where the real and unreal collude To make memory a sanctuary, Where childhood warmly welcomes our return.
When I emerge and meet my mother’s scared eyes I lie down and breath in waterlogged undulations, Of sand made liquid by my body’s memory of the oceans sway The warm sand is a rocking cradle My mother puts a towel around my shoulders and asks “Why do you always go out so far? It scares me”.
These are the rules to write by, to live by, escape the penitentiary of the mediocre into the wilder realm of raw living experience, Whitman’s sun burning warmth through the skin of our beings.
These are the rules to guide by, to breath by, to masturbate and fornicate by. Rules to die by.
These are the rules, the markers of life as it is lived as it can only be truly known. Believe it until it’s no longer true.
Accept That there is nothing you can do. Accept That you cannot control or know for certain the outcome of events. Accept That you are merely one of trillions. Accept That your parents are dying or already dead. Accept That you are dying and this all means nothing. Accept That you are vulnerable, shatterable to the winds of fate. Accept That even the mountains die. Accept That you are truly alone Accept That you will die alone. Accept That you will remember none of this. Accept What you will not accept.
Igor Goldkind 2020
Illustration by Rian Hughes 2020 from: Take a Deep Breath – Living With Uncertainty
The month of January was silent due to my having accused a local mask-denier of demonstrating “a lethal stupidity”. 30 day suspension for “bullying’. I assume based on her complaint that I was telling her not to spread misinformation.
My latest trespass, again for another 30 days (first 7, until I appealed the decision), was for taking issue with a Trump supporter on one of Alexandra Cortez’s threads.
The woman was claiming that AOC had made up her account. A Portuguese participant commented in AOC’s defense whereupon the virulent QAnon proponent told the Portuguese national that he was a foreigner and to mind his own business, going back to his own country. I immediately responded in his defence by inviting him as my guest, to comment on anything he wanted to in the land of freedom of speech and then chastised the woman to stop being an ignorant American.
She complained that I was nationally slandering her for being an American manifestation of supreme ignorance. I was again suspended from using Facebook for 30 days, 27 more.
My appeals have been well reasoned and completely ignored.
I am awaiting the moral judgement of the algorithmic overlords by which human employees make decisions at Face Book. Repeatedly, I have been censured and censored for challenging misinformed comments that Facebook itself, if it contained one iota of the moral standard it claims to hold, should have caught in the first place!
If challenging and taking issue with those who question the legitimacy of the election, the validity of the pandemic or its remedies and continue to spout dangerous, Trump inspired, racist and and anti vax madness goes against Facebook’s Community Standards then those standards and their deployment are in serious need of actual public review and scrutiny.
In the meantime, I shall wallow in the righteousness of my exile. Dostoievski won’t be drinking alone tonight in the Facebook Gulag.
The real war between man and machine is about whose judgment is wielded and whose judgment prevails. This battle is fought every time we use the net to transact. At what point do our algorithmic interpreters control the game?You find human judgment in abeyance and retreat each and every time you deal with a call center.
Logic is now servant to system:
“This is the way it’s done, always been done”. “It’s not set up that way.”
We are slowly but steadily surrounding human judgment to the computational power of machines.
Soon, ‘computation’ will be a competitive methodology for cognition itself and non algorithmic entities will be on the defensive. We will compete to be better machine-like people; while the machine have already crossed the finish line, miles ahead of us.
Nourish your exceptionalism. Don’t be so distracted by expediency that you learn to overlook your common sense. Machines were invented to emulate and enhance human judgment, but not to replace it. Remember who you are.
The human mind is not a machine. But the machine was made by the human mind.
My Credentials for “Bullying”, “Persecuting”, “Mutilating” and “Obsessing” over the racist David Kirke; or so say my critics. As my Sikh friend and young teacher Prabjot Singh would say “Dont’ blame them, they are only children who need to be guided”.
Ivan Moscovich has created more brain-teasers than most people have solved crosswords. Igor Goldkind set out to piece together his fascinating and harrowing life.
Ivan Moscovich has his life’s work wrapped up in a bundle of about 10,000 pages of A4 paper. On those pages there are some 5,000 separate puzzles, puzzles that range from the hang-on-let’s-look-OK-I-see to beyond the fiendish. Some are variations on themes, some utter one-offs. Some are to be made on paper or card, some are designs for tricky little – or big – devices. Moscovich calls them the S.A.M. archive – science, art and mathematics. The puzzles use…
A book of poetry and art, fables and philosophies aimed at the pandemic of crisis anxiety so many are facing.
In uncertain times people turn to uncertain means. This is a book of poetry and art, of fables and philosophies aimed at the pandemic of crisis anxiety so many of us are going through right now in our daily lives and in our inner spaces. We are all of us and each us in this together.
The sciences but also the arts do provide remedies. The ancient Egyptians wrote curative words on fragments of papyrus to feed their burnt ashes to the afflicted. Lacking morphine, Walt Whitman read verses to fallen soldiers on the battlefields of the first Civil War.
At their best, the right words are more than therapeutic, they can be curative. Take a Deep Breath emulates this ritual here in administering remedies for living in these times of crisis, in living with uncertainty.
Haven’t you noticed? I’ve been pulling my hair out not knowing who to call. They’ve suckered us all in with another used year! Sure, it’s been refurbished and looks a lot like a New Year, But don’t be fooled, This is a counterfeit New Year being passed off as a real one. The surface looks sharp but its purely cosmetic. It won’t load the latest Operating System It’s warranty has long since lapsed. And its components are no longer compatible. Don’t be fooled by fake years. You’ll wind up forgetting the real ones.
Do something! Call somebody. Don’t just sit there lamenting Demand refunds and store credits! Stomp your feet and threaten court actions. But whatever you do, don’t be taken in by second-hand years, When what we really all need is a new one.
A Brief History of Poetry Therapy From the collection of poetry, philosophy and art TAKE A DEEP BREATH: Living With Uncertainty by Igor Goldkind (Chameleon Publishing, 2021)
Poetry Therapy, or poetry which is used for healing and personal growth, can be traced back to primitive Man, who used religious rites in which shamans and witchdoctors chanted poetry for the well-being of the tribe or individual. It is documented that as far back as the fourth millennium B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, words were written on papyrus and then dissolved into a solution so that they could be physically ingested by the patient and take effect as quickly as possible.
The first poetry therapist of historic record was a Roman physician by the name of Soranus in the first century A.D., who prescribed tragedy for his manic patients and comedy for those who were depressed. It is not surprising that Apollo is the god of poetry as well as medicine, since medicine and the arts were historically entwined. For many centuries the link between poetry and medicine remained obscure. The poet John Milton wrote in 1671:
“Apt words have power to swage The tumours of a troubled mind And are as balm to festered wounds.” Pennsylvania Hospital, founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and the first in the United States, employed many ancillary treatments for their mental patients, including reading, writing and the publishing of their work. Dr. Benjamin Rush, called the ‘Father of American Psychiatry’, introduced music and literature. The writing of poems was was encouraged, and the results were published in The Illuminator, their own newspaper.
On the battlefields of the American Civil War, Union field medic Walt Whitman would administer recitations of verse to fallen soldiers who were well beyond hope long before the use of morphine. He was later to pen the classic Leaves of Grass, the greatest celebration of humanity in the midst of its own despair. Pennsylvania Hospital employed this approach as early as the mid- 1700s.
In the early 1800s, Dr. Benjamin Rush also introduced poetry as a form of therapy to those being treated. In 1928, Eli Greifer, an inspired poet who was a lawyer and pharmacist by profession, began a campaign to show that a poem’s didactic message has healing power. He began offering poems to people as prescriptions, and eventually started “poem-therapy” groups at two hospitals with the support of psychiatrists Dr. Jack L. Leedy and Dr. Sam Spector. After Griefer’s death, Leedy and others continued to incorporate poetry into the therapeutic group process, eventually coming together to form the Association for Poetry Therapy (APT) in 1969.
Librarians also played a major role in the development of this therapeutic approach. Arleen Hynes was a hospital librarian who began reading stories and poems aloud, thus facilitating discussions on the material and its relevance to each individual in order to better reach out to those being treated and encourage healing. She eventually developed a training program for those interested in teaching poetry therapy.
In 1980, all the leaders in the field were invited to a meeting to formalize guidelines for training and certification. At that meeting, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was founded. As interest grew, books and articles were published to guide practitioners in the practice. Hynes and Mary Hynes-Berry co-authored the 1986 publication Bibliotherapy — The Interactive Process: A Handbook. More recently, Nicholas Mazza outlined a model for effective 188 poetry therapy, also discussing its clinical application, in Poetry Therapy: 189 Theory and Practice.
The Journal of Poetry Therapy, established in 1987 by the NAPT, remains the most comprehensive source of information on current theory, practice, and research. There is also a relationship between psychological healing and incantations, either repeated as a musical chant by the patient or recited by the attending medicine man. Of course, modern medicine and science consider the notion of magical incantations possessing healing or restorative powers as so much superstition.
But this, of course, begs the question that if recitations and incantations had no evidential result and no beneficial property then why would have nearly every human culture have adopted the method and repeated it for thousands of years? Surely if there was no value to vibrating the air with the sound of one’s breath, rising from the abdomen, pushed upwards by the lungs, shaped by the throat, mouth and tongue, with the added stimulation of associative meanings being understood cognitively by the patient’s mind, we would have given it and its sisters, singing and chanting, up aeons ago.
I am not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent, but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and cognition, and for which there maybe a myriad of imprecise explanations, none of which can fully explain why it works. Today, poetry therapy is practiced internationally by hundreds of professionals including poets, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, social workers, educators and librarians. The approach has been used successfully in a number of settings — schools, community centers, libraries, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and correctional institutions, to name a few.
SO HOW DOES POETRY THERAPY WORK?
• Poetry is beneficial to the process of introspection, and can be used as a vehicle for the expression of emotions that might otherwise be difficult to express
• Poetry promotes self-reflection and exploration, increasing selfawareness and helping individuals make sense of their world.
• Poetry helps individuals redefine their situation by opening up new ways of perceiving reality.
• Poetry helps therapists gain deeper insight into those they are treating.
In general, poetry therapists are free to choose from any poems they believe offer therapeutic value, but most tend to follow general guidelines. Some poems commonly used in therapy are: The Journey by Mary Oliver Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov The Armful by Robert Frost I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Turtle Island by Gary Snyder as well as the poetry of Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg and Antonin Artaud.
TECHNIQUES USED IN POETRY THERAPY Different models of poetry therapy exist and are being refined all the time, but one the most popular is the model introduced by Nicholas Mazza. According to this model, poetry therapy involves three major components: Receptive/Prescriptive, Expressive/Creative, Symbolic/Ceremonial.
I. In the Receptive/Prescriptive component, the poet merely introduces the subject of how to focus on their own issue. The aim is to establish concentration and cognitive focus on the details, none which is revealed to the poet. Only when the poet feels confident that the subject is cognitively attuned to and non-verbally focused on the problem or issue of concern does he or she begins to ask suggestive questions as to how the subject feels, not thinks, about their issue. This provocation of tangible emotions usually comes in three distinct phases of emotional content. First is the predicament, when the subject becomes aware of the existence of the issue. This is a gateway phase, where anticipatory feelings are illicit and registered by the poet.
II. Then there is a further stage when anticipation of the issue has given way to the full experience of all the emotions, anxieties and fears related to the issue. This is usually overwhelming (or it wouldn’t be ‘an issue’ in the first place), and it is paramount that the poet guides the subject through distinct words to describe the layers of emotions experienced by the subject. The poet must ground the subject’s emotions in language. Language and the use of words is the key here, because emotions always come in complex clusters that make it difficult for both poet and subject to distinguish them and focus on the underlying causes.
“What kind of anger do you feel?”, “How would you describe your sadness?”, “How much shame do you feel? What would you compare it to?” This is a sophisticated method of word association, but rather than creating bridges between seemingly disparate words the goal is to drill down to the core emotions of the issue by refining the language, as led by the subject. Achieving exactitude of description is the task at hand. The poet makes careful notation of everything the subject says in regard to describing their emotions. It is important to keep them focused and not to succumb to intellectual distraction. Thoughts are illusions and often lies, whereas emotions are facts. Get the subject to correctly describe the facts of the matter. All meaning is metaphorical.
III. The final stage is waiting for an exit strategy. How do the feelings begin to recede? How does the issue move back into the background? What are the parting emotions? Is there anxiety about the leaving? Anticipation of an issue yet unresolved? Or is the issue impermeable, and subject to a rhythmic return? Again, the subject’s wording, their adjectives, adverbs and phrases are the material of the poem. At this point there is usually a short break to give time for the subject to recover from the emotional transitions and for the poet to briefly skim their notes and begin to focus on the flow of adjectives. It is preferable, if possible, to compose what amounts to a first draft, a flow of words which the poet can read back to the subject to confirm its accuracy.
At this first reading stage it is possible to start interjecting logical bridges between the emotional descriptors. This is the creative factor 194 unleashed. The poet, assisted by the subject, creates coherent sequences 195 between the emotional states. The poet suggests and the subject confirms or vetoes the phraseology, one line at a time. Now we arrive at a second draft which is the property of the subject. It is their poem. The preference is that the subject now reads the poem aloud and takes ownership of its content. The subject can redraft the poem a third time, or many more times, claiming it as their own. The poet has merely provided poesy prompts, the poem is the creation of the subject.
The expressive/creative component involves the use of creative writing — poetry, letters, and journal entries — for the purpose of assessment and treatment. The process of writing can be both cathartic and empowering, often freeing blocked emotions or buried memories and giving voice to one’s concerns and strengths. Some people may doubt their ability to write creatively, but therapists can offer support by explaining they do not have to use rhyme or a particular structure. Poets can also provide stem poems from which to work, or introduce sense poems for those who struggle with imagery. A poet might also share a poem with their subject and then ask them to select a line that touched them in some way, and then use that line to start their own poem. In groups, poems may be written individually or collaboratively.
Group members are sometimes given a single word, topic, or sentence stem and asked to respond to it spontaneously. The contributions of group members are compiled to create a single poem which can then be used to stimulate group discussion. The symbolic/ceremonial component involves the use of metaphors, storytelling and rituals as tools for effecting change. Metaphors, which are essentially symbols, can help individuals to explain complex emotions and experiences in a concise yet profound manner. Rituals may be particularly effective to help those who have experienced a loss or ending, such as a divorce or death of a loved one, to address their feelings around that event. Writing and then burning a letter to someone who died suddenly, for example, may be a helpful step in the process of accepting and coping with grief.
HOW CAN POETRY THERAPY HELP?
Poetry therapy has been used as part of the treatment approach for a number of concerns, including borderline personality, suicidal ideation, identity issues, perfectionism, and grief. Research shows the method is frequently a beneficial part of the treatment process. Several studies also support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression — it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the articulation of feelings. Researchers have also demonstrated poetry therapy’s ability to reduce anxiety and stress. Those experiencing post traumatic stress have also reported improved mental and emotional well-being as a result of poetry therapy. Some individuals who have survived trauma or abuse may have difficulty processing the experience cognitively and, as a result, suppress associated memories and emotions.
Through poetry therapy, many are able to integrate these feelings, reframe traumatic events, and develop a more positive outlook for the future. People experiencing addiction may find poetry therapy can help them explore their feelings regarding substance abuse, perceive drug use in a new light, and develop or strengthen coping skills. Poetry writing may also be a way for those with substance abuse issues to express their thoughts on treatment and behavioral change. Some studies have shown poetry therapy can be of benefit to people with schizophrenia, despite the linguistic and emotional deficits associated with the condition. Poetry writing may be a helpful method to describe mental experiences, and can allow therapists to better understand the thought processes of those they are treating.
Poetry therapy has also helped some individuals with schizophrenia to improve social functioning skills and foster more organized thought processes. It is important to note in many instances, especially in cases of moderate to severe mental health concerns, that poetry therapy is used in combination with another type of therapy and not as the sole approach to treatment.
TRAINING FOR POETRY THERAPISTS
Poetry therapists receive literary as well as clinical training to enable them to be able to select literature appropriate for the healing process. While there is no university program in poetry therapy, the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy (IFBPT), the independent credentialing body for the profession, has developed specific training requirements. Several studies support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the expression of feelings.
However, the only qualitative measure of effective poetry therapy is in the poesy and the results. No accreditation can guarantee or substitute for the quality of cognitive empathy that is achieved during a successful session. Ultimately, there can be no real separation between the experience of the poet and the subject. This methodology provokes a meeting of mind in confrontation with universal truths. The poet is there merely to reassure the subject that there is no hocus-pocus, no supernatural or alternative reality, and that the cognitive associations that ring true are true in the present mind of the subject. The poet is on hand to reassure, to validate the responses of the subject to radical new perspectives into their own most intimate selves, and to relieve and dispel any accompanying trauma as grounded in the normalcy of human experience.202 203
CONCERNS AND LIMITATIONS OF POETRY THERAPY In spite of its widespread appeal and broad range of applications, some concerns have been raised about the use of poetry therapy.
Some critics have pointed out it is possible for people to analyze a poem on a purely intellectual level, without any emotional involvement. This type of intellectualization may be more likely when complex poems are used, as a person might spend so much time trying to decipher the meaning of the poem that they lose sight of their emotions and spontaneous reactions. Poems that are unoriginal or filled with clichés are unlikely to stimulate individuals on a deep emotional level, or challenge them to think in ways promoting growth.
Just always keep in mind that poetry therapy may have little or no value for those individuals who simply do not enjoy poetry.
References:
Chavis, G.G. (2011). Poetry and story therapy: The healing power of creative expression. Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Gooding, L. F. (2008). Finding your inner voice through song: Reaching adolescents with techniques common to poetry therapy and music therapy. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 21(4), 219-229.
Mazza, N. (2003). Poetry therapy: Theory and practice. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Olsen-McBride, L. (2009). Examining the influence of popular music and poetry therapy on the development of therapeutic factors in groups with at-risk adolescents (Doctoral dissertation).
Rossiter, C. (2004). Blessed and delighted: An interview with Arleen Hynes, poetry therapy pioneer. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 17(4), 215-222.
You are more loyal to your party and it’s grand standing leader than you are to your fellow citizen.
You refer to and think of immigrants in terms of a problem.
You think political refugees fleeing violence are actually all con artists looking for a hand out.
You are repulsed by certain races.
(Be honest with yourself and recognize it. Then decide if you want to continue feeling this way. Reason is the stone path to liberation).
You ascribe personality traits and physical characteristics to people by race disconnected from culture (e.g. Caucasians are not genetically disposed towards excelling at Dungeons & Dragons; they just play it more.)
The way other people honestly love each other and what turns them on sexually makes you sick.
You think most, but not all people are worthless.
You wish your parents had disciplined you more as a child.
You think non white people can overall preferential treatment.
You think White is a culture rather than an embodiment of privilege and power.
You think certain music and art is debased and decadent.
ALL of your friends are White and the people of color you insist on citing…none of them call you their friend.
You support Donald Trump because you fear Freedom, which you call The Press and Socialism.
You like being told what to do.
You hate other people because you hate the secret weaknesses inside yourself, which everyone can see clearly while you think you’ve kept your self loathing so well hidden.
Original Words, Music, Video and Antidotes for Living With Uncertainty
Internationally renown fine artist and producer Frederic Iriarte and American Poet Igor Goldkind have collaborated on 9 original tracks of musical interpretations based on Igor Goldkind’s forthcoming collection of poetry also entitled TAKE A DEEP BREATH. The album of 9 tracks is being launched as a complete work at this year’s International Beat Poetry Festival and will be released for download at midnight this coming Saturday, September 5th.
This unique multimedia work was written and produced during the pandemic in Stockholm, San Diego and Moscow. It is intended as an artistic attempt to help us live with uncertainty and survive catastrophe living.
“TAKE A DEEP BREATH is most important piece of Spoken Word Art to come along at just the right time: right when we all needed it the most!” – Henry Rollins
TAKE A DEEP BREATH and step out of your comfort zone. Just don’t look down.
2020 has been a year of both social, economic and psychological upheaval. Humans have been required to adapt to drastically changing circumstances without forewarning and without certainty as to the outcomes.
We are being challenged as a species to adapt. Adaptation is our genus but it is also painful and exhausting. TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a guidebook: a pause for a moment of reflection. Take a break from panic and get a clear view of where we are as individuals, as a people and as a species.
Covid-19 has literally attacked our humanity however in doing so has done us the service of reminding us of our shared humanity, our common mutual vulnerability. These are hard lessons to learn and uncomfortable changes to be made for us to survive. TAKE A DEEP BREATH is a pause in the gloom and a chance to regain our strength and resilience to all carry on.
TAKE A DEEP BREATHis a step backwards in time when poetry and music were used and appreciated as tools for contemplation, meditation and reflection on the most crucial factor in our lives. Now that we are being confronted and overwhelmed with multiple catastrophes, is the time to return to using poetry for what it is designed for:
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
― Franz Kafka
We quest for meaningful truths about our existence and what we bring to bear upon our environments. Mathematics, science and technology enable our mechanical ability to crunch big numbers, calculate near infinite possibilities and deliver probabilistic results.
To be able to knowledgeably predict the multitude of buying behaviors of literally millions of customers using Amazon is an impressive computational accomplishment, in the service of consumer capitalism. Or to be able to use peoples’ most personal and intimate preferences and tastes as unstructured data, to be sold onto those who would better manipulate our preferences for profit.
Profit motivates the interests of those who control data to use it in order to steadily limit the range of free (unpredictable)choices to achieve more predictable decisions. The more predictable the judgements of choice, the better the profit in meeting those wants. The freer the will, the wider the spectrum of discernment between what is needed and what is merely desired. Not ideal customer relations if your goal is for the customer to buy exactly what you tell them to buy and have already prepared them to buy.
But the truth is that we are all free to make choices, even when there isn’t much to choose from.
We are still free to deviate from the predictable norm and exercise our wider, human judgement in our choices. But to do so successfully is to break down the predisposed contexts to our decision making. We would need to embrace the fact of Uncertainty, unpredictability and see beyond the unreliable predilections of Causality. We must, so to speak, break our causal chains as they have been manipulated in advance by pragmatic and diabolic conventions.
To live outside of predetermined contexts, to break out of the “real world” into the actual world, where we really exist necessitates first the understanding of context in the service of truth. To understand the dichotomy between perception and interpretation we should adopt a new vocabulary: The study of interpretation is called Hermeneutics, which is the scrutiny of language mainly text, in the context of interpretation.
However, language is not limited to text. Much of human history (of consciousness), has been devoted to poring over sacred and heretical texts; but there is also the language of dreams and music which are open to both reading and expression.
Then there is of course, the language of the image. The useful lie of representation, predating photography by some 30,000 years.
In so far as hermeneutics is the study of text and its interpretations, Irrealism examines the language of images by posing that no one account or one representation of a reality can accurately account for that reality apart from that one possible narrative. But there are millions of narratives, millions of representations of any event or occurrence in reality. There exists a vast multiplicity of perspectives and vantage points of which no one of which can be designated the sole “true” representation. Namely because the quantum diversity of perspectives is fundamental to that singular truth. This is one of infinite possible worlds but the only truth that can be found in this assertion is within the context of an infinite number of real possibilities.
Thus we each stand on a ledge overlooking the infinite, the universe waiting for us to take a step in whichever direction we choose.
Irrealism casts light on this distinction. There is no one reality or real event, but a multitude of infinite possibilities, some more probable than others in terms of predictive outcome. But to understand this and sustain it visavis perception requires first a relinquishment of the notion of one sole truth or truthful perspective. The truth is not found in once account, one representation; nor it it found in accumulating and theoretically distilling all possible accounts and perspectives. Instead, the monotheistic idea of one truth needs to be exchanged for the greater truth of infinite diversity in limitless combinations.
Irrealism is a type of existentialist literary artform for which the means are continually and absurdly rebelling against the ends that we have predetermined for them. The whole causal relationship between means and ends is brought into question and we gain the insight of restraining from linking events, so as not to fill in gaps with significance.
If we can easily detach significance from coincidental events and understand their own phenomenal existence without added meaning, then equally we can detach significance from events that just happen to follow each other in time. By freeing events and objects from the phenomenal artifice of a causal chain of meaning, we gain an irreal insight into the true nature of events and objects as they exist.
Like existentialism, Irrealism has presented itself as both a philosophical argument and a work of art in which the philosophical principles are demonstrated by the fictional subjective experience of a protagonist. For examp0le, In THE MALTESE FALCON, Dashiel Hammet’s existential detective, Sam Spade is a free man as he is free from the compulsive and lethal greed of the antagonists. At the end of the film and novel, Sam chooses the virtue of duty over love .
By proving the reality of an existential choice as a empathetic human choice, the fiction delivers a more visceral universal understanding of the underlying principle.
Some lies reveal deeper truths.
Breaking attachment to one true account or representation permits the “irreality” of circumstance to become our context. This is akin to wavicle theory in which light is not reduced to one structural account but rather we adapt our contexts to fit the data. Sometimes light behaves like and can be measured as particles and sometimes it cannot. It can only be measured within the context of waves. So is light either a particle or a wave? Well neither, nor both. The truth is that light exists outside of our realm of contexts. It is not unreal to describe light as a particles, but it isn’t solely true either. Nor is the fact that light consists of waves soley true. This quantum perception version Schrodinger’s Cat does not dwell on the mortality of the cat but rather on our ability to perceive beyond uncertainty.
The awkward term “wavicle” is a contrivance of vocabulary: there is no such object as a wavicle. All there is, is a misleading name to make it easier for us to measure and understand the phenomenal nature of light, not its physicality. In this light, so to speak, Irrealism addresses the false dichotomy of physicality vs the phenomenal. Yes, the universe is a physical one and objects and events have gravitas and yes, the universe is merely comprised of what we perceive and subject to the limits of our own perception. The universe is neither singularly physical nor singularly phenomenal; nor is it both. As both interpretations hold weight in their individual contexts, neither are false but again neither by itself is true. The perception is not one of unreality (or falsehood or fantasy) but of irreality, reality is not above what we perceive and experience, but behind it.
So it is with irrealism. The philosophical premise of Irrealism is that both the physicality of objects and events is one context, whereas their phenomenal content, our perception occupies a separate but parallel context. Objects and events exist in both worlds’ the physical and the phenomenal.
Irrealism demonstrates the irreality of events and objects by demonstrating existence as neither/or. An irreality demonstrates objects and events outside of their contextual rules. Viscerally this can be expressed in Art & Music and cognitively, in philosophy and poetry.
In philosophy, the belief that phenomenalism and physicalism are alternative “world-versions”, both useful in some circumstances, but neither capable of fully capturing the other.
Irrealist art and literature features an estrangement from our generally accepted sense of reality. Which explains the often welcome sense of discomfort or unease that often accompanies taking in an irrealist perspective. SF and Horror are good examples of that unease and rumbling anxiety as entertaining.
An example of this would be Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, in which the salesman Gregor Samsa’s plans for supporting his family and rising up in rank by hard work and determination are suddenly thrown topsy-turvy by his sudden and inexplicable transformation into a man-sized insect. Such fiction is said to emphasize the fact that human consciousness, being finite in nature, can never make complete sense of, or successfully order, a universe that is infinite in its aspects and possibilities.
Irrealism is the Impossible and the Unexplainable laid as foundation for an art form that can directly communicate, by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence and the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.
This suspension of the temporal extrapolation of causality requires a vantage point outside of the law of causality, (that every phenomenon and corresponding qulia has a predetermining cause).
The balls falls down because you threw it up because of therule: what goes up must come down. This fundamental layman’s interpretation of Newtonian laws of motion of course derives from a specific time frame that is pre space travel. To travel back to this context and suggest that this law may not always apply universally and that there are contexts such as weightlessness for which the causal relation does not exist, is an example of irrealism.
To suggest to Newton that what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down is to express an unreality to Issaic based on the context of his understanding. Moreover as Newton’s laws of motion are universally adopted as convention, to assert this truth too loudly will get you locked up in a mental asylum.
Those of us living Newton’s Impossibility know that whether or not the ball falls down is completely dependent on the existing context. To suggest a state of weightlessness to Newton’s context is an irrealism. It is false within the given context but true in a greater but remoter context. What we call ‘real’ appears to be exterior to us and perception-independent when in fact, it is neither. Irrealism exposes the mythic unreality underlying our virtual fixed world, the world we manifest with our minds by responding to certain stimuli in our environment. These stimuli and their interpretation sketch the internal map of our presumed outer world experience.
It is because of this out of context impossibilities that Irrealism is considered to be dream-like in nature, which is a justifiable description so long as we remember that the Irreal representation does not relate a particular dream that we might have had but instead evokes aspects of the dream-state within the work. Irrealist objects occupy our dreams as props for symbolic meanings much as one reads the symbolism within a medieval painting or a film wherein every object captured is there for a meaningful reason.
To understand that reality exists both outside of and inside of perception,( not in one or the other soley nor both together), is to glimpse the tapestry of infinite possibility divorced from the coincidences of causality. Quoting the American philosopher Nelson Goodman “as much as we might try to order our world with a certain set of norms and goals (which we refer to as the real world), the paradox of a finite consciousness in an infinite universe creates a zone of irreality. The Irreal is that which lies beyond [or behind], the real”) that offsets, opposes, or threatens the real world of the human subject.
Irrealist art highlights this irreality, and our fascination with it, by combining the unease we feel from a world that doesn’t conform to our desires; with the narrative quality of a dream state wherein safe and familiar realities are being constantly undermined.
“We are not speaking in terms of multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world but of multiple actual worlds.] Goodman makes no assertions regarding “the way the world is” and that there is no primary world version i.e. “no true version compatible with all true versions.” nor world-versions” of the world”. Instead he describes worlds as “made by making such versions”. As Goodman says, “Not only motion, … but even reality is relative.”
Irrealist art shows us this.
A successful irreal work of art, music or literature confronts its audience with a perception that cannot simply be translated as merely a fantasy, speculative or as a symbolist work. . Thus cut off from the familiar context of what is possible and ultimately explainable, impossible, one is left alone in the company of the absurd. It is thus communicates directly, “by feeling rather than articulation, the uncertainties inherent in human existence or, to put it another way… the irreconcilability between human aspiration and human reality.”
The artist Tristan Tondino writes, “Realism is an Irrealism. Reality is plurality – we partially create it, and we must open our universes and our perceptions to all possible versions of it.
Irrealism is a vaccine for living with the truth of uncertainty
What if we thought of this uncertainty as the Jews consider our Sabbath— As a sacred space in time? Stop travelling Stop buying and selling. Stop working. Give up for now, trying to make the world better than it is.
Instead, Sing. Dance. Pray. Write songs and read poetry. Paint the pictures from your eyes. Walk amongst the leaves and the stars. Touch only those to whom you have commited your life.
Sit down. And when your mind and body have become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are both terrifying and beautiful. No one can deny that now.
Do not reach out with your hands. Reach out with your heart. Reach out with your words. Reach out with all the curled tendrils of compassion that connect us invisibly, where we cannot touch each other.
Promise this world your love for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, For as long as we all shall live In this time of mass uncertainty.
This where I am at this moment in time. At peace both inner and outer. My hand polishes the glass I hold, Until there is no longer an inner nor an outer. Only what is left in between.
San Diego poets are wet gutter snipers Taking pot shots at frivolous affluence and misspent eternities From the street corners and back alleys of our prematurely grey dementias.
San Diego poets cast lines like fishing reels Screaming curses at angels in heels while Humming blues tunes to the damned, under our breaths.
San Diego poets spit surreal spiels into ribbons of unfurling images That rain down like bright pathetic confetti Against a blank horizon of an empty human empathy.
San Diego poets slide their wild, horse hair bows Across taut, tied strings that sing Above a psychedelic landscape of the gradually worsening human condition
You and me are not blind instruments of self-immolation. We do not have to sit at the center of the fire to make it our home. We can play our songs on sad air violins And dance in the rain to drown our sorrows in the sea of greater uncertainty.
San Diego poets press our runny noses against The pained windows of badly lit coffeeshops and crafty bookstores, Hosting poetry readings for the over groomed; Those educated only in the blind arrogance of their own judgements.
San Diego poets litter the streets with our menial typewriters Preaching doomsday fire sales to tourists and Liberation to those still hounded by carnivorous ambitions In the current climate of fear that tries to pass itself off as survival.
San Diego poets never have enough money to buy you a drink But will spare you a cig-regret – –if you’re willing to spare the change you need you to make –to make your tomorrow just a little bit better.
San Diego poets are all clowns, fools and charlatans Keeping ourselves amused on the ragged streets of cold hangover dawnings Whilst skipping around and dancing through the circus of mediocrity that pervades us.
San Diego poets migrate like flocks of hummingbirds Seeking warmer climes and heartfelt compassions. Blurring our wings the whole distance in getting there.
Each moment of daily life is an opportunity to arrive in the present moment. Gathas are short verses that we can recite during daily activities to help us return to the present moment and dwell in mindfulness.
As exercises in both meditation and poetry, Gathas are an essential part of Zen Buddhist tradition. Using a Gatha doesn’t require any special knowledge or religious practice. Nor does it adhere to one style or structure. It only follows the rule of leading the reader back to their present moment of existence.
Here is my attempt:
“The reflection of a reflection is your reflection
Upon the surface mirror of a pool,
Being slowly filled by the very source of the life
Death is in my garden again, Whispering to my flowers as he pulls away the weeds. Plotting and potting each stem as it grows Making certain that the roots are shaken of clinging regrets and life’s debris. Only to cut my life short more easily.
Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder. A beautiful woman who he woos and waters with my love? He gathers my blossoms into a beautiful bouquet Of lost souls and freshly cut lives. To gift to the one who holds him closest.
She presses his dead heart to her breast with one hand The bouquet that surmises my life with the other. She holds his weight against her body. Until death sighs and buries his head between her breasts So she is certain that he will return to his labours in the morrow.
Thank you so much for your light I came here especially to see it and I was not disappointed! Your shimmering light so beautiful That it penetrates deep inside my darkest well. Filling the emptiness of the dark with your long journeyed light.
You remind me that I am part of your beauty That we are all beautiful when bathing in your light. And that your talent for night Opens our hearts and our minds To the Beauty that would hold us closer to her breast.
Nourish us with Your love So that we may flourish and Become as beautiful as You have always been And always will be.
Go Fuck Yourself, you pathetic failure. Leave the arts to the poets, the dancers and the painters Go get yourself a real job, a real vocation. Fuck off and leave those of us who fight for our culture alone. Fuck off and stop leeching the creative spirits of the secular martyrs who have sacrificed their lives on the holy altar of Art, Truth and Freedom. Go Fuck Yourselves! And each other in your sleazy stinking orgy of self-gratifying bigotry and weeping pustule aesthetics.
Go Fuck Yourself in the Ass With Your Own Extended Nose Go let yourself get fucked in the ass by all the bogus arts nonprofits that pocket tax money to further their own finances while cheating artists and reviewers out of their livings.
Go write yourself a grant.
Write up your mission statement in day-glow gold-gilded writing. Put on your ‘supporter-of-the-arts’ makeup Keep counting the coins in your bookseller’s till While prescribing the rules that determines who is in and who is other.
Go Fuck Yourself and try reading a book for a change. Go read Whitman, Bukowski, Anais Nin and Henry Miller on art. Let William Burroughs into your dreams. Go get yourself a self education. In the meantime, shut up, sit down and just listen: You are the enemy of art, the enemy of poetry, the enemy of life. And we’re coming for you. Because all you are is in the way.
She said Hii! I said hello She said let’s go for a drink. I said sure. She asked ‘what are you having’? I said, whatever you want. She said, thank you for thinking of me first. I said your pleasure is all mine.
Later she sent me a text. ‘Have you ever tried phone sex’? She said. I said ‘Sure’. She said how about now? I said I need to go home. She said she did too, She sends me a naked picture of herself.
“Are you hard”? She asks ‘Sure’, I said. “I want you to fuck me”, She said. ‘Shall I come over’? I say. “No”, she said. “Let’s meet and fuck tomorrow. But for right now, just this moment Can you just talk to me”? ‘Sure, ‘I said.
“Right now I just want you to tell me how you’d like to fuck me. ‘Do you…
She said Hii! I said hello She said let’s go for a drink. I said sure. She asked ‘what are you having’? I said, whatever you want. She said, thank you for thinking of me first. I said your pleasure is all mine.
Later she sent me a text. ‘Have you ever tried phone sex’? She said. I said ‘Sure’. She said how about now? I said I need to go home. She said she did too, She sends me a naked picture of herself.
“Are you hard”? She asks ‘Sure’, I said. “I want you to fuck me”, She said. ‘Shall I come over’? I say. “No”, she said. “Let’s meet and fuck tomorrow. But for right now, just this moment Can you just talk to me”? ‘Sure, ‘I said.
“Right now I just want you to tell me how you’d like to fuck me. ‘Do you want me to come over,’ I said again. “No,” she said, “Don’t come over Just talk to me and make me cum. I just love the sound of your voice”. ‘Sure’, I said. And she did. ‘Are we still getting together tomorrow by the fountain in the park’? I asked, after a while. ‘Of course’, she said. ‘Great’, I said.
The next morning she sent me a message: “I’m sorry but your age is something I just can’t get past, I’m not meeting you next to the fountain, I’m sorry. You’re just too old and I shouldn’t have let things go so far I just can’t get past that; your age” ‘Sure’, I said. ‘Neither can I without fatal results’. She did not laugh “I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel” She said. ‘That’s how you feel’, I said. Later that morning I died my hair black and left dark stains in the sink.
All I need is a gorgeous woman who wants to Make love all day And let me write her love poems in the sunlit afternoons That pass from time to time. Now and then again.
Everyone wants to be free. ven from the things that once gave us comfort. We are like children who swap our blankets For softer ground.
So why do you wait to be free When the keys to your cage Are hanging right outside your front door? Reach through the bars with your hand Stretch your fingers far and bend your will around the bars.
Your mind is your best friend, your best teacher, your best doctor, Whether you believe it or not. In spite of everything you’ve done to yourself, Your mind really does care about you and often thinks of you, quite fondly.
Just let your mind mend itself Heal yourself with a few choice words. Your own words. When you say:
The truth is not a cold tombstone The truth is not a judgement The truth is a flowering realisation inside your own living mind. Pulling you outwards, & forwards, enraptured by Time.
When my breath and My will are as one, The universe swallows me Whole.
13,200 brown children are detained. Taken from the arms of their parents by American immigration authorities. Infants are held tightly, cared for by other children In dirty, neglectful, and dangerous conditions That scar the southern border of the American Dream The SCOTUS Jenny Flores settlement mandates by law that children must be held in safe and sanitary conditions, “Moved out of Border Patrol custody without unnecessary delays”. This is the Federal Law Except children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
The conditions the human lawyers found, they found inhuman Flu and lice outbreaks left untreated, Children filthy, Sleeping on cold floors, Guarding each other from the guards. Most have been there for weeks. Constantly switching blankets between covers and floor mats. Everyone is crying, crying all the time Only children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
Across El Rio Grande; across that lazy river A scared little girl stands on the safe American shore; then jumps back in El Rio To reach her father and cling to him as he swims back to Mexican shore to retrieve her mother. El Rio’s currents care not of human intent; The river just flows and it flows and it flows, Until the little girl and her father are washed up, facedown on the shore. Her arm still protecting him, curled around his neck. You know, just like your daughters and mine have done countless times before. Dead children are taking care of their dead parents on the south side of Border Town.
A treacherous river divides this nation There are twisting bends and perilous nationalist waters to traverse. When death took the scared little girl and her father, I hope he took them together So that they can be forever together If only in the little girl’s dream. When will we stop murdering the poor just for being poor? The only document you need to prove you’re human is the record of your deeds While children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
A 2-year-old boy locked in detention, wants to be held all of the time. He has wet his pants and has no diaper He is wearing a mucus-smeared shirt. He does not speak. Two detained girls, ages 10 to 15, have been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler. Children taking care of children The 10 year old girl speaks for the quiet boy: “A Border Patrol agent came yesterday and asked me’: ‘Who wants to take care of this quiet little boy who nobody wants?’ So I said us. Because only children are taking care of children on the south side of Border Town
“Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” ~ The US Constitution
There are few shreds of dignity left When you drown face down in your own back street gutter. You can cry out as loud as an archangel’s horn, if you like. It won’t do you any good, or any harm either. You still can’t silence the wind or turn back the tide. Fate is nothing personal.
It’s just the universe catching up and then passing you by. Your dream of yourself evaporates, Forming clouds that obscure the night’s sky. The stars are leaving you now, blinking out one by one. This is the last moment of your own self-awareness. Your last chance to figure out what the fuck’s been going on.
It’s very much like the moment you first awoke Although your mother’s smile is nowhere to be found All that remains of her unlimited love is your fast fading memory The sound of her voice calling out to you to come home now, In the far distance, From where the stars have gone to mourn your passing.
I got news for you goyim, You’ve been shooting at me for 900 years From arrows to bullets to canon and you still haven’t hit me. Because I am no other than you. How can I replace you when I am you? Open your eyes, you are aiming your gun at yourself.
You don’t get it. This must be the trick of the devils’ twisted tongue, right? The one that tries to deceive you With the facts of truth Poured from the goblet of reason. Go on, take a sip.
No, you can’t shoot me, you can’t even aim. Your hatred is so predictably boring, Always looking for someone else to blame For your failure as a human being. Anyone should do, Just like a bad movie cliche, you pick the Jew.
How can you shoot me, When most of us are already dead? Replaced, misplaced, driven from your nations’…
So you think you’re going to Shoot Me? I got news for you goyim, You’ve been shooting at me for 900 years From arrows to bullets to canon and you still haven’t hit me. Because I am no other than you. How can I replace you when I am you? Open your eyes, you are shooting the gun at yourself.
You don’t get it. This must be the trick of the devils’ twisted tongue, right? The one that tries to deceive you With the facts of truth Poured from the grail of reason. Go on, have a gulpful .
No, you can’t shoot me, you can’t even aim straight. Your hatred is so predictably boring, Always looking for someone else to blame For your failure as a human being. Anyone should do, but Just like a bad movie cliche, you pick the Jew.
How can you shoot me, When most of us are already dead? Replaced, misplaced, driven from your nations’ borders. Baked in your ovens. Never even pausing To wonder what the difference ever really was.
Now we have nations, guns and missiles and Our own black-booted armies, to protect us from bad shots like you. To protect us from everyone but ourselves. Now we can sip from the same blood cup, While hating then shooting, All of the Other Jews.
You are our lady And now your dress Is flames. The beauty of your sunken dome from a drone Is a poem in itself. Written by us and Destroyed by chaos.
This is what we do that rivals the stature of the gods: To astound ourselves and each other, With the wonder of Pure enduring creation. The sacrifice we all make to our better selves Who gave buildings wings and Lay the foundation stones of Our own perfecting.
Epiphany is not found in the act of worship It is found in the insight gained by a gratitude for the world. Exactly the way we built it. Exactly the way we know it to be. Whispered prayers are but poetry That none other than you will listen to. It is good to talk to yourself, To sing in harmony with all the selves who are listening,
Wearing Not false, but true masks Revealing the kind of truth that can only be told with a lie. The subtler architecture that carves heavens into the spaces on this earth. Reconstructing what can be seen behind your faces, Behind all the saints who guard you, Behind the divine grace of your stature. The sensuousness of your catastrophe is breathtaking.
Once again the ghostly powers of Facebook have judged me and found me wanting.
Or wanting of the veneer of non threatening, amiable posts. Nothing that would offend a Humming Bird of nerve endings. A Calvinist shaking in their boots. I’m not a Facebook post, you don’t have to like me!
My grave offence was to post a photograph of the great American poet Allen Ginsberg standing naked on a Moroccan beach. The original naked poet; metaphor and literal combined into one. His words, not his images were deemed obscene way back in the last century. There was a public trial and unlike Socrates, Ginsberg (and City Lights, the publisher) were both found not guilty of obscenity. Howl was deemed a work of art and protected under the first amendment. Why doesn’t Facebook abide by the first amendment instead of hiding like a coward behind their Emerald City curtain of Community Standards?
And why don’t Americans know their own history?
I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Allen Ginsberg during my Freshman year, when he had come to do a reading and lead a group meditation paying his dreadful table accordion. Was I 17 or 18? I was studying Heidegger and Charles Olsen, the Action Poet; Kandinsky’s New York roommate right round 1959 thereabouts, when the photo of Ginsberg on the Beach was taken. But I knew all of his work, inside and out. I was never gay but Ginsberg made me want to be!
I had stopped Allen in an outdoor corridor lined by lawn between two campus buildings. I was armed with my copy of the first edition City Lights Kaddish epic that I had found by blissful chance in the long gone used intelligentia bookstore at the corner of College and El Cajon Blvd, in San Diego, over a lifetime ago.
Allen looked at my book and gladly signed it. “I haven’t seen a first edition of these in years!” I told Allen about the used book store in San Diego where I had gone through all of his poetry and Kerouac and Cassidy’s First Third and Dylan’s Tarantula, Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki’s 3 volume Essays on Zen, all bought and consumed at this temple to beatitude at the cross roads of the world. I didn’t tell him how in high school we used to climb to the top of Cowell Mountain and howl the words to Howl at the valley unfolding beneath us. We didn’t know what hungry junkies were quite yet, but it sounded good and it was real. As real as the suburbs of San Diego can ever be.
In the past present, Allen handed me my book, more of a pamphlet, back and looked me up and down and smiled. It was a genuine smile and not the least bit lecherous considering what he said next. “Would you like to come up to my room, it’s just over graduate housing? I can show you some poem books you haven’t seen. I knew what he meant but I was so stunned dumb by the proposition (Allen Ginsberg!). I stuttered something still trying to make up my mind before I spoke. But alas, fear of the unknown vanquished my curiousity or perhaps it was my vanity to be loved by a star that was defeated.
Nonetheless I must of said something because we went on our merry ways, my thanking him a little too profusely and the back of his bald head bobbing down the corridor.
So when I posted the photo a young Allen standing nude on a Morrocan beach, I kind of felt like I had earned the right to share his image, naked and vulnerable for the sake of a poetry reading which it was more than certain that someone would recite a Ginsberg-eque poem.
The Philistines may have conquered the machines but not me as of yet.
There’s an emptiness at the heart of any space: The air that escapes a room; an unanswered echo, a vacant womb. There’s an emptiness in my heart That reminds me All of my ideas are empty. Floating leaves from a fumbled folder. Coloured streams falling from the sky.
This emptiness reminds me How slight my desires really are How gently they fall from the sky A confetti of mercy and discarded emotions, They are in the end, Compared to nothing, Merely the litter from an emptied mind.
If you love your mind just let it go. If you lose your mind, don’t worry. It will find you again, eventually. Trekking across the tundra, Scaling the icy ridges Crossing a vale of tears.
At midnight in the Dead of the Night. Just to get back home to you. Merely moonlight pausing to reflect upon still waters No need to be concerned. In future, make sure your back gate latch is secure Before letting your mind run free.
Let Your Mind Run Free II
If you love your mind just let it go. If you lose your mind, don’t worry. It will find you again, eventually. Trekking across the tundra; scaling the icy ridges Crossing a vale of tears.
At midnight in the Dead of the Night. Your mind will tap you on the shoulder You’ll jump And your mind will say ‘Well, here you are’! Sitting alone in the last place I looked.
While I am Merely moonlight pausing to reflect upon still waters. There’s no need to be concerned. Next time, just make sure your back gate is securely latched Before you let your mind run free.
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness Vibrant with jubilant celebrations. And gratitude for the joy in rolling a boulder blissfully up this steep hill. Tripping over our own thoughts like loosened cobblestones, We no longer see the reality directly in front of us.
The truth is a truce we struck with certainty ages ago. After losing the desperate struggle… To cling to some kind of hope buried deep beneath the root of ourselves. I am fearful of fully failing myself and yet I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
I’m still choking on my own blood. As it slowly fills my lungs. I am drowning inside myself The blood is mine; the air is gone, Now so am I.
After death, there’s nothing more than that same familiar empty space waiting for your thoughts to refill it Infinite & Eternal in every direction;. both up and down and beyond before. encircled by the horizon.
This emptiness where your awareness doesn’t so much ‘go’ as recollect that it’s always been here. Look through this persisting dream! there is no afterlife because nothing, not even memory, is really destroyed. just transformed.
Into particles into wavicles into higher frequencies, your mind no longer fathoms. so you leave it, your mind, behind.
Crystal liquid, gas, plasma. aware is the fifth state of matter.
After my 3-day exile from FB as sophomoric punishment for posting one among several of the spreads from my book IS SHE AVAILABLE? featuring one of Rian Hughes’s bare breasts (ok, not exactly HIS breast but nonetheless his photograph!), I am revitalised and ready to re-enter the morally ambiguous, inconsistent fray of FB’s so-called Community Standards barred cells.
By these very standards, Facebook prefers a world where women have no nipples, only dead artists are permitted to display the human body, Nazis trump radical socialists in free speech and if anyone whines and complains loudly and long enough to the invisible authorities that hide behind our screens (and Mark’s logo), they can elicit erratic judgements on the part of our social wardens. Not social workers, social wardens!
Well, I’m not putting up with it. Reality is too precious to be mediocratized to the lowest level of education, much less lowest common synaptic denominator.
I do get it. Children use Facebook and we can’t be exposing our children to naked nipples! They might just recall sucking on one and then where would we be? I’ll tell you: outside the confines of a gated morality where scary, unpredictable things might occur! My god, what if I were to get an erection! Is there a Community Standards Forum where I can ask what am I to do with it?
After all, Facebook lays claim not just to the moral high ground, but the moral low ground and the in-between ground as well. They act on behalf of Community Standards. Not my community, that’s for sure. My community has nipples, menstrual cycles, flatulence and those troublesome erections. Not to mention madness, depression and hallucinatory revelation. Ok, I admit I hang with a strange crowd. But need I mention that they poop and pee sometimes more than once a day? Oh, the moral horror, the humanity, the humanity, the lack of humanity!
You wouldn’t know it from following Community Standards, that’s for sure. Tell me, oh great Facebook, am I allowed to bleed? For you have cut me. Cut me off from Messaging some of my friends about politics and rendezvous, not nipples. Nipples is one of those words that if you say it enough times really fast, it loses all meaning. Try it. Just don’t post it on Facebook.
Please share with your fellow users, poopers and nipple owners. WE are the Community, not Facebook’s false authority. After all, algorithms don’t live in communities, they just exist everywhere else they can shape and conform our computational reality, far away in the bowels of the flashing lights and annoying pings. Far removed from human judgement, common sense and of course human Freedom.
The machines don’t need to take over, we’ve already surrendered and their flesh-eating servants are holding their napkins for them.Edit or delete this
Haven’t you noticed??? I’ve been pulling my hair out not knowing who to call.
They’ve suckered us in with another used year! Sure, it’d been refurbished and looks a lot like a new year, but don’t be fooled, This is a counterfeit year being passed off as a real one.
Sure, the surface looks sharp but its purely cosmetic.
It won’t load the latest OS
Its warranty has long lapsed.
And its connectors are outdated.
Don’t be fooled by fake years. You’ll forget the real ones. Do something! Call somebody! Don’t just sit there lamenting.
Demand refunds and store credits!
Stomp your feet and threaten court actions.
But whatever you do, don’t be fooled by second-hand years
When what you really need is a new one.
Today was every other day.
My boss says,
“Hey, Joe, where you going with that staple gun in your hand?”
I draw a blank on my face and turn to face his.
“You don’t really know, do you, Joe?
You don’t know where you’re going.
You don’t really know who you are.
You don’t know much of anything anymore,
Do you now, Joe?”
Then he laughs at me
In front of everybody
He laughs and points at
What everybody but me can see.
And everybody laughs and they laugh and they laugh
But nobody talks to me anymore.
My boss don’t talk to me anymore.
My neighbors don’t talk to me anymore.
My doctor don’t talk to me anymore.
My mother don’t talk to me anymore.
My father don’t talk to me because
He’s long since gone
Flown far away from the words to this song.
I call my girlfriend up on the telephone
She says, “Joe, I’m not your girlfriend anymore”
And hangs up the phone.
Nobody talks to me anymore.
I call my doctor on the telephone
He says, “hello, is there anybody there”?
I say, “it’s me, Joe, doctor help me, nobody talks to me anymore!”
My doctor coughs and hangs up the phone.
Nobody talks to me anymore.
I call on my priest in the church down the road
I say “Hello, Father? my Father, is that really you?”
“Please tell me, dear Father, what should I do?”
My priest says “Joe, God don’t love you anymore”
And throws me out through God’s front door.
Even God don’t talk to me anymore.
So, I go down to a bar to have a little swim.
There’s a bar stool there where the X-mas tree should have been.
The bartender looks at me,
But he doesn’t say a word.
I hold up two fingers and point at the sky
So he pours me a double, ten-year-old rye.
Which I toss down and motion for another
While calling him “my brother”.
The bartender stares at my face.
As silent as the stones in his wall.
Nobody talks to me anymore.
On the street, the headlights blind my blinking eyes.
Strangers push past me, some I know, most I despise.
A cop car pulls up and flashes his bright light on me
The cop points his flashlight in my eyes so that I can’t see.
There’s nothing he or I need to say.
He won’t arrest me.
It just ain’t worth his time to talk to me anymore.
A ghost walks up and stares into my face.
He doesn’t say a word; just hangs there in space
Instead, he spins ribbons of colored lights
Inside my head.
There’s no knowing with ghosts no more
The dead don’t even talk to me anymore, either!
Suddenly I see an explosion of lights
There are trumpets and harps and angels in sight
A liquor store, a neon vision of light
Promises me spirits of salvation and delight
If I just step inside….
While next door, a gun store slowly cracks open its door . . .
I am my father and my mother’s son and
I’ve never before bought me a gun.
But nobody, nobody talks to me anymore.
Hope is mortal, not eternal.
Though it may feel like eternity
Sitting in a chair by the window.
Gazing up and down the path that leads
Up the hill and down to the canyon on your doorstep.
Every morning, every evening, every day.
Waiting for an answer to your prayer for hope to be restored.
Resilience rewarded
Patience still burning brightly
Under your old photograph on the wall where you live now.
I’m not sad.
No, sadness is just passing rain to irrigate the eyes.
Instead, I’m a new planet
Ringedby the last halo of hope
The one wrapped tightly around my head.
I write this mainly for my regular readers who may be concerned about my apparent absence from FB. I’ve always used FB as a fencing ground and now I’ve been fenced out, temporarily, for 3 days.
My account has been public for the last 5 years because I always fully intended to provoke, and attract engagement particularly from those that find offence or challenge here or just take exception to my posts.
But mainly, I use this platform to hone my writing skills in real time.
It’s a form of art activism, Artivism.
Bringing the origins of my work; the emotions, the outrages, the political anger and the moral dismay I feel directly to confront on their walls, in their replies and in their faces, those who are morally failing.
Who do I mean are morally failing?
Well, anyone who still says they support the treasonous weasel in the White House, is a start. But more generally Americans who should be more French than they’re English but unfortunately share more with the English propensity for worshipping dogs and traumatising their children.
The present generation of “youf”; be they white, black, Chicano, Native, Vietnamese, Gay, Chinese, Transitioning, Korean, Japanese, Indian, African, Middle Eastern (and every combination of the above), have more in common with each other than they will ever have with any of their previous generations.
Revolution needn’t be violent they just need to turn things around.
But to the point in question, I have not been in touch because I have been barred from both Facebook and Messenger for not following community guidelines, poor dears. Except that I am as much a part of that community as anyone. Not of an algorithm that flags random posts to FB ‘s appointed moral custodians.
My crime against the community?
Reposting the profile photo of a woman’s breast dripping with red wine into a crystal goblet. In fact, her nipple is obscured as it is drenched in wine.
You can see it for yourself here below.
What is the algorithm’s crime? Well nothing, it just follows and acts on long lists of tedious commands; executed in the blink of time
No mind, I’ve been a naughty, naughty boy and my shrilling mother will not allow me to save the human race from amnesia.
I can’t stop the algorithm from making a moral judgement that supersedes mine, or any human’s. I can’t have a quick word with the algorithm or anyone at FB to teach them what a juxtaposition of symbols that create an allusion to the truth.
Such as the sweet wine depicted being the mirror of the sweet mother’s milk as is symbolically conveyed by the nude breast. You cannot make that visual allusion with a bra.
It doesn’t work.
The breast must appear as nude as it is to the baby that seeks its nourishment. Sweet breast milk, sweet primal nourishment, sweet wine that I sip in the middle of my night to remind myself that I was once a child, protected and loved by my mother.
As were you.
Algorithms have no mothers. And those who are the masters of those algorithms long ago put their mothers out of their eye’s way, in homes.
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness,
Jubilant celebration
And gratitude for the joyous exhaustion in the rolling of a boulder up a steep hill.
Tripping over our thoughts like loosened cobblestones,
The truth is a truce we struck with uncertainty ages ago.
After losing our desperate struggle…
To cling to some kind of hope buried deep at the root of our own awareness
I am fearful of fully failing myself.
But I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
Secure and supported by this very clarity.
This is the latest, better version.
Can anyone else feel the submerged story emerging?
This is really a very sad and lonely story if you can feel it inside you.
I didn’t get her name.
It was a hot and wet Saturday night;
So I left the screen door wide open
Hoping for a change in the weather.
She strolled in like the queen of Sheeba riding a breeze.
Her inspection was on schedule.
She allowed me to imagine that it was my company she was after.
Earnestly engaging my eyes with her face.
Which she put close to mine and stared into my eyes.
As if she were the only soul left on earth who still loved me.
All the while she scanned the kitchen floor out of the corner of her feline eye,
I became fascinated by her calm, steady gaze.
Once having assessed my meagre, modest, means
She walked straight back out the door she had walked through.
And out of my life again. Leaving me to gaze at the space she had deliberately…
I didn’t get her name.
It was a hot and wet Saturday night;
So I left the screen door wide open
Hoping for a change in the weather.
She strolled in like the queen of Sheeba riding a breeze.
Her inspection was on schedule.
She allowed me to imagine that it was my company she was after.
Earnestly engaging my eyes with her face.
Which she put close to mine and stared into my eyes.
As if she were the only soul left on earth who still loved me.
All the while she scanned the kitchen floor out of the corner of her feline eye,
I became fascinated by her calm, steady gaze.
Once having assessed my meagre, modest, means
She walked straight back out the door she had walked through.
And out of my life again.
Leaving me to gaze at the space she had deliberately left behind.
The healing effect of words has long been recognized. As far back as 4000 BCE, early Egyptians wrote words on papyrus, dissolve them in liquid, and gave them to those who were ill as a form of medicine. In more recent history, reading and expressive writing have been employed as supplementary treatments for those experiencing mental or emotional distress. Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital established in the United States, employed this approach as early as the mid-1700s.
In the early 1800s, Dr. Benjamin Rush introduced poetry as a form of therapy to those being treated. In 1928, poet and pharmacist Eli Griefer began offering poems to people filling prescriptions and eventually started “poem-therapy” groups at two different hospitals with the support of psychiatrists Dr. Jack L. Leedy and Dr. Sam Spector. After Griefer’s death, Leedy and others continued to incorporate poetry into the therapeutic group process, eventually coming together to form the Association for Poetry Therapy (APT) in 1969.
Librarians also played a major role in the development of this approach to therapy. Arleen Hynes, one pioneer in this area, was a hospital librarian who began reading stories and poems aloud, facilitating discussions on the material and its relevance to each individual in order to better reach out to those being treated and encourage healing. In 1980, all leaders in the field were invited to a meeting to formalize guidelines for training and certification. At that meeting, the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was established.
As interest grew, several books and articles were written to guide practitioners in the practice of poetry therapy. Hynes and Mary Hynes-Berry co-authored the 1986 publication Bibliotherapy – The Interactive Process: A Handbook. More recently, Nicholas Mazza outlined a model for effective poetry therapy, also discussing its clinical application, in Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice.
The Journal of Poetry Therapy, established in 1987 by the NAPT, remains the most comprehensive source of information on current theory, practice, and research.
There is also a relationship between psychological healing and incantations; either repeated as a musical chant by the patient or in fact recited by the attending medicine man. Modern medicine and science of course scoff at the notion of magical incantations having healing or restorative powers as so much superstition. But this, of course, begs the question that if recitations and incantations had no evidential resort and no beneficial property then why would every single human culture have adopted the method and repeated it for several thousand years? Surely if there was nothing to vibrating air with the sound of one’s breath as well as the added stimulation of associative meaning being read cognitively by the patient’s mind; we would have given it and its sisters, singing and chanting aeons ago.
I am not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and behavior for which can be a myriad of imprecise explanations; none of which explain why it works.
Today, poetry therapy is practised internationally by hundreds of professionals, including poets, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, social workers, educators and librarians. The approach has been used successfully in a number of settings—schools, community centers, libraries, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and correctional institutions, to name a few.
How Does Poetry Therapy Work?
As part of therapy, some people may wish to explore feelings and memories buried in the subconscious and identify how they may relate to current life circumstances. Poetry is beneficial to this process as it can often be used as a vehicle for the expression of emotions that might otherwise be difficult to express
•Promote self-reflection and exploration, increasing self-awareness and helping individuals make sense of their world
•Help individuals redefine their situation by opening up new ways of perceiving reality
•Help therapists gain deeper insight into those they are treating
• In general, poetry therapists are free to choose from any poems they believe offer therapeutic value, but most tend to follow general guidelines.
It is recommended selected poems be concise, address universal emotions or experiences, offer some degree of hope, and contain plain language. Some poems commonly used in therapy are: “The Journey” by Mary Oliver “Talking to Grief” by Denise Levertov “The Armful” by Robert Frost “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman “Turtle Island” by Gary Snyder The poetry of Alan Watt, Allen Ginsberg and others.
Although the selection of material is often by the therapist, those being treated might be asked to bring to therapy a poem or other form of literature they identify with, as this may also provide valuable insight into their feelings and emotions.
My Technique in Poetry Therapy
A few different models of poetry therapy exist, but the one I’ve had the most success with is a Four Phased Progression of Attention:
Recognition – Focus – Intention – Action
In the receptive/recognition phase, the poet therapist merely guides the subject to focus on their issue. The aim is to establish concentration and cognitive focus on the details of the issue which are not revealed to the poet/therapist. Only until the poet/therapist feels confident that the subject is cognitively attuned to and non verbally focussed on the problem or issue of concern that they begin to ask suggestive questions as to how the subject feels, not thinks about their subject.
This provocation of emotion usually comes in three distinct phases of emotional content:
I. First is the one of the predicament, then the subject first becomes aware of the existence of the issue. This is the gateway phase where anticipatory feelings are registered and ideally conveyed through the prompting of the poet/therapist.
II. Then there is the full throttle stage when anticipation of the issue has given way to full experience of all emotions related to the issue. This is usually overwhelming (or it wouldn’t be “an issue” in the first place), and it is tantamount that the poet/guide leads the subject through distinct words to describe the layers of emotions experienced by the subject. Language and the use of the words is the key here because emotions always come in clusters of complexity that make it difficult for both poet/therapist and subject to distinguish and focus on underlying and suppress emotions.
“What kind of anger do you feel?”
“How would you describe your sadness”
“How much shame do you feel?
“What would you compare it to?”
Are typical of the questions a poet therapist would ask the subject.
This is a sophisticated method of word association but rather than creating bridges between seemingly disparate words, the goal is to drill down to the core emotions about the issue by uncovering and refining the language the subject has chosen.
Achieving exactitude of description is the task at hand. The Poet/Therapist makes careful notation of everything the subject says towards describing their emotion. It is important to keep them focused and not to succumb to intellectual distraction. Thoughts are illusions, emotions are facts.
Getting the subject to correctly and precisely describe the emotional facts of the matter at hand is the objective
III. The final phase is the exit strategy.
How do the feelings commence to recede? How does the issue recede back into the background? What are the parting emotions? Is there anxiety about the leaving? The anticipation of an issue yet unresolved? Or is the issue impermeable and subject to a rhythmic return?
Again, the subject’s wording, their adjectives, adverbs and phrases are the material of the poem.
At this point, there is usually a short break to give time for the subject to recover from the emotional transitions and for the Poet/Therapist to briefly skim their notes and begin to focus on the flow of adjectives. It is preferable if possible, to compose what amounts to a first draft, a flow of words which the poet can read back to the subject to confirm the accuracy of the flow.
At this first reading stage, it is possible to start interjecting logical bridges between the emotional descriptors. This is the creative factor unleashed. The Poet must be led by the subject to link coherent sequences between the emotional states. The poet suggests and the subject confirms or vetoes the phraseology, one line at a time.
Now we arrive at a second draft which is the property of the subject. It is their poem for which it is crucial that the subject now read the poem aloud and take ownership of its content. The subject can redraft the poem a third time in making it their own. But the physicality of uttering the words they have chosen to express their emotional state is an act of ownership and closure.
The Poet/Therapist can either email the finished poem to the subject, hand them his/her notes or rewrite the poem into a legible form. In any case, it is important that the Poet/Therapist ascribes the authorship of the poem to the client. If the client is hesitant to put their name to the poem than something is lacking in the poem and must be redressed or indeed started over again.
The key to the entire exercise is freedom of expression, honesty and then refinement; exacting the poem.
Other Approaches and Other Models
The process of writing can be both cathartic and empowering, often freeing blocked emotions or buried memories and giving voice to one’s concerns and strengths. Some people may doubt their ability to write creatively, but therapists can offer to support by explaining they do not have to use rhyme or a particular structure. Therapists might also provide stem poems from which to work or introduce sense poems for those who struggle with imagery. A Poet/Therapist might also share a poem with the individual and then ask them to select a line that touched them in some way and then use that line to start their own poem.
In group therapy, poems may be written individually or collaboratively. Group members are sometimes given a single word, topic, or sentence stem and asked to respond to it spontaneously. The contributions of group members are compiled to create a single poem which can then be used to stimulate group discussion. In couples therapy, the couple may be asked to write a dyadic poem by contributing alternating lines.
The symbolic/ceremonial component involves the use of metaphors, storytelling, and rituals as tools for effecting change. Metaphors, which are essentially symbols, can help individuals to explain complex emotions and experiences in a concise yet profound manner. Rituals may be particularly effective to help those who have experienced a loss or ending, such as a divorce or death of a loved one, to address their feelings around that event. Writing and then burning a letter to someone who died suddenly, for example, may be a helpful step in the process of accepting and coping with grief.
How Can Poetry Therapy Help You?
Poetry therapy has been used as part of the treatment approach for a number of concerns, including borderline personality, suicidal ideation, identity issues, perfectionism, and grief.
Research shows the method is frequently a beneficial part of the treatment process. Several studies also support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the articulation of feelings. Researchers have also demonstrated poetry therapy’s ability to reduce anxiety and stress in people.
Those experiencing post-traumatic stress have also reported improved mental and emotional well-being as a result of poetry therapy. Some individuals who have survived trauma or abuse may have difficulty processing the experience cognitively and, as a result, suppress associated memories and emotions.
Through poetry therapy, many are able to integrate these feelings, reframe traumatic events, and develop a more positive outlook for the future. People experiencing addiction may find poetry therapy can help them explore their feelings regarding the substance abuse, perceive drug use in a new light, and develop or strengthen coping skills.
Poetry writing may also be a way for those with substance abuse issues to express their thoughts on treatment and behavior change. Some studies have shown poetry therapy can be of benefit to people with schizophrenia despite the linguistic and emotional deficits associated with the condition.
Poetry writing may be a helpful method of describing mental experiences and can allow therapists to better understand the thought processes of those they are treating. Poetry therapy has also helped some individuals with schizophrenia to improve social functioning skills and foster more organized thought processes. It is important to note in many instances, especially in cases of moderate to severe mental health concerns, poetry therapy is used in combination with another type of therapy, not as the sole approach to treatment.
Training for Poetry Therapists Poetry therapists receive literary as well as clinical training to enable them to be able to select literature appropriate for the healing process. While there is no university program in poetry therapy, the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy (IFBPT), the independent credentialing body for the profession, has developed specific training requirements. Several studies support poetry therapy as one approach to the treatment of depression, as it has been repeatedly shown to relieve depressive symptoms, improve self-esteem and self-understanding, and encourage the expression of feelings.
Concerns and Limitations of Poetry Therapy
In spite of its widespread appeal and broad range of application, some concerns have been raised about the use of poetry therapy. Some critics have pointed out it is possible for people to analyze a poem on a purely intellectual level, without any emotional involvement. This type of intellectualization may be more likely when complex poems are used, as a person might spend so much time trying to decipher the meaning of the poem that they lose sight of their emotions and spontaneous reactions. Poems that are unoriginal or filled with clichés are unlikely to stimulate individuals on a deep emotional level or challenge them to think in ways that promote growth. Just always keep in mind that poetry therapy may have little or no value for those individuals who simply do not enjoy poetry.
The Advertising Pitch:
Words are the Most Powerful Magic There Is
Sometimes Your Mind Has a Will of Its Own
With PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY you can
Learn How to Read Your Own Mind!
Confusion bringing you down?
Is manic depression touching your soul?
You know what you want, but you just don’t know how to get There?
Poetry therapy is what you need when the medication, the yoga, the guided meditation, the crystals, the chakra alignment and other Somatic treatments just aren’t working.
Some things only work when you let them work:
• Restore Self-Confidence
• Achieve Closure from Painful Relationship Breakups & Lost Loved Ones
• Find a More Meaningful Direction to Your Life
• Get Unstuck and Out of Your Own Way
• Overcome Fears and Anxiety
• Control panic attacks
• Change Addictive Behavior Patterns, like OCD
• Re-Write bad Scripts
Recognition > Focus > Intention > Action
There is no trick to listening to yourself and learning how choosing and rearranging your words can unlock darkened doors, de-clutter basements and clean out the attics of your life. Sometimes in merely one session.
Every Tuesday from 11:00 am until 6:30 pm at the
Inner Temple Inner Healing Center
at Eve’s Vegan Cafe 575 S. Coast Highway 101 Encinitas, CA
PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY has only recently launched its online version via FaceTime, Skype or Facebook video. Just add <poetry therapy> to your Skype contacts and schedule a date. Payments accepted through PayPal or Facebook cash. Here are some examples of the poetry achieved through PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY:
I.
Narcissus in a Nutshell
I’ve lost the person locked within the situation
Like a nut dwells within its hard shell of fearful anger.
Escaping vulnerability
Hiding from the unknown.
Hard shells, hard feelings, hardness itself
The excitement of living days in the present
Belonging to the past
I will not let go of what I can recall but not relive
My belonging to that which encompasses myself
Another nut within its shell.
To belong is to exist
Without belonging there is Nothing and
I fear nothing most of all because I do not know it
And I fear what I do not know more than
I would remedy the pain of this loss with trustworthy tools
When two liquids are bonded as one
A single drop of poison poisons the whole glass
And betrayal is always poison no matter how little or how much
The glass of Narcissus’s tears is now empty
He has blinded himself rather than drink his own poison.
Instead he has left me to sip the bitter poison
Of fading better days.
Like a cat
Poised in stillness
Distracted by nothing
Readyto pounce
I will not surrender the pain.
I will not surrender the pain.
Because the pain is my memory of the happiness
We’ve now lost
A sweet nut within a bitter shell.
II.
The Martyr
Last night I saw you beatify a martyr
With a magical brush of gold belief.
You were serious and determined
But your brush strokes were light caresses
On a sky blue span of canvass
As you gently coaxed another image into being.
You remind me of my mother earth
Stern in her compassion
Willing to tolerate just so much from me
Before reining in my love
With her brushes.
And where you have drawn your line
‘Be careful’, you said to me on parting
But all the care in the world could not stop
My bulb from bursting
Rendering me blind in the speeding night
But still seeing with the golden light
Of the martyr you have shown me.
III.
Snake Heart
This sadness, this hopelessness
Will not be swatted away
Nor drowned by the busy work
Of the day to day.
It persists
Even when I am submerged in my bathtub.
The warm water rising from the bottom of my lungs.
Until I lose the will to breath
And the sadness becomes anger
Rising to the very top of my horns
Of my red-hot raging exhaustion.
How good to be angry!
I used to be afraid of snakes but no longer. I am hissing from the centre of my snake-heart
As you try and step over me.
Your eyes fail to see as you tread on my tail.
On my snake heart.
On my resolution without confrontation.
Without the owning of emotion
All that’s left for us is the hissing sound of machinery.
What happens in life never really unfolds like a story. Events are chaotic determinants by forces; more than you can recognize at any given moment. Forces,”energies” bouncing, conflicting competing, compromising and resolving while constantly falling forwards in time.
We are forever falling forwards in time.
But this still isn’t enough to satisfy our minds. We demand answers! Sometimes with clenched fists shaking at the heavens: Reasons, Causes, Meanings, Sense. So that we can understand how it all fits together and possibly improve our fortune at the next turn of the carousel. At the next “happening”.
We need to make Sense.
We need to investigate, to explain, to decipher our dreams, not merely dream them. So we strive to find stories in our rearview mirrors. We create links between events and project pattern, structures, relationships, understandings onto a blank canvas.
We make things up from what we feel then recount our stories first to ourselves and then to each other.
Tell me, is it still allowed to feel sad and lonely on a sunny southern California day? Do I need to get a sad permit or risk my sadness being towed? I’ve had this sadness in my family for many years and I don’t want to lose it or have it stolen by someone fed up with happiness.
I already feel as if my emotions have been impounded.
I am sad for and from events; exhausted from the strain of holding my head up in this churning karmic current, just so as not to drown in the Red Queen’s swimming pool.
Yesterday started as a warming of the air. The first signs that Spring is calling out to Summer. I had started my day by flying 70 mph down the hills of La Costa, curving around the Cardiff lagoon while the Carlsbad state beach winked and waved at me from the western horizon.
Soon I will be ending my days by plunging into the burning sunset of my mother’s arms. No, not suicide; rebirth and the cleansing of the accruments gathered from the other seasons, now no longer needed.
I am moving forward on the highway numbered 5 looking forward to my rehearsal with gifted collaborator John Kingsmill who understands sound as breaths. He understands me, what I’m trying to do and since it’s what he’s trying to do we get along fine. My mind is thinking of the piece he has orchestrated which we have yet to practice, much less perform. Then further on to the Misfit Gallery in La Jolla where we will perform to an unknown number of people looking at art.
Suddenly my wings begin to fail me. (Oh why didn’t I listen to Daedalus?) My engine slows down, I pull to the side of the freeway and turn off the engine and turn it back on again. Hey, it works with computers! But not this time. Now my mind begins to race, instantly recalculating my day. I am on the side of Highway 5 just past the Leucadia on-ramp. I have 20 minute’s to get to John’s to rehearse the one poem the organizer hates and told me not to read. Yes, yes, I know. I’m a rebel without applause.
What the organizer has to her credit is the sheer scale mounting an original exhibition in such short time. That is truly awesome; and you know I never use that word! It nearly brought tears to my eyes the day before in the gallery seeing not just the individual canvasses for the first time but the urgent, pressing social beauty of the exhibit as a whole. I was at home with these artists fighting for social justice; we are comrades with many arms trying to change the world into a better place, a fairer place: each one of us different, each one of us in our own way.
One canvass, one poem, one dance, one book, one note at a time.
But right now I am furious. I’m at the side of the freeway, space vehicles whizzing past me and I must get to Encinitas, just a couple of miles up the road. I am furious with my mechanic who had only recently returned my bike to me supposedly repaired. I am infuriated with myself for not having planned a contingency. I am infuriated at the passing cars who are free to go anywhere they want to, unlike me. Then I stop and recall my practice. None of this anger is solving the issue.
It crossed my mind how motivating my own anger was. My father told me once that the only way to overcome, to cancel out an overwhelming, overpowering emotion is with another equally strong emotion. All it takes to stop a ‘bad’ emotion is one ‘good’ one, to borrow from the NRA. So I put that emotional “energy” to use, slipped my Victory into neutral and began to push it to the next off ramp down the road: Encinitas, just another 2 miles to find parking.
Sweat drenching my best shirt, every few yards I would stick out my kickstand, and turn over the engine. Nothing, which gave me more adrenaline and more strength to get my bike to Encinitas. To John, to La Jolla, to the Misfit Gallery, and most of all to the organizer who I had made a commitment to: To bring poetry to the public space, to an art show and make it work!
Sisyphus would have been proud of me if he didn’t have his own Herculean labor to perform. And yes, I was beginning to like it. To sweat against the odds, to face resistance and overcome it. The sheer exertion of raw muscle to the task. This was my Will taking center stage. This was so much better than hopelessness!
There is a comfort to take in hopelessness which you can only know if you’re paying rent there. It is the comfort of one’s own courage, the bottom-of-the-barrel resolve that not only survives but is strengthened in the face of adversity and injustice. In spite of the powerful forces aligned behind the injustice, in spite of how weak, how haggard, how exhausted, how old, or how frail you may feel, at the very least you are standing up and shouting “No!”
And that is the greatest political power of them all: Basta!
As Emma Gomez (the Joan of Arc of the resistance) cries out, “Enough is enough’! And with that cry called forth the spirits of every American, every person who ever fought for Truth, for Liberty and for Justice.
Just like in the comic books.
Just like in your high school civics class, just like at the signing of that great document in Philadelphia, the capital of the United States. Where freedom’s bell still rings loud and clear; regardless of the visible cracks.
We refind the courage in ourselves that connects us to the sake of others, for the sake of our brethren who are equally ravaged by the same foul-smelling winds: The Long Great Fart of capitalism. Only then are we truly liberating ourselves as much as we aim to deliver freedom to others.
No one will be truly free until we are all free.
Free of want. Free from terror. Free from greed, from avarice, free from war, free from our own self-destruction.
When we stand up, we all stand on the same ground, the only ground that ever covered this planet; this tiny blue marble in the sky.
And I got through. I got through to Encinitas, legs slightly bent. I got through to my mechanic who would dispatch a truck to pick up my bike the next day. I got through to John and rearranged our spontaneity. I got through to the organizer who generously sent her boyfriend dressed as Che Guevara to collect and deliver me to a room brimming with Misfits.
I got to hear my favourite Persian poet Ari Honarvar. (I like her more than Rumi because she’s still alive;~) And then finally the true consequence of my efforts. The real reward for my persistence and determination. Something I would gladly have pushed a ton vehicle a hundred miles to find:
When I read my work, I got through to the audience.
They heard me! They heard me paint a portrait of a shooter and reconnect to their own empathy and complicity. They heard me lament the dehumanization, the tyranny of automation and shine a light on the chains around our ankles we barely notice anymore.
They heard me speak to and of, their own lives. Their own seemingly private rituals in front of their computer screens, replicated by the billions.
When I read, we were all up close and personal. Can there be any intimacy at an orgy? I think sometimes there might be.
They heard me and I got through!
Halleluja, Halleluja, the long hard road is still worth travelling, that is with a better bike that won’t break down.
In the end, it was the numbers that did us in.
They lined us up into military rows
And assigned us all numbers
One after one after one after one after one….
How many, nobody knows.
You see, it’s a numbers game
It’s all the same
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Let me explain how it’s done,
And how this game can never be won.
See, there are good numbers and bad numbers
High numbers and sad numbers.
Sometimes high numbers are good and low numbers are bad
And sometimes low numbers are good and high numbers are sad.
It all depends on who is counting.
Not you or me
Not the numbers either.
They don’t know, they’re just numbers after all.
Although…
The numbers are counting on each other.
Just not you or me
Because we will never be free
Of Big Numbers and small numbers,
Negative numbers and imaginary numbers,
You see, it’s a numbers game.
It’s all the same
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Let me explain
How it’s done.
And how this game can never be won. Prisoner number…
Credit Score number
GPA number
SAT Number
Zip code number
Blood pressure number
Heart rate number
DOB & TOD numbers
House number
Gas number
Phone number
Electricity number
Room number
Water number
Dog tags number
Social Security number
Bank account number
Table number
Sibling number
Temperature number
Flight number
License number
Vehicle registration number
Alcohol level number
Height, weight and age number
I hear you scream:
“I’m not a number, I’m a human being!!”
Sure you are,
Now take a number.
It’s for your own protection
There’s safety in numbers.
Numbers can answer all of your questions:
How far, how long, how deep, how high, how many,
How often?
Just not ‘how come’?
Anyone can count,
But you can’t count on anyone.
See, it’s a numbers game
That can’t be won
It’s a numbers game
It’s just how it’s done.
It’s all the same.
You’re not your name
You’re your numbers.
Now count to ten
And start all over again.
For Rob Thompson who asked me if Numbers occupy Space.
I am a paper bag, I am.
I am only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag, I am.
I’m not the smart one,
I’m not the successful one.
I’m not the tall one who always won and
Then died.
I am a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag,
I’m not plastic or burlap, not I.
I am paper: rough, brown and thin
I’m not waterproof, you know.
And I can’t hold any liquids or gases within.
I only have the energy for stuff that really matters.
I’m a paper bag.
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
I am a paper bag.
Wrinkled and used and too often abused
Thrown on the floor.
Buried deep inside your drawers.
I am a paper bag.
I cannot ask you for anything more
I’m only as good as what I can carry.
Has been entered int the Realistic Poetry Contest and thus is no longer available on my blog as it is defined as non-exclusive or previous publication by the contest rules.
Who knows, I may even win.
Either way, it returns once the contest is over in February
Tune In.
Last night was kind of my XXXmas eve, being a Saturday night, with no ghosts to placate until Monday morning. So I took my Victory out for a long ride, 46 miles down to Chula Vista to drop in on my drunken-angel-poet-brothers Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoy. As I told them, I’ve never stopped in Chula Vista before, only passed through it; well on my way to crossing the border between Mexico and Madness.
Back in the Beatnik Days, when America was still a Great Shining Beacon of Golden Intentions and jail-breaking freedoms, going south of the border was a euphemism for leaving the straight rational world and exploring the psychedelic corridors and hallways of the unconscious mind, where the muses played poker to the sound of Gabriel’s saxophone under a streetlamp, playing for spare change, playing for the end of time. Kesey, Cassidy, Timothy Leary had all spent time south of the border, hiding from the authority.
But I wasn’t going all the way south or crossing any borders. Instead, like a Boddhisatva practising the discipline of worldly compassion, I was riding south on the great American highway stopping just short of going over the edge. Stopping long enough for the rest of my sentient species to hop on board and cross over with me. How long I gotta wait? The blur of the wind in my eyes transforms Inter-state 5 into a two-lane river of white headlight diamonds on one end heading towards but past me and on the other end, a torrent of glistening rubies speeding with me, flowing around me, carrying me forwards in one high speed direction.
I was carried on a slipstream of glistening rubies last night. Chilled legs wrapped around my angel in flight, carrying me aloft above all thought, beyond all hesitation, in that dangerous living moment when every half second of thought is solid and real with consequence; and any distraction is a trap door thumping open under the hangman’s rope.
That is the fury of mediation. That is my arrival in this moment that we all share. The calm at the center of chaos. Join me, dear reader, at the centre of chaos.
So I’m heading south armed with an unopened bottle of rye, the spirit of the season travels with me. Good whisky is about as spiritual as I get these days. It is my usual Xmas tradition to grab a bottle of good booze and head down to the Greyhound station, or the street corner, outside a homeless shelter or an alleyway or anywhere I can find and join a cluster of the disaffected, the homeless, the pointless, the ones left out of family portraits. Just to share a drink, a joke and the dregs of our mutual humanity.
But this year, not particularly in contrast, I’ve chosen the company of Deadbeat poets, failed self-construction workers, mental hospital misfits, suicide skippers and gravel-voiced prophets capable of predicting the present with uncanny accuracy. Cassandra’s children muttering under their condensed breaths, scratching their prophecies from the oracle down for the benefit of anyone who still remembers how to read; or how to listen. Tonight these are my brothers (and sisters), in arms. Raging against a sea of struggles, believing that by opposing them, we will end them and wrap our soiled blankets of peace around this cold, shivering world’s shoulders.
Dead Beat Poets
I make it to Main Street much too early and agree to meet my comrades in a bar called Sanctum. I have no currency apart from my still untried bottle of rye so I stand outside on the pavement near but not too near two young women smoking butts and laughing. ‘Merry Xmas’, I venture.
‘Merry fucking Xmas to you too’, is their reply. So I listen. A skill I am still mastering. The raven-haired beauty of the pair is recounting her love life to her friend. Telling her how she had met her intended’s eyes at work, a burning penetration in time and how happy she was that at least she knew, that she knew that she knew that there was an unstated passion, thrilling at the unstated, as yet unenacted attraction between them.
The bittersweet anticipation of passions yearned for but still yet to come.
I wanted to tell the dark-haired young woman how lucky she was to be free to express such yearning to another woman. Jealously, I wanted her to pity my poor lame masculinity and the political mindfield I had to traverse to even come close to sharing such a pure moment of true emotion and affection. But I didn’t. Who wants to hear another pitiful man’s story anyways? This was the year of raised female voices. Voices raised in anger, in righteous retribution for all the wrongs accrued., in demand of recognition. Voices of freedom insisting on justice, insisting on equal treatment without unwanted trespass.
Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink. . . .
So instead I pulled out my weapon of virtue, my great equalizer of man and woman, my bottle of rye from my bag and asked if ‘You ladies would like a drink”. “Hell yes”. And for a brief instant, I felt just like St. Peter patrolling the earth and giving comfort to lost souls.
This murdered the time until my wordly brothers finally arrived. We poured from the bottle into bright red dixie cups, swigging them down in the parking lot before entering the warmth of Sanctum Ale House to talk poetry, performance, and what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. This was beginning to feel a lot like a rendezvous of fallen angels pausing for a drink and brief reflection before hitting Hell.
Beatnik Approved!
There was no reason to take a picture or a selfie or even take note of the time. We drank, we talked, we tried to make each other laugh and we indulged in our common humanity; a focus on what we shared more than what we didn’t.
My mind spun back in time to the many drinking conversations I had with my late great friend, the writer David Halliwell. The only man I had ever met who had got drunk with Sam Beckett. So David told this story of buying a bottle of good Irish whisky and taking the train to London, from Yorkshire. Easily a 4-hour journey. On the trip, David got nervous opened the bottle and drank half the contents on the way down arriving completely cut up the King’s Road party where San Beckett would be. He did find Beckett apparently and immediately sat down to finish the rest of the bottle he’d brought. David got so drunk he couldn’t remember a word that Sam Beckett had said to him.
Last night, I told Chris and Alex about the year that David called me up to join him for a Xmas drink and The Bull Tavern in the little North East Oxfordshire village of Charlbury, whose village council insisted on calling it a town because it had 4 pubs, a pharmacy and a post office.
I walked down the unpaved bumpy road to the tavern, past the Egyptian cottage with the papyrus reeds of Isis, the Goddess, not the terrorists. I reached The Bull pub and Inn, Opened the heavy oak door and walked into a movie. The pub was nearly empty save for the bar that featured David on his bar stool holding court with his mates. Only his mates were images burnt on my retinas since childhood: John Hurt, Ben Kingsley, David Warner, Freddie Jones and his son, then unknown now better known than him, Toby Jones. I remember blinking in disbelief. I might as well have walked in on Lewis Carrol, Tolkien and CS Lewis downing pints all who had also frequented this pub some hundred years previously.
I remember David smiling, laughing his phlegmatic cough and motioning me over to introduce me to these faces from the screen. “This is Igor, he’s another writer; he’s a Yank but he’s alright”. I was just another writer in the company of actors, everyday workers taking a break from toiling in the star-maker factories behind the popular film. I was handed a bulbous goblet of glowing ruby wine and the rest is hard to remember. But I do recall making them laugh and David Warner towering over me and reminiscing about his one appearance in a two-part Star Trek opposite Patrick Stewart that had earned him enough to comfortably return to the stage for 7 continuous years. Apart from young Toby, these were board strutting actors; indifferent and virtually contemptuous of their movie work save for the vast sums Hollywood paid them for peddling their trade of packaged emotions.
The next year most of them would be dead, David Halliwell included. I would empty his cottage with a Scottish actor of his while his Yorkshire sister wept inconsolably on his stairwell. In England, people let you weep and leave you to the dignity of your grief out of respect for the exceptional display of emotion. If you openly weep in England its because the pain is so hard that you really can’t hold it in.
Back in the Sanctuum, I explained to my companions how David had taught me the true meaning and value of the literary arts, which for David included actors who tell stories with their faces. Storytelling’s place in the human universe, keeping the stars locked in their firmament and the cosmic spheres in perfectly balanced and meaningful rotation. David Halliwell wasn’t famous. He died a virtual pauper, alone, estranged from his sister, a Yorkshire man with an RSC accent from wanting to be an actor, who wrote every day of his life before heading down to the pub to argue with me.
But he was a great success, albeit not by any kind of American Calvinist standard. Rather he succeeded in staying true to his art. He never sold out to better-paid mediocrity. He stayed true to his art, to himself and he survived with the respect and admiration of his fellow artists. When he died, I wrote and read this eulogy at his memorial, after Harold Pinter came up from Hampstead to say a few words about his departed friend. As did Stephen Frears and Scott Hampton (author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses).
I read this poem to David to my friends Alex Bosworth and Chris Vannoylast night. And in my mind, I went hunting and visiting my own xmas ghosts to remind me of the true joys of this season.
Daedalus Afraid to Fly
David, you bastard, you’ve left me
Understanding here alone,
With only these words falling out of my hands
When it is yours I want to hear again.
Words of your mastery, not mine.
So what was all the swearing about then, David?
What were all those Northern fumes really burning from?
I told you the songs of Yorkshire would never play in LA
Or London for that matter):
Two cities equidistant from your Yorkshire mother.
Tell me, David, why didn’t you just sell out?
You could have bought yourself a much better pint of beer
With all that money for old knotted ropes and
Still, have coughed up the phlegm to laugh at us all.
Is death your idea of some kind of joke?
Did you finally track down the film rights to Malcolm, David
And cash them in?
Are you really, secretly living in Barbados,
Making beautiful women miserable?
To think of all this wasted sorrow and
Empty glasses of beer.
You did say that you always wanted to visit other places.
But Daedalus, you were afraid to fly.
If you had been born upside down in America
You would have been a southern writer living in some Northern town.
Spilling your southern drawl over a rum and coke in a New York City bar.
Sitting elbow to arm with Williams, O’Neill, Baldwin and them all.
Your America was always an America of the mind.
So why fear the flight?
Your America David was where Charlie Parker
was forever sharp shooting pool with Humphrey Bogart
in some room behind a neon-splattered bar
Where Chet Baker never jumped or fell but flew, man!
He just flew away.
Just like you.
So you’re off then, David?
Back up the bumpy road,
Turning the corner around the Little Egyptian cottage
Navigating the reeds of Isis, Long past the close of time.
A brown duffle coat ship, bobbing on an unpaved surface,
Weaving a few well-spoken thoughts into your
Captain’s cap.
Can you tell me, David:
Were you X-Centric, or
Merely Eggs Essential?
How about this time I tell you, David:
The spark was always there.
But not like Daedalus, like Prometheus.
The living punishment of Truth,
Chained to your bar stool,
That eternal pint of Carlsberg lager gnawing at your liver.
Like Prometheus David,
The spark is always here.
For the late, great David Halliwell; poet, playwright,
So who is this Soul that you sing of?
The silent, invisible witness
Who counts the leaves off of trees
instead of gathering them?
Then raking them into a funerary circle,
Into a giant pile, your better self can fall from,
Or jump into?
Up to your eyeballs,
Up to your own little crown of thorns.
Mysterious Hands
The world is not a mystery, children.
It is an enigma waiting to solved
Or a safe that awaits its own combination.
A puzzle patiently poised for its pieces to coincide
With your hands.
The question is not who made the world we exist in
The question is who made your hands?
Prayer
I can no longer afford my own vices.
Is this g/d’s way of saving me?
Mysteriously?
If so, then more salvation and
Less mystery is all I can say.
Lead me to more fortune and less poverty, g/d.
So that I can pave my own way.
Oh what a beautiful morning,
Oh what a glorious day,
I’ve got a wonderful fee-ling,
That Donald is going away!
Spotted by puddles of darkness &
Forever burning lights.
Who at first, allured us,
Then wouldn’t allow us to leave her side.
Though she may be so much older than you or I,
She was, after all my life is recalled,
My greatest lover, ever.
Please remember Paris with fond tenderness
And fire.
Recent rewrite. When I first wrote and posted it, no one seemed to know what I meant by it. But now it’s becoming a favoured read aloud piece:
Insomniac Awareness
We who are hiding in our second bedrooms,
Licking the silver from the backs of our screens,
Are living in a different time zone
Of Insomniac Awareness.
Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four or more
Lives are lived and lost each night.
In our rooms, by ourselves
Sitting precariously on the edge of our beds.
This is our legacy
The lasting perpetuity of our sensory species:
The glow that contests the light that once shone from our eyes,
Right up to the surface of our understanding.
What is not yet known.
Or what was known and long since forgotten.
Dances across the screen you stare into.
Tripping over your coded memories; in Real Time.
Who are you reading this?Do you know
What perturbs your sleep-walk into the night?
Or are you merely waiting for the screen to pull you through?
Into your own quiet world,
Where things that count never change.
And no one is dreaming you but your mother,
Who has left you now for another child.
Death and his brothers are in my garden again.
Moving my plants around.
They tend to the growth quite delicately
Careful to not reap the harvest until the plants mature
And begin to lose their hair.
Death and his brother are in my garden again,
Whispering to each other as they pull away the weeds.
Poting and repotting each plant as it grows
Making sure the roots are clear of regrets and debris
So that in the end, it’s life can be cut short more easily.
Does death have a sweetheart? I wonder.
A woman whom he woes with words of love?
As much as death can love any living thing, at all.
He gathers my plants into a beautiful bouquet
Of lost souls and freshly cut lives.
To gift to she who holds him near; squeezing his dead heart in one hand,
None of us gets paroled From the prison cells, we lock ourselves into. So that we all can fit together inside This jigsaw life that we lead. Which of course, eventually blows apart. We are merely the fragments of ourselves awaiting reassembly.
Each moment of thought is but a small drop in time. Every piece fits the next piece. Although we may try to avoid The murmurs of our own thoughts. It is our hearts that yawn and awaken slowly From their long winter night’s sleep.
You and I are mere mortals,
Who dreamt of a life without end. We are the ones who made up immortality and notoriety. For the sake of seeking sweet comforts and sad joys. And this is the story we tell ourselves
Harvey Weinstein is a relatively insignificant porcine individual. What is significant both historically and otherwise, is that the tipping point has been reached from a time when male abuse and harassment of women as acts of dominant power was acceptable social behavior (at least behind closed doors), and the new world of Now: when people (especially in power), have had enough of sitting in silence on the other side of that door.
It looks to me like enough men finally said enough is enough visavis the behaviour of other men to express their disapproval. Couple with the facts that enough women are now in positions of leverage and power now to censure inappropriate professional behaviour as well as report assault as a crime. No one should ever be forcing anyone else to have sex or anything approaching it, regardless of circumstance. There really, simply is no excuse. We all know that, don’t we?
This is a small triumph for feminism when unwanted sexual advances are de-normalised. Calling something the ‘new normal’ indicates a change and progression in the zeitgeist. This turning point has ‘No Return’ stamped on its ticket. We won’t be going back anytime soon on this new normal in which men keep tabs and check each other and women assert their social space, no longer afraid to speak out when it is compromised.
‘But where does that leave us horny men?’
I can hear someone muttering under his trenchcoat from the back row.
Will men no longer be permitted to express attraction, much less physical affection towards a woman without incurring the wrath of the new PC-Puritan sex police?
Of course not, that is unless you don’t subscribe to something we call
Common Sense.
No matter the testosterone level, a man knows when a woman isn’t interested in him. Common Sense dictates that you move along and stop bothering her; because that’s exactly what you will be doing if you keep garnering attention on a woman who is clearly uninterested in you. Bothering her. Move along son, there’s nothing more to do here.
For those for whom rejection is a challenge, or at least not an obstacle that can’t be overcome, things get a lot trickier.
My advice is to learn how to flirt.
Flirtation is where sexual negotiation really takes place. I admit that it’s much more common in European environments (even Britain) than in the US. There, flirtation (or banter), plays on wit. You’re going to need to charm your way forwards; which means most of all, consideration and respect for her and her wishes. Is romance really dead in America? Usurped by the hook-up apps? Or is it just common courtesy that’s expired? Why wouldn’t you treat a woman (or man) with whom you wish to share an intimate moment like gold (or a shooting star or a rainbow or even a delicate but fragrant pink rose)?
But those to whom I really want to address my remarks and who may very well be reading this, are those young (or old) men who are confused about a woman’s reactions, detect so-called mixed signals or just really can’t figure out what she’s about or where she’s at. I have the universal answer for you in just two words: Ask Her.
‘Is it ok’? Is it ok for me to get your number? Is it ok if we hangout sometime? Is it ok if I put my arm around you? Is it ok if I kiss you? Is it ok if we go somewhere else? If the response to any of those questions is ‘No’ that’s exactly what it means. You stop. You don’t ask again. You either move on or change the nature of your relationship. I’ve made great friends with women who have initially shot down my romantic gestures. There’s always more to a woman than your attraction to her. Let her express her wants and her desires to you. How?
J.A.H.: Just ask her. I guarantee no matter who she is, she will appreciate the respect of your consideration. Which is really what you want to both give and receive. Respect, consideration, politeness, gallantry are never going out of fashion, guys. It is astounding how many men really don’t know how to treat women, especially beautiful women with any gentility, much less respect.
If you can’t treat a woman as well as your best friend, you have no business trying to go to bed with her. Any attempt to do so outside of mutual respect and genuine affection (be that as mad or passionate as it might be), is an abuse of some kind. If not simply self-abuse of one’s own sexuality. On the other hand, many seem to thrive on self-abuse in one form or another.
That’s it guys, lecture over. Now let’s go out there and win our selves a Football Game!!!
NOTHING has prepared you for This. Nothing ever will.
Because whatever is happening Now has never happened before.
This is a web-nurtured collaboration with 27 artists, sculptors and musicians from the world of Comics, Fantasy, Fine Art and Jazz, including Bill Sienkiewicz, David Lloyd, Liam Sharp, Glenn Fabry, Shaky Kane, Lars Henkel and the cutting edge sculptural typography of the highly acclaimed book designer Rian Hughes.
This illuminated book is a contemporary Dante’s Divine Comedy; a journey through the confessional landscape of a masculine identity. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity design: by the UK’s eminent graphic designer, typographer, illustrator Rian Hughes.
The music is composed and produced by iconoclast, ex-Israeli, Middle-Eastern jazz virtuoso Gilad Atzmon, along with five other jazz artists.
Written by San Diego native Igor Goldkind, this illuminated book will revolutionize the way you view poetry by meshing comics, art, music and animation in a truly unique way. It uses poetry to construct a narrative that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love, and the modern American and Jewish identity. The book is available for download on the iTunes Store andGoogle Play, as well as in a 166 page, fully illustrated in colour hardbound edition available ORDER HERE.
The eBook edition pushes the edge of what is possible with present EPUB3 technology. It is not an App, it is a true book that marries pop art, comics, avant-garde, jazz, spoken word poetry, video and animations, and type design in a manner that we have not seen before IS SHE AVAILABLE? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.
Sample interior pages:
IS SHE AVAILABLE? RRP is $34.95, SHIPPING INCLUDED Educational Discount for Students and Teachers:$29.95
Both deluxe hardcover edition PLUS animated and musically scored eBook App edition of Is She Available? bundle: $39.95
Shipping included in orders within the US and its territories.
If you are in Britain and/or Europe, please contact my European wholesaler Fanfare Productions who will take your order and dispatch to your address the same day: stephen@fanfareuk.demon.co.uk
Reviews ? Sure We Got Reviews. Why You Wanna See Them? Be my guest.
“Igor’s “Illuminated Book” is like a new genre.It is a wonderful ekphrastic expression; a fusion of the arts.” — Poet Mel Takahara
“His collection Is She Available? has the feel of an artefact from the near future – a seminal work of a new genre-fusing poetry, graphic art, music, and animation.” —(San Diego’s) City Beat
“Is SHE Available?” is an experiment, and reading it feels more like an act of discovery… nonetheless there’s a thrill to scrolling through its pages. It’s an ambitious step toward what digital media can (and will) be.”—The Chicago Tribune
The166 full colour, fully illustrated hard cover deluxeedition is available in discerning and eclectic independent bookstores everywhere.Including Fahrenheit 451 in Carlsbad, Soulscape Bookstore in Encinitas, the Upstart Crow in San Diego, Verbatim Booksand Mysterious Galaxy also in San Diego, City Lights and the Cooperfields chain in Marin County and Sonoma County, amongst a growing number of independent book stores.
Order direct from PayPal and shipping is included!
The only way to explain Zen is by describing the sleepy mind. The sleepy mind describes a tree in terms of attributes and data: the number of leaves, the leaf shape, the number of branches, thickness of the trunk, the colour of bark. Which birds make use of the tree etc.
All these observable and measurable attributes are assembled as data by the sleepy mind and voila! the sleepy mind thinks it knows what a tree is. The sleepy mind can give arguments with citations about the validity of its data. The sleepy mind works well with other sleepy minds.
And the sleepy mind isn’t totally wrong, the data it compiles in reference to ‘tree’ are all real and quantifiable features of the tree. But no matter how exact or comprehensive, the data is not the tree nor even the experience of the tree.
The awoken mind merely says “Look, a tree”, and points.
Because there is no data that conveys the experience of that tree in the moment of your apprehension. The awoken mind, sees the leaves, the branches, the colour of the bark, the thickness of the trunk, which birds fly in and out of the tree as much and as well as the sleepy mind does.
But the awoken mind also sees that the spaces between the leaves are part of the tree. The negative space surrounding the tree. The unseen roots spread beneath the ground are part of the tree. The sunlight reflecting off the green of the leaves are part of the tree. The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.
I think this is the closest I can come to describing the Zen disposition. I say disposition because too much is made of practice and the philosophy of Zen when all are merely aids to assist in the unravelling of illusion and self-deception. Zen is not an acquisition of skills, rituals, garments or ideology; instead, Zen is relinquishment. It is a reminder to keep paying attention.Not acquiring but letting go: unravelling, stripping away layers of calloused skin, leaving your baggage behind and not looking back over your shoulder. In the words of the bard:
“My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip My toes too numb to step”.
Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.
We are all distracted by anxieties and worries about money, about jobs, about partners and children. That distraction is manufactured by the powerful in the society we live in to keep us consuming, acquiescent and very sleepy! It doesn’t matter if you meditate or not; if you read poetry or not; if you drink tea or practice martial arts or not. It doesn’t matter how you get there or what you wear; just that you wake up and experience the miracle of persistent and unwavering creation. The universe is created, then destroyed then resurrected millions of times a second, faster than you can blink; so try and keep your eyes open!
I leave you once again with the immortal words of the Nobel Prize laureate:
“Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Burt and Astrid had sat down at one of the outdoor tables outside theEncinitas Cafe along the Pacific Coast Highway.
I sat down at the single table next to theirs
Burt, from his wheelchair, had noticed the bundle of books
I had dumped from my shoulder onto my breakfast table,
Startling some spoons and a left behind saucer, and remarked:
“You’re an author, aren’t you?”
“Why would you think?”was my reply.
“I don’t think, I know”.
Astrid tucked Burt’s napkin under his chin.
She was his nurse and his wife.
“Because nobody but an author would carry so many copies of the same book around”, Burt said.
“Burt used to write before he got sick”, Astrid explained.
Burt coughed long into his napkin.
“I’m sorry’, I said, just because I meant it.
Burt finished coughing and reached with his hand gesturing
To pass him my book.
I did and Burt leafed through the pages,
Feeling the clay surface of the paper with his fingers.
“You’re a poet!Very brave.”, Burt pronounced.
And then we talked about poets ancient and new.
We compared reading Rilke, Neruda, Pushkin,
and others both living and dead
I felt like I was visiting my old college roommate
Who had studied the exact same subject as me.
We spent nearly 2 hours over breakfast
Until Burt began to speak Yiddish to Astrid.
Astrid replied in kind.
The moment we shared peeled like a bell across time.
Awaking the ghosts of my ancestors.
Astridrose from her chair to roll back Burt’s wheels
And then they justleft
With my book on Burt’s lap in his chair.
Hi Igor
This is Astrid we had the pleasure to meet you my husband and I in Encinitas this summer and had a most pleasant conversation. You gifted us a copy of your book I just wanted to let you know Burt passed away August 23 We really enjoyed meeting you especially Burt….
When I sit at my desk in the barely blinking dawn,
I sit at the helm of a Starship.
Each dimension of time or space is available to me
To go anywhere I want to.
With the flick of a switch and a weird background sound
The course can be faithfully plotted,
At just the right warp speed to be there, be heroic and be back before dinner.
As safe as the hum of my engines.
When I sit at my desk in the mid-morning blue light that pierces
My east facing windows.
I pray that I can write something today,
I pray that I still have something to say.
My eyes are drawn to the street just beneath me,
That winds around the standing tree,
Just outside my window.
There is a spoonful of sunshine in my coffee.
When I sit at my desk in the midday sun
At the zenith of all of Creation,
I know that the bright light that now floods my room,
Will wash the shadows of doubt from these walls.
I still hear that first sound,
The Bang! that expands the spaces around.
I can feel how the act of creation was never just one moment long gone ago.
But a circus of new sensations, an ongoing show.
Will too soon leave us behind sleeping eternity away.
When I sit at my desk in the mid-afternoon sun
And the light of creation slowly dwindles,
I can reflect on all the things that I’ve done
While counting the tasks that remain to lie in the sun.
When I sit at my desk at dusk’s twilight time
When light and darkness are twined,
Each wrestles the other to the ground.
I know that darkness will eventually swallow,
The fading strength of the light.
The time for my bed is just insight
And the twin brothers have given up their fight.
When I sit at my desk in the heart of the darkness
I know that death is hiding in my closet.
I know that the covers I wrap so tightly around me
Offer no protection from what time has brought (me):
The drowning of the light by the darkness.
I bury my head in the night and dream of the return of tomorrow.
Caught unawares in a diamond downpour.
When did fate get so quick and immediate?
So judgment-like and familial?
When did I last step out of my room
And begin to orbit time?
That vantage point that surrounds us,
Is not just this moment,
But every moment you or I have ever or will ever live.
A handful of jewels lie scattered at my feet.
Each crystal catching and tricking the light into reflecting each and every possible face of existence that there is,
All at once.
Each stone weighs down heavy on my stomach.
Forced downward by the sheer gravity of events.
When did I step out of myself, again?
I am no longer there.
Or rather I am here, just not in this world.
Instead, I’m living in a different world
Built from longing, solitude, and reflection.
Two mirrors face each other.
One rag wipes dust and sweat off both our dirty faces,
Go on, reach out with your fingertips to see and feel,
Every surface of this jewel,
We named Being.
Can you see over there, the sole distant surface we inhabit?
Reflecting in all the faces of every other surface,
Of all the other jewels that are falling around us?
THIS is what it’s like, to be caught in the Diamond Rain
Caught in the Diamond Rain
Caught unawares in a diamond downpour.
When did Karma get so immediate and so personal ?
So judgment-like and familial?
When did I last escape from my room
And begin to orbit outside of time?
That vantage point that surrounds me,
Is not just this moment, But every moment you or I have ever lived.
A handful of jewels lie scattered at my feet.
Each crystal catching and tricking the light into
Reflecting each and every possible face of existence that there is,
All at once.
Each stone weighs down heavily on my stomach.
Forced downward by the sheer gravity of events.
When did I last step outside of myself again?
I am no longer there.
Or rather I am here, just not in this world.
Instead, I’m living in a different world
built on longing, solitude, and reflection.
Two mirrors face each other
One rag wipes the dust and the sweat from both our dirty faces,
Go on, reach out with your finger tips to
Caress every surface of this jewel
We call living.
Can you see over there, that distant surface we exist on?
That reflects the face of every other face.
On all the falling jewels that surround us.
THIS is what it is to be caught in the Diamond Rain.
Here’s your chance to come and hear me read from my collection of Graphic Poetry IS SHE AVAILABLE? and some new poems and a short story at ComicKhazi Comics Shop at Liberty Station, San Diego on September 1st starting at 6.00 pm.
I’ll be reading, signing and dedicated hard cover copies and generally corrupting youth.
You know what I miss?I miss inebriated conversation as practiced to the point of an art form by the British, the French, the Italians, the Greeks, the Russians and certainly the Spanish, if no one else.
Americans are weird.They all seem to follow the same cycle from excess to abstinence, rarely pausing in-between.So it really depends on when in time you encounter them along their cycle from either one extreme or the other.
Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder; for every thing, you’re abstaining from!
I’ve been drinking most of my life many times to excess but more lately in not so much moderation as mindful enjoyment.I’m muted more attended to certain aspects of my mind when getting drunk, which these days only takes 3 classes of wine or 2 beers.I am happy to say that I am having turned the corner on 50, a light weight.Proud?
Yes, because I’ve not had to give up drinking.Binging is over, yes.Being too far from a safe place, guilty.But sometimes enjoy the adventure of being lost and trying to detect your way home? It’s much more exciting than simply leaving point A and arriving at point B.Nothing wrong putting some adventure in your life is there?
As Chet Baker and Bob Dylan told us with the name of their corresponding album and film:
Get Lost!
It’s such a great feeling when you find your way again.
Well worth the anguish, the anxiety, the tears and the embarrassment of begging strangers to give you some indication of where you might be and how to get home from here. It’s like channeling Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
How did a Nazi sympathizer and puppet of a foreign dictator get into the White House?
I don’t know and I don’t care; I’m more focussed on how to get him out.
A sex pervert, a racist and a traitor walk into a Manhatten bar.
“And what can I get you to drink, Mr. President?”,
Says the barman.
Did You Also Know?
That you can also ORDER a signed and dedicated copy of my book directly from PayPal, shipping included in price!
Let me introduce you: Mike Ryan startled me outside of Albertsons from a dark shadowed corner when he asked me for a cigarette. I had stopped to roll myself an American Spirit cigarette and hadn’t noticed Mike sitting in the dark, in the alcove on the sidewalk outside the Albertsons supermarket in the East Village of San Diego. He was wearing a camouflage canvas jacket, combat trousers and sandals on his feet. I nodded affirmatively, finished rolling and handed him the cigarette.
I had returned to San Diego after half a lifetime at sea, sailing past foreign shores, exploring jagged islands and visiting shining cities. I returned to San Diego because my mother could no longer care for herself and her needs were such, (fluctuating, altering day by day), that I had to be on hand to administer to her wants while protecting her from the medical authorities and the police.
I had first learned of her condition 2 years previously attending my father’s funeral and had been on call since, day and night. Tonight was supposed to be my respite, a meal with friends, one old, and two new. I was looking forward to wine and food and laughter. But most of all the comfort of familial conversation. Instead, I was pursuing this conversation.
‘Thank you, brother’ Mike said reminding me of my poet-friend Gerald Arthur Moore (Art) who called everyone he met or passed on the street either brother or sister which used to bug the hell out of me until I began to realize he wasn’t a Jesus freak or a hippie.
He was worse than that: he was sincere.
So I lingered in this moment, having set my meagre groceries down. I asked Mike how he was doing and his name.
‘Up and down’, was Mile’s reply ‘could be better, could be worse’.
‘Mike, my name’s Mike Ryan”.
We shook hands.
I took a closer look at Mike and saw under the street grime, a clear gaze. I took in his craggy Irish features and asked:
‘Has anyone ever told you you look like Chet Baker?’ Mike looked quizzical.
‘Well, I did play the trumpet, long time ago’.
‘You do remind me of him’.
‘Everybody reminds everybody of somebody else,’
Mike replied.
So it was this Bodhisattva-like wisdom that pulled me in Mike’s direction. He’s 64 and served in Vietnam having seen action as a Corporal with a tank division, he told me. Mike Ryan acquired a slight stutter when he talked about his time in Vietnam. Near the border with Laos, driving through and over villages, flattening them, hoping there were no families or children left inside the flattened shacks.
‘Action!’ Mike snorted. ‘They call it action now like it was some John Wayne movie we were all watching.’
I saw Mike Ryan stand up even though he was still sitting. His clear eyes flashed anger and focus ‘You know what we called it? Us boys shooting other boys in the jungle? We called it living hell.” Mike Ryan said the two words with no exclamation; as though he was just naming a town or a state: living hell.
My father had been in Europe during the great war hating the war and the military with a passion. He told me some mornings he woke up in his foxhole and didn’t know whether to point his rifle at the German line or his own officers. He never let me be a patrol boy in grade school or a boy scout. “No son of mine is ever going to wear a Goddamn uniform”!
My father hated the brutality, the cruelty of the military training but mainly he hated their senseless bureaucracy, their SNAFU rules and how their system in spite of the lip service, never cared for the average GI. Like Mike Ryan.
I asked Mike where he was staying and he told me under the bridge near the onramp to 5, heading from the north all the way to the Mexican border. I asked Mike about his Veteran benefits and he gave me some convoluted, fading answer about extradition of forms as he lost his focus and slipped back into his comforting slump. He was vigorously scratching his scabbed legs.
‘Man. You got to get yourself to a clinic and have that seen to! And ask to see the social worker too; they should be helping you with those forms.’
‘I know, I know. I will, brother, I will’. He said those words so they sounded just like he meant them; meaning he wouldn’t. Just another plan for tomorrow that never comes. Later, meaning never. I tried one more time. And this time I heard my father’s voice speaking through my lips:
“You’re entitled, you know. You served your country, you’re entitled to what’s yours. I pay my taxes.” In my mind, I paused on that word ‘entitled’ . . . ‘entitlement’. What the mean and petty of this nation had succeeded in reframing as a handout, against the very grain of the meaning of the term. ‘Entitled’ means you earned it; no question of deserving it.
My father continued speaking through and to me. “To say otherwise is an insult to soldiers, to Veterans, to the disabled and the elderly and to those who are just plain down on their luck, There but for a roll of the dice, go you and me, brother. God Damn those latter day Puritans with their work-to-death ethic and their loaded dice.”
Mike Ryan deserved better than this but he was too distracted by his own confusion to ask for, demand, the help to which he was entitled. Mike had served his country but his country had failed to serve him; for more than half his life. 64 and sleeping under the bridge. God damn it! My father cursed like a soldier.
Mike Ryan looked at me, annoyed.
‘You ever been to war?’
‘Me?’ I shook my head.
‘No, my dad did, WWII. He was a private in the army infantry; Rainbow Division’.
‘Well you don’t know shit then, do you? And I ain’t nobody’s dad, I’ll tell you that for nothing!”
My father was silent. Then I remembered that he had been dead for awhile.
I had no idea what Mike Ryan had seen, or had heard or what had scattered his mind. I just remember my aunt telling me that when my father first came home from his war that he had had screaming nightmares for weeks in the small bedroom he shared with her. She told me about waking up to her mother cradling my father’s head as he wimpered to her lap, repeating over and over in comforting Yiddish “es s olreyt, alts vet zeyn olreyt”
“It’s alright, everything will be alright”. Over and over.
You and I can’t save the world.
However we can save each other; but only when we see ourselves in each other. We can show the Mike Ryans of this world the meaning of the word humanity merely by not ignoring them. Just the acknowledgement and reflection that he or she has an intrinsic value, regardless of circumstance.
One human at a time.
I didn’t give Mike Ryan any money or any of my food or take him home to my living room couch. I don’t know that he would have accepted if I had offered. I had only given him the couple of cigarettes. But in doing so I gave Mike Ryan something we all desperately need, more than money, more than a place to live, more than food, more than medicine. I gave Mike Ryan the one thing in life we are free to give or deny anyone we meet along our path. I gave him acknowledgment, the simple consideration of one human being for another.
“You don’t know shit”, Mike Ryan repeated
And with what I took to be Mike Ryan’s dismissal, I picked up my bag of groceries, traded another rolled up cigarette for these photos, and wandered on my way into the safe, warm San Diego night. There was a roof made of stars above my head. It was the same roof that rests above Mike’s head.
If you enjoyed my story and would like to read more of my work in the genre of Speculative Realism. Please check out my first book of short stories, poetry and comics:
IS SHE AVAILABLE?
As well as my forthcoming collection of short stories entitled THE VILLAGE OF LIGHT.
Contact me on igorgoldkind@me.com if you’re interested in either or both!
“Igor’s “Illuminated Book” is like a new genre. It is a wonderful ekphrastic expression; a fusion of the arts.” ~ Hawaiian Poet Mel Takahara
Order my book directly from PayPal, shipping included in price!
“Is SHE Available?” is an experiment, and reading it feels more like an act of discovery… nonetheless there’s a thrill to scrolling through its pages. It’s an ambitious step toward what digital media can (and will) be.”
It’s official, I’m back on line with my periodic musings about life in the computational age.
Kind of a stone’s soup of insight, speculation, and anecdote all wrapped up in a bright ribboned visual package for you to peruse.
The long hiatus was largely due to a Singapore based company highjacking my domain name igorgoldkind.com. Please go to that page and defecate your discontent with corporations stealing the identity of artists, just because we’ve gained some popularity.
What kind of on line world are we constructing here that permits commercial interests to pose as real people, even steal their names and profit from their hard work building their brand reputation? Some people live shameful lives on the backs of the labour of others. Tell them what you think before they steal your identity too!
Tales of Sedition and SUBVERSION welcomes your comments, opinions, condemnations, outrage and commiserations. Don’t be shy, I like to have my feelings hurt!
This publishing platform also offers me the chance to post drafts of on going work which eventually see publication either online or on the backs of trees; sometimes both.
Here is the most recent draft of the most recent poem I’ve written this week:
There is No Escape
None of us gets paroled From the prisons we locked ourselves into. Just so we all fit together inside These jigsaw lives that we lead That eventually of course, blow apart, We are the fragments awaiting reassembly.
Each moment of thought is a small drop in time. Each piece fits the next piece. Though we may try to live without The murmurs of our own thoughts, It is our hearts that yawn and awaken slowly From their long winter night’s sleep.
You and I are mere mortals, Who dreamt up life without end. We are the ones who made up immortality. For the sake of comforting sad joys. This is now just the story we tell ourselves while Slumping back to our death beds.
You don’t need Seymour Chwast, Chip Kidd and other designers to tell you that cartoons and comics are vital sources of creative inspiration (although they do that here). So maybe you’re thinking about exploring the graphic novel realm, but you’d like something more exceptional than usual, more out of the ordinary. Well, here’s the first of a series of suggestions that either defy or disregard categorization as comics. And the first, Is She Available?, is an eBook that also challenges conventional book classification in the process.
As you scroll through, you hear 1950s cool jazz in the background. Then gunfire blasts out of nowhere. A choir sings. Dogs bark. Bombs drop from the sky. And all the while, letterforms unexpectedly appear, tilt, transform, and vanish while spoken words interweave with the music and sound effects. Is She Available? is a trans-media poetry collection, one that pushes at the limits of eBook technology. It’s also comics, kind of.
Its author, Igor Goldkind, is a 2000AD comics sci-fi writer. He describes his 50 or so poems as “a contemporary Dante’s Inferno… that explores themes of death and loss, sex and love.” He’s included a couple of standard, panel-sequenced comic book narratives, including one rendered by V for Vendetta’s David Lloyd. But the bulk of the book is enlivened with music and other effects that enhance the moody illustrations and minimalist animations from a diversity of other skilled artists. The lineup notably includes Judge Dredd’s Liam Sharp and Shaky Kane as well as Bill Sienkiewicz of Daredevil/Elektra fame. Most impressive is the overall design, by accomplished comics illustrator and self-described “commercial artist” Rian Hughes. With graphic flair and acuity, Hughes proves himself to be a worthy digital age successor to Stéphane Mallarmé and Robert Massin.
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
Secure and supported by this universal clarity.
Depression is merely an afterthought.
We are slaves to our memories
the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) was established.
not advocating a supernatural or spiritual causation for the effectiveness of poetry as a healing agent but rather the supra-natural mystical cause which is grounded first in human nature and behavior for which can be a myriad of imprecise explanations; none of which explain why it works.
There is no trick to listening to yourself and learning how choosing and rearranging your words can unlock darkened doors, de-clutter basements and clean out the attics of your life. Sometimes in merely one session.
Just add <poetry therapy> to your Skype contacts and schedule a date. Payments accepted through PayPal or Facebook cash. Here are some examples of the poetry achieved through PEGASUS POETRY THERAPY:
Suddenly my wings begin to fail me. (Oh why didn’t I listen to Daedalus?) My engine slows down, I pull to the side of the freeway and turn off the engine and turn it back on again. Hey, it works with computers! But not this time. Now my mind begins to race, instantly recalculating my day. I am on the side of Highway 5 just past the Leucadia on-ramp. I have 20 minute’s to get to John’s to rehearse the one poem the organizer hates and told me not to read. Yes, yes, I know. I’m a rebel without applause.
Prisoner number…
Spotted by puddles of darkness &
Do you know
We are merely the fragments of ourselves awaiting reassembly.
The seat waiting to rest your back against the trunk is part of the tree. The awoken mind ‘see’s the tree; the form of the tree; the tree itself in all its ‘tree-ness’, the tree as a child sees a tree; not what the sleepy mind contrives to substitute as its surrogate.
Buddhists will talk about the Buddha-nature as universal, the same as our original nature. Don’t listen to them. The face that first looked up at your mother’s face is still there, submerged and (sometimes suppressed), within you. All that Zen suggests is that we are encumbered by needless worry, anxiety, expectations, daydreams and nostalgias that have buried your true self under the rubble of your crumbling castle and keeps you from seeing the world and your place in it, with any clarity.
I pray that I still have something to say.
Or rather I am here, just not in this world.
But every moment you or I have ever lived.
If you’re interested in comic books, chances are you’ve heard the names Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. After all, their partnership paved the way for the Golden Age of comics beginning in the 1940s. With The Art of the Simon and Kirby Studio by Mark Evanier, learn more about the duo who invented noteworthy characters like Captain America and Sandman, conceived the idea of romance comics, and created a new standard for the genres of crime, western, and horror comic books. Take a look inside the various aspects of their career, and see some of the works that defined them.
igorgoldkind
The Poesie of Igor Goldkind – Reciting Truth to Power 
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January 9, 2021 | Categories: art, book launch, books, comments about poetry, digital insurgency, Existentialism, Faith, Healing, literature, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, mental health, Mindfulness, new poetry, Paper Bag, physics, poetry, Poetry as therapy, Poetry Therapy, politics, Self-Therapy, spoken word, story-telling, Suicide, Therapy, Zen | Tags: Democracy, Donald Trump, philosophy, poetry, Poetry Therapy, Therapy | Leave a comment