Wickens full of the Dickens

"During the Civil War, President Lincoln continually faced oversight hearings in Congress. And during World War II there were a number of commissions -- the most famous conducted by then Senator Harry Truman.

Republicans have not held one hearing on the President's wartime failures."

from Harry Reid

1965 – 2006

Julie and Mary, celestial bodies,
kept weaving ‘til their hands cramped
kept trying with their hard black volumes

not even by accident but
I’m reading informed accounts of terrorism, diplomacy,
the FBI, Winston Churchill reincarnated

And back to you, love via satellite,
The moon looks more Coca Cola than ever before,
breathing, static, clam shells shattered through space.

Tall weeds make a median where there is none.
Fireworks make a splash, lazy black leopard,
he has black spots against the smooth nightness,

has some jawbone, really, let’s reel in the dinero.
Upgraded gangster devices, twenty-first
century turbulence, a maniac on the floorboards,

unabashed jean jacket retro,
the first to wish for time travel
the first to take it back.

AND HER WHITE GLOVES

at 10:20pm, so that the rain
could be Sally: a dark wig
has to scream to be heard.

More steps he won’t take,
dropping pennies
on the rocks
to make new coins.

His cell phone rings primary colors,
mismatched, had they lasted.

Sometimes Germany, Sally sings.

On the hardwood
like Ted Bundy
she sings, would you like one?

With the dogs, the cheap notes falling,
they’re each alone and sewn up.

for those who are concerned for my literary career, well, i have been writing, i just haven't been posting anything. i been real busy.

i got a new computer and stupidly lost my bookmarks in the process and when i set out to post this one, i couldn't even remember the actual url for my blog page. my writing these days is extremely light. my response to war, genocide, more war, more genocide, and even more war on top of that, seems to be levity about my own life and circumstances. so easy, people, most of us have it so easy.



I’M TEMPTED TO SAY

It’s chemical, the way
the old ones
fall

ash along your flesh
stories we tell

always
never had
tend to
like to
lie
lazy
asleep

bring wine and duct tape
I need to wrap something up

and outline it in goldenrod
we’ve been four out of five
for most of the night

I won’t say it but
I swear I just heard
electric guitar sneak into the bolero
it’s not fair
that you have to go away
as they say
when the darkness does

Read about it here:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Sign up your own blog, sign petition, etc:
http://www.civic.moveon.org/netblog/?nbsp=&r=1771&a=8


From Save the Internet website:
Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet's First Amendment -- a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you -- based on what site pays them the most. If the public doesn't speak up now, our elected officials will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign.

Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn't speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.

This isn't just speculation -- we've seen what happens when the Internet's gatekeepers get too much control. Last year, Telus -- Canada's version of AT&T -- blocked their Internet customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to workers with whom the company was having a dispute. And Madison River, a North Carolina ISP, blocked its customers from using competing Internet phone services.

How would the gutting of Network Neutrality affect you?

* Google users—Another search engine could pay dominant Internet providers like AT&T to guarantee the competing search engine opens faster than Google on your computer.
* Innovators with the "next big idea"—Startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay Internet providers for dominant placing on the Web. The little guy will be left in the "slow lane" with inferior Internet service, unable to compete.
* Ipod listeners—A company like Comcast could slow access to iTunes, steering you to a higher-priced music service that it owned.
* Political groups—Political organizing could be slowed by a handful of dominant Internet providers who ask advocacy groups to pay "protection money" for their websites and online features to work correctly.
* Nonprofits—A charity's website could open at snail-speed, and online contributions could grind to a halt, if nonprofits can't pay dominant Internet providers for access to "the fast lane" of Internet service.
* Online purchasers—Companies could pay Internet providers to guarantee their online sales process faster than competitors with lower prices—distorting your choice as a consumer.
* Small businesses and tele-commuters—When Internet companies like AT&T favor their own services, you won't be able to choose more affordable providers for online video, teleconferencing, Internet phone calls, and software that connects your home computer to your office.
* Parents and retirees—Your choices as a consumer could be controlled by your Internet provider, steering you to their preferred services for online banking, health care information, sending photos, planning vacations, etc.
* Bloggers—Costs will skyrocket to post and share video and audio clips—silencing citizen journalists and putting more power in the hands of a few corporate-owned media outlets.

Blocking Innovation

Corporate control of the Web would reduce your choices and stifle the spread of innovative and independent ideas that we've come to expect online. It would throw the digital revolution into reverse. Internet gatekeepers are already discriminating against Web sites and services they don't like:

* In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.

* In 2005, Canada's telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.

* Shaw, a major Canadian cable, internet, and telephone service company, intentionally downgrades the "quality and reliability" of competing Internet-phone services that their customers might choose -- driving customers to their own phone services not through better services, but by rigging the marketplace.

* In April, Time Warner's AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com -- an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme.

This is just the beginning. Cable and telco giants want to eliminate the Internet's open road in favor of a tollway that protects their status quo while stifling new ideas and innovation. If they get their way, they'll shut down the free flow of information and dictate how you use the Internet.

A story from my uncle about his daughter:

just wanted to share the profound statement that my deep-thinking kindergardener Eliana made tonight (and I quote ~ half the charm is in the way she puts it to me):

"Dad…I know you know this, but…I'm me and you're not me, so I'm aware of me."

according to amnesty international letter 3.11.2006:

"Congress recently voted overwhelming to ban torture. ...Unfortunately, when President Bush signed the bill, he unilaterally added a provision that gave himself permission as commander-in-chief to disregard the ban on torture whenever he deems it necessary."

amnesty international is undertaking a huge campaign against US torture. you can check it out and become an AI member on their website.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/

recent ailments:
a strange pain in my right leg when i've been sitting too long, dry skin, insomnia, gradual but unwanted weight gain, cravings for caffeinated diet soda, unexpected mood swings.
what is wrong with me, gentle readers? is this cancer? pregnancy? no, it's graduate school.

reading James Ellroy, Allen Ginsberg, Georges Bataille, Walt Whitman, and a bunch of people you've probably never heard of.

still writing poems.

experiencing financial strain. will accept donations of food and clothing.

enjoying this colder rainier Sunday.

it is best to wait until after dark to start writing crime fiction. i just wrote the 3 sickest pages of my whole life. i was sober too, which is extra disturbing. and it's just getting started, because i need 12-15 pages to turn in a few weeks from now.

i cannot express how simultaneously sick and powerful it feels to create something so wrong.

also, very scary to write fiction, because i haven't done it before.

my friends Amy and Thomas just opened a new cafe in the East Lake neighborhood of Oakland. One block past the Parkway Theatre @ 1918 Park Boulevard. www.prismcafe.com

they have great organic food and are OPEN LATE, people, LATER than most places in Oakland. they also serve BEER and WINE at all times. check it out. you'll see me there, making myself right at home, putting my feet up on the coffee table, etc.

hey there.
i removed some of the poems/entries from the past few months, because i'm trying to get these poems published. and most editors don't take kindly to stuff being broadcast on the www simultaneously. don't worry, though, i'm sure there'll be something new any day now. i've had such horrible luck the past 2 years with submissions, so cross your fingers. 90% of the time, i heard nothing back at all, not even a tangible rejection, just email or snail mail silence. if i have to enter another NR (no response) on my spreadsheet...i can't even talk about it.

so yeah, i'm just indoors tonight drinking wine, ass-bonding with my desk chair, and i just sent some of my newest stuff off to 3 different journals. it's been a real literary day. earlier i had an online meeting with the other Monday Night editors to review our submissions for issue #5 (5 years - holy crap). which was great fun. almost as much fun to gush about the good writing as it is to make fun of the bad. why can't i get paid for doing this?

so how is everyone? who is reading this rambling egocentric thing these days, anyway? comments, por favor! and happy new year, if i haven't seen you yet.

am i getting sick again? does my forehead feel hot? is this laptop distracting me? am i getting distracted by that guy's bare lower back and just the suggestion of buttocks out of his tight jeans? are they speaking spanish? what is 108 divided by 3? why is that other guy wearing 3 shades of brown? why not throw some black in there? why not dye your hair? is it time to go yet? have they run out of coffee yet? will we ever run out of coffee? why not have some more? why not?

in order of importance:

1) built about 10 tents with my niece from blankets and furniture. inside these forts, took naps, played with various animal toys, pretended to be mean puppies or mean tigers and at times left the tent to go looking for "olivia, the other girl". olivia's existence cannot be confirmed or denied at this time.

2) also with niece, watched the following: shrek 2 (twice), beauty & the beast (disney), the little mermaid (cheap not-disney version) and the beginning of peter pan.

3) breakfast with ginny, which morphed into lunch at a chinese restaurant. hoping to hang with her again when i pass back through chicago.

4) twice (mostly by myself) watched dvd of serenity which i recently purchased.

5) finished eleni sikelianos's the california poem (technically i am 2 or 3 weeks late with this so should not really consider it an accomplishment), and started fanny howe's the lives of a spirit.

6) read madras on rainy days in about 36 hours.

7) filled in myspace profile. finally.

Too much pie.

My brain is melting here in Manistee.

http://www.ci.manistee.mi.us/

Help.

I'm (finally) getting a cold. That old scratchy throat feeling.

Dinner tonight (w/ Chica): 3 dishes for $15.99 at D&A Cafe, Oakland Chinatown, 7th & Franklin (roughly). Good God. A whole fried flounder with spicy sauce.

Then on to B&N in JLS to study. It's fun to study with Chica because she's preparing for her physical therapy exam and her vocabulary and fun facts about the human body are inspiring to me. For example, she borrowed my ibook to look up a word in the dictionary. I am now sitting at home and looking at the entry she left open on my dashboard:
"diaphysis: noun. the shaft or central part of a long bone."

new poem for y'all's entertainment. buena noche -



Three Stars for the Colonel

Fast train. Thunderbird. North Side gritty. Darker now, headlights eyeing intersection and her shifting thighs. Wires basketing the sky. Sky scratched out. Glowing white windows. The rolling lay of the land or tiny script on stucco. Choose one or both. Scribbled messages on the doorstep. Black birds explode into view of red taillights.

*

Happy birthday! Papers slipping from windows. Parade on Main. Crumbling brick wall and crumbs. Brushed from hands. Hair in orange scent. All the heat of a Saturday pushes us through the crowd and the crowd into the evening and the evening into the midnight and so on.

*

All the cold of an evening. All the apparatus of motorcycle suits. All the fat babies in blankets. All the tres leches a girl could eat. All the birthday boy’s favorite songs. All the stretching smiles and shouting Os of mouths. The road runs into the railroad. All the lines in the world.

*

The square made of lines binds the red balloon. The lines that pace the feet from concrete to concrete. The lines in the wood punctuated by staples. The lines of barbed wire across the sky. The cursive curvy lines, the scratched out lines, the lines of chrome deliberate and subtle. The line of the road thick and warning. The line that finishes. The last line. The flat line. The dangling line of lights.

It's just after midnight and I am somehow still awake even after having slept only 4 hours last night, then a quick nap today. It all started with an ill-advised Diet Dr Pepper. I drank it around 5:30pm yesterday while eating a really tasty vegetarian burrito from Happy Burrito in downtown Oaktown (highly recommended burrito place). (Can I not write a single blog post without a shout-out to some Oakland business? No. Because I am a dork).

So it's been a wild ride the last 24 hours, and maybe if I wasn't so obsessed with my various writing projects and work responsibilities, the insomnia wouldn't have been so extreme.

well, one thing i am working on right now is a book. i mean an actual physical book. i made a series of collages (all having a similar theme and structure) and am now working on a poem to go with them in the book. then i'll put it into indesign (hopefully this works, because i have run out of time to letterpress the darn thing), print it onto some nice thick paper, glue/adhere the pages together in an accordion shape and attach a hard cover (glued only to one side of the cover). the idea is that it can stand up on a table and be looked at as a sequence of images with text.

from the Sunday Times On-line:

IT IS the kind of story you hear from a friend of a friend — how,
after a long night in a rural hostelry and at a loss for
entertainment in the countryside, they head out into a nearby field.

There, according to the second-hand accounts, they sneak up on an
unsuspecting cow and turn the poor animal hoof over udder.

But now, much to the relief of dairy herds, the sport of cow-tipping
has been debunked as an urban, or perhaps rural, myth by scientists
at a Canadian university.

Margo Lillie, a doctor of zoology at the University of British
Columbia, and her student Tracy Boechler have conducted a study on
the physics of cow-tipping.

Ms Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian
Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing
with its legs straight would require five people to exert the
required force to bowl it over.

A cow of 1.45 metres in height pushed at an angle of 23.4 degrees
relative to the ground would require 2,910 Newtons of force,
equivalent to 4.43 people, she wrote.

Dr Lillie, Ms Boechler's supervisor, revised the calculations so that
two people could exert the required amount of force to tip a static
cow, but only if it did not react.

"The static physics of the issue say . . . two people might be able
to tip a cow," she said. "But the cow would have to be tipped
quickly — the cow's centre of mass would have to be pushed over its
hoof before the cow could react."

Newton's second law of motion, force equals mass multiplied by
acceleration, shows that the high acceleration necessary to tip the
cow would require a higher force. "Biology also complicates the issue
here because the faster the [human] muscles have to contract, the
lower the force they can produce. But I suspect that even if a
dynamic physics model suggests cow tipping is possible, the biology
ultimately gets in the way: a cow is simply not a rigid, unresponding
body."

Another problem is that cows, unlike horses, do not sleep on their
feet — they doze. Ms Boechler said that cows are easily disturbed. "I
have personally heard of people trying but failing because they are
either using too few people or being too loud.

"Most of these `athletes' are intoxicated."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1858246,00.html

my new upstairs neighbor has begun his semi-weekly late-night moving around of furniture? hammering? firing nail guns? firing real guns? dropping anvils onto the wood floor? jumping around and rapping? singing obnoxiously but passionately to classic joni mitchell?
he's like 19 or something. he's so hyper and i'm so over it. i don't get it. he once answered the door naked, with a shirt draped over his nether parts. he had friends over and i guess they were sitting around in the dark. smoking pot? snorting lines? blowing each other? i don't get it.

sorry if any of my mature relatives are reading this. i'm just really bewildered. i might have to put in earplugs tonight to get any more writing done.

my special poem of the day (hot off the presses). unfortunately, i don't have the html skills to get it to do the right tabs. you'll just have to try and imagine that every other stanza is tabbed over about 3x from the left margin.


CAFÉ POEM #172

Thinking suddenly of Amy
the girl who bested me at clarinet,
there she was in the coffee line,
someone who looks just like her.

Actually, I was looking up at what looks like
a giant pot plant, like fingers the leaves
all glowing in the window.

I dreamed of Vivian last night.
Philly, Brazil, performance art,
Humboldt County, don’t go back to him please.

This music is distracting,
it’s about love or existential bliss. You know,
heavenly blended guitars with girly voices,
happy alterna-rock smoothie.
The chorus starts with “Today”
and I’m having none of it today.

Dressed for all kinds of weather.

Wondering how a person’s stumbling
can go on
how far along the gutter.

NOTE: This was a class assignment - write a letter to someone about 9/11 and think about the public/private interactions. So, the letter is private, but posting it on my blog makes it more public.


Dear Scott,

September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday. I was scheduled to fly on Friday, just three days later, to Chicago and then later head to Georgia & Florida. The airports re-opened just in time, and so I spent the next two weeks on vacation, sort of having a blast and sort of numb. All the flights were nearly empty, I had whole rows to myself. In St. Augustine, it was 110 degrees and I was at Andy’s parents’ condo, drinking whiskey in the middle of the day, going bowling, swimming at night among tiny jumping fish.

One afternoon sitting at the window, we saw a beautiful girl dance across the lawn like an angel down toward the beach and we ran out and followed her for a while. That was a little creepy, I admit.

Another day, I called my roommate to chat and was told that at midnight the night before, a tow truck, hit by a drunk driver, had slammed into the nonprofit agency where we both worked, taking out the entire lobby and a few offices behind it. Our own mini-disaster.

But first I was in Chicago. It was dreary. I sat in the Old Style bar where my sister worked and watched the TV and drank beer. You know the kind, that doesn’t appear to have a name but instead has an Old Style neon sign in one barred window? People were sad everywhere and it rained the whole week. I wrote a poem about it.

CHICAGO*

I walked in the rain
restless
until my hair wept


felt that great flood
of loneliness hit me,
finally,
and pull me along
past the few
dry places.


All week I was
careful with people,
saying ‘please’
and ‘thank you’
like these were
their names
and mine.


A person wouldn’t know from reading it that it was about this time, but that’s okay with me and now at least you do. I wrote about four good poems in that bar, actually, one of them about watching TV and drinking beer while a girl danced around the floor, an American flag scarf wrapped around her hair.

Truthfully, though, I was in a kind of shock and numbness for two years or so after 9/11. My grief, if I can even call it that, was untouchable, buried as if under all that rubble. My overwhelming response was fear – of how many more people would die from the inevitable, willful acts of vengeance. Along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, which as you know is basically a freeway, I saw in the windows of a luxury apartment building, the word REVENGE spelled out with 8½ x 11 sheets of paper, one sheet for each letter for each window.

On hearing the news that early Tuesday morning, I thought – What will they do with this? And I knew it would be nothing good. And they’re still doing it. Sometimes now I catch myself hating the men who flew the planes into the buildings, thinking they started it all, but then I remember that we did too.

If I could untangle the thread of blame back to – to what? To warring hairy bands living in caves? To Cain and Abel? – maybe I’d have some satisfying understanding. Instead I look up out of some useless old instinct to the bright empty blue.

Your friend always,

Jessie


*A version of this poem was published in The Peralta Press 2003.

woo hoo!

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_3096705