Egypt

Description For A Car

Almost colorful. Round tires, hard as your smile. Firm body, stylish. The wipers can wipe dried leaves out of sight. Great lights, big. Its name has the same number of letters as my worst description of you. The license plate can be a dinner plate, if need be. I see dead words in it talking like humans driving themselves crazy at 120mph. It smells leather in some parts. Other parts smell like engine smell. The rear-view mirror can't view the rear. A bear once bumped against it. It has been through natural disasters, like stormy arguments. It runs on historical element, fossil fuel. It has windows, square as souls.

Products

Phones. Phonemes. Names. Aims. Alms. Balms. Bumps. Bump. Pump. Rump. Rumpus. Umph. Lump. Mephisto. Christo. Gesto. Gestapo. Abelardo. Leonardo. Borado. Prado. Rado. Aldo. Algo. Algonquin. Akin. Taken. Aching. Achtung. Entschuldigung. Bildung. Building. Vading. Gelding. Grading. Degrading. Mending. Manning. Canning. Cannes. Ban. Bane. Rain. Pain. Raising Cain. Vaining Cain.Vain. Weathervane. Lane. Sane. Brain. Braun. Bran. Brink. Link. Crink. Ink. Beatnik. Neatnik. Freak. Leak. Seek. Meek.Reek. Leek. Wikileak. Beak. Eek. Mach. Bach. Iraq. Barack. Barbwire. Ire. Ireland. Sand. Stand. Bland. Rand. Bend. Send. Lend. Sand. Band. Canned. Tanned. Wand. Blend. Hand. Frond. Id. Did. And. The End.

Mike Tyson

[This was posted two years ago: 19 Jan 2009.] David Carr's recent interview with Mike Tyson at Utah's Sundance Festival was quite revealing about the boxer, even though it was very short. Sometimes, I like Carr, because of his voice. This hoarseness makes me think of the gritty aspects of New York City's urban world; and I'd like to think this is one reason why The New York Times chose him to be the web-video correspondent for the paper's The Carpetbagger episodes, or webisodes. I know that's a weak justification; but still, there's no harm speculating. Now I don't know if his voice always sounds like that. I haven't checked the rest of his webisodes. But the feeling of urban grittiness in his voice does make him sound endearingly cool. And too, the image of approximate roughness on his face somehow reminds me of Mickey Rourke, a one-time boxer aspirant. And so when Carr was interviewing Tyson, I had this playful image of boxer interviewing boxer. Mike's answers were, I thought, articulate and gave me ideas of how he thinks. Of course, the act of manipulating answers to interview questions to give a pleasant or certain effect to viewers could certainly be factored there. Mike has had extensive experience with the media for years; he had been in the spotlight since he was 20-years-old as world champion, then the rape charges, the drugs, and other dramas or tragedies along the way. He did mention the word 'tragedy' towards the end of the interview, as though highlighting something in written-text narrative. Somehow I can sense the link between how he answered Carr's questions and his rise to prominence in the boxing world: sharpness, focus, and his determined right to carry things through the end. This short interview made me want to see the documentary "Tyson", directed by James Toback. The director was actually there, sitting beside Mike, and mentioned there were other celebrities there at Utah, but that people paid more attention to Mike than these other Hollywood big-names: what a natural way to promote his film's subject, I thought. Then there's that tattoo around his left eye, a sort of Maori tattoo. He can look menacing with it, no doubt, although not during that interview.

(For interested parties: video section of paper's website.)

Ian McEwan & Richard Dawkins - On Moral Instincts, Religion, Atheism, Love, Darwin, Inward Cinemas.

There's a lot to absorb here, at least, for me. One is a scientist, concerned with investigations to solve the mysteries of the material world, and the other a literary-writer, concerned with investigations NOT necessarily to solve the mysteries of the material world, but more so, to expand and deepen the meaning of those mysteries and, to certain extents, illuminate hidden mysteries. That's why, while this exchange feels fresh, it's also not easy to listen to it, because of the layers of perceptions embedded in their spoken words. The tone of their exchange proposes that they have the same wavelengths, and understand each other well. But I think that is an aspect of the highly deceiving glamor and color of appearances.

What is ironic about the way or tone Dawkins promotes his ideas regarding atheism and evolution is that he often sounds eerily dogmatic you think he's about to start his own religion, a fourth and official addition to the eternal triumvirate: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Righting Frames Left

I am on the left-turn pocket, about to make a left. The wait hair-splits seconds to infinity, a very physical experience of eternity on a street-intersection, the kind in which your life feels trapped, and there is only one direction, there, into the abyss of the left, into its freedoms, chaos. I see faces in the cars, on the other direction, faces of pursuit, aggression, those who'd confess their day in frantic phone calls later, unnecessary calls they have to make just to have someone to talk to, to feel linked, networked. They are wearing sunglasses, as though to leave the sun out of their directions, ignore its illuminations, consider them distractions, nuisance. I am in the intersection of 5:00pm and 5:01pm, the intersection of life as abstract and life as material, bad decisions and worst decisions, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and reality. In a moment, I could crash, collide into another dream in the making, a city official, a president of a porn-company, a thief trying to be the best thief in the world, or a horny man having phone sex on his cell-phone. My life is on the line, and there are no lines to read in-between those lines. Am I in someone's surveillance camera? Am I in a movie-production set? I make the sign of the cross. Soon, I let that sign fade to insignificance, to the shadows of other crosses I've made before. The light is green, is yellow, is red, the color of anything, an empty sign, emptied of sunsets, death, crime, failure, genesis of ironies, the erotics of daily life, birth, or as myth before flights to nowhere.

Reroute

I drive through freeways in your thoughts, but you've blocked all the xits.
I roll down the windows, for the wind to blow your mind in mine.

One Way

The direction of arrivals and departures is one way, regardless of destination: Into the fragile journeys of the heart. Taken at Los Angeles International Airport, 2011.

@ Calliope Nerve

Thanks to Nobius Black,
for publishing my poem at Calliope Nerve.

Flatmancrooked published an interview
by Nobius Black with Make It New Media, LLC.

Galatea Resurrects 15

Galatea Resurrects #15 was released last month. Thanks to Eileen Tabios for including my review. Below the excerpt is a list of this issue's contributors.

Inside the sound of words are entanglements fighting for coherence, or some sense of it, at least. Approximations of this coherence can materialize in imagination of the speaker, especially through the visuality of text, a compact architecture of curves and lines furnished by constitutions of desire in writing and printing presses, processes that may formulate a sense of accessibility and familiarity, through journeys in reading. Thus, implicit in certain theories of language is a dance that intimates copulation of perceptions between text-image and its equivalent sound, whether through orally-conveyed sound or sound produced that cannot easily be translated into decibels recognizable by human-ear – sounds of silence, or those in meditation, which may also include sounds in structure of movements, the sonicity of action, especially in the context of physical vibrations and physical geometries. And in this dance are certain modes of producing rules or memory set in principles, to activate hierarchy of evolutions, and inherent devolutions in progressions. [ More here.]

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 Access Table of Contents here.
Reviewers & Contributors

Aileen Ibardaloza
Albert B. Casuga
Allen Bramhall
Anny Ballardini
Barbara Roether
Camille Martin
Edric Mesmer
Eileen Tabios
Eric Dickey
Eric Hoffman
G.E. Schwartz
Genevieve Kaplan
Hadas Yatom-Schwartz
Harry Thorne
Jeff Harrison
Jim McCrary
John Bloomberg-Rissman
John Herbert Cunningham
Jon Curley
Kathryn K. Stevenson
Kristi Castro
Kristina Marie Darling
L.M. Freer
Lisa Bower
Lynn Behrendt
Margaret H. Johnson
Marianne Villanueva
Michael Caylo-Baradi
Michael Pollock
Moira Richards
Nicholas T. Spatafora
Patrick James Dunagan
Peg Duthie
Rebecca Loudon
Richard Lopez
T.C. Marshall
Thomas Fink
Tom Beckett

Boxing Royalty

While undressing the Christmas tree, news announced that Interstate 5 has become hazardous to drive around Castaic, because of snow showers. On the small table above, the duchess, her court, and other royal elements that were hanging out from that tree are now bound for the medieval-dimness of storage boxes, once again, until the reappearance or renaissance of their reign, later this year.

Insomnia Los Angeles

You are filament in this glowing dissonance.

You dissolve me into latitudes,where
we levitate into sidewalks without lights.

Miss Havisham's Flower

If Miss Havisham, in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, would make a catalog of neglected gardens in Los Angeles, she may have a hard time making that, not because many would qualify, but because she might not prefer to use Excel, or other qualified software to collate that long list; she'd probably prefer Victorian Era collating methods.

The garden, in this picture, might not necessarily qualify as a neglected garden, to her, because there's still life in it, still saturated with green. On the other hand, it's possible she'd put this somewhere on the top of her list, particularly because of the one flower visible here, still red, but appears withering out of its color. It's a fitting representation of Miss Havisham's interior life, disintegrating, expanding under shadows of great expectations once nurtured in love.

Into New York City

Video Source: Thought Catalog

I first saw this short video at Thought Catalog, a listopia of anything conceivably listable you may not immediately think of cataloging. I love the video-tour into NYC history. Historian Steve Duncan opening that manhole (?) at one in the morning looked risky. But when Steve went up Williamsburg Bridge at 3:30AM, while director/cinematographer Andrew Wonder was trying to steady his camera, I thought I'd slip down the bridge myself, at some point. Then, this dynamic duo heightens the drama in this clip and shows Steve on one of the large suspension cables, without a protective harness, only holding the cable-rails of that suspension cable, while walking on it. Amazing. And of course the standard caution: he warns us not to do at home what he is about to do, before walking on that cable; but in a way though, we are. We are walking into his New York City, the history of that space, or even the history of space as New York City.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Some lines I came across in 2010

Many memorable lines for me in 2010. I only have some of them below. I found most of them, from the internet, especially through blogs and on-line literary magazines, and others from books in my local public-library system. Occasionally, my local library displays a box of free books, in its lobby. One of the books I found in that box was The Modern Poets: An American-British Anthology, published in 1963. The poets included in this anthology appear to be a catalog of prominent poets writing in English, back then. It's a big book, in content, and probably belongs to a specific era in publishing. One of the poets I like in this anthology is Cecil Day Lewis, the father of actor Daniel Day Lewis. Lewis is on the list below. More lines soon.

†††

He grew orchids on his roof
and slept there in an August
of derelict hotels burning, smoke
rushing up like a gutted down pillow
into streets thick and red with ambulances
screaming the air raw and bleeding.
Kate Braverman ("By Madness Wooed")

†††

its life cinders on
until this ultimate imploding,
one deafening blast to climax rite
as loved ones writhe, ashen
in their own consumed shells,[...]
Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta ("One Final Burning")

†††

Her eyes have made a loyalist of me.
On the last day of winter, is it natural
my future resembles lime grapes? What cost
will I pay for the rapture of a solarium?
I wouldn’t have thought I’d fall so easily for
bejeweled eddies. I am seduced by the fever coming
off the shores of her eyelids. My inbox is oblivious
to my steadfast gaze. As they say in Petra, I prefer
you cut into the hillside of my mountain, which means
your face is the coastline to my dreams.
Major Jackson ("Here The Sea")

†††

And memories sleep
Like mammoths in lost caves. [...]
Cecil Day Lewis ("Departure In The Dark")

†††

Awake, I strike a word against the dark
like a match. This could be the past
we are leaving. Buses on high beams;

wild eyes that ride down the road’s
unpromising narrative. The sky at a loss
for stars, thick as a foreign tongue.
Cyril Wong ("Night Bus")

†††