crude gospel

20 Sunday Oct 2013

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What, you asked, goes with fright-wigs, kick boots, doll
pink smeared lipstick? —- Wear the blue nondescript

ones, they’re less immodest than none at all,
or would be if they weren’t just a touch ripped

down the middle of your sensitive groove.
Funk it ain’t: this kinderwhore look that you

took to like crude gospel, as if to prove
that you just didn’t give a schmuck-fuck who

saw what. We’ve all been there, once or twice. When
the earth was new —- faith still uninvented —-

passions of things hadn’t had time to cool —-
and we were loved —- before the rise of men.

I love you with or without your wig, blessed
because you are brave and funny and cruel.

][][

notes:

Looking back on certain fads and fashions that once seemed radical and important it amazes me at times of how we ever took things seriously. The kinderwhore look is one of those fads, consisting of torn, ripped baby-doll dresses, heavy makeup and leather Doc Martin boots of various colors. Various female punk/grunge musicians during the early to mid 1990s wore the look, including Kim Shattuck of the Muffs, Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland. Why my friends and I thought that this was the greatest look since the invention of tight leather trousers I’m still not sure, but it seemed to make sense at the time.

the song of the witch from prague

20 Sunday Oct 2013

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“I beat you with a hazel rod,” the Witch
of Prague once sang. “Come to me in madness.”

Come, come, these are love-charms that will bewitch
any heart that you long for. Blasphemous

some call it, but what love is not born in hell?
“I beat you with a bloodstained rod,” the Prague

Witch once sang. “Come to me like a gazelle.”
Come, come, I was her student, her love-dog,

these love-charms works. “I beat you with a rod
from the Tree of Gehenna,” my mother

witch once sang. “Come to me like a wild boar.”
I did—-I did—-I did—-with nails that clawed,

teeth that bit. These charms will make your lover
feel the sting on naked flesh and want more.

open mic poetry reading

17 Thursday Oct 2013

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The rich, we’re told, suffer just like the poor,
except that they have paychecks from the New
Yorker and dental insurance. The war
of the classes, we are told by those who
were once poor but now rich, shouldn’t appear
in your work. What if the Academy
one day likes you? Like the war profiteer
fortune falls to the bold. Hypocrisy
is just sour grapes, they say. I love Open
Mics (not Slams, not Lectures), with the freedom
to read out loud, for that very reason.
I don’t care what books you’ve sold. Our fortune
falls to all who burn, Open Mic’s maxim,
we’re small town democracy in action.

counting games

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

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I wish to live while you can still love me,
while I can still hold you, while all that’s yours
lies on me. My love was once free, easy,
childish. I wish to live; take me to our
bed, our kisses, our heat; they will do no
good to me when I’m dead. I wish that you’d
love me now, since I’m healthy now. I know
enough to know. Death is misunderstood;
poor death has no place here, but death is all
that this world can give. I say that I wish
to live while you can still love me. My dear,
each day I feel cold and ill and so small
compared to your heat. Love me. It’s hellish
to count down all my passing days, months, years.

sister swallow

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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scream, spit or swallow
–舔阴horny goat weed

swallow, my sister, o sister swallow
–Itylus, Algernon Swinburne

][][

Just as I swallow, just as I must close
my eyes and let it all trickle down my throat.
Call it doom. Gag and it spews out your nose
while up above you, with a sneer and gloat,
some blue, puffed face pats the top of your head,
says, “job well done.” And it was a good job,
getting it down, daring yourself, the dread.
Doing what you said, “never again.” Slob
that you are. Slob, coward: there’s a whole list
I keep in my head just in case. What doom
could get me this far except the sweat-stink
of raw despair? Because after this tryst
I will excuse myself to the bathroom
just to throw up everything in the sink.

martyr’s ancestors

14 Monday Oct 2013

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photo by katie aune

I lived near the ruins of All Saviors
Church. If this were an altar for the dead,
worshiped since 3000 BC, martyr’s
ancestors, then I would have prayed and fed
them as I once fed the dead of Ani’s
ruins, across the border, a different
city of ghosts. But it is not. What frees
all these dead from Arcadia’s ancient
curse? They entered into me, sick larvae
in a ripe fruit, and now I can’t leave it
alone. If I could call on some unknown
fury to heal this I would. But fury
and loss is what binds these cast-off spirits;
and now, like them, I can’t leave this alone.

][][

notes:

If metaphors are the engine that drives a poem then the problem with writing about a city that 98% of the free world has never heard of is, like trying to make sense of out-of-date pop cultural references, 98% of the free world won’t get what you’re trying to say. The metaphor, in other words, fails. I’m trying to avoid that here, but I realize that if I need to write several paragraphs in my notes explaining what each reference I use means then … perhaps I need to rethink how I can “talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.” (thank you, Living Color).

So, as a quick reference guide, here goes:

The poem is set in the earthquake-devastated city of Gyumri, Armenia; a part of the world that archaeologists have determined has been continually inhabited since 3000 BC. All Saviors Church was a ruined church down the street from where I once lived. Ani is an abandoned, ancient Armenian city just across the border between Armenia and Turkey. As a metaphor, Arcadia usually refers to the idea of an unspoiled, utopian wilderness; sort of like what your hippie parents (or grandparents) might talk about when someone mentions California in the 1960s. Needless to say, the 1960s have never been “all that,” in much the same way that modern-day Turkey has never been the cradle of anyone’s crescent civilization.

The photo I use here was taken by Katie Aune.

the heathen times

13 Sunday Oct 2013

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Dry this stream bed, flowing through not desert
heat but Neolithic outcroppings, hills
they call them, marking the border. The dirt
here is sweet, sweeter than whatever spills
out on the other side. I have wandered
through these hills, down paths that even shepherds
couldn’t get their flocks to follow. I’ve heard
the sound of paw-pads on rock, like drunkards
kicking stones. Later my neighbors would tell
me ghost stories of the heathen times, back
when goddesses of wind, fire and shadow
roamed the hills. But I was under the spell
of youth, where having Cantor and Cossack
blood was all the safety I needed to know.

][][

notes:

It’s odd how one starts a poem about the river that divides Armenia from Turkey and ends up writing about being chased through the hills by unseen forces. I suppose it’s all about where the rhyme takes you.

This poem comes from my time spent in Gyumri, Armenia, as a Peace Corps volunteer. The city is surrounded on two sides by mountains and between the endless flat land the towering mountains are the foothills, which were bizarre when I first looked on them. The closest I’ve ever seen as a comparison is the Glastonbury Tor, in England, which looks like a huge burial mound. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, spanning the eastern and southern sides of the valley Gyumri is located in. It took around four hours to hike from the city center where I lived out to the hills, but I liked it because, for some odd reason, no one else seemed to venture out there. One night, though, having decided to go on a midnight stroll, I ended up getting lost and coming to the conclusion that something was following me. Perhaps I was hearing things, perhaps it was something as innocent as a wolf. Whatever it was I never found out, for even when I turned around and began looking for the source of the noise I couldn’t find anything. When I asked my neighbors why the hills were deserted they began telling me stories about the pre-Christian times of Armenia, with tales of fire whirlwinds, goddesses that caused goats to dry up and dragons that lived on the slopes of Mt. Ararat. I suppose they thought that since I was an American I’d be willing to believe in anything.

The Cantor and Cossack reference is personal, for as far as I can gather from the little information I have found, my grandfather’s father on my dad’s side were both holy singers and horse soldiers during the days of the Russian Tzar. But that’s just family lore, what I know is that he came from a small village in the Ukraine, near Minsk. The difficulty of pin-pointing my ancestors isn’t just that everyone on my father’s side is dead, it’s that since they were Jewish and everyone else in the surrounding villages during WWII the Nazis rounded them up and executed everyone, afterward burning down the villages. There is literally no literal trance of my father’s roots.

what a muslim feminist looks like

12 Saturday Oct 2013

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muslim feminist 1

muslim feminist 2

muslim feminist 3

muslim feminist 4

muslim feminist 5

muslim feminist 6

muslim feminist 7

][][

[the biography] Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, states that although Stanton is well-known for her involvement in the women’s rights movement, she descended to some rather ugly racist rhetoric along the lines of, ‘Only we educated, virtuous white women are more worthy of the vote’ … That is where my disagreement with Stanton is strongest: Whose rights are you going to put down in the process of demanding your own?”
—-Lori Ginzberg

There has always been racism within the various mainstream Feminist movements. From Suffragettes like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spent a lifetime advocating that black women should never have the same Constitutional rights as white women, all the way up to our modern age with Sarkozy’s France and FEMEN claiming that Muslim women should not have the right to choose how to dress themselves as they see fit.

I focus here on the debate over the hijab, the Islamic head-cloth that many Muslim women choose to wear, because for me it has direct parallels to the same logic and reasoning found in many Pro-Choice and Sexual Rights movements operating today; that is, that every woman should have the freedom to choose what they want to do with their bodies. Control over her body and the freedom to decide the course of her own life is critical not just to woman’s civil rights but all human rights as well. The fact that the people—-who seem blind to their own racial privileges and use xenophobia and Islamophobia to support their cause—-just happen to be women does not strengthen their arguments, it simply shows that we still live in a time and place where the dominate culture feels that it has the right to declare who gets to be called a Feminist and what a Feminist should look like.

Writing in her essay, Does Your Lifestyle Make You Unworthy of Feminism? Noor Al-Sibai says:

The term “Lifestyle Feminism” became a buzzword in the second wave of Feminism during the 1960’s and 70’s (in the Western-centric view of “Waves” of Feminism). The term, as defined by influential writer Bell Hooks in Feminism is For Everybody, is “the notion that there could be as many versions of Feminism as there were women”. It is the recognition—-or rather, the lack thereof—-of the fact that there is as much plurality within Feminism as there are Feminists that’s been troubling me recently. Many Feminists of all flavors (queer, fat, etc.) seem to be engaged in policing who can and can’t identify as a Feminist based purely on their own preferences and lifestyle choices. While this sort of internal division and conflict is nothing new (like when Black Feminism and Womanism split from mainstream Feminism, or the Feminist Sex/Porn wars of the 80’s and 90’s), it has reached a peculiar pinnacle when it comes to specific lifestyle choices such as the decision to engage in sex work (defined broadly as anything from webcam porn to stripping to escorting), or the decision to be a Muslim and wear a hijab …

I find the disassociation between fighting for the right of women to have freedom of choice over their own bodies when it comes to sexual reproduction but not when it comes to faith, fashion or lifestyle utterly bizarre. The fact that in 2013 there are still Feminists who are not only attacked and silenced by the larger “White Imperial Patriarchal culture,” as Bell Hooks points out, but also by members within their own struggle disastrous on all levels. I am not Muslim but as long as there are women in this world who choose to wear a hijab then I will help fight for their right to do so. That is, after all, what freedom of choice is all about.

][][

The photos I use here were taken from various Muslim Feminist websites I read as I was writing this essay. The last, of the woman wearing the tiara, is Obabiyi Aishah Ajibola, from Nigeria, who was crowned 2013 World Muslimah in Jakarta.

the path into purgatory

10 Thursday Oct 2013

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… at the midpoint of the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the clear path was lost.
—Dante Alighieri, Inferno

All roads to Hell start like this, Dante tells
us. The path into purgatory, though,
the ghost realm, is much more difficult. Hell’s
Nine Circles are sick and flash, we all know
Hellz da bomb. Limbo, though, is a bus ride.
We wound through the farms on the Hrazdan,
then north, near Aragats. I had no guide,
no blessed Virgil. I could not speak more than
baby-words. But, as the bus turned the last
mountain pass, there it was spread out below:
empty, vast, flat. A gray valley so vast
it was all horizon. But there—a glow
on the edge—ghost ruin that had survived
the ’88 earthquake—I had arrived.

notes:

Inferno is the first part of Dante’s epic poem Divine Comedy. It is an allegory telling of the journey Dante took through Hell, guided by the soul of the Roman poet, Virgil.

Hrazdan is a river that flows through the Ararat valley, irrigating many apricot orchards and farmland. It divides the city of Yerevan in half. Once, during a very drunken party, a bunch of us Americans went skinny dipping in the river because what’s the point of having a river in your city if you can’t strip off all your clothes and jump in it now and then?

Mt. Aragats is the highest peak in Armenia, forming part of a mountain chain that separates Gyumri from Yerevan. To travel between the two cities required me taking a big red autobus that traveled roughly 15 miles an hour, it felt like, worming its way up and down high mountain roads. The city I refer to at the end of the poem is Gyumri, which in 1988 was totally destroyed in an earthquake that killed 25,000 people. When I arrived seven years later it was still rubble, looking like something out of a war movie.