FOUND POETRY: VICODAN

thought weather trouble
blue house stand fast
last luck lord engaged
wife, she remained
respect finished
they point
surely part class drop
likely raised offer
fancy share afterwards
stayed period

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

’T’was the day before Thanksgiving

and all through the houses

plump turkeys were thawing, not petit grouses!

Though the cupboards were groaning

all the tables were laid bare. What? No carousing?

My birthday comes but once a year.

"We forgot," cried relatives and spouses

to friends and neighbors moaning in thin air.

They scolded their watches & their PDAs too,

"it's not that we don't care. Really, we do.

Forgive us. We really forgot. It wasn't a plot.

Forgive us, our memory's got dry rot. Or ergot.

We'll make it up to you at Christmas. Never fear."

Lest I complain, "let them eat crow," (or cake)

one year, even my mom forgot, alas, heartbreak!

I don't hold my breath lightly, nor do I lend an ear,

for tomorrow will come when pigs learn to fly

by all those pumpkin and mince pies in the sky

without gobbling them up, none for the throngs.

So much for the promises of yesteryear—

or even next year. Now, don't get me wrong.

Indeed I long for that glutton of a beast

with all the trimmings of a glorious feast.

I dispense fowl blessings reiterated with grace.

Hope springs eternal, so I save a small place

for dessert — because it might be a bit of cake.

OK, I’m quirky if I confuse turkeys with candles.

And tomorrow when we dismantle the big bird

I’ll blow out the drumstick with a wing and a prayer.

I won’t let this bailiwick of a pilgrim’s parlance,

betrayer of fowlish deeds, with dissonance absurd

occlude my birthday with a yam dance. Not a chance!

Conclude your fawning and hemming and hawing.

Pass the blasted dressing. For next year, never fear

my birthday will reappear on Thanksgiving Day. OK?

Pity my poor cousin born on Christmas Eve

and not to grieve on such a moveable feast.

11/24/2004

In North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle

11/17/ 2004  We’re in Myles O'Reilly's pub at 622 Green St. in North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle. Ha, ha, ha, we're all drinking somebody's open swill – Pinot Noir for breakfast. Ugh. I was hoping for food. It’s Myles’s birthday. The jazz club band brings us in with a little swing, some Maria Callas, and the Tarantella and the Godfather meets the Irish in North Beach.

Nearly an hour later, Roddy Doyle saunters in and steps up to the microphone, taps it thunderously, and says he's now a Yank, having been in nine cities in 10 days. We laugh.

Doyle is bald as a skinhead, it takes some getting used to. He read from Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and a small bit on Henry Smart, an IRA volunteer, from A Star Called Henry, and some stray bits from a play he's been working on, and then he thanked Elgie Gillespie for making this so. There is a River of free flowing booze. By this point, we're all fairly toasted.

Neil Jordan, steps up, looking upscale and fashionably thuggish, wearing shades, having just returned from a TV interview, he's a rare bit of gloom, despite it being sunny, midday. Maybe the alcohol's wearing off. 

He begins with: I know when I died, May 1950. It was a rare whinge, the perspective is written from that woman. He ended on an upbeat note: George killed me... He reads from The Dream of a Beast, with a segue into Interview with the Vampire.

After they were finished reading, there was a Q&A. Someone asks: Would you like to write The Commitments today?

Roddy Doyle said, Well, I'd need to express the conditions along similar lines. The Irish, the blacks of Europe would figure into it.

Jordan said the USA has been good to me, re: The Crying Game. 

Phoenix rising freewrite (drawing)

A phoenix rises from the ashes, is it Ash Wednesday, or resurrection, or soot from the chimney, midwinter, a creosote threat, sparks climbing the night sky, seeking distant cousins. The Perseids and Leonids flash, Astro fire, cat’s-eyes glowing. The phoenix lust, and foxfire, the moon, hidden behind clouds, bows at the torii gate. Heaven and earth. Wind and sky. Fire in the head. 

I am the word of science, the song of Amergen, as he set forth upon the land of Ireland for the first time. I am the fire in the head, I am a work of art rising from the ashes. Bone ash, white, hot, bonfires to couch, the sun, to bring it back after the darkness. 

My great grandfather drove cattle between two bonfires, their mad eyes glowing as they charged forth. Holy smoke anointed the sky and settled down, phoenix, rising. The tears of the phoenix will heal the mortally wounded. But after hearing one truth but she waited so long. When the bird lands, the land, the air is transform by fire. Flight and wings of ash falling down to earth nourishing it. 

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group

In the rain without an umbrella, freewrite (Merrill Gardens journal)

Singing, dancing in the rain, the world is transformed, even the gutters lose distinction with the sidewalks and curbstones. The rain pounds the pavement with such vigor that the streets are transformed into vast, gray trampolines, and the Magritte’s Golconda jumpers are falling from the clouds. Not to mention the cats and dogs. The rain bounces up and blurs that distinction between street and curb, ocean and sky. 

Today, in my Elder writing group at Merrill Gardens, one old woman from the northern provinces, tried to reconstruct images of home. She wanted to become a phoenix and rise up from her own ashes in another country. She studied hard to be a doctor. Tomorrow I’ll be 88, she said. I have not thought about China for many years. She is beginning to remember after forgetting the atrocities of the past for so many years.

She said, Once it was raining in her village, the Japanese had invaded, so she walked to school in the rain without an umbrella. She needed to be the strong one, she didn’t let go of her young cousin’s hand, not even when the rain beat down with such force, that their legs turned yellow from the mud. She tells me that the Yangtze means yellow river.

Rivulets made their way to the ocean, to the China Sea, and the school became a raft across the sea to Africa, to the Sahara, and then to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, the place of flowers, where she made her escape and met her husband in transit, waiting there for years as he perfected his surgery on the open heart. 

The breakthrough operation was the first of its kind in a country of parched thirst, under siege, in a drought. She wears an umbrella for the sun. She is waiting for her people to go to Cold Mountain, where she watched her first movie of a man with an umbrella, singing and dancing in the rain, and his heart was full. He was dancing with an open heart. The rain rose up, like a flock of phoenixes, seeking the eye of the sun.

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group