do it
shape it
no copy
count on it
depend on it
believe in it
this is it
this is yours
this is ours
we got it
we share it
we live it
here it is
here you go
here we go
now
posted by judy j @ 7:48 PM
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dark sky glows
one came into focus
always a surprise
automatic sprinklers,
in case the clouds catch fire
just in case
your big chance
we talked about this earlier
tell the news
posted by judy j @ 5:06 PM
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I see a man
with blood on his hands
who decided to retire early;
he called for his pipe
and he called for his bowl
and he called for his massacres three.
His decades with Bush were three,
and his staff swore, to the last man,
that the Tigris would be like a salad bowl
into which they could dip their hands
and pour crude oil down the pipe,
quick enough to leave for lunch early.
But did they vacation too early?
It wasn't until day three
after Katrina burst the pipes
that Turd-Blossom's man
stuck his lily-white hands
into the Mississippi blood-bowl.
No, they didn't always win at the Health Care Bowl,
as any debater could prove, bright and early;
once they put the vets into Walter Reed's hands,
you could say the old soldiers had only three
chances to walk, again a healthy man,
one who could pay for crutches, and not use pipes.
Of course, loyal Bushies would'nt use lead pipes
to question suspects in Guantanamo's bowl,
where cells, pens, and cages divide man from man;
instead, they declare sleep after three days too early
and the number of people who see your evidence is three
and you're not one of them: Rove kept secrets out of your hands.
Will we ever know what records have passed through his hands?
Who can tell which taps he put on whose telephone pipes?
As California knows, it doesn't take much to ring up Three
Strikes: you might as well pull your charges out of a bowl.
Tried as a criminal? Or prisoner of war? Don't speak up early:
if you want to be both, ask Jose Padilla - he's your man.
Gonzalez's best man: let's give him a hand.
It's hardly too early to strike up the pipes:
send him down Dante's bowl: he belongs on level three.
posted by judy j @ 6:32 PM
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21 stayed -
prisoners of war
US soldiers joined the Chinese
20 had never heard of Communism except as a dirty word.
They told me, "Don't you marry that Mexican girl,
it'll be a curse on the whole family."
19 felt unloved and unwanted by fathers or stepfathers -
he worked nightshift in the Lockheed plant:
we buried him in the backyard
17 did not finish high school -
I made it to graduation:
enlisted the next day.
18 took no part in school activities or sports -
we helped mom in the general store,
sold chocolate to the rich kids.
16 were withdrawn, lone wolves -
little brother was only two
when dad died drunk.
15 had average to low intelligence quotients -
you can only listen to so many notions
before you become a basket case.
posted by judy j @ 2:55 PM
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She was one of the unidentified.
had lived with her uncle
had a brother in new york and two in minneapolis
an uncle in Brooklyn, a baker with a comfortable home
two unmarried brothers
living with a married brother
her brother who is a tailor
a sister who was a dressmaker's apprentice
sisters were looking forward to coming to New York,
another brother was serving his second year in the army,
none of whom earned much.
$25.00 was given to the brother to send to his sisters
$50.00 was given to the brother for a tombstone
$50.00 given by the Union to cover funeral expenses
1000 roubles sent to the father
1250 kronen was sent to the American Consul
600 roubles was sent to the mother
making the total appropriation 950 roubles.
to her widowed mother and sister in Galicia
their parents in Russia
her mother and the four younger children
her father and step-mother in London
the mother had become insane
she might use it for the education of the children
it would be sufficient to set him up in a peddlar's business
for personal expenses, in consideration of her health
he had a good opportunity to rent a farm
the father might start a stationary store
this was clearly a great exaggeration.
This was equivalent to the girl's usual remittance for five years.
what the girl would have sent for three years
she had sent about $5.00 a month
her contribution being about $8.00 per month
had sent 10 roubles a month
A money order for them ready to be mailed was found on her person.
earned $16.00 a week
boarded on the lower east side
boarded with strangers
a member of the Union
earned a little teaching Hebrew
had worked in the shop for only three days
had been in America only for three months
her steamship ticket was not yet paid for
had been bought on the installment plan
was killed
was killed
was killed
was killed
had no children
had four children with him, one an insane deaf-mute
had one child and expected another
had an invalid crippled son of 13
they did not believe it.
was engaged to be married
supported her fiance
the husband, a barber, earned not more than two francs a day
$50.00 was given to her husband
her fiance paid for the funeral
a note of thanks has been received.
* excerpts from records of injuries and settlements in Triangle Shirt Waist factory fire, March 25, 1911
posted by judy j @ 4:15 PM
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"Take it down."
I misunderstood.
Not much land is left.
"Take it down."
I have misunderstood.
A partial meltdown.
"Take it down."
ancestral habit:
dictate, speculate.
"You misunderstood."
wage cut
suicide rate.
"We're cooking now."
bomb test
final rest
It's funny when you make it so.
"Take it down."
I don't understand.
Please translate.
"Take it down."
I can't understand.
Remember that.
It's a loss when we let it go.
"Take it down."
I will not understand.
A deal is a deal.
posted by judy j @ 3:38 PM
0 comments
i didn't believe until Brahms played your hands across a silver screen and you nodded under compliments to require a bi-national solution that incorporates past and present.
we list massacres of innocents only to begin. Wagner couldn't have known how we'd dismiss his hatred and seize upon The Ring to begin to reconcile a Holocaust with a Nakba.
but who are we?
more than you know...we won't let fear of surpassing our fathers keep us from preludes, overtures, or odes to peace. we won't let Romantic sentimentalism keep us from lieder, tone poems, or symphonies. Beethoven may have intimidated Europe for half a century, but Haydn kept joy alive with quartets. You taught me that.
i didn't understand that music emerges from silence and disappears into silence until you recorded your voice and transposed the words onto a printed page, so how do we let the terms of endearment surpass rules of engagement to bring young cellists from the stage to the streets, where we can refute Krystalnacht as well as refugee camps, Stonewall closures as well as Franco's expulsion of those dissidents who insisted on their right to hold hands?
how do we let the music speak for itself, and still refuse to accept a national language as the final solution?
Our repertoires don't have to remain mutually exclusive - Mozart wrote six hundred and twelve major pieces by the time he died at age thirty seven.
So what takes these desires beyond the scale of Great Works by Great Men?
We play it. We take it. We make it ours.
Claim it. Re-frame it. Don't let anyone else steal what you've started. harmonics carry through you, like Chopin's deceptively complex serenades - seems so easy to say what matters, but when blood stains the sheets, is this menstruation or tuberculosis? does our sex bypass the menses, or does my cough spatter the piano score?
and still, the urge to insist, to list referents - that's one way to compose yourself.
and yet, if we do not respond as part of the whole, how extensively we deceive ourselves with continual revisions. evidence of three perils in humanistic criticism - Mahler's despair, Liszt's indulgent frenzies, and Adorno's destructive rage - bulwark us against summary interpretation, and avail us to create a democratic history.
these are your terms - i didn't believe i could ever feel them. we argued over anger and how it ought to be spoken, and yet we can still reunite with four-handed inventions, Purcell's lullabies, and a Well-Tempered Clavier.
So it begins.
Later, we reunite over Irving Berlin and good-bye parties, Mendelssohn and cocker spaniels, Satie and hiking trails. Here's how we ask permission to accept an impersonal invitation - informal and yet polite, reticent and bold. Leave it to Lulu to wallow in death - Berg may have fetishized murder, but that doesn't mean we have to (nor does it mean he actually did - ask Brecht for a review, and he'll give you a manifesto).
so the point is we are not the silent lovers of a frozen past; we have become a living poem, authenticated by each others' lashes (both eye and fist) and influenced by the burning pestle of satire, passed from Chaucer to Cervantes, Debussey to Spooky, in an uncanny evocation of millennial repression and civil discontent. from Freud's Dora or Hirohito's "Tora" we have not learned to evade abuses of senility, but we may continue to see just how Shostakovich captitulated to Stalinist censorship not only to save his hide, but to surpass it.
In these sustenatos, evidence; in these glissandos, perseverance. I have you to thank for that - and Heifitz.
posted by judy j @ 2:24 PM
0 comments
sure way to insist, sure...but sure way for true? can't be, when sulfur soaks into skin, epidermis cracks widen in steam and shrink in sunlight - these markers trace a silhouette pattern of not-fallen-leaves on our not-following bodies. so, even when "I'm with you" turns into "Whatever you like, don't let me stop you," we insist on complications of public space that divide ASAP from STAT, phlebotomists from mesmerists, and facial hairs from horn-rimmed frames. With these gaps between produce stalls and live bands of nostalgic riffs, how do we trade basil bunches for collected impressions in a manner which accords a future to our guesses? In these silences, a five-years' conversation; in such absences, a stage-play's kneecap collapses. Don't keep the vial too close to your pocket: a painful lesion may result. That's one way to notice this exists. Still, to act on it? That's next.
posted by judy j @ 12:22 PM
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Nijinksy went mad and his wife took notes: not The Afternoon in The Life of A Faun, but Freud's least successful patient (if possible) and best dancer - how do we both be best and worst and somewhere in between? Duncan traveled to Greece, try to keep up that toga when our history gets tangled in tank treads like long scarves in automobile wheels (croak [gratuitous choking noise here]) and yet I have to admire the insistence on classical forms as much as I scoff, because back braces and elbow shards don't support leaps of logic and lifts of reason when the drama of sitting and standing is never exhausted: Barishnikov still dances in his fifties, New York lofts his new studio; next to come, an itinerary of urban spaces...an architecture of discarded furniture? a catalogue of structural remains? or a choreography of exhaust pipes and assembly lines, where we punch in and punch out, words of want, punch in, whisper, out
posted by judy j @ 12:20 PM
0 comments
by the way, Gettysburg wasn't just an address: whole fields of rotting bodies subsided into soil and streams), not just mountain ranges coincide on desire, but hatred and microscopic ignorance lead to a KT extinction event as seismographically influential as Everest's second cousin collapsing into the Marineras Trench - topographical opposites that would seem to never meet if it wasn't for us, we humans who hold bullets between teeth both to celebrate and pray, as well as prepare for war (but I don't trust these big phrases, the grand claims that sweep history like Himalayan gestures of continental drift, get it? I don't have a sex, I have a Continental Divide; I don't get erections, I have an Altiplano of emptiness, somewhat high, somewhat plain, but no sheep graze my slopes, no llamas cavort in my caverns - I don't know, maybe Peru doesn't have llamas, do you know?). Meanwhile, Switzerland sits on the Alps, a neutral territory of not this, not that; not man, not woman - who can catalogue, how can we describe the quake of sudden shifts / the territorial battles of belonging and becoming, the Union's confluence on the Rebels - when the lists drift: me Kilaminjaro in my simplicity, you Sierran in your international relevance; me Fuji in my isolation, you the Great Barrier Reef in your mingling of land and water, life and death, coral and stone, life and death.
posted by judy j @ 12:20 PM
0 comments
Here are a few fill-in-the-blank exercise to check whether you are a Saxon saint. Simply make "instructive orders" your authoritative default and make sure your "clever for the sake of being clever" is installed. Then switch to your "Sweet Jesus, blasphemy is both a mean and easy target" mode and assert the correct conclusions among the scenarios below. Accuse a dissident of witchcraft to see if your dogma is accepted. The first heresy is a freebie. Pretend you have nothing to lose, ridicule the dispossed, offend all your friends who are actually working for justice, and see what happens.
Learner's and standard Reactionary vocabularies are available here if you need them. If a security request appears, grant it and ask that your neighbors remember your presence by dealing drugs from an upstairs window, convening daily arguments with your lover (as well as weekly bottle-breaking and monthly knife fights), and generally acting like the white trash that you are. Torching a cross on the front lawn is optional. It only infuriates the general populace so designated to quell supremacist displays. Close the window in the usual way, by shooting an "X" in the upper righthand corner.
Now, forth with those missives, Chronos, to the invader! But first, remember, Laertes, the dangers of irony include that while some may take you too seriously, others may not take you seriously enough. How much is too much? How little is enough? Accounts of the malfeasance you accrue can never be adequately tabulated, nor can momentary shifts into sincerity provide significant reparations for the benefits you've assumed. Yes, retribution will be swift and silent, so let these words be a mere map for it, direct into your existence and with a full-stop there, no exit into the rest of our lives, so that I can find a way to laugh that doesn't hurt so bad, so that you can learn a way to love that doesn't require pain, and we can begin, again, to remember the terms of mutual deliverance. You do the rest.
posted by judy j @ 3:46 PM
0 comments
the important thing to remember is that stories, whatever their origins, must agree with the lies they modify. this is nothing new. you've probably heard it, or something like it, before. before what? before now, this. and before this, now. so, there will be no social contract, or if so, then only for the moment. how do we negotiate those absences of place and change, of tone and let? begin.
st. thomas had a legend, he was a doubter. st. augustine had a confession, he was a believer. so what do we do at the sites of our new constitutions? i wouldn't worry about it. "submit or delete, it's all the same." that's the cynic's line, i don't go by it. "the woman must be progressive, and the rise must be feminine." now, i know that's not quite right, but you don't mind, do you? perhaps you do, and i'm making a fatal error. uh-oh.
acker didn't play these word games, she wallowed in the shit. that was agreeable to her delivery: insistent, but not dependent. there is less time for these sort of allusions than. there is less room for these illusions than. there is less forgiveness for this sort of trickery than agreement will allow. so how do we go on? like this, apparently. also like that. maybe also...no. but still, "how are you? i am fine." the populists' route repeats.
who has received? assertions exercise patience, and mistakes exorcise insistence. so there, malfeasance! content, i depart, and we return, bedraggled like army chaplains up against the wall. this is the poetry of firing squads and evicted squats. how do we face the unknown? with a blindfold, or a clenched fist? perhaps better to stay low, keep moving, stick to shadows. light falls from the letters, leaving the spaces between in darkness. so we go
posted by judy j @ 3:15 PM
0 comments
the problem is not that we do not have an inner life but that the buildings we occupy belong to someone else, the speech of the common breath, where line is but a thing to toe and and rent is more than what you did to your garments; in these houses, we accuse and perturb, present and describe: an abandoned mint, a brick warehouse, an obvious whorehouse, a gregarious mansion, section eight tenements, waggle of brow and curl of lip - before the time when i recognize of what exactly i am capable, the sidewalk burns with frozen flame (were we ever alone? was i wrong? how did you know?) and the accident of our silence
then again, the bed wasn't always adrift, and our sexes combined for mass-market consumption. meanwhile, back on the thousand islands of inside jokes, our collected memory trumped pianola reflections and chin glares based on petroleum deposits, so, for the last time, this is the reason why this, and this, and this, doesn't belong. it is an incommensurability of deceit, where my lies don't add up to decrepit deceptions, and the local play of title and life lends more amusement to backyard escapades and drunken-cat calvacades than all my caged fear and preconceptions. otherwise, it doesn't mean a thing, not this. nor that.
how to play it back? you were right, that was a ghastly smile. and no, i don't believe it's shameful to let you in on our secrets. you swept while we napped, and if you want it, you got it - just so long as (cancel that, i make no demands - but that's not right, either) this is where we live, in the tips of confused grimaces and hidden grins, in the marble counters of mis-en-place and kitchen fixings, in the left-overs of the re-elected and never-consented, in the dash towards a finish and the sketch of this coast, this one, this one here; and in this way, perhaps, we have a new landscape.
posted by judy j @ 2:49 PM
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"...to confront the transience and phenomenality of the realm of human affairs directly, in wonder and horror."
