Thursday, September 25, 2014

...the uncompromising love...


17th Street Santa Ana, 2014
Poem 25-09-14

Those trailing times I have made
Aimless described
Along sidewalks the men that made them never tread
Crafted three square feet at a time 
Designed with a quick slide of a pencil across a ruler
Utilitarian of all things utility
Do men really walk in such straight lines as these?  I will admit they do little to aspire.

And I drive as aimlessly
Music is my companion
Underscoring the lack of drama on
any one of those nights
Perhaps that is what jazz is
A backdrop to blurry lights
Santa Ana Side Street, 2014
The underpinning of late night 
Dinners in diners where the clatter
of plates and metal make a music
That no one is awake enough to care
I barely make it out
And only in time for the bleary
Eyed fossil hands me the check
Without a word
It is pedantic as the food that is made
like the sidewalk
But the coffee is delicious and
why I come.

And the road ahead!
It curves and bends following the contour of the ocean's edge.
There's the thrill!
There's the jazz. ///////

Hollywood Blvd, Facing West from the Pig, 2014

Monday, September 22, 2014

...measured...

How shall we measure it
Is it physicality?
The rush of blood through our members
The blush response
In tears then?
In long and languid sighs
When reciprocity is figured like an equation that ends falsely
An irregular sum
A null statement; the sum or product was false to begin with
Then what was this that was felt
Far to look backward, inward
If by feeling then how measured
For I felt and feel
In tears and sighs
My God how I apologize.  Measure it thusly?

Perhaps in works?
In poems and drafts and art
In sketches and of clay
How many to prove? 
Words as proof, as better parts where the whole may be lacking
I know I know
I know it like the song I capture in a sigh
The declarative made when ended in a tear stain
The ink run
But not far enough.

Is it time?
If it is not enough now, would a year suffice?
Is that how it can be proved.
Two or more.
Twenty?
If the sense of novelty can be stripped away in the nearness of now
Would then you see?
If, combined, I stack all these as a whole in two decades or more
And lay them at your feet and earnestly lie, a poorer comparison
would be proved
But the physical will pass as it should
But the art remains
But will it prove?  When I am gone?

Saturday, September 20, 2014

...Balboa Pier Fishing...August 2014...



Louise Gluck, 1943
Vespers
In your extended absence, you permit me 
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report 
failure in my assignment, principally 
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow 
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold 
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come 
so often here, while other regions get 
twelve weeks of summer. All this 
belongs to you: on the other hand, 
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots 
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart 
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly 
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of 
that term. You who do not discriminate 
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, 
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know 
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible 
for these vines.



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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

...instagram / wallpapers / a little bit of both...16sep14...

picking back up on instagram since twitpic may be shuttering up; here's a few photos from my Windows Phone shot recently at Huntington Library and Level 3 at Hollywood and Highland...


 


there i am in the midst of weeds
in the uncaring tangle of refuse
returning to the earth returning to the earth
this is not what i meant
this is not what i sought
but they came all around like hunger
like decision bury me please bury me
all desires have melted into the earth
and all i ask is to unexpose me
the desire in how i left
in reaching out to the voice on the other end
find me find me
is what i meant find in me - open as i am

Friday, September 12, 2014

...Robert Frost...the Heat Wave...12sep14...

My parents returned from Vermont a week ago and brought back with them a copy of Robert Frost's Poems.  A simple paperback copy from St. Martin's Press (1971 version).  Thankfully I received a present I find enriching.  As I am sweating at my desk in the break of the historical record of heat, I came across his Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.  How it awakens the frost long forgotten otherwise.  The type of snow that silently falls, as gentle as nothing else along our hair and skin.

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.
 - 1922



As a stone, through lifeless lids, track the monotone horizon
The fire extinguished, the sun black marble
The memory lost.

The cold no different than cold flesh, covered frost
My breath no different in the air
Thoughts decay.

All to ice, the tracks undisclosed, layer upon layer,
Hardened upon itself, a clear glue
The heart last.
- 2014

Monday, September 8, 2014

...through the ripples how they shine...08sep14...

the yellow pad and all of what it affords, sep'14
Endlessly working like a Tolstoyan laborer in the harsh freeze of the Tundran farm.

Half-way through the second draft of my first full novel 'Filipino Cookbook', getting it prepped for a professional editor.  This was the outcome of last year's NaNoWriMo and I've been polishing it as much as I have the ability to.  Polishing it with the care afforded the small Native American child, using his small hands to polish the inside of an abalone until it sparkled in the sun.

Gearing up for this November's wicked ride with a narrative re-study of a script I completed back in 2004, 'Freeway 1976'. Seemingly, I know the ending to it, but it has been lost in multiple transitions from one computer to the next.  But, having not committed it seemed to have a latching effect, and it is in my memory locked.  That'll be this year's novel.

In between, doing a study of another concept, 'Thief'.  It is a response of sorts, where I challenged myself with the question, if I could not create a game, what would the story be?  You'll note it in the last couple of entries on the blog.  Thanks for visiting, and if you haven't done so, please check out the Store for anything you may be interested in.  No pressure.  It's always there.  :)

Monday, September 1, 2014

...being of a restless mind, Thaddeus always awoke at the first sound of a carriage wheel...

NEXT MORNING.

Another spoon of peach preserves on his toast as he scrutinized the diorama of Atlanta.  The grey early light stole through the sheer curtains of his foyer.  Furniture was still arriving by rail.  Thaddeus had pulled a seat from the sitting room, the only one with wax covered feet, as he would do several times a week.  His Southern staff probably thought him strange, but, as would always be the case, in his calling, was to accept their perception and they would leave him be in time.  No one appreciates the strange or the different.  They would much rather have the expected.

For the restless Timminick son, the first order of business in any city was to commission a piece for his mansion: a diorama of the city that can be read by candlelight.  These were rarely small.  The Atlanta diorama was six by six foot.  Thaddeus could brag of others, like the work commissioned for Tsaritsyn, which was overly done at fourteen feet square.  That was only the case because of Saratov, the man was induced to build the biggest map because of the interest of one of the Tsars.  He would do nothing to specification.  It was not an inducement to allow the city to receive it as a gift.  It still sits in the city museum today.  A man by the name of Arkhil, whom he knew in India, was the one that taught him such small, but powerful, tools to use.  The map was key.  Thaddeus was the one to see a different approach: hide it in plain sight.  To this end, his persona (which he affectionately named, the Phantasm), fashioned himself a minor cartographer, hanging more than two dozens maps of antiquities on the walls, and more than four handsome globes.

The instructions of the diorama would include the relative enlargement of the quarters of the city that one could consider 'opulent'.  The homes nearer the museums; the homes nearer the theatre districts.  Those what folks can separate themselves with a systematic series of parks, gates and streets.  Delineated by electric lamps or gas lamps, or worse of all: none at all.  Thaddeus had no desire to be there.  It did not fit the business.  "Please enlarge these areas by a fair factor of four, if you can.  I would very much like to see the places of the upright be outlined larger than the rest of the city.  Include every wall, prodigious trees and window - for they all, together, form the beauteous part of the city.  Is it not the heart?"  The crafter would wholeheartedly agree and make fine work of it.

He slightly angled the chair to look down Peachtree [Street], then twisted to scrutinize Ivy.  Thaddeus first hit the Healy building on Forsyth five nights ago, but took nothing.  It was a run to start getting a sense of the city.  There was factoring that needed to be considered.  But it really came down to the response of the police and the demeanor of the city.  Healy was also an advantageous place to view the relativeness of location he would be visiting over the next couple of years.  [Much of this work was heavily reliant on scouting and foresight, if the popularized beliefs that it was all the base traits of pick-pocket.]

American cities were unique in that the places of amusement were staying up later and later still.  It would not be uncommon that the noveau riche were playing about in their casinos and at parties until three in the morning.  Such factors would not work when visiting those places, but it did hold that now their residences were clear for pilfering.  The unfortunate thing was they would take their best baubles and cash with them.  Thank Fortune that they've yet to discover the safety of a bank vault.

His mind is wandering again.  He asked for coffee and moved the chair back as he awaited it.

Build up Arkhil would say to him.  Make love to the city.  A true lover takes his time with a woman, he makes her thrum: call out for more.  Do this incorrectly and the city will betray you, as surely as you are betraying it.

He looked across the body of Atlanta and found a series of homes purported to be the noveau riche.  It was in a cluster of homes near Spring.

Thaddeus put the map out of his mind and walked to his study.  He carefully eyed the mail and found that he had already received the requisite invitations for a personage of his status arriving to the city.  He would use his secretary to start in reply.  He would make every gathering he could.  The first days were crucial to his cause.  He pulled a clippings book that he had his staff formulate months ago.  There were names he would have his secretary initiate meetings with: Jennings, Lavoie, Billings.

He dressed and called for his carriage.  He would go to the office today.  Thaddeus Timminick had a reputation has a mechanical dealer with a catalog of patented goods in both tools and metallurgy.  His real calling, however, will always remain a secret.