lizard

[This is a poem I read for To Have and To Hold. It underwent a number of changes even up to five minutes prior to reciting it. Like any of any poet's poems, it's still a work in progress, but I am honored to have been approached to write specifically for this event and that a version of lizard contributed to the event's success.]

neuroscientists call it our reptilian brain, sitting inside
of our cortex it is smaller and primitive a croc
scaly, slithery, leather-skinned lounging lizard-like,
keeping time and moving us dancers rely on it, they
call on its memory it is the mother of our kinesthetic impulses
steps to a rhythm, our flight and fall, the beat of our heart or tapping
of our foot, the tick-tock of our souls the metronome to
the movement of ourselves within ourselves without it
we cannot avoid injury or win at boxing matches walk into our lover’s arms
or down an aisle to an andante tempo of a promenade
it is infallible if only we would listen closer to the sussurus
hissing between its forked tongue into our ears
from inside the inside of our head to the rest of the brain
this lizard computes in alternating numbers, say zeros and ones
but the dancer and musician knows it thinks differently, unlike a robot
but in soaring lines perhaps flashing colors or a story about itself

there is a hot rock, it crashed from a planet that resembles the Russian tundra
and it is in the center of a desert now California is a Gila monster
who spends its respite summer idling hot—hot and cold-blooded,
it needs the rock to stay alive the rock is the right parts cool and warm for now
California wants to move from off of the rock and into danger
a Katrina or a tsunami it wants to shatter itself orgasm is the best way
to put it precipitate into the Ocean and from the foam rise
like a fiery bird California wants to birth and mother itself
into a better Gila from broken pieces become better, better because it was broken
but the rock is committed to its own inertia growing colder into the winter
the lizard will die if it does not move off of the rock
in the delirium of heat the Gila dreams itself a dissociative disorder

California is an angel its disparate parts the parts of that angel
she is fractured but all there there is a golden halo and a lake of tears,
from both sadness and joy, beneath it
there are dry patches of land that is its body and the valleys
of green that carve it out there is a heart, a stomach, a brain and a reptile-brain
there are shoulder-blades that slice into the sky like a bird with fire for feathers
and a faulty heel that will some day crumble into the whispering Ocean
like the crack of thunder the angel, California, will beat
its wings to the music only she can hear—the BPM of birth, love, rebirth,
the heartbeat of a monster, the unshakeable imperfection of the cerebellum
deeply submerged beneath a riverbed—flying out toward space, screaming
at the stars ‘move out of the way’ a bat out of hell imitating a banshee,
she is a serpent with cotton-like wings, thunderously battering the air around her
applauding the break the break of a state into an island

to have and to hold

[from facebook]

Host:	RAWdance
Type:	Music/arts - Performance
Network:	Global

Date:	12 July 2009
Time:	14:00 - 16:00
Location:	Union Square Park
Town/City:	San Francisco, CA

Email:

raw@rawdance.org

When did love become a threat?

Mixing displays of public affection with visceral, athletic dancing, RAWdance reminds that you can never tell anyone who to love or how to love. The company will be joined by poets Robert Andrew Perez & Cristobal McKinney.

Chuin Phang & Andrew Ng, contributors to Do the Love Thing, will be on-site to take pictures for the web photography project featuring images of couples and families who believe in spreading the message of love, tolerance, and marriage equality. Check out dothelovething.org and come with your loved ones ready to take part.

Sunday, July 12th
Two shows : 2pm & 3pm
Union Square Park, SF

Performed by: Alexis Miller, Chad Dawson, Diana Broker, Dudley Flores, Gretchen Garnett, Jessica Stephenson, Laura Sharp, Mayuko Ayabe, Nikki Pinchott, Ryan T. Smith, Sonja Dale & Wendy Rein.

www.rawdance.org

origami

I am meeting
the corners of the square
sheet making
on a diagonal
a valley

now I’m closer
and steps ahead

flat, fat right
triangle and invisible
almost at times so thin
a syllable in epic
the width of string

now valley opening
lips whispering fire

vapor of our under-the-breath
confessions creased into
an ear, a letter penned
in vanishing ink
a page forgetting turning
bright white, light
was beaming beneath it

the edges line up
so imperfectly

it’s a piece of paper
meant for disappearing
acts not writing.

a call for poets

A good friend of mine, Ryan T. Smith, the artistic director and one of the choreographers for the contemporary dance group RAW, based in San Francisco, is organizing a protest in Union Square responding to passing and subsequent decisions regarding Proposition 8. He asked if I wanted to participate and if I knew any poets who would like to contribute spoken word or any other type of artistic expression to the demonstration.


So, if you’re in the Bay Area July 12th and interested in participating, we would love to work with you. Here’s what Ryan originally sent me, though I’m sure there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of how we can integrate our work; in any case, it should give you a sense of what page he’s on:

so we're down for union square, finally starting to pull our shit together, and would love you to do something for the event. i'm not sure how it would make sense to organize things. right now i'm wondering if we may want to actually integrate readings into the piece, not necessarily dancing to them but using them as intros before sections. or maybe they are totally separate....

do you want to get other poets involved or fly solo on this? talk to me. get your brainstorm on. what ya thinking? my hesitation with opening it up is always a) the quality of the work and b) the dependability of the person. so that'd be up to your history with other folks.

if you have any work already done tat you'd be interested in. i could use inspiration these days.

we are discussing asking a photographer friend of mine who is already doing a project in response to prop 8. but wendy's not sure about how she feels about his work or the addition. we'll decide to approach him or not this weekend.

if you're still down, get me a few sentence bio ASAP. going to get a press release for Monday morning so it comes before the outcome tues. am.. the release will basically say that either way, it goes we are ready and eager to respond.

okay end of business mode.
hugs.
r

I hope to hear back from some of you. Aside from the fact that contemporary dance demonstrations are always in dire need of good text, this will be an amazing and beautiful avenue for queer and allied artists to voice their feelings on this heated and critical issue.

Ryan needs responses by Sunday, June 7th, for a press release, so if you're at all interested and sure you can commit to this project email/text/call/im/harrass me by 12:00a that day. If you won't be sure by then, it's no travesty, just get to us later; the press work will just be deficient information.

one art - elizabeth bishop

A good friend lent me a copy of a superb anthology of poetry, Strong Measures, when I had expressed to him some interest in reading and composing more classic poetic forms. As of late, I’ve found this particular book particularly invaluable. Though I’ve specifically been focusing most of my recent creative efforts in the writing of pantoums, I found a vianelle by Elizabeth Bishop eloquently haunting. Like the pantoum, the vianelle is defined by a series of repetitions of either lines or words. That is to say, the form is intrinsically designed to be haunting; I acknowledge how I have been manipulated. In this piece, the repeated lines are reiterated with subtle changes that enhance their emotional impact, though the images are pedestrian in nature. The poem moves from household objects to, eventually, globally expansive concepts but never adopts the tone of grandiosity. The repetitions assist it in staying focused in an almost clinical manner. Though amidst its clinical and aloof tone, the poem elicits a pointed emotional response. The speaker requires this tone to engage the poem's loaded subject matter, the subject of loss.


One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

a relevant vintage youtube video

It was a pervasive but fleeting fad, once upon a time, to produce parodies of the Brokeback Mountain trailer as it applied to films or TV shows with similar plots to that of the BBM--though with less direct outcomes--using the underscoring and voice-over of the original trailer as a template. I found the youtube phenomenon astute and illuminative of how films inadvertently code homoerotic/homosexual tensions for an ignorant audience. This clip I found especially germane given my last post.

star trek and anal sex: jj abrams' take on the black hole

As you may have noticed, it is finals season for those still in school. Soon, I will reenter their company, but until then, I'll continue to stew in my envy. Though I probably hated and cursed writing papers and doing all-nighters—the memory is far too distant for me to muster a pure recollection—what I distinctly remember is the sense of relief and accomplishment when I completed an essay, usually just in the knick of time. This rush of nostalgia and jealousy, along with a debilitating fear of how much my grey matter has atrophied since graduating in 2006, has motivated me to [half-heartedly] attempt to write an essay in my free time. this is what I have so far:

Star Trek and Anal Sex: JJ Abrams’ Take on the Black Hole

Homosociality, or—in these days—“bromance,” goes into warp-speed in the recently re-imagined story, JJ Abrams’ Star Trek, a prequel of the original Starship Enterprise. In this version, it is difficult to tell whether it is a common tale of male-male camaraderie saturated with blatant pulp and understated subtext of homosexual iconography, or a pornographic, sexually charged homoerotic intergalactic Brokeback Mountain thinly veiled as a run-of-the-mill origin story. Frankly, I think the point is that there isn’t a difference, nor would it matter if one existed. This buddy movie, like all buddy movies, like all queer psychoanalytic theorists have come to know, posits the male buddy characters in an unrealized sexual romance that is continually skirted around, cited and transferred throughout the film. JJ Abrams, in this—time will eventually tell—2009 masterpiece, takes a quantum leap forward with this notion, going where no man (or film) has gone before.

The protagonist of the film, Jim, or James Tiberius Kirk, is introduced as a troubled child lacking discipline because of an absent (read: dead) father. In his first scene, he has hijacked what appears to be his stepfather’s convertible, blasting the Beastie Boys’ hit, Sabotage, whizzing through the landscape of the seemingly endless cornfields of Iowa. Though Abrams may not be prescient enough to predict that Iowa would be the first in a string of states to legalize gay marriage since California’s Proposition 8 debacle, this scene creates a relevant and elucidatory backdrop for my queer reading. On his joyride, Jim drives past a boy, taller than he but we are to assume that they are classmates or neighbors in close age range, taunting him […]

It’s rough, I know. Like my poetry, there’s much to flush out and inject. Since I rarely make outlines, I often use the space of the introduction to parse out my preliminary thoughts. I intend to navigate the reader through a series of portraits and interactions the film presents with interpellation and temporal intercourse at the crux of it all. I will employ the term "interpellation" as both, simply, the act of naming, and in its Althusserian mode, the hailing an individual into a station. It’s exciting to try to regenerate that portion of the brain I’ve neglected for so long. If anyone out there reads this, I need the encouragement!