Blood stone: A Memoir

Blood Stone: A Memoir

I am a Bloodstone. Shaken and weathered.
I am on the balcony in Mishima’s Japan
as the crimson sun sets on the seppuku ceremony
in the empty courtyard--

I carry with me the maroon anarchist blood
mixed at Chicago’s Haymarket Square
and Boston’s forgotten earth
where Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted.

I am the fire engine blood behind
the frenzied fiery frightened eyes of the childhood mob
in Montreal as they chant: Tue-la! Tue-la! Tue-la!
behind the schoolyard dumpsters.

I am perfectly pitched through space and caught in little Pierre Laport’s
catchers glove when someone yells: ‘Teacher! Allons-Vite!’
and everyone scrambles to get on the yellow bus.

On the bus, Pierre pushes me inside his pant pocket,
along-side spare change.
I nestle between silver-haired queens and well-fingered nickel beavers.

I had 15 minutes of fame on national television
when I lay on the Pakistani soil at Daniel Pearl’s scarlet feet
as he is shot, beheaded, hacked divided into 10 pieces as we sit unknowing in our fecund living rooms.

I have traveled ; been put-down, tossed, pick-pocketed, hanged,
shot, rolled along with some heads of state.
And how memorable
that day in the elementary school classroom
with the President of the Unites States.

George W. brings me in for show and tell.
He is reading about a pet goat that eats everything in its path.
His chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispers in his ear.
I think this is my moment.
Playing the lead on the international stage.
All the wide-awed children will be clamoring
over each other to catch a glimpse of my hued brilliance.
Damn him.

George slips out of the classroom,
abandoning the children
and me,
the Bloodstone
supine on the table.

first meeting

i am going to post a few newish poems i have been crafting. please feel free to stop by, have a look around and comment if the spirit moves you--





first meeting

something in the way
he moves
sits
sways
has me
arch my back
lurch my heart
slowly forward

careful

wild abandon
doesn't stop
to smell the flowers
nor to feel
the rain
fall--

it is indignant

it does
not
hear
the
fluttering
in your
heart.

i really like kissing...

mood: frisky
music: 'in the backseat' arcade fire
time: indefinite

there! i got it out of my system. whew. ahhhhh. mmmm. kiss. smack. yes. yum. wet, juicy...i guess it's not quite out yet--

celebration time, yahoo!!! 100 words of pleasure--

everyone around the world, come on! it's celebration time!

when I was 10, I spent the whole night outside by the side of the house squatting, to study a flower. its petals were tightly closed around the stamens. i waited all night, and then it happened. the petals shook and gently opened themselves to kiss the morning light…

petals supine and subtle, androecium rising to the occasion; the pollen sacks quivering while the dew melts into the rising sun, and the lingering sensations causing gentle tremors throughout the stalk.

my first sexual awakening and to celebrate I earned my horticultural badge.

don't WAIT to be hunted to hide...100 words and some--

an homage/deconstruction of beckett utilizing endgame, molloy and waiting for godot--

pozzo: the tears of the world are a constant quantity. for each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. the same is true of the laugh. (he laughs.) let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (pause.) let us not speak well of it either. (pause.) let us not speak of it at all.

vladimir: that passed the time.
-----------------
nell: nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
nagg: oh?
nell: yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. and we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. but it's always the same thing. yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
----------------------
don't wait to be hunted to hide, that's always been my motto.

but is it true love, in the rectum? that's what bothers me sometimes.

too naughty--

So, I'm a guest writer, a ghost writer, though no ghost am I.

When's the last time you had sex in a car?

Me, it was a couple weeks back. Watching 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom's sex, drugs and rock'n'roll mock-doc, with my girlfriend and her mother, yes, her mother. Those who've seen it know it's not a movie to see with your potential mother-in-law.

Thankfully, she left half way through, said "I think I get it."

My woman came out of the cinema in hot flashes, taking deep breaths. She didn't expect to see porn in an art house theatre. I had warned her, having seen the movie twice before, that it was graphic, hardcore, intense. I didn't know she'd invite her mom!!

We all had a drink and then dropped her mom off. My woman and I, sat in the driveway of my house and ravaged each other in the car like two highschool lovers on lovers lane.

So, when's the last time you had sex in a car?

News of my father's imminent death--

Today they told you that there was nothing left for you except to die--
And dear father, did you ever think for a moment about Dylan Thomas?
Or is your mind filled with Blakean visions?

What will we do without you?
Man who took off his wooden shoes and never looked behind him
But always gloriously ahead—
What do you envision for yourself?
Are you at peace with everything that you said and did?

“Whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’

Hard-working father--
Do you know how your children worship you?
Do you witness how our own ambivalence is melting away…
In the face of your own stoicism—

Dear Father teach us courage and teach us love
Teach our mother how not to miss you in her bed

Teach us how to move furniture from one house to the next
Without you and your car to pile things on top of the hood.

Teach us how to cultivate inner peace
And how to make amends

“Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice,
Such are the Gates of Paradise.”

Please teach us more than this
There are still lessons in you for us to learn

Without you
We can only imagine the answers you might give
Without you Life might seem a little less plentiful
So, dear father, if it please you…

“Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The deafening silences between the two that thought they could be friends--

You could have sent word that everything was all right between us
But your silences speak louder than any sentences you might have crafted.

Your hostility towards me in my hour of darkness
The inablility to forgive
Lets me know how much we have lost.

Lost to you, I now find myself speechless.

Speechless I no longer know what to say

And the chasm widens--

As i discover
The possible
Impossibility
Of remaining friends.

tribute to my father...

i have decided to post about my father for a spell, to celebrate his life and in turn celebrate my own, since he helped shape the person i am today.

i was never really a 'daddy's girl' by any stretch of the imagination but i do know that i shared similar traits with him and this allowed us an understanding of each other-- we would wax philosophic together about a wide range of topics...

my father and i are both mavericks.

after surviving the second world war; leaving the old world and all his family behind, he traveled across the ocean in quest of the 'american dream'-- canadian style. although the canadian version differs from the america in some subtle ways they both share the dream of 'freedom' and for most immigrants that has a powerful draw. i think what most immigrants do not realize, is that they will have to break their backs working very hard to make this dream come true, and perhaps never in the end obtain the things they ever dreamt of.

my father landed in montreal--enrolled in university as an engineer and basically survived by selling his blood to the red cross. he even saved enough money to buy an underwood typewriter.

he came to canada during a time when a man could work for a company and be pretty much guaranteed to be employed with the same company for his whole life. how times have changed.

i remember the day my father retired. i went to his office with him to pick up his stuff. dusty framed photos of the family, paperclips, old notes--while we were packing up his boss came in, a fast-talking greasy-haired young whippersnapper. he rattled on about how the company would miss my father and what a great job he had done. he seemed so insincere and trite but perhaps that is because he had only been hired on a few months before my father decided to retire, so he really did not know the man. the man who crossed the ocean wearing wooden shoes.

i think he felt that he had to say something and so he pulled his old salesman speech out from underneath his slippery tongue. i remember thinking that this was a clash of cultures--a generational shift--and a profound moment that was lost on this younger man. it was there and then that i understood his need to retire early and after working hard all his life to feed and clothed his family--he was finally free!

now he could begin
to really live
the 'canadian dream'...

knocking on plastic--

they say that in troubling times you find out who your real friends are...i am learning this to be true.

have you ever lost a loved one?
how does one survive it?

all around us the world swirls in mad conflict--people fighting with each other, against each other. greed, avarice and pride plays itself out for its witnesses. implacable.
when will we learn to love? when will be embrace differences as a forte instead of a launching pad for strife?

nobody wins in battles, even if they declare a victor.

'peace now for all men or amen to all things'--kenneth patchen

flotsam and jetsam

floating in the waste land... t.s. eliot style--with modern day schism--

when everything is too much and nothing is everything-- where does that leave you?
are you tossed overboard again and again only to wash up on philistine shores?