This is the official blog of Northern Arizona slam poet Christopher Fox Graham. Begun in 2002, and transferred to blogspot in 2006, FoxTheBlog has recorded more than 670,000 hits since 2009. This blog cover's Graham's poetry, the Arizona poetry slam community and offers tips for slam poets from sources around the Internet. Read CFG's full biography here. Looking for just that one poem? You know the one ... click here to find it.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Monday, May 11, 2009

The wit and wisdom of cancer


The video is associated with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group which I found fascinating today, simply because it pushes environmentalism to one of the furthest extremes. It a way it's a cartoonish representation of Agent Smith's in "The Matrix:"
"Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
I don't things are that bad by any means. A professor of mine once said that if human beings ruin the environment and destroy life as we know it, the planet won't care. Earth has suffered mass extinctions on a global scale hundreds of times and if we kill ourselves and 70% of life, the planet will just start over. Sucks for us, sure, but we learn the hard way.

From "Extinction," John Baez, 8 April 2006:
  • The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, 440-450 million years ago at the end of the Ordovician Period.
    27% of all families and 57% of all genera went extinct.
    This was the second biggest extinction of marine life, ranking only below the Permian extinction. There was only life in the seas at this time, and more than one hundred families of marine invertebrates died, including two-thirds of all brachiopod and bryozoan families. One theory is that as the continent Gondwana drifted over the south pole, there was a phase of global cooling, and so much glaciation took place that sea levels were drastically lowered.

  • The Devonian Extinction, 375 million years ago at the end of the Frasnian Age in the later part of the Devonian Period.
    19% of all families and 50% of all genera went extinct.
    By this point there were plants, insects and amphibians on land, fish in the seas, and huge reefs built by corals and stromatoporoids. The continents of Uramerica and Gondwana were just beginning to move together to form Pangea. The extinction seems to have only affected marine life, but 70% of marine species went extinct! Reef-building organisms were almost completely wiped out, so that coral reefs returned only with the development of modern corals in the Mesozoic. Brachiopods, trilobites, and other sorts got hit hard. Since warm water species were the most severely affected, many scientists suspect another bout of global cooling. There may have also been a meteorite impact, but it seems this extinction was not a sudden event.

  • The Permian-Triassic Extinction, 251 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period.
    57% of all families and 83% of all genera went extinct.
    At the end of the Permian there was one supercontinent, Pangea. There were many sorts of reptiles and amphibians on land, together with many plants, especially ferns but also conifers and gingkos. There were also complicated coral reef ecologies undersea. After the extinction, we mainly see fossils of one species of reptile on land: a medium-sized herbivore called Lystrosaurus. We also mainly see fossils of just one species of sea life, a brachiopod called Lingula. Eventually other species seem to reappear - the so-called "Lazarus taxa", named after the Biblical character who returned from the dead. Clearly they must have survived the extinction event, but in very low numbers.
    This was the largest disaster that life has ever yet faced on our planet.
    Perhaps 90% or even 95% of all species went extinct. (The figure of 83% above comes from some papers by Sepkoski, who tried to calculate the number of families and genera that died out in each of the Big Five extinctions.
    It took about 50 million years for life on land to fully recover its biodiversity, with the rise of many species of dinosaurs. Nothing resembling a coral reef shows up until 10 million years after the Permian extinction, and full recovery of marine life took about 100 million years.
    The causes remain controversial: some scientists blame an asteroid impact, while others blame severe global warming and a depletion of oxygen in the atmosphere due to prolonged massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia - we see signs of these in lava beds called the "Siberian traps". On the other hand, Benton and others argue that the rise of carbon in the atmosphere at this time is only explicable if there was also a catastrophic release of methane from gas hydrates under the ocean.

  • The Triassic-Jurassic Extinction, 205 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period.
    23% of all families and 48% of all genera went extinct.
    By the end of the Triassic there was again a variety of reptiles on land and in sea. But the reptiles were completely different from those at the end of the Permian, and the biodiversity had not completely recovered: for example, there were no truly large predators. There were primitive conifers and gingkos; ferns were not so dominant as before. There were also frogs, lizards, and even the first mammals.
    The extinction at the end of the Triassic destroyed about 20% of all marine families, many reptiles, and the last of the large amphibians - opening niches for the dinosaurs of the Jurassic. The cause of this extinction remains obscure, but it's worth noting that this was about the time when the supercontinent Pangea began splitting into Laurasia and Gondwanaland, with massive floods of lava in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province - perhaps one of the largest igneous events in the earth's history.

  • The Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction, 65 million years ago at end of the Cretaceous Period.
    17% of all families and 50% of all genera went extinct.
    By the Cretaceous there were dinosaurs and flowering plants on land, many new insects taking advantage of the flowering plants, and modern fish. Continents were beginning to resemble the current configuration. In the disaster at the end of this period all the dinosaurs died out, as well as many species of plants, diatoms, dinoflagellates, ammonoids, brachiopods, and fish. Often called the "KT" extinction, this was the smallest of the Big Five - it's mainly interesting because it led to the rise of mammals, and in particular, us. As explained above, many scientists believe this extinction was due to an asteroid impact at Chicxulub. Another popular theory is that it was caused by the enormous volcanic eruptions which formed the lava beds in India known as the "Deccan Traps". Either way, we know it took 10 million years for biodiversity to recover from this mass extinction.
  • Sex on the backs of unicorns

    "Ever seen two people having sex on the back of a unicorn? My life is the exact opposite." -- Alun Wile

    I have no idea what that means.

    Sunday, May 10, 2009

    Love Like a Scar

    Betwixt my eyebrows
    a three-second mistake
    of my 6-year-old self
    dug a pox mark divot
    forever into flesh
    the reminds me daily
    in the reflection of mirror,
    glass frame and inverted spoon
    how a reckless moment
    marked me months and miles
    after context collapsed into confusion
    and left me with a scar that pulls me back into
    that moment with increasing vividness
    so that the facts
    enrich and embellish themselves
    a vibrant fiction
    worthy of Vonnegut or Tolstoy or Tolkien

    she scars memory in the same fashion
    breaking my heart
    whenever her image emerges from picture frames
    or she slips into my peripheral
    to hang on every unsaid word
    I refuse to speak
    knowing the desperation
    with which she longs to hear them
    I revel in sadistically parrying
    her stabs toward my affections
    and hate myself for it
    the burning pleasure that lurks in abusing power
    seeped beneath skin in shameful celebration
    best elucidated in how children kill small animals
    then tearfully confess to parents hours later
    part of me wants to crush her beneath my boot heel
    while the other half of me wants to save her from it
    unreconciled, the two factions vie for control
    of my unsatisfied electorate
    whose ever-changing pulse pollsters calculate

    I've longed a decade
    for a lover beholden to my whims
    whose loyalty could dance on my fingertips
    and here, she twirls,
    a paper doll
    I want the conviction of her sincerity
    the fire of her resistance
    to burn my palms with any attempt to hold fast
    she yearns for a master
    but I require no puppet
    I left my toys in a box
    when I chose to play with words
    she finds new boys daily
    who seek the newest shiny thing
    to touch and prod and jiggle
    until it breaks or they get bored
    I learned too quick
    grew up too fast
    calculating the physics of matter
    while most boys were adding lips to lips
    I solved her equation long before I met her
    and now want new math
    to entice my interests
    she bears potential to spend my head like a top
    but refuses to try
    misbelieving I am some dull creature
    like those she's met before

    I want to want to love her
    free from scars or fictions
    let her slip into my mind
    as easily as she slips into bed
    when I'm too drunk, too tired
    or too uninterested to resist
    I won't share the parts of me she wants
    because she hasn't earned them
    she can't invite the army of fingers or
    heavy artillery of tongue
    or invasion of cock
    if my mind generally refuses
    to fall for an ambush
    I’ve read Sun Tzu too many times
    to acquiesce to her bait
    or be drawn into the conflict
    from which I know there is no swift retreat

    I should erect a Great Wall between us
    hold back her barbarian mess
    stand guard all along the watchtower
    and prevent her flanking maneuvers
    something in me
    longs for a pitched battle
    a contest of wits
    strategies, forces, and tactics
    the conflict between worthy adversaries
    a sparring match
    a fencing gambit
    a card game with control of an empire on the line
    because so few past lovers
    offered challenge beyond the moment

    I pull back too often
    shelter in my warm deceptions
    hold back from feeling
    the fall of water
    the touch of soil
    the warmth of fire
    the caress of wind
    and the shutter when nature shatters shelter
    too afraid of the stain
    I resist hearing the sound of rain
    just grab my gun
    and bring in the cat
    before she gets close enough to harm me
    I stand mome with mimsy sword in hand
    against the fabled frumious Jabberwock
    with jaws that bite and claws that catch

    the men who know me
    just want me to get laid
    “it’s just one more pussy vacation
    to notch on the headboard”
    but I’ve been down this road
    chipped so beaverly into the wood
    that it fears collapse if I orgasm again
    and new ports match old harbors
    I don’t care where I drop anchor
    because no storm yet has sunk me
    she’s merely a summer squall
    shimmying the jibs and fluttering books on deck
    but the crew is sleeping drunk down below
    oblivious to the winds stirring the soup outside
    she wants to swamp the boat
    but her crests fall below the gunwale

    I should sleep through her winds and waves
    remember her as a crossed-off calendar date
    but she scarred me in a moment
    somehow, somewhere, some when
    so that my fiction-focused protagonist
    fills in the potentials of how and why
    I’m unable to withdraw my rearguard
    trapped Slaughterhouse-style
    on her Vietnamese hillocks
    Tễt transfigures into Groundhog Day
    whenever she walks into my room

    this divot forged a new history
    once the flesh that filled it
    departed my skin for an undiscovered country
    but its secession stares back
    a perpetual absent passenger reminding me
    how adults can be broken
    by their own childish naïveté
    reminded with every wayward glance
    every new “hello”
    and every “good to see you again”
    how she marked me the same
    although the evidence lurks beneath skin
    I can still see her with these eyes
    and gritted teeth
    I yearn for a plastic surgeon who can fix me
    restore me to the way I should be
    before I met her
    made the mistake of loving her for a moment
    longer than I should have
    but enough to mark me with the reminder
    of how the absence of her
    will ride shotgun into my last decade
    separated only when my final campfire
    frees my visage from this flesh frame
    and converts Earthbound skin and bone
    into the ash of a million gray angels

    Saturday, May 9, 2009

    The Taste of Brownies

    The Taste of Brownies
    For Lori-Ann Rella, my "sister from another mister,"

    we sat over brownies the last night
    relating in our particular linguistic dance
    the stories of the last six months
    recounting in details only we knew
    how a brother and sister should speak
    when all secrets are thrown aside
    and we knew the combinations
    to the hall closets
    where daddy keeps the gun
    and mommy hides her booze

    “remember when …”
    “oh, yeah, that, wasn’t that a good time?”
    “only because no one got hurt,”
    the instigations and infidelities
    that defined darker days
    the anecdotes of our soap opera life
    all the lies laid bare
    without pretext that this deception or that
    had to be believed
    and we could compare what defines us
    the real us beneath façade
    when the mask of formality set aside
    and we see our nakedness reflected
    with moles and scars exposed to open airing
    talk honestly and slow
    about the facts and figures
    compare the notes borne through our veins
    bled out over bare skin

    over brownies
    she showed me her scars
    and I measured the entry wounds
    told her what each press of skin meant
    while she anecdoted the chapters
    in chronological order
    until I could Cliffs Notes the story for others

    over brownies I told her
    that with a new lover
    I was becoming a unrepentant sadist
    wanting her to suffer vividly
    due to how she wounds me privately
    but resented the shame in holding that power
    but over brownies,
    she patted my head
    and told me that she had faith
    that my atheist countenance
    would find the path
    back to the man I wanted to be

    over brownies,
    we flipped forward a few pages
    read the stories we had yet to live
    planned out how we’d like to reach there
    compared law and loopholes
    that technicalities and linguistic tenses
    could alleviate

    over brownies
    I said my goodbyes
    to a sister I was soon to lose
    knowing unwritten stories rarely
    follow the outline we so exhaustively prepare
    coffee spilt on the manuscript
    newborn babies interrupting writing rituals
    tornadoes and career changes
    adjust all the details
    until we forget where we left our lucky pens
    or the chunk of dialogue
    that seemed so flawless last night
    but unrealistic this morning

    over brownies
    I knew she was leaving
    the chapter between us was over
    and a new one would pick up
    time zones apart in media res
    I knew then
    but such things mean little before the fact
    only in retrospect moments in ages hence
    can we state clear hindsight
    of days gone by
    I knew our future but bit my tongue
    swallowed the late-night conversation
    without chewing the meaning into unrecognition
    enjoyed what was shared between us:
    a plate of brownies to say goodbye

    Friday, May 8, 2009

    Calculate Jesus in CFG

    Although I am atheist, this is not meant to be blasphemous, just pointing out a numerical fact. And having a bit of fun.

    Wednesday, May 6, 2009

    Zombies will eat your brains in 2012

    Seriously, people, zombies. The Mayans didn't say "zombies" specifically because they didn't want to frighten us. And the Mayan word for "zombie" roughly translates as "dumb as a banana," which got mistranslated.

    I figure I'll gain the anti-zombie vote at the cost of the zombie vote - which is fine because they usually only trip the voting booth lever while chasing those poor, poor, elderly election day workers desperately trying to scramble away.

    So when they come for your brains, Sedona voters, will you have chosen wisely?

    Honesty in politics

    Poster courtesy of Alun Wile.

    A new dawn is coming

    Tuesday, May 5, 2009

    Say Your Prayers and Vote

    Don't speak ... rebel

    I found a photoshop version of this photo about a year ago and built a flyer around it. Since I changed venues, I went back to find the photo for a new flyer and found the original image. Now I can credit it, too. The photo is by Austrian Berit Leena Raven and the model is Jasmin S. The image reminds me of a René Magritte painting.

    Rock on, grandma, rock on

    This woman isn't my grandmother, and my Grandma Redfield isn't a rebel per se, but my grandmother is awesome and this is kind of how I picture my grandmother in my mind's eye.

    Monday, May 4, 2009

    Nuclear weapons in Sedona


    Every elected official needs a little fear-mongering. George Washington used the British and "taxation without representation," Pericles used Sparta and "No dynasty without pederasty" and Thag of the Bent-Tree Cave used mastodon stampedes and "No dead youths without sabertooths."

    Speak for the silent

    Sunday, May 3, 2009

    Beware of the pink bunny ninjas!

    Some images just scream out for a flyer to be made of them.

    What Are Your Words Worth?

    These are all poets who spent time in prison because of their poetry. Flora Brovina (Kosovo), Irina Ratushinskaya (Russia), John O’Leary (Ireland), Myo Myint Nyein (Burma), and Armando Valladares (Cuba).

    Two new CFG2012 election posters

    Not sure which of these I like better. I like the text of the first one, but having a good haiku is nothing to shake a stick at.

    My destiny is mayorship


    We can not fight our destiny. Mine is to run for elected office. It might also be to face impeachment, but such is life.

    CFG2012 committee gets in gear

    The election heats up. Yes, it's 3 1/2 years away. So what? I plan on winning the procrastinators' votes.

    Saturday, May 2, 2009

    Art makes you famous

    You know you've become famous in a small town when you're included as a in local art. In this Brian Walker mural now hanging at Java Love Cafe in West Sedona, there are several local arts figures, everyone from Brian Walker himself as an elephant, my ex-semi-quasi-current-roommate Lori-Ann Rella as herself and a panda, Tyrell, Gianni, Angel Mike, Jesus and Streetwalker Jesus, Gandhi, Lou Moretti as Charlie Chaplin, etc.

    I stand out with my 2012 mayoral campaign sign, American Spirit cigarette and Red Star Communist hat.