Banned Books Week: "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

Howl
By Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

San Francisco, 1955—1956


Banned Books Week: Obscene Odes
Posted by Jenna Krajeski

Out of all banned poetry, perhaps the most notorious, in America at least, is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and for good reason. The work attracted controversy almost immediately, which culminated in an obscenity trial brought against its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and that history is virtually inseparable from the poem, and the poet. This is not to belittle Ginsberg’s artistry. As David Gates wrote in his contribution to “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later,” from 2006:

Banned literary mandarins such as Joyce and Nabokov may simply have wanted to go about their hermetic work unmolested, but Ginsberg was a public poet and a provocateur. “Howl,” for all its affirmations, is a profoundly oppositional poem, and it counts on being opposed.…It’s a radically offensive poem, or used to be—offensive even to received notions of what poetry is, and it needs offended readers whose fear and outrage bring it most fully to life.

Since its publication, “Howl” has hardly left our literary consciousness. Now Gus Van Sant is set to produce a star-studded movie about the trial. But where does this leave the poem itself? Even in 2008, it’s hard to imagine that small black-and-white book being part of an established American curriculum, and not just the occasional revelatory tool of a rebellious teacher. Had it not been for one of the latter, who in high school nudged me toward an anthology of Beat literature, I would not have discovered “Howl” until college.

In 200, on the 50th anniversary of the obscenity trial, a radio broadcast of the poem was halted because of FCC laws. Never mind that the judge ruled, in 1957, that “Howl” was not obscene. It’s depressing that our national discourse moves in baby steps. But perhaps the banning of books is a useful barometer of prejudice. And it’s a sign of our particular time that, barred from the airwaves, the poem found another home, in the most egalitarian place of all: as a podcast on the Internet.

Banned Books Week: "Manifesto," by Ellen Hopkins

"Manifesto"
By Ellen Hopkins

To you zealots and bigots and false
patriots who live in fear of discourse.
You screamers and banners and burners
who would force books
off shelves in your brand name
of greater good.

You say you’re afraid for children,
innocents ripe for corruption
by perversion or sorcery on the page.
But sticks and stones do break
bones, and ignorance is no armor.
You do not speak for me,
and will not deny my kids magic
in favor of miracles.

You say you’re afraid for America,
the red, white and blue corroded
by terrorists, socialists, the sexually
confused. But we are a vast quilt
of patchwork cultures and multi-gendered
identities. You cannot speak for those
whose ancestors braved
different seas.

You say you’re afraid for God,
the living word eroded by Muhammed
and Darwin and Magdalene.
But the omnipotent sculptor of heaven
and earth designed intelligence.
Surely you dare not speak
for the father, who opens
his arms to all.

A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.

Banned Books Week adopts author's anti-censorship poem as manifesto

An author of young adult fiction whose books have provoked bans and complaints in the US for tackling controversial topics such as teenage prostitution and drug addiction has written a poem that is being used to champion the cause of banned books across America.

The author, Ellen Hopkins, this week saw a school visit in Oklahoma canceled after a parent complained about her New York Times bestselling novels "Crank" and "Glass" – loosely based on her own daughter's story of addiction to crystal meth.

"I have had my books challenged before, but never had an event canceled because of a challenge. I was then and remain incensed that a single person could go to the school and make that happen," said Hopkins. "No one person should have that kind of power. No person should be able to choose what anyone else's child can or can't read, let alone who they can see speak to. Some of the kids were devastated."

The idea to write a poem addressing banned books and censorship came to her after all her books were banned from an Idaho town, she said, because her novel Burned features a Mormon girl who is questioning her faith because she can't get help for her family, whose patriarch is abusive.

"Pocatello has a large Mormon population, but half the town isn't Mormon. And the book isn't a slam against the religion, anyway ... it's one girl's story," she said. "How can half the town censor the other's ability to read something? Anyway, that's where the idea came for me to write a poem."

The poem has now been picked up as the manifesto for Banned Books Week, the annual American celebration of the freedom to read, which kicks off on Saturday and which will see hundreds of libraries and bookshops across the country drawing attention to censorship with displays of challenged books and events. According to the American Library Association, there were 513 challenges to books reported in 2008, up from 420 the previous year.

"I most definitely see the problem growing here, with the quite vocal, extreme right-wing power grab going on right now," said Hopkins. "My books speak to hard subject matter. Addiction. Cutting. Thoughts of suicide. Abuse. Sexual abuse. All these issues affect children. Look at the statistics. Closing your eyes won't make these things go away.
"Why not talk about them with your kids, to arm them with knowledge. Open the books with them. Listen to the author speak with them."

Objections from challengers have ranged from upset over positive portrayals of homosexuals to books which were seen as too sexual or too violent, according to Banned Books Week.

In 2008 Khaled Hosseini's novel "The Kite Runner" became one of the top 10 most challenged books, with objectors complaining about its sexual content and offensive language. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy was the second most challenged of the year, over its "political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence", while And "Tango Makes Three", a children's story about two male penguins bringing up a chick, or for complainants "a homosexual storyline that has been sugar-coated with cute penguins," topped the list for the third year running.

Hopkins said that she and others like her were "quite willing" to stand up to the "vocal, extreme (wrong) minority". "Torch every book. / Char every page. / Burn every word to ash. / Ideas are incombustible. / And therein lies your real fear," she wrote in her poem Manifesto.

"The First Amendment is alive and well in America and if they don't believe it, they'd better keep both eyes open. Their power is limited, even if they don't know it yet," she said.

Banned Books Week: "Lethe" by Charles Baudelaire

"Lethe"
By Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Geoffrey Wagner, "Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire"

Come on my heart, cruel and insensible soul,
My darling tiger, beast with indolent airs;
I want to plunge for hours my trembling fingers
In your thick and heavy mane;

In your petticoats filled with your perfume
To bury my aching head,
And breathe, like a faded flower,
The sweet taste of my dead love.

I want to sleep, to sleep and not to live,
In a sleep as soft as death,
I shall cover with remorseless kisses
Your body beautifully polished as copper.

To swallow my appeased sobbing
I need only the abyss of your bed;
A powerful oblivion lives on your lips,
And all Lethe flows in your kisses.

I shall obey, as though predestined,
My destiny, that is now my delight;
Submissive martyr, innocent damned one,
My ardor inflames my torture,

And I shall suck, to drown my bitterness
The nepenthe and the good hemlock,
On the lovely tips of those jutting breasts
Which have never imprisoned love.

The original French:

Le Léthé
By Charles Baudelaire

Viens sur mon coeur, âme cruelle et sourde,
Tigre adoré, monstre aux airs indolents;
Je veux longtemps plonger mes doigts tremblants
Dans l'épaisseur de ta crinière lourde;

Dans tes jupons remplis de ton parfum
Ensevelir ma tête endolorie,
Et respirer, comme une fleur flétrie,
Le doux relent de mon amour défunt.

Je veux dormir! dormir plutôt que vivre!
Dans un sommeil aussi doux que la mort,
J'étalerai mes baisers sans remords
Sur ton beau corps poli comme le cuivre.

Pour engloutir mes sanglots apaisés
Rien ne me vaut l'abîme de ta couche;
L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche,
Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.

À mon destin, désormais mon délice,
J'obéirai comme un prédestiné;
Martyr docile, innocent condamné,
Dont la ferveur attise le supplice,

Je sucerai, pour noyer ma rancoeur,
Le népenthès et la bonne ciguë
Aux bouts charmants de cette gorge aiguë
Qui n'a jamais emprisonné de coeur.

This poem was banned from "Les Fleurs du Mal" because of its corrupting content. This poem which was most likely inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duvall, also known as his "Black Venus."


The son of Joseph-Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Archimbaut Dufays, Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. Baudelaire's father, who was 30 years older than his mother, died when the poet was 6.

Baudelaire was very close with his mother (much of what is known of his later life comes from the letters he wrote her), but was deeply distressed when she married Major Jacques Aupick.

In 1833, the family moved to Lyons where Baudelaire attended a military boarding school. Shortly before graduation, he was kicked out for refusing to give up a note passed to him by a classmate. Baudelaire spent the next two years in Paris' Latin Quarter pursuing a career as a writer and accumulating debt. It is also believed that he contracted syphilis around this time.

In 1841 his parents sent him on ship to India, hoping the experience would help reform his bohemian urges. He left the ship, however, and returned to Paris in 1842. Upon his return, he received a large inheritance, which allowed him to live the life of a Parisian dandy. He developed a love for clothing and spent his days in the art galleries and cafes of Paris. He experimented with drugs such as hashish and opium. He fell in love with Jeanne Duval, who inspired the "Black Venus" section of Les Fleurs du mal. By 1844, he had spent nearly half of his inheritance. His family won a court order that appointed a lawyer to manage Baudelaire's fortune and pay him a small "allowance" for the rest of his life.

To supplement his income, Baudelaire wrote art criticism, essays, and reviews for various journals. His early criticism of contemporary French painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet earned him a reputation as a discriminating if idiosyncratic critic. In 1847, he published the autobiographical novella La Fanfarlo. His first publications of poetry also began to appear in journals in the mid-1840s. In 1854 and 1855, he published translations of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he called a "twin soul." His translations were widely acclaimed.

In 1857, Auguste Poulet-Malassis published the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire was so concerned with the quality of the printing that he took a room near the press to help supervise the book's production. Six of the poems, which described lesbian love and vampires, were condemned as obscene by the Public Safety section of the Ministry of the Interior. The ban on these poems was not lifted in France until 1949. In 1861, Baudelaire added thirty-five new poems to the collection. Les Fleurs du mal afforded Baudelaire a degree of notoriety; writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo wrote in praise of the poems. Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire claiming, "You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else [which is the most important quality]." Unlike earlier Romantics, Baudelaire looked to the urban life of Paris for inspiration. He argued that art must create beauty from even the most depraved or "non-poetic" situations.

Les Fleurs du mal, with its explicit sexual content and juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay, only added to Baudelaire's reputation as a poéte maudit (cursed poet). Baudelaire enhanced this reputation by flaunting his eccentricities; for instance, he once asked a friend in the middle of a conversation "Wouldn't it be agreeable to take a bath with me?" Because of the abundance of stories about the poet, it is difficult to sort fact from fiction.

In the 1860s Baudelaire continued to write articles and essays on a wide range of subjects and figures. He was also publishing prose poems, which were posthumously collected in 1869 as Petits poémes en prose (Little Poems in Prose). By calling these non-metrical compositions poems, Baudelaire was the first poet to make a radical break with the form of verse.

In 1862, Baudelaire began to suffer nightmares and increasingly bad health. He left Paris for Brussels in 1863 to give a series of lectures, but suffered from several strokes that resulted in partial paralysis.

On August 31, 1867, at the age of 46, Charles Baudelaire died in Paris. Although doctors at the time didn't mention it, it is likely that syphilis caused his final illness. His reputation as poet at that time was secure; writers such as Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a predecessor. In the 20th century, thinkers and artists as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney have celebrated his work.

Banned Books Week: "To One Who Is Too Cheerful" by Charles Baudelaire

To One Who Is Too Cheerful
Charles Baudelaire

Your head, your hair, your every way
Are scenic as the countryside;
the smile plays in your lips and eyes
Like fresh winds on a cloudless day.

The gloomy drudge, brushed by your charms,
Is dazzled by the vibrancy
That flashes forth so brilliantly
Out of your shoulders and your arms.

All vivid colors, and the way
They resonate in how you dress
Have poets in their idleness
Imagining a flower ballet.

These lavish robes are emblems of
The mad profusion that is you;
Madwoman, I am maddened too,
And hate you even as I love!

Sometimes within a park, at rest,
Where I have dragged my apathy,
I have felt like an irony
The sunshine lacerate my breast.

And then the spring’s luxuriance
Humiliated so my heart
That I had pulled a flower apart
To punish nature’s insolence.

So I would wish, when you’re asleep,
The time for sensuality,
Towards your body’s treasury
Silently, stealthily to creep,

To bruise your ever-tender breast,
And carve in your astonished side
An injury both deep and wide,
To chastise your too-joyous flesh.

And, sweetness that would dizzy me!
In these two lips so red and new
My sister, I have made for you,
To slip my venom, lovingly!

- Translated by James McGowan

This poem was banned because censors believed "venom," in the last line, was an overt reference to syphilis, a disease Baudelaire was afflicted with and one which was later suspected to have caused his death. At the time, Baudelaire told his censors they had taken the word too literally, and maintained the word more abstractly referred to his melancholy.

The son of Joseph-Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Archimbaut Dufays, Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. Baudelaire's father, who was 30 years older than his mother, died when the poet was 6.

Baudelaire was very close with his mother (much of what is known of his later life comes from the letters he wrote her), but was deeply distressed when she married Major Jacques Aupick.

In 1833, the family moved to Lyons where Baudelaire attended a military boarding school. Shortly before graduation, he was kicked out for refusing to give up a note passed to him by a classmate. Baudelaire spent the next two years in Paris' Latin Quarter pursuing a career as a writer and accumulating debt. It is also believed that he contracted syphilis around this time.

In 1841 his parents sent him on ship to India, hoping the experience would help reform his bohemian urges. He left the ship, however, and returned to Paris in 1842. Upon his return, he received a large inheritance, which allowed him to live the life of a Parisian dandy. He developed a love for clothing and spent his days in the art galleries and cafes of Paris. He experimented with drugs such as hashish and opium. He fell in love with Jeanne Duval, who inspired the "Black Venus" section of Les Fleurs du mal. By 1844, he had spent nearly half of his inheritance. His family won a court order that appointed a lawyer to manage Baudelaire's fortune and pay him a small "allowance" for the rest of his life.

To supplement his income, Baudelaire wrote art criticism, essays, and reviews for various journals. His early criticism of contemporary French painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Gustave Courbet earned him a reputation as a discriminating if idiosyncratic critic. In 1847, he published the autobiographical novella La Fanfarlo. His first publications of poetry also began to appear in journals in the mid-1840s. In 1854 and 1855, he published translations of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he called a "twin soul." His translations were widely acclaimed.

In 1857, Auguste Poulet-Malassis published the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire was so concerned with the quality of the printing that he took a room near the press to help supervise the book's production. Six of the poems, which described lesbian love and vampires, were condemned as obscene by the Public Safety section of the Ministry of the Interior. The ban on these poems was not lifted in France until 1949. In 1861, Baudelaire added thirty-five new poems to the collection. Les Fleurs du mal afforded Baudelaire a degree of notoriety; writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo wrote in praise of the poems. Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire claiming, "You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else [which is the most important quality]." Unlike earlier Romantics, Baudelaire looked to the urban life of Paris for inspiration. He argued that art must create beauty from even the most depraved or "non-poetic" situations.

Les Fleurs du mal, with its explicit sexual content and juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay, only added to Baudelaire's reputation as a poéte maudit (cursed poet). Baudelaire enhanced this reputation by flaunting his eccentricities; for instance, he once asked a friend in the middle of a conversation "Wouldn't it be agreeable to take a bath with me?" Because of the abundance of stories about the poet, it is difficult to sort fact from fiction.

In the 1860s Baudelaire continued to write articles and essays on a wide range of subjects and figures. He was also publishing prose poems, which were posthumously collected in 1869 as Petits poémes en prose (Little Poems in Prose). By calling these non-metrical compositions poems, Baudelaire was the first poet to make a radical break with the form of verse.

In 1862, Baudelaire began to suffer nightmares and increasingly bad health. He left Paris for Brussels in 1863 to give a series of lectures, but suffered from several strokes that resulted in partial paralysis.

On August 31, 1867, at the age of 46, Charles Baudelaire died in Paris. Although doctors at the time didn't mention it, it is likely that syphilis caused his final illness. His reputation as poet at that time was secure; writers such as Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a predecessor. In the 20th century, thinkers and artists as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney have celebrated his work.

Banned Books Week: "America" by Allen Ginsburg

America
By Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

This Country

when your feet grow tired of globetrotting
and all the monuments to forgotten kings
have blurred into obscurity


when your shoulders ache
from carrying your whole world tortoise-style
from one rest-stop lover to another


when you’ve heard all the foreign tongues
repeat the same stories for the last time
and you’ve grown tired of translating


when your shoes have fallen apart
unable to martyr their soles
for your hobo evangelism …


come home
this country still longs for your sunrise
its geography is easy to map:


to the East lie my arms
curling inward to hold back time
their digits stretch northward
ten fingertips on separate crusades to find you
they unite only to pen poems about
the futility of kidnapping you across the borders
back into the caverns of my chest
overwhelming vacant since you stole its last inhabitant
which you unraveled the way Hansel and Gretel taught
to fashion a string to trace your route back here
these cave walls still shudder with your laughter
turning ribs into organ pipes
I play in dreams to orchestrate your reconquest
fool my yearning that you are only a hitchhiker’s thumb
and an hour from my doorstep —
a lie, but at least I can sleep through the night
without filling the hollow in my bed with my wailing
instead, try to keep it warm for you


to the South
are mountains of memories
impossible to scale without oxygen and a Nepalese Sherpa
they stretch to the clouds and in winter, blot out the sun
I chip at them with a pick axe of ink
take the pieces home to an orange juicer
attempt to squeeze out story after story
told in Homeric fashion
the gods of Olympus jealously dwarfed in the shadows
find their epics insufficient
Odysseus, Gilgamesh and Arjuna
camp in the foothills unable to scale you
talk about the good old days
when there wasn’t so much poetry in which to live
on the cliff sides I hunt for the road trips
the afternoon siestas
the midnight embraces
the slow Sunday mornings
for new word wombs
new poems to trap, take home, raise to maturity
and release back into the wild
for the world to see how you changed this boy
I will climb them as long as a pulse thumps me into movement


to the North is an ocean of your words
tide pools of sentences
waves of your stories
tsunamis of our arguments
to wash over any fool who braves to sail them
on maps print the words, “Here Be Dragons”
and I’m never sure which will swamp my boat
or carry me home
white-tip arrogance soothed by Sargasso Sea gentle honesty
choppy squalls when I lost myself to ego
pleas for forgiveness offered on Yom Kippur
all the poems over the phone blowing lost sailors to safe ports
someday when I have outlived you
I foresee abandoning shoes,
gripping frail hands on armrests,
rising from wheelchair
striping down to unflattering Speedo
and walking into these waves to drown
up to my ears in the waters of your laughter
filling my lungs with drops of your whispers


in the center is a house of paper
naked 8½ by 11s begging to be bathed in black ink
the first 30 stories are made of rough drafts
in preparation to meet you
the upper stories will be built to celebrate you
and when I reach my 90s
the tower will collapse with the weight
spreading the pages across this county
Billy Collins keeps an apartment across the hall from Derrick Brown
they meet in the lounge with Shane Koyczan and Ed Mabrey
have coffee on Sundays with R.C. Weslowski and Mike McGee,
each reading a new ode to you
they found that week on the cabinet
under the sink or behind the door
banisters Bill Campana will jot haiku from
window frames slam poems Klute will read aloud after bagels
dueling in rhyme with Shappy Seasholtz
sonnets on fireplaces Dan Seaman and Mikel Weisser will read in tandem
on weekends, CR Avery, Scott Dunbar and Lights
will play the ballroom made of canvasses
echoing through the vents all week long
on the upper floors
poets yet unborn ready to join to the conversation
there is room here
for whomever you choose to fill the house with
forgive the flesh of this man
for being made of flawed skin unedited
he knew not what he did
you always liked me better on paper anyway


to the West is an open country
as far as the eye can see
lie no walls nor borders
no future beyond what we make of it,
without a horizon to fall over
sunsets are unimaginable,
the land yearns for your footfalls
and I will chase you across it
until these feet break beneath me
never ask if it was all for naught
until you have seen the country you built here
the boy you reshaped who lives out in the open
uncertain of where to go now
penning poems from dawn to dusk
dreaming of your open arms
reading them to anyone who’ll listen


when you tire of travels
when you need shelter to rest weary limbs
when you want to see a boy left better
than the one you first met
this country is wherever you choose to meet me
ready to welcome you home


I met Azami on Sept. 28, 2009. How my life has changed over the last 12 months.

"Is There A Future For Spoken Word?" by Rami K

"Is There A Future For Spoken Word?" 

by Rami K

DropMagazine

 

What is Spoken Word? Is it really hip hop??? One thing that’s certain is that more and more hip hop fans are allowing Spoken Word into their cribs. Does Spoken Word have what it takes to make it mainstream?

 Poetry slam; ideas of dimly lit cafes, mahogany tables, free spirited individuals of all colors, dreadlocked hair humbly standing on a stage in front of others like them, speaking of oppression, struggle, history, and truth - Not exactly the image that record labels try to market within the rap and hip hop genre, huh? But despite not being the most known sect of hip hop, spoken word continues to push forward through the waves of marketable mainstream music and make its’ presence felt within the worldwide urban community.

Now, before we can hop into the “locks” of spoken word, we need to travel right to the roots and explore the core of the art, and the long history which surrounds spoken word poetry. The true essence of music isn’t built on the instrumentals, or flashy marketable stereotypes, and infectious hooks; instead the essence of music finds its’ roots right within the words, and in order to take an actual look into the heart of music we have to look past the catchy beats, and “blinged” filled videos, and peer right into the words that the artist speaks… hence, spoken word. Simply seeing the term, “spoken word”, images of a lone man or woman on stage with nothing but a microphone, and a voice box to produce rhythm come to mind, allowing us to relive a moment in time, or experience an emotion; that essentially is the definition of Spoken Word poetry, the act of reading a literary work or poem out loud. However, we have to keep in mind that Spoken Word poets do not necessarily follow the conventional “guidelines” of poetry (remember trying to count syllables and stanzas in the back of your grade 11 English class during the poetry unit?). Guidelines don’t exist within Spoken Word, instead a different approach is taken, which offers a more free flowing, and open ended style of poetry where there are no real limitations, and a poet is essentially able to do what they please. In fact, Spoken Word extends itself into all different artistic styles, ranging from the recitals and performances of poetic works by Shakespeare and further manifesting itself into hip hop music, all through the use of rhythm and words. As far as looking at where it all started, there really isn’t a specific time, or group that opened up the world of Spoken Word, but it can be said that it’s most basic form has existed for centuries, ever since mankind learned how to communicate with those vocal chords (Rahzel would have had his own shrine back then). But, we can still attribute the creation of Spoken Word back to times of ancient chants, and tribal story telling that have swayed generations, which really is the epitome and true primal nature of Spoken Word, the act of communicating with others through words.

Let’s just say that we’ve come a long way from circle fires and loincloths. Throughout the past years Spoken Word has flourished and continued to expand outwards, and along with its’ nature of being flexible and limitless, it has been able to open up its’ doors to artists from all paths of life. Within the realm of Spoken Word, there are no credentials, styles or certain images artists have to uphold, instead just being oneself is enough to move and connect with a crowd on levels of mind, and body. How often is it we experience an individual who has lived through the struggles of the streets, and a teacher living in the suburbs swaying the same crowd, and sharing the same stage? Just compare the works of Spoken Word artist, Rives, and Black Ice, that’s love right there! And when it comes down to it, hip hop and Spoken Word go together hand in hand, both carrying the same underlying meaning, giving individuals a medium to project ones’ feelings, and emotions, while creating a connection with a diverse crowd that isn’t limited by race, sex, or social class; in a sense, Spoken Word is like hip hop’s little brother, tagging along singing the same concept of spreading a message.

Of course, as Spoken Word has expanded greatly into urban communities it has become more recognized within the media and gained a whole new fan base outside of the “poet’s corner”, but we have to keep in mind that with moving comes luggage, and with the exposure to mainstream media, Spoken Word is seeing its’ fair share of misconceptions. The word poetry itself carries a little negative connotation for much of mainstream society, who see it as being too “sensitive”, or geared more towards a “conscious” crowd, which makes the integration of Spoken Word into the mainstream more difficult. As long as people carry a negative preconceived notion of what Spoken Word poetry is, there isn’t much room for reaching other crowds. However, these stereotypical views of Spoken Word Poetry are beginning to be lifted, along with the support of hip hop heavyweight, Russell Simmons, and his HBO television series, Def Poetry Jam, Spoken Word is taking a break from the incense filled rooms, and coffee shops to appear on a more national stage. With major hip hop figures like Kanye West, Talib Kweli, and Common lending performances, along with Def Poetry Jam’s current host, Mos Def, Spoken Word is being embraced into the hip hop community with open arms, and rightfully so. The incorporation of hip hop artists into Spoken Word allows us to see how well both styles compliment each other, sharing a connection of the importance of words and rhythm, as well as the connection between the artist and crowd. The similarities that hip hop and Spoken word share allow both fans and artists alike to comfortably step in and indulge in both styles. Fact is, at the end of the day whether you are reciting a poem, or dropping 16 bars, it all comes down to man and his microphone.

Although Spoken Word seems to be finding a home within the hip hop community, there still is the question of whether or not there is any room for Spoken Word artists, and their microphones in the world of commercial and mainstream hip hop? Even with Def Poetry Jam opening up doors for the Spoken Word community, the art still finds itself confined to a less mainstream crowd, making it difficult for the artists of Spoken Word to get heard. While major record labels dominate the market, and promote marketable images to different fan bases, Spoken Word currently suffers mainly due to it being less understood by most of the mainstream, and not being as easily marketable. Although Spoken Word still has a large fan base for itself, as well as a mass group of hip hop fans to carry it further, it still is considered an “acquired taste” by mainstream standards.

However, with commercialization also comes controversy, making Spoken Word’s slow progression into mainstream media somewhat helpful. We can’t deny that in the earlier days hip hop was at it’s peak as one unified art, but through dominance of major record labels, and the need to sell units, the rap and hip hop genre became plagued with accusations of becoming “too commercial”, or “selling out”, causing fans and artists to separate into mainstream and underground, ultimately hurting the hip hop community– “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” anyone?. Of course, the debate of “Who Killed hip hop?” seems never ending, but in spite of the commercialization of urban music, there still is a glimmer of hope that we see through many Hip hop artists that stay true to the art. While Spoken Word poetry, may, or may not go through the same pressure of commercialization, the entire hip hop community needs to continue to lend a helping hand in order to keep hip hop a true art form, and from there it can only grow bigger. And that is what the hip hop community needs at a time like this, growth.

Whether people have taken time to realize it or not, Spoken Word, graffiti writing, emceeing, B-Boying, and everything else in between has stemmed right from the same root, and all these branches share an equal level of importance that all contributed to the building of one main element, which is hip hop itself. Thus, for hip hop to grow, we as a community, and as a culture need to grow along with it, and break down the barriers and images hip hop carries in order to make one unified front. Whether it’s freestyling, or Spoken Word, we all have to embrace these styles with an open mind, and work to bettering hip hop as a whole. So, how can we best sum up this need for a communion with in hip hop? Well, Spoken Word artist, Anubis the Necro Nubian, best says it as, “A big ol honkin’ photo of Mohammed Ali, Gil Scott, Martin Luther King, MC Shan, Clive Clambel, Q-Tip, Che Guevera, Zack DeLa Rocha and Saul Williams all holding hands and singing along to the Age of Aquarius.”

Azami Leaves My Country Today

Azami Leaves My Country Today by FoxThePoet

she leaves my country today
uncounts the miles,
returns the geography of states
abandons the familiarity of our silly accents
for one more common to her architecture
any feigned allegiances to politics
are left to shrivel in the sunlight
she no longer cares for the posturing
the details of who harmed who
which rhetorician stands more right
untrod roads must now make their own footprints
she will not pass over you, friends,
your dreams must evaporate into whatever bore them
unvisited campsites reclaim their virginities
untouched, uncaressed, unbroken
cities shed naked, stripped down to bare bones to embrace her
must now envy those she'd seen
ask how she shimmered over their sidewalks
reclined in their open parks
slept in their bedrooms
held lovers in their shadows

my countrymen begin to hear the epics
enumerated by those who had met her
watched how she glistened with exuberance
glimmered with an unsoiled joy
not seen in generations

they all come whimpering to my bedroom windows
tap reluctantly on the glass
plead an hundred existential crises
confess that in her absence
they fear nothing new will be born
I roll over, emerge from once-shared bedsheets
currently under excavation for her fingerprints
halt the archaeological expedition recostructing
how she must have inhabited this region in her golden age

assure them in calm, quiet tones
that my poems of remembered moments,
reflections on the weight of her tenancy
naked pleas for repatriation
will emerge from fingertips and speaking lips
they will be new to fill her vacancy
assuage the grief as best possible
I will use them to keep us warm
they will hold us in her absence
I will whisper them down barren highways
the hollow city streets
into unseen bedrooms,
on the mountaintops
through the empty fields
send them north to coax her home
in vain on our behalves
tell them to "go, rest now, all will be remedied"

but I am lying
poems merely comfort the dying
the abandoned,
the widowers

for those of us left behind
this isn't the end of the world
but I can't tell the difference

25 haiku about Azami

Azami Haiku* No. I

My heart heads northward
held in Azami's backpack
sending me postcards

Azami Haiku No. II

I love Canada
because that country raised her
and sent her to us

Azami Haiku No. III

Get two drinks in me
and I'll spill all my secrets
of how she broke me

Azami Haiku No. IV

When the nighttime comes
Azami returns in dreams.
Kill me in my sleep

Azami Haiku No. V

Seen sorrow in life
but never broke down and wept
'til she left my arms

Azami Haiku No. VI

Azami's last words:
masturbate furiously
and write poetry

Azami Haiku No. VII

She makes the best dreams
holds me like a lover should:
ignorant of sins
Azami Haiku No. VIII

The smell of her hair
is what I miss most at night
unwashed, holding all

Azami Haiku No. IX

Adam left Eden
to hold Eve. With Azami,
I understand why

Azami Haiku No. X

Wraps arms around me
she kisses like an earthquake
makes my cities fall

Azami Haiku No. XI

She wore a short skirt
with nothing underneath it
gave me a passport

Azami Haiku No. XII

I never sleep nude
until she shared my bedroom
her embrace clothes me

Azami Haiku No. XIII

She bottles pure joy
spills it out when we need it
intoxicates world

Azami Haiku No. XIV

counting down the days
until she wanders back here
slips into my arms

Azami Haiku No. XV

To survive, I need:
shelter, coffee, poetry,
food, Azami's arms

Azami Haiku No. XVI

Today she called me
new city, new stories told
new poems debuted†

Azami Haiku No. XVII

Waited seven years
to find a girlfriend like her
she was worth the wait

Azami Haiku No. XVIII

Wonder which of us
more eager to hear poems,†
poet or the girl?

Azami Haiku No. XIX

When love affair ends
she sets off on a new road
I reflect in words

Azami Haiku No. XX

New boys will hold her
New girls will fill my pages
our year fades away

Azami Haiku No. XXI

I'll hold her again
though not like before. Still say,
"see, I told you so"

Azami Haiku No. XXII

She visits some nights
rides in on dreams, snuggles close,
rides out on dawn wind

Azami Haiku No. XXIII

She visits some nights
rides in on dreams, snuggles close,
rides out on dawn wind

Azami Haiku No. XXIV

What is a border?
A line? A fence? An idea?
A foe to conquer?

Azami Haiku No. XXV

My new GPS
reprogrammed to calculate
the distance to her

*Technically, these aren't haiku, but senryū, because there is no kigo (season word) nor kireji ("cutting" word), but most English speakers aren't familiar with the difference.

†I usually speak "poem" as a single syllable /poʊm/, but write it to be pronounced as a two syllable /ˈpoʊ̯ əm/

Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians
By Constantine Petrou Photiades Cavafy

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

C.P. Cavafy, "Collected Poems." Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992.
The original Greek:

Περιμένοντας τους Bαρβάρους
Kωστής Πέτρου Φωτιάδης Kαβάφης

— Τι περιμένουμε στην αγορά συναθροισμένοι;

Είναι οι βάρβαροι να φθάσουν σήμερα.

— Γιατί μέσα στην Σύγκλητο μια τέτοια απραξία;
Τι κάθοντ' οι Συγκλητικοί και δεν νομοθετούνε;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.
Τι νόμους πια θα κάμουν οι Συγκλητικοί;
Οι βάρβαροι σαν έλθουν θα νομοθετήσουν.

—Γιατί ο αυτοκράτωρ μας τόσο πρωί σηκώθη,
και κάθεται στης πόλεως την πιο μεγάλη πύλη
στον θρόνο επάνω, επίσημος, φορώντας την κορώνα;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.
Κι ο αυτοκράτωρ περιμένει να δεχθεί
τον αρχηγό τους. Μάλιστα ετοίμασε
για να τον δώσει μια περγαμηνή. Εκεί
τον έγραψε τίτλους πολλούς κι ονόματα.

— Γιατί οι δυο μας ύπατοι κ' οι πραίτορες εβγήκαν
σήμερα με τες κόκκινες, τες κεντημένες τόγες·
γιατί βραχιόλια φόρεσαν με τόσους αμεθύστους,
και δαχτυλίδια με λαμπρά, γυαλιστερά σμαράγδια·
γιατί να πιάσουν σήμερα πολύτιμα μπαστούνια
μ' ασήμια και μαλάματα έκτακτα σκαλιγμένα;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·
και τέτοια πράγματα θαμπώνουν τους βαρβάρους.

—Γιατί κ' οι άξιοι ρήτορες δεν έρχονται σαν πάντα
να βγάλουνε τους λόγους τους, να πούνε τα δικά τους;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·
κι αυτοί βαρυούντ' ευφράδειες και δημηγορίες.

— Γιατί ν' αρχίσει μονομιάς αυτή η ανησυχία
κ' η σύγχυσις. (Τα πρόσωπα τι σοβαρά που εγίναν).
Γιατί αδειάζουν γρήγορα οι δρόμοι κ' η πλατέες,
κι όλοι γυρνούν στα σπίτια τους πολύ συλλογισμένοι;

Γιατί ενύχτωσε κ' οι βάρβαροι δεν ήλθαν.
Και μερικοί έφθασαν απ' τα σύνορα,
και είπανε πως βάρβαροι πια δεν υπάρχουν.

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.
Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις.

Constantine Petrou Photiades Cavafy (as he wanted the family name to be spelled in English), son of Peter-John Ioannou Cavafy and Charicleia Georgaki Photiades, was born in Alexandria on 29 April 1863. Both his parents were natives of Constantinople, and Constantine was proud of his heritage and his illustrious ancestors. His Phanariote great-grandfather Peter Cavafy (1740-1804) was Secretary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, while his Phanariote great-great-grandfather John Cavafy (1701-1762) was Governor of Jassium, as was his great-grandfather Michael Scarlato Pantzo (brother of Meletius, Patriarch of Alexandria), while his great-great-great-grandfather Theodosius Photiades (brother of Cyril, Bishop of Caesarea Philippi) was an Official of the Ottoman Government.
Cavafy was a cosmopolitan by birth, his family roots extending from Constantinople to London (via Alexandria, Trebizond, Chios, Trieste, Venice and Vienna), and was the youngest of seven brothers (two more elder siblings, a boy and the sole girl, died in infancy).
His father, Peter-John, the fourth child of five, proved to be an astute merchant (his own father had also been a merchant and a landowner). Holding dual citizenship (Greek and British), he set up offices in Constantinople, London and Liverpool, before establishing firm and family in Alexandria, where he was one of the founders of the Greek Community. The Cavafy family flourished there both financially and socially, but Peter-John's death in 1870 forced the surviving members of the family to move to England in 1872, when Constantine was nine years old.
His mother, Charicleia, the eldest child of eight, was a practical person. Her father was a gem merchant, and married off Charicleia to Peter-John when she was about fourteen years old. As her husband was mostly away on business, she spent the first couple of years of marriage at her in-law's and later set up house in England, where Peter-John hired tutors for her education. After his death, Charicleia returned to England in order to be close to the family of her brother-in-law George Cavafy, who was running the Cavafy firm.
As family fortunes declined, Charicleia lived in Liverpool for almost two years, then moved to London for roughly the same amount of time, then back to Liverpool for less than a year. The firm «Cavafy & Co.» dissolved in 1876, and in 1877 Charicleia and her younger children returned to Alexandria, settling in an apartment instead of the townhouse of old.
Not much is known about the five years that Constantine spent in England, save that he attended school there and that he spent some summer vacations in Dover. We do know that in Alexandria he attended the «Hermes» school, where he made his first close friends in the persons of Mike Ralli, John Rhodokanaki and Stephan Skylizzi, that he was borrowing books from public libraries and that he had started drafting his own Historical Dictionary at age eighteen.
Cavafy's second Alexandrian period was cut short in less than five years by local unrest. Charicleia, sensing that an invasion was imminent, packed her family once again and sailed to her father's home in Constantinople, just two weeks before the British fleet bombarded Alexandria. The Cavafy home was destroyed in the ensuing fire, and with it all of Constantine's books and papers. Thus the first surviving manuscript we have of Cavafy is the journal he kept on the journey to Constantinople, and the first surviving poem in manuscript is «Leaving Therapia», written in English and dated at 2:30 p.m. on 16 July 1882.
In Constantinople, the nineteen-year old Cavafy met his numerous relatives and became acquainted with the legendary Queen City of the Greeks, the seat and capital of Greekness. It was there and then that he started researching his ancestry, trying to define himself as a young man in the wider Hellenic context, preparing for a career in politics or journalism. It was also there and then, according to one source, that he had his first homosexual experience. «Themes of my poetry were fashioned, and the area of my art was mapped out, in the wanton days of my youth», he was to write many years later.
Most of his brothers had returned to Alexandria in the meantime, in order to work and sustain the family. Charicleia and Constantine (who had already started writing poems and articles) remained in Constantinople, awaiting payment of the insurance indemnity for their destroyed house. As much as Constantine enjoyed living in Constantinople, he was eager to return home. The indemnity was paid in September 1885, and the Cavafys sailed to Alexandria one month later, where Constantine faced the ruins of his former house. During the same month, joint British and Ottoman rule was imposed in Egypt, and young Constantine renounced his British citizenship.
This political act was not inconsequential in the British-run Protectorate of Egypt: when Constantine was finally able to gain employment in 1892 in the Third Circle of Irrigation at the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt, he was hired as a temporary clerk, since his Greek citizenship excluded him from any permanent position. Being an assiduous and conscientious worker, Cavafy managed to hold this temporary position (renewed annually) for thirty years. He was always mindful of his finances, both out of necessity and out of vanity: he recalled the affluent days of his childhood and strove to halt the family's declining fortunes. He started working at the Alexandrian Stock Exchanges early on, and was a registered broker from 1894 to 1902. He was also gambling systematically, entering his gains and losses in a «Gambling Notebook» which he kept until 1909. This parallel source of income, along with some shrewd investments, enabled him to live in relative comfort for the rest of his life.
Cavafy started publishing poems and articles in Greek following his second return to Alexandria. His first published text was an article entitled «Coral, from a Mythological Viewpoint» in the newspaper Constantinople on 3 January 1886. Three months later, on 27 March, he published his first poem, entitled «Bacchial», in the Leipzig periodical Hesperus. Around that time came the first in a series of deaths that would leave their mark on him: in April 1886 his friend Stephan Skylizzi died, then in 1889 his friend Mike Ralli, in 1891 his brother Peter-John and his uncle George Cavafy, in 1896 his grandfather George Photiades, in 1899 his mother, in 1900 his brother George, in 1902 his brother Aristeides and in 1905 his brother Alexander.
Cavafy rarely left Alexandria: he took some day trips and excursions in Egypt (especially to Cairo in the winter, as had been his father's custom) but after 1885 he traveled abroad only five times: in 1897 he visited Paris and London (with his brother John-Constantine), in 1901 and 1903 he visited Athens (with his brother Alexander), and in 1905 he travelled again to Athens to be with the dying Alexander. His next (and ultimate) trip abroad came twenty-seven years later, once again to Athens (with Aleko and Rika Singhopoulo), for reasons of his own health.
In Alexandria, Cavafy lived with his mother and his brothers Paul and John-Constantine, who were the closest to him, not only in age: Paul was known in Alexandria as «the homosexual Cavafy», while John-Constantine was known as «the poet Cavafy» (he was an accomplished poet in English). After Charicleia's death in 1899, Constantine lived with the two brothers until 1904, when John-Constantine moved to Cairo. Cavafy continued living with Paul, and in 1907 they moved to an apartment on rue Lepsius. In 1908 Paul traveled abroad, never to return, and Cavafy started living on his own at the age of 45. Soon his life took a marked turn: he severely limited his social life and devoted himself to poetry. He had by now discovered his own poetic voice, and he was confident of its worth.
Cavafy was fond of his two nieces, Charicleia Cavafy (daughter of Aristeides) and Helen-Anghelica-Lucia Cavafy (daughter of Alexander), but was especially tender towards Aleko Singhopoulo, the son of the Greek seamstress Helen Singhopoulo, who was employed by Cavafy's mother. His unusual concern for Aleko (later his designated heir), coupled with their facial resemblance, led some people to speculate that Singhopoulo was Cavafy's illegitimate son. This hypothesis is certainly valid, especially since Rika Singhopoulo (Aleko's first wife) notes that Cavafy was bisexual into his thirties. Another, equally plausible, hypothesis has Aleko as the illegitimate offspring of one of Cavafy's brothers, which would explain the reluctance of both men to specify the exact nature of their relationship.
Cavafy made a clear distinction between his public persona and his personal life, which became a cause celebre as soon as his poetry became popular. He was, above all, a poet (in his last passport, issued in 1932, under «Occupation» he declared «Poet») and wished to be remembered solely as a poet, with no modifiers (with the possible exception of «Hellenic»). He lived a rather unremarkable public life, offering no cause for scandal to the Alexandrian community or the Athenian establishment, where he was under close scrutiny as the potential diasporic alternative to the native poet Kostis Palamas. The followers of Cavafy and Palamas first clashed in 1918, but all-out literary war was declared in Athens in 1924, only to end when Palamas published a brief and sober appreciation of Cavafy's work. In 1926, during the Pangalos dictatorship, the Greek state honoured Cavafy for his contribution to Greek Letters by awarding him the Silver medal of the Order of Phoenix.
In his mature years, Cavafy's interests were many and diverse, as evidenced by his personal papers, and by his unsigned comments published in the periodical Alexandrian Art (he had founded this magazine and was essentially running with the help of Aleko and Rika Singhopoulo). In 1932 Cavafy (who was a life-long smoker) first noticed an irritation in his throat, and in June of the same year his doctors in Alexandria diagnosed cancer of the larynx. He traveled to Athens for advanced treatment, which proved ineffectual. He was subjected to a tracheotomy depriving him of the power of speech, and resorted to communicating through a series of written "hospital notes". He returned to Alexandria, where he died a few months later in the Greek Hospital which was close to his home (when he had moved to this apartment he had said, somewhat prophetically, «Where could I live better? Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die»).
Cavafy developed a unique method for publishing his poems. He never published a collection in book form, and refused at least two such offers (one for a Greek edition and one for an English). He opted to publish his poems in newspapers, periodicals and annuals, then printing them privately in broadsheets, which he would collate in makeshift collections for any interested party. The first volume of the 154 poems which comprise his poetic Canon (he had repudiated 27 early poems) was published posthumously in Alexandria, edited by Rika Singhopoulo. This same collection was first published in Greece in 1948 by Ikaros Publishing, and was issued again by the same publisher in 1963, edited and annotated by G.P. Savidis, who first adopted the thematic sequence advocated by Cavafy. Savidis acquired the Cavafy Archive in 1969, after the death of Aleko Singhopoulo. He had already edited Cavafy's Unpublished (or Hidden) poems in 1968, and invited scholars to study the other material resting in the Cavafy Archive, resulting in a variety of publications, most notably Cavafy's Unfinished poems in 1994 (edited by Renata Lavagnini), Cavafy's Prose in 2003 (edited by Michalis Pieris) and Cavafy's Comments on his poetry (forthcoming, edited by Diana Haas).
Cavafy was introduced to the English-speaking public in 1919 by his friend E.M Forster, who used translations of selected poems by George Valassopoulo. There have been numerous translations of the Canon over the years, most notably by John Mavrogordato in 1951 (with an introduction by Rex Warner), Rae Dalven in 1961 (with an introduction by W.H. Auden), Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard in 1975 (edited by G.P. Savidis) and Stratis Haviaras in 2004 (with a foreword by Seamus Heaney). The international appeal of Cavafy's poetry, as attested by the multiplicity of its translations, would not come as a surprise to the poet.

Even my truck misses Azami

Even my truck misses Azami. You can tell.

Today, I will wash my bedsheets

Today, I will wash my bedsheets
it has come that time in the laundry cycle
when towels and sheets are pulled from their homes
added to the general population
and thrown into the soap for purification
the sheets were granted parole last time
pleading their case that of all the remnants of you:
the abandoned clothes,
the unfinished chapstick,
the notes on the back of receipts
too far from the trash can lid to lift up from the floor
the calendar still pausing over the day you left
the unread, overdue library books
the unstamped, unsent letters
to friends I’d yet to meet —
of all these things either since remedied,
expelled or ignored for later contemplation
of them all, only bedsheets can still claim proof
they held you next to me,
still bear on strands the isolated molecules of your scent
bloodhounds may use to track you
and bring you back to my arms
when time and circumstance are ruled inadmissible by the court
your departure premature
on these sheets, hide cells of your skin
that forensics investigators may one day
reconstitute into a clone of you
and ask under hot lights
in a good cop, bad cop interrogation
what gave you reason to love me
what right you had to reach through bone and flesh
cradle my ventricles and aorta like newborn puppies
breathe into them the taste of your smile
that infected the rest of the victim’s circulatory system
and now leaves me unable to move
without thumping your name
into my organs 80 beats per minute

today I will wash my bedsheets
because the moths who share my room
are beginning to ask questions
the generations of them who last heard you laugh
all have died from old age
their sons and daughters are soon to retire
they tell their children
they heard stories of a raven-haired creature
who used to sleep through the morning
disappear in day
and play in the night with the creature
who still remains here
the one who whispers her name in his sleep
tries to weep so soft
we must strain to hear him

today I will wash my bedsheets
is what I said yesterday
with the full conviction it would come to pass,
but the stress of laboring for daily bread
and the nonnegotiable duties of nighttime contemplation
left me too exhausted to fulfill such trite obligations —
yearning for you is a full-time hobby for the most fervent devotees
akin to those who attend sci-fi conventions
with pointed Vulcan ears surgically grafted
or fully functional lightsabers peace-tied to Jedi belts
lest a rascal child should grab it in haste —
for all the anime fans who cosplay as Akira to the grocery store on Sundays
or Civil War reenactors who pretend to disbelieve Appomattox’s surrender
or Renaissance Faire nobles who strut the mall with longswords sheathed,
I will delicately affix the decals
reimagine all the famous battles with new plotlines
but diligently reassemble their conclusions in perfect detail
to keep our timeline pure
this attention to each feature of our story
makes it impossible to worry about trivial matters like dirty sheets or laundry
when there is so much more reliving to do

Today I will wash my bedsheets
because yesterday I said I would do so
and if I failed,
I would instead collect all your love notes
and file them into a box
in autobiographical order
so I knew with which order truths and lies
were told, believed, exposed, forgiven, forgotten and laughed over
from our first kiss to my last touch
as I left you staring at the stars —
and if I failed that
would donate all your leftover shirts to Goodwill
hoping other girls would feel finally what love was
soaked in our shared heart rhythms
baked into the threads
and passed on their lovers
like a whispered game of telephone —
and if I failed that
promised I would stop thinking so hard for you
that my skull pounds with ache by end of day
leaving wine, ibuprofen or poetry to unshackle thoughts —
and if I failed that
to remove your name from the immediacy of daily vocabulary
so if a stranger were to ask for a word
that begins with an “A,”
your name would not be the first in my lexicon —
and if I failed that
would cease sending you daily love letters —
this one is proof I have yet to begin

Today I will wash my bedsheets
is what I plan to say tomorrow
because today, I plan to spend one more night in your arms
hold the sheets over my open mouth and breath in
so I remember what it’s like to kiss you
then breathe out so you remember me
strip naked and roll into a ball so you’re wrapped around me
tight like you used to be
before you bid goodbye to this room —
tonight, I will unhinge my eyes
let tears pour out in my regret
that I did not strip these sheets from the bed
the moment I last saw you
shove them into your arms and told you:
as long you keep these sheets unwashed
I will always be with you
my tears and sweat are held here
whenever you need them to remind you
what a boy’s heart feels like
when dripped out day by day
given in fair trade for the right to love you
and when you miss me
wrap them around you tight
and wherever I am,
my arms will curve inward to keep you warm
hold them over your open mouth and inhale
and remember how I kissed you

17 Poets Enter, 1 Poet Leaves: Haiku Death Match begins at 4 p.m.

GumptionFest V's Haiku Death Match is at 4 p.m. today, Sunday, Sept. 12

When GumptionFest, Sedona's annual grassroots arts festival returns for its fifth year, one of the poetic elements for the festival will be a Haiku Death Match, returning again from last year.

The festival organizers need Haiku Death Match competitors, or “haikusters” to start writing now and have roughly 20-30 haiku each by the time of GumptionFest, Saturday Sunday, Sept. 11 to 12.

There will be a cash prize for the winning Haikusters.

GumptionFest’s Haiku Death Match rules:

Haikusters can read their haiku’s titles before they read the haiku. This technically gives the haikusters more syllables to put the haiku in context, but the haiku itself must still be only 17 syllables.

Poets must be the sole authors of the haiku they use in competition. Poets can read from the page, book, journal, notepad, etc. Poets can have haiku written beforehand or write them in their head while at the microphone. As long as the haiku are 17 syllables, we don’t care how, when or from where the haiku originates.

Rounds will be determined by the number of haikusters who sign up to compete. Thirty haiku will likely be enough for poets to compete in all the rounds. More haiku is always better.

Be flexible and include a mixture of serious and funny haiku. Adult themes and language are acceptable.

The Haiku Death Match will take place at GumptionFest V in the early evening on Sunday, Sept. 12.

For Haiku Death Match tips and haiku examples, visit foxthepoet.blogspot.com.

To register or for more information, e-mail host Haiku Death Match host Christopher Fox Graham at foxthepoet@yahoo.

For more information about GumptionFest IV, e-mail to GumptionFest@gmail.com.

What time is it? GumptionTime!

It's GumptionTime - the festival starts now! Get in your car, truck, jet, boat, hovercraft, helicopter, Ultralight, TARDIS or hop on your bicycle, skateboard, horse, motorcycle, Hoverboard, rickshaw, mule, scooter, Segway, camel, hang glider or zip line and get over to Coffee Pot Drive in West Sedona.

GumptionFest V

• Fifth annual event takes place Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 11 and 12.
• Activities last all day at several venues along Coffee Pot Drive.
• Admission is free. All art and music is supplied by donation.
• All amateur and professional artists are invited to participate.
• To volunteer, participate or for more information, e-mail GumptionFest@gmail.com.

To compete in GumptionFest's Poetry Slam or Haiku Death Match, e-mail: foxthepoet@yahoo.com

To participate, volunteer or for more information about GumptionFest V, e-mail GumptionFest@gmail.com or visit GumptionFest on Facebook.

They Held Hands

On a commonplace Tuesday morning,
not unlike that Sunday morning
60 years before, destined for infamy
they held hands as they fell

It was a working Tuesday
a date on the calendar
a morning like the morning before
but now they found themselves
standing on the window sill
of the 92nd floor
overlooking the city
and they felt weightless

They were not thinking
about the cause-and-effect history
of textbooks and CNN sound bytes
they weren’t debating the geopolitical ramifications leading up to that morning
he had decaf
she had a bearclaw and an espresso
and they talked about Will & Grace

jets impregnated buildings with infernos
and now the fire was burning
and the smoke was rising
and it was getting hard to breathe
even after they smashed the window out
the inferno was swelling
it had reached their floor
their stairwells were gone
and the options now
were to burn
or to fall

when the human animal realizes death is inevitable
psychologists say we want control
over those final moments
choosing suicide over surrender is a healthy reaction
because we choose to accept annihilation
rather than letting it choose us

So on one side
is unbearable heat
roaring flames
acrid smoke
and screams of the suffering
On the other side
fresh air
suicide is the final act of free will
that keeps the consciousness intact
even as it is destroyed

but they were not thinking about psychology
they were not thinking about terrorism
the debate about responsibility,
retalaiation,
wars, flags, and Patriot Acts
can wait until September 12th
this morning belongs to them
because they did not have a tomorrow
the true terror of that morning
is to know what they were thinking
as they decided then whether
to burn
or to fall
now, imagine having that conversation
with the stranger
sitting next to you:
The barricade at the door is on fire
the extinguisher is empty
we are blinded by the smoke
and on the windowsill of the 92nd floor
we wait until flames lick our clothes
before we lean forward
and choose that moment to fall
others who fell were scrambling
or screaming or on fire
but we held hands as we fell

survivors of falls from extreme heights report
that falls are slow-motion transcendence
and the experience is almost “mystical”

I don’t know if they felt “mystical”
I know it takes
1 …
2 …
3 …
4 …
5 …
6 …
7 …
8.54 seconds to fall 1,144 feet

just enough time to say a prayer
or regret a memory
or ask forgiveness
or say goodbye
or wonder how the sky can be so perfectly blue
on such a beautiful morning

GumptionFest is so awesome, you want to high-5 a cat

GumptionFest V will be so awesome that you want to high-5 a cat.

What is GumptionFest V? Thanks for asking:

GumptionFest V

• Fifth annual event takes place Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 11 and 12.
• Activities last all day at several venues along Coffee Pot Drive.
• Admission is free. All art and music is supplied by donation.
• All amateur and professional artists are invited to participate.
• To volunteer, participate or for more information, e-mail GumptionFest@gmail.com.

To compete in GumptionFest's Poetry Slam or Haiku Death Match, e-mail: foxthepoet@yahoo.com

To participate, volunteer or for more information about GumptionFest V, e-mail GumptionFest@gmail.com or visit GumptionFest on Facebook.