Marilyn Mendoza (4.23.06)

Excerpt from "I do too" by Hawaii-Jason Luis Riveras book "Sorrows Crows"

Young man

what plan do you entertain

what song

do you sing

within your brain?



without love

what comliness

can be maintained

in what frame

what comparison

would you say

this clarity

would explain

to the sane

the insane

to me

it is all the same

with or without fame

with or without

a lady to entertain



who will enjoy

my lines of rhyme?



Anytime

anytime

Every time

my lie

to you subsides

I cannot cry

though I sigh

and my lines

are sublime

like our life

in the tides of Hawaii



to saddle our horse

one for me and one for thee

the horizon to see

in the deep

purple pink

sunset sky

island sea

island dream

be with me

eternally sing

what the corner of my eyes

thinks to gleam

waterfalls to rinse

out the sea

you and me

in sea

where will we be?

in the sea

Hawaii

you and me

eternally

I'll make you sing

If you would be there with me





226-10-1 Come by Hawaii -Jason Luis Rivera

Words flow

with all its power

as a stage show

in its hour

is a lame doe

left to cower

all alone



as an age known

for two towers

and two planes

go in an hour

smoke and flames blown

tasting sour

lift to roam



tears sown

fear empowers

spirits roam

passing towers

soft goodbyes

left from quick

cordless phones



as the roe

moans and cowers

all alone in that hour

so the homes full of flowers

send their groans

to the throne

all is known

all is known



Love sick fool by Jason -Luis Riveras "Sorrows Crows"

If you should find this love sick fool

strolling through Liverpool

would you stop to just say hi

or would you you keep on

rolling by

would you put on a disguise

and come up close to see my eyes

though I am no one

and your sublime

and time has turned our hearts and minds

will you still remember when

a crumpled paper and a pen

two lonely hearts

alone to blend

could turn this world

into a friend

(some hopeful words to Paul I send)

hoping this is not the end



If the Beatles turn 2

I was born on St. Patricks day

so you must wear green or I'll pinch you

till black turns blue

as asphalt ends

to sail me to emerald green

I'm coming back to you

it's the first thing I'll do

If the Beatles turn 2

Branko (4.23.06)

David Schooley (4.23.06)

Jack Yohay (4.23.06)

Patrick Widdess (4.23.06)

Marilyn Mendoza (3.26.06)

These are the poems from my sons first published book, "Sorrows Crows"



SORROWS CROWS

Sorrows Crows

In throngs I long to hold

GOD only knows



AS LONG AS THE ROAD IS WINDING

The sun was hot

I was alone

I longed for deaths last breath

to take me home

the road was long

yet still I roamed

filling my pockets full of stones

Hawaiian hills

that lacked the thrill

empty beaches

onward still

The pain that fueled

my quill to spill

the days I long to remember

to forget



ME IN YOU

I'm missing you

miss kissing you

till time is through

and rhymes come true

in songs soo blue

from me

to you

and wrongs of long

that I shall shew

through and through

till I've set my love aglow

from me

to you

till angels sing the songs on wings

and mortals follow through

that I shall stand with rod in hand

and stand beside my pew

and behold it's you

it's you

so come to me my love anew

and stand behind our pew

and sing the signs so true

deep within me

in you

deep in sleep sand slips and creeps

and lands in mounds anew

forever one is two

and two is me in you



UNBOUND

Can't keep me down

Unbound

Chains that surround the ground

Unbound

Tears falling down on the ground

Unbound

Love is the sound that I've found all around

Touch the ground

Unbound



A POET WITHOUT A PEN/LUDICROUS

I gather a letter

one of wanton rends

I'd rather a feather

my lonsesome hearted friend

to the road that has no end

from Japan

to the friend of a friend

salutes and hands

I haven't a pen

dear fans

from heaven to zen



HAWAIIAN RIVER RAN

Hawaiian river ran

rocks my form was bent

deep into the sand

my aimless shot was sent

healing rock that time has spanned

trusty friend my heart would lend

out of place in foreign land

easing broken hearted friend

in a heart within a hand

in a cart that came and went

arms so strong their rise remand

towers gone now past and spent

two towers strong their rise demand

fool and a cart to heal what rent

soothing hearts strong to withstand

casting our lots in cool wet cement

Jerry Gordon (3.26.06)

Castles of Smoke


"Man is most nearly himself
when he achieves the seriousness
of a child at play.” -- Heraclitus

I started growing buildings when I was in junior high. It's what started me smoking. I've never liked smoking, really, and don't need the nicotine to calm down, but I keep it up as a sort of nostalgia for those early castles I exhaled. Those still have a purity I continually strive for, something that is perhaps only visible in the eyes of innocence. Those early castles are what inspired the whole field we now know as Grown Engineering.

In elementary school I began experimenting with growing buildings. I did it with milk in water. One morning while eating my breakfast cereal--for no real reason--I leaned forward and spat a little bit of milk into the goldfish bowl on the table. It was simple act and virtually free of motivation. I just peeked over the glass rim and “bloop.” That was the extent of the inspiration: bloop.

I wasn’t shooting at Pinch, our fish. I was just spitting. But, then what I saw was somehow so beautiful. I was attracted by how complex a structure the milk made in that little environment of semi-balanced gravity. Every arabesqued wing and elaborated strut and the curvilinear column of the main trunk of the spit-milk revealed the amount of energy it carried for as far as it extended within the turbulence and drag of the water.

I didn’t understand any of these ideas then, but I knew it was marvelous. From my deviant little lips, beauty played itself within three liquid and gravity-soft dimensions.

I kept it up that morning, turning the fish bowl into a murky mess. I changed the water again and agian. Each time, the spit milk shot into the tranquil clear water with an energy. Then, it would slow into a calm stasis, become semi-stable as a structure and then begin to drift and dissipate, vanishing into a total graying of the water. The energy of the milk created ripples and turbulence that undid the castles. And, of course, the gold fish didn't help any. Finally, I felt his little movements were destroying things too quickly. I knew I couldn't continue to experiment with him there, so I asked my mother it I could flush him down the toilet and out to the ocean. She said, no, because he'd die in the treatment plant before making it out to sea. So, I poured him into a coffee cup and gave him a bit of clean water and a Cherrio to chew. Then I filled his bowl again with new, clear water from the tap and got down to further experimenting.

I refused to go to school that day, my adamance slightly scaring my mom. But I went the next day and brought my bowl to show all the kids.

As it turned out, no one understood the significance of my discovery. Some of them said, "Cool" but then just wanted to try spitting into the water from greater and greater distances. Most just said, "That's gross."

I eventually got a big empty fish tank of my own, specifically for engineering purposes. That's where smoke castles actually came from. Water was a good environment to work in at first, but it was ultimately just too wet. Besides, it required changing water all the time just to see the structures. Smoke was, and still is, a better balance of exhalation forces, environmental turbulences, soft-gravity and spontaneity. All that, and it's more conducive to contemplation because it's dry and you can lean back in a comfortable chair.

To do anything creative, a person can't have too much control. Mastery is not really about having total control. While it’s true that precise control of some skills is essential, this is because having this ability makes it more possible to open up larger areas to play. Then real creation can happen. The artist's job, ultimately, is to be a passionate witness, to see what was previously not just invisible but unseeable. That's how something can be made from nothing, which is where the ancient origin for the word poetry comes from: “To do; to bring into form from nothing.” The best artists are those who can watch the most honestly, the ones who can see what even they can't admit is imaginable. The artist is the one who can't look away from even his own death, and in that way transforms it and everything into moments that can’t be fixed as life, death, play or any other form of purpose.

And, perhaps for this reason, the very first castle of smoke I made is still the finest. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps it is because I have unwillingly compared all the subsequent to it--or because I have reimagined it in infinitely greater degrees of fantastic abstraction and theory ever since first noticing it churning and coming to a pause in the air beyond my exhalation. Regardless, that first castle of smoke has taken on the pathetic but grace-filled elements of a romantic quest. No matter how much I resist it, I know I hope to see it again. To examine that first one’s mystery with the tools of analysis I have developed in these subsequent decades of reflection. I hope to retouch the naïve with the hands of the master. Like some sort of arrogant Utopian in the Industrial Revolution, I harbor the hubristic hunch that that castle can save us all.

Of course, the monkeyfooted brat in me that first leaned out and spat into that fish bowl knows there's nothing to save us from, but the only thing more complex than turbulence is the workings of one's motivations, so please don't crucify me for my contradictions, okay?

. . .

Kansai Underground

Last night, drunk with two friends.
Wine and wiskey.
I'm sure God keeps track
of such things. brash temptation.
Back at the last-train station,
everybody on God's folded little list.
So many blushing knuckles and glasses askew.
I ask you, yes you there across from me,
"Why is it only the end of night
when we can meet?"
Yes, noone else knows either. So, i imagine
stacking stones between this creeping distance.
A little mound of rocks
on the floor of the subway car,
piled in the unmortared way
God likes His gravity.
A salaryman turns to watch me
shifting brain-sized bulks of basalt, and then
he's down on the grubby floor too,
his fingernails getting chipped and noble,
working amidst the floating ghosts of hair
as each lump of dust gets balanced
in the rattle and the bump
of the train pouring through the dark.
And then a girl with a mouth so full of teeth
there's barely room for words
hunches down and from her purse
pulls out rock after rock the size of hearts, each
sung smooth in a river beyond our echoes.
She fits them in, like keystones to lock
all the world's cracks and steady the impossible architecture.
I look up, looking for more eyes unwilling to look away,
and say, "Don't mind us, late-night commuters.
We're not building a wall
or barricade. It's just our way
of giving to the community,
to us as we
speed deeper into night
together, our flesh one breath
and stinking booze."

. . .

The Instant that Isn't

The crowd, too, is a trio--
three strangers here becoming
nothing less than unknown
as ourselves. Why else sit
with this look of
jazz in our eyes? I see you
and before the glance decays
there is time to forget
the 64 words for now.
There is the instant that isn't
before or after.

Beyond the end of your boot
begins the logical curve
of your calf.

The flawless flow
from limit to limit;
how many worlds are lost
in a language?

Thus, this is
how we unknow them,
much as ourselves. The invisible
within invisibility. And, so I love
to say, "Your face," and
"Let's behave like the dance of smoke
that shows our grave is smouldering."


3.10.06
watching Bebop International at Savannah

. . .

How I Started Smoking

I am not a trend-setter. I am more of an inventive imposture who follows the wrong details.

And, so I started smoking.

We've all been there. The group pressure. The room is packed with so many stripes of cool and I feel awkward, as though even the way I hold a glass of beer shows I am a poser, as though everybody else is weaving notes into their memories: "Alert! Alert! Dork drinking from a pint glass like it's some sort of trough of butter, thumb and fingers all up at the ceiling. Do American's really have no education system at all?"

And, so, one night in a crowded room around a glass coffee table littered with deep red Marboro triangles and flat red Lucky Strike dots and the tiny promises made by Hope boxes and bags of roll-your-own streaded leaves and a famously phallic Cuaba Generosos smouldering on a $80.00 ash tray, I decided to start smoking. I saw into the rhythmic beauty of hands performing intricate simplicities of work and gesture. The way the flame is cherished. The way delicate paper is held and moved. The way the embers glow more faintly than candle light. These were the pressures that got me to start smoking. But, I should clarify that I smoke incense sticks.

I'm no idiot. I'm not going to suck the stuff into my body. I have enough trouble with alcohol and starchy carbohydrates. I don't need to add nicotine. I just want to join in the ritual of timing. And, so, I started. Of course, in bars and other public places where the priests of the personality cult gather, there are pauses and some looks weighing me for mockery when I slide a very thin steel case from my pocket, open it like a book and carefully remove a stick of incense. I can almost hear people think, "What the fuck?"

I hold the stick just below my face and carefully light the tip with an expensive micro-lighter. A tiny flame burns silently for a moment. Then, I calmly wave the stick through the air to out the flame and start the thin and constant line of white smoke into its life of ephemeral calligraphy.

At this point, it’s hard to find any difference between my smoking and others'. I tend and care for the stick throughout its burning, making sure to not let the accumulated ash fall anywhere but in an ash tray. To do otherwise would be uncouth. I usually hold the stick between my fingers, but, of course, I never put it in my mouth. Beyond not sucking on it, I can find almost no difference. Well, that and the smell. But, do any two tobacco's really smell the same? Cigar smokers speak of the aroma being one of its ritual pleasures and they give it as a reason why they won't smoke cigarettes. Clove cigarettes. Pipe tobacco. Each has its kind, scent and brand. Each has its individuality. And, within the intricate subtlties of culture, the task has become just this, to define oneself as unique without becoming a dick. Wouldn’t you agree?

Civility then seems to be to know where “interesting” transforms into “freak.”

Kent English (3.26.06)

Parades
by Jesse Ball
(from The Paris Review no. 174)

And when you are finally caught and questioned,
it is discovered, sadly, that you know
nothing of use. Your captors exchange glances, nod.
You are released in the freedom of some afternoon,

some autumn of the year, your coat, hat, returned
as if to continue your life. Now it is you

in the world again. In yellowing rooms, life
becomes no more than the places where it occurs.
At the pier in darkness, parades will cross the water,
visible but once. Or I could say

I saw the wind coming hard along the river
touching all it passed.

How are things consequent? When they catch you
again, what will you say? That all things
may be weighed, may be raised and weighed
by two human hands?


Ovid in Tears
by Jack Gilbert
(from The Paris Review no. 175)

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. "In the cities,"
he said, "there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman," he said. How like
a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds
later he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn't read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped and he fell.
"White stone in the white sunlight," he said
as they picked him up. "Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world." His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. "Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all."

Dan Marlin (3.26.06)

BEFORE THEY LET YOU SUE

The good mailhandler Breader
Educated me
As we watched a wild truckyard storm
Whirl out to sea

"They'll pay for your codeine
For your splint for your nurse
For I.V.s and transfusions,
If they have to, for a hearse
They'll pay a million dollar bill
For anything you break,
They'll pay for jacuzzis, acupuncture, witches brew
--But you one stone fool
If you think they'll let you sue!

They'll pay you compensation
For all the time you take
Then put detectives on you
To see if you a fake
--But one thing they won't ever do
For man or pity sake
Jesus Christ will come again
Before they let you sue!

It don't matter if what fell on you
Wasn't made right
Or if they'd been warned about it
40 days and nights,
Or if they had you doin' shit
You ain't supposed to do
They'll truss up your guts
And phenobarb your seizures
Pay for your ultrasound
Catscans and procedures
They'll pick your veins for blood
Til your arm is black and blue,
But you'll pitch in the World Series, boy,
Before they let you sue!"




RONALD REAGAN'S ENTRANCE TO HEAVEN
PORTAL OF EL SALVADOR


Ronald Reagan was welcomed to heaven by a manicurist, her black hair pulled tightly back from a widow's peak. She took his hand, looking up at him.

"What do you see?" he asked, from his chair of gleaming combs.

"The book of your eyes."

"And in them?" ( ' It goes well' he thought, ' Truly as on earth, so is it in heaven.' )

"I see....myself".

" And what are you doing in the blue field of my eyes?"

" I am looking for my mother," and she lifted his hand to her mouth.

" Where is your dear mother?" ( ' The tenderness in my voice has perfect pitch ', he mused.)

" She is deep in the village well with the other women, packed like pigs' feet in a jar.
She lies in the field of bones, unburied, in a skirt of mud and spiders. I see her torn in the vulture's beak, where you left her."

She curled her tongue around his little finger, sucked out a microphone, a cowboy shirt, a papaya, and spit them at his feet.

He jerked his hand away, hissing, " You're not from here, are you? Go back where you came from!"

" We've all come here from the same place" she spoke slowly, " We can only go back to each other."

Ronald Reagan closed his eyes and prayed, " Our father who art in Heaven"

" Yes? "

" This woman does not belong here! Send her away!"

" I will send her where she belongs."

"Thank you Lord", he sighed, opening his eyes.

The manicurist, her hair black as obsidian, sat before him.








BESIDE A RAIN CANAL IN MUKONOSO


The first warm evening in March. I'm walking beside a rain canal in Mukonoso, across which I can see the open back door of a small restaurant's kitchen, where a pair of mops lean into the yellow light. There's a swift, sudden shadow at my shoulder; I turn, watch it dip and climb, blend into the penumbra, then reappear.

I recognize this bat by the red gold spot at the base of her left ear.

"Hey, I know you, rice paddy down the road. May 14, 2000."

" You have a good memory" she replies, " Where has the wide world taken you?"

" I'm trying to find room for it in here " I say, tapping the hard bone of my brow, " And you?"

" Just heading out for the fields. By the way, have you been by the field where we spoke last time? A quarter of it has disappeared."

" When did that happen?"

" A week before New Year's I saw the old farmer out there with a couple of guys in business suits doing a play by play on their cell phones. Couple of weeks later a truck came by and they unloaded thick--I mean manhole-thick iron plates --and covered the rice stubble in the southeast corner of the field. Pretty soon people started driving over the little ramp the farmer used to wheel his tractor down on. First there were only three or four; now you got cars crowded in like so many billiard balls. Each model has to have a name, you know: Mellow Cruise, Swift Glow, Cuddle Cube, Every Jerry, Sambar."

" Sambar? That's a weird name for a car. "

" Tell me about it! Do you know what Sambar means in India? It's a kind of lentil soup. Add a little dumpling to it, and you have Idli Sambar. I had a cousin travelled over to Madras on a container ship. They don't call cars Sambars in India, though."

" You're not thinking of Samarkand are you? "

" I do know the difference, friend, between Uzbekistan and Mother India. But as long as you mention it, the bazaar in Samarkand is fragrant through the night, especially when they unload summer melons."

" Sounds lovely" I reply, " but back to the field? Maybe those iron planks are temporary, until Spring planting. Could be the old farmer is having trouble paying his land tax."

"That's possible, but here's how I see it: the less planting, the fewer bugs, the fewer bugs the harder to feed my bat babies and my own face. Tell the truth, I'm getting hungry right now. If I don't eat six, seven bugs a minute I get light-headed. Where are you headed?"

" Me? I'm just walking no place in particular; that's how I find my sense of direction. It makes it easier, when I get home, to enter my wife's eyes."

" Huh? Sounds interesting, but just because we're both mammals doesn't mean I know what you mean. Never have expected human beings to make sense."

A bit self-conscious, I look at my shoes for a moment.

" You know, I'm not sure I know what I mean either. Give me another couple of years to think about it, OK?"

But when I glance up I realize she couldn't wait, and I am talking to the wide, empty face of the neon-sprinkled darkness.




NO BABIES TONIGHT


The lovers arrive in the country night,
Slip off their shoes
At the kitchen door.
As the old florescent bulb flickers on
Crystal lenses glint
In the brown moons of her eyes
Where the cataracts' clouds were lifted.

They will make no babies tonight.

His sperm, tainted once
By chemo poison
Cannot pass on the genes
For foolishness, narcissism, ardor.

Her one ovary
Cannot drop an egg
To the altar of the womb,
Which was taken long ago
To stop a great bleeding.

The weave of their tongues
Will be real
Though all of their teeth are not;
The warmth of cheek and thigh
Smoother now
That the liquid nitrogen torch
Burned their warts away.

Deep within his scrotum
Spent radioactive seeds
The size of rice grains
Float in the withered prostate--
Vigilantes once,
Who hunted down renegade cells.

Tonight, though, they do not think
Of death or tumors
As they sweep the tatami floor,
Lifting away a weightless, knuckle-size spider,
Unfold the futon and sheet,
The flowery faux-wool cover
And lay themselves down.

Ralph Famularo (3.26.06)

"The Crying Trapeze Artists"



My Aunt Joan
would whisper hysterically
on every Birthday Eve.

"Oh my God, I'm no longer 27"
was her HUSHing yearly Mantra.

27 was her favorite number.
She said it had once shouted out to her
from a wall emblazoned in florescent orange-pink
in the "most exquisite parking garage I have ever seen."

With the wispy dew of fond memory
welling in her eyes,
She quavered, "I was with Grandpa -- for the last time.
He shuffled up the rectangular concrete staircase
looking like a tired Leonid Brezhnev. But Grandpa,
dear Grandpa", she would add with pride, "had 2
good eyebrows."

"I always judge a man by his eyebrows"
concluded the Spinstress.

"Funny", I said. I always remember Grandpa
as looking something like Bing Crosby on dope.
Every Yuletide, the frosty air outside our house
would thunder with the jolly tones of
"I'm dreaming of a (*sniff*) white Christmas."

He would enter the warm, cozy living room
wiping the numbing snow from his
red, Santa-like nose.

My brother, Janik, would greet him with,
"What didn't you bring us THIS year, Grandpa?"

"Bad boys don't get nuthin' -- except maybe a little
Budweiser from time to time."

Grandpa was referring to the often not-spoken of
family scandal. Janik had been dishonorably discharged
from the Jamaican Army. We all knew it was political,
though.
Besides Janik not being a Jamaican citizen, Jamaica was
merely
looking for a scapegoat in retaliation for the Canadian
Press's
treatment of Ben Johnson during the 1988 Seoul Steroid
Olympics.

So, Janik was sent packing and came home to Pennsylvania.

I've never understood why my brother and I have different
passports.

I've never bothered to ask.

We have a TV.

At sundown we would all take our seats around the round
table
in anticipation of another Xmas-TV dinner. Consuming it
with glee,
we eagerly awaited desert. Aunt Joan could defrost a Sara
Lee Cherry Cheesecake
like Nobody's Business.
I preferred Boston Cream Pie but she insisted that THAT
would be a slap in the face to the Keystone State -- not
to mention Canada.

Then the phone would ring -- as it did every
Xmas night around 7PM. My mother & father
would emotionally voice their Holiday Greetings to the
family.

You see, my parents are rarely home. They are understudy
trapeze artists
traveling w/ the Ringling Brothers Circus. At least,
that's what I've been told.

After completion of the heartfelt and tearful collect
call, we'd sit back down
and intently listen to Grandpa tell us memorable stories
about how he heroically
crossed the Delaware and built a house with his own 2 bare
bank accounts.
Or, perhaps he would engage us with the tale of how he had
come up with
an idea for an incandescent device. Of course, Edison had
already invented it but Grandpa proudly explained that HE
had thought of it independently,
and without the help of "a fancy workshop and Big Money
backing me. It came to me in a Flash! It was as if a
lightbulb went on over my head."

We'd all retire and at mid-morning on the 26th, Aunt Joan
and Grandpa would go out to the mall just over the hills
and through the Woods Retirement Village
to stock-up on Xmas week provisions
Janik and I would be up after noon and commence the
arduous task of repacking the Xmas presents so we could
celebrate Boxing Day.

But, on this particular Boxing Day, as we labored at
affixing the green and red bows back on the partially torn
wrapping paper, the sun dissolving into the cold, hazy
horizon, the front door opened and in-walked Aunt Joan. .
.without Grandpa.

Pale-faced, tongue-tied, the wispy dew
of painful memory welling-up in her eyes,
She said, "Grandpa has passed-on."

"He's not alive!?" blurted Janik.

"Worse than that. He's gone to Columbus, Ohio.

He's forsaken the Keystone State -- not to mention Canada.

He said he was tired of entertaining
a family of gullible liars.

He left me standing at the station wagon with a 6-pack in
my hand and boarded the bus to Ohio."

"Well I'll be damned", I said, dumbfounded. "The Xmas
snow has finally
destroyed Grandpa's mind. The chemicals have eaten away
his roots."

And Aunt Joan, 2 sad eyebrows, has been unable to stop
Whispering Wildly
on Birthday Eves.




Ralph Famularo

Kevin Keane (3.26.06)

Uncertainty

I spoke to the graves
lying in rows, indifferent,
bleakly reflecting
the dim twilight,
but they were silent
as the gray sea at dusk
when the fog envelops us
in obscure mists.

briefly finding relics of the dead:
cherry smell of a pipe, frayed brown
slippers, yellow pages of Othello-

lost unsteady stumbling
falling silently all night
down endless dark corridors
that open out unsurely
to the morning sky.

— by Kevin Keane


Dreamscape

Black sea where we swim
in the silence of stars as
boats bellow in the distance.

Night a dark country
across the invisible
sea-

swim still waters
to the quiet
fields of memory
slip on sand dunes of regret
or scale the peaks of the unseen.

-by Kevin Keane