Karate Fix

C'mon now, sometimes you just need to get some Karate in you!

Here's some high kickin' action:



Here's some serious fighting skills:

You Want To Run

You hiss nickel daydreams into the fog and fog answers back, "Your life is your own if you want it." What about fear of falling, or flying, or powers in a cave or a cage and the respondents to The Hankering Survey? They were all about a packable apocalypse, one you can fit in your pocket and it folds into itself like a trick joke: a joke that is supposed to be funny but you’ve been tricked and it’s just not. And then some expression from somebody’s weird heart comes through and you have to deal with that like it’s serious even though you have nothing serious to say especially when you are in a group and you want to run instead of talk.

I went to the woods...

An excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

The Run Up

Absolutely no way ever, allowing singers to triple their 400 hundred ten million action on the court, number one, in the run-up you gave away 1.2 million, which was awesome when you figure what it’s like standing in front of a mountain, Zambia, Gondwana, the wide ranging gold element for a charity you simply can’t meet or get something in return, yes, I’ve been to the street outside the white house and the government may try to prove it, we’re looking at a low income charitable initiative talking to someone who is being paid to prevent 300,000 children from going to school does Zambia stand a chance? Special thanks to everyone who vultured the shit out of everything just to get the best things, if you want, you get to want, and wanting is wanting, is wanting the want for much more, oh yes, much much more wanting, you could want a train a car a magnet a chalupa a tragedy compendium a reporter to follow every place you go and if you could extract more than 76 million dollars then you could want more and more and what about speculating about the cheap birds that whisper in your ear with political muscle, trying to get the number one donor to some presidents and security men and maybe former mayors of cities, obviously very close to collecting money from poor coffee cups, the state of the union is cobbled together with old buckles and shit and some other fucked up stuff that has been earmarked for other shit.

Problem It Is

Problem it is beautiful,
it is, the felt,
the felt and the attempt other
problem which those observe usually,

perhaps are.
Those can use
other problem
always almost.

et. al.

And therefore all night you walked someone sufficiently opens the complete blood of shoes of the dry dock of snowbank of his et. al. Ones and the yeast river to steamheat of the room with the gate draws up the enormous suicide and the Grecian month tree and boiling which is cooked by the lamb of imagination where sort of his "et. al." ones cried. The complete onion and bad music of pushcarts makes the box sit down or the rear which ate food which digested the crab of the basis of the mud of the river of Bowery is put in place ahead of the wartime of the month it should cover, with love depending upon opium is blue, bottom of the floodlight. The decision of the large main thing where so it makes with darkness of the bridge which breathes at the cliff bank of the apartment of Hudson, under being small. Had it with the hat of the 6th floor of Harlem? The attic which does the rose to his et. al. ones? The roll during the yellow morning when you surround the sky where flame has been attached being shaken, the pancake of thin where it runs and theology of wooden framework of the orange lathe which you write, you cooked the tail of a lung, central feet of an animal which rots and it has dreams, has a meal of corn, roof of the watch which you threw apparently always successfully in 10 spell. All night the pure plant boundary disordered language ream which sank monopolized ones in order to throw the ticket eternal for outside time in order to pursue an egg under the meat track/truck is high is the wrist 3 which and eye the clock head. Next, everyday opened, it cut, you abandoned, it was forced, the antique. The house you think of the senior person where it reached with the taxi which is drunk by the action which is the absolute actual responsibility where it fell down. Really? And method of the sonorous healthy steel iron regiment of the tanked-up nitroglycerin point scream and announcement and being unlucky with Madison of poetry whose God is heavy main line. The lime bridge which it brews in order to clothe the flannel of the innocent person who lucid edition mustard gas gust is done to happen this. It jumped, was confused to free beer where there is an unknown, which does to walking and sings the window outside the Chinatown soup tunnel and his et. al. One balances and has forgotten living, or get off and burn slurp and cry to open those it increases: the illusion of firetrucks? Wastefulness of the German jazz which is completed with sort of the slurping crying where you see, fall outside the window of the subway, jumps with impure Passaic, black, dances? It jumps anywhere? Class of wine of grape which was broken by 30 age of record homesick Europe did and groaned and the skin with in order to throw the groan voice which was broken in his et. al. The washroom of the blood, sound of voice in order to participate the ear and enormous steam gust as for seventy-two time crosscountry me had in range of vision and how discover drove high, in order mutually barreled traveling the lonely watch of the jail of hotrod-Golgotha, blow the fact that the whistle is blown under the past highway Birmingham jazz incarnation and to be or as for him there is a range of vision which discovers eternity in range of vision. Who, who navigates, does Denver, which dies, arrive, being Denver, reach to Denver? It returned? Waiting, it reaches, end Denver which was seen and reaches in order to consider from method and time Denver of discovery, finally knows crosses, and Denver now is lonesome, as for her hero where the quiet knee cathedral falls down? You saw in order to pray rescue because of each other, the hair to mind second illuminated the light/write and the chest, in.

The Beauty Of Things

The beauty of things
is that they usually
look, feel,
smell and taste

like other things.
They almost always
do the work
of other things.

Imagined Midnights

Who told the moon to come out?

Was it the hands of the fountain,
So outstretched they couldn’t be anything but lonely?

Was it the sigh of the owl,
Rounding the treetops in vagabond sadness?

It was the high, cold pines, who,
Uninterested, made the whole sky jealous.

I Dreamt Of You, My Bearded Professor

for Carey Harrison

In Dharamsala, India, where Avolokitesvara sells T-shirts and incense,
I walked up a little mountainside every day for a week,
Sat for a while with my meditation pals,
Picked stones out of rice,
And watched monks and monkeys shout at each other.

Two times that week I dreamt of you.
I can’t remember the first dream at all.
But in the second, we clasped hands and danced together in a huge ballroom.
Spinning around and around,
Women in beaded dresses and men in tuxedos became a wallpapery blur.

We had yellow Buddha robes on.
You morphed into Brando,
I into Pacino.
Godfathers One and Two,
Of no soul.

5.06 AM (Every Stranger's Eyes)

by Roger Waters



[Waitress:] "Hello, you wanna cup of coffee?"
[Customers:] "Heh, Turn that fucking juke box down
You want to turn down that juke box....loud in here"
[Waitress:] "I'm sorry, would you like a cup of coffee?
Ok, you take cream and sugar? Sure."

In truck stops and hamburger joints
In Cadillac limousines
In the company of has-beens
And bent-backs
And sleeping forms on pavement steps
In libraries and railway stations
In books and banks
In the pages of history
In suicidal cavalry attacks
I recognise...
Myself in every stranger's eyes

And in wheelchairs by monuments
Under tube trains and commuter accidents
In council care and county courts
At Easter fairs and sea-side resorts
In drawing rooms and city morgues
In award winning photographs
Of life rafts on the China seas
In transit camps, under arc lamps
On unloading ramps
In faces blurred by rubber stamps
I recognise...
Myself in every stranger's eyes

And now, from where I stand
Upon this hill
I plundered from the pool
I look around
I search the skies
I shade my eyes
So nearly blind
And I see signs of half remembered days
I hear bells that chime in strange familiar ways
I recognise...
The hope you kindle in your eyes

It's oh so easy now
As we lie here in the dark
Nothing interferes, it's obvious
How to beat the tears
That threaten to snuff out
The spark of our love

Saguaro, Bud, I'm afraid
If you don't bloom soon
My heart will bust.

Gone With The Mind

“Bugged the flesh and bugged the mind
and bugged the scene between.”

Some folks think I’m lonely,
Or sad in my little room,
But breathing keeps me warmly,
When I’m sitting in the gloom.

I stand in friendless alleyways,
Waiting for a dream,
I banjo dusty crossroads,
Howling at the scene.

I blow at tumbled weeds,
And ring the lonesome bell,
And rock my onlyness back to sleep,
On wide green ocean swells.

I see myself a sailor,
Tossed on endless tongues,
Groaning in the darkness,
Breath beating at my lungs.

It’s tough to have to love things,
And tougher still to leave,
Since time’s a flick of batwings,
And death’s a heartless heave.

I wish the world a pile of love,
From my dopey tarnished heart,
May children play in sainted lands,
May lovers never part.

But truth is hard and kicks the head,
No matter what I say,
And kids and dogs and seas of green,
All must fade away.


Click to hear this poem.

Résumé Of Friends And Rites

Ben Cramer. Blond Indiana madman. Six foot four in the shade. Size sixteen shoes. Quiet genius. Won’t buy products that appear on TV. Sees humanity as an experiment. All the thoughts of civilization swimming in his blue blue eyes. Asks without fear: If you had a choice, how would you go out? Rural North Carolina Rite: Down by the train tracks, we drink cokes and watch freights go by. Ben picks me up by the waist and flings me at a coal car. I grab a handle and my legs are almost cut off. Finally I swing myself onto the beast. Ben jumps on, laughs at my gangly legs dangling. We ride a hundred miles into cowfields and clover. Watch the crazy sun rise over the steaming south. I jump off and hitch a ride home. Cramer keeps going. Calls me from Seattle.

Buck Schall. Sits for hours in zazen. Keeps head shaved. Speaks in koans. With his camera, documents dissolution. Photographs fire. Writes backwards and upside down. Tells me not to wonder what he’s thinking, to follow my own breath to safety. 400 Horsepower Pontiac Rite: Buck drives me into the Utah desert at a hundred miles an hour. Turns off the road, straight into the brush. Away from all human traces. Sits me down on a rock. Shuts his eyes and speaks. You got to get to where you can’t smell people. You can’t get quiet unless you sit. Are you listening?

Jann O’Mara. Shining black hair, sharp green eyes, animal grin. Lithe runner’s legs, quick painter’s hands. Paints beetles. Takes me home when I’m a wandering scribbler dwelling in black clouds. Shows me her paintings, what a disciplined mind can do. Speaks to me in perfect Italian. I don’t get the words, but understand. Desert Storm Rite: During Gulf War One, takes me up on her roof. Open air privacy. We remove some clothes to make it interesting. Photographs me doing handstands on the ledge. She begins to cry. If there’s a draft, promise me you’ll go to South America. Holds my head in her hands. There are words in here that have to come out. Don’t lose them in that shit war.

Manfred DeMateo. Aikido wizard. Hispanic kid in Bruce Lee’s body. Thundering voice, shrill laughter. Dreams often of dead father. Like me, a mountain roamer. Communion Rite: Zinging on LSD, Manny goes into my kitchen, takes a watermelon out of the fridge, finds a meat cleaver. Howling and dancing, spins in the air around the blade. Jumping and shouting. Nothing to lose but his arms, hands, eyes. I’m afraid to look in the clanging kitchen. After an hour, quiet. Manny is naked, sweating over a table full of pink pyramids, finely chopped. Panting laughter. Take, eat! This is the work of my body! We fall to, sucking down melonflesh, spitting pits, cool sweet crunch crisp in our cerebellums, eyes wide with impossible flavor.

Another Version of "Father Death Blues"

Here's a link to another, earlier version of "Father Death Blues." It's from 1976 and has lots more musical and polyvocal accompaniment.

Can we remember to "continue our celebration," no matter what happens?

Ginsberg's "Father Death Blues"

I b'lieve this was recorded round 1996 or 1997, near Ginsberg's death:

Hon jyst i mewn! (7)

On one occasion, Ben got a call from a rambler.

Hon jyst i mewn! (6)

Here's an insight I had whilst calling Ben Cramer.

Come Back Masking

In midst of all, this busted hovel, the temperate nature of x, smooth mendicancy. When it's then, we’ll go toward fine bodies of water, burglarize lonely and sanguine, busting chops like a long day: mines, rapid skies and hunting movements. My chemicals induce Guilt in volts, in hindsight perhaps, or feelers, as of an old bug found by some pathtaker. Free of copying, of hankering distractions, wheels bop some in-between space.

The ship traverses the map. An older kid makes games, vagabundos, telemetry. Nobody stops him. Planet lumps once more = the way I’m thinking.

In arm strength, come back masking. And when we slowly meet again, there’ll be bones, rattling like old bones, in a can. I wait for you, bathtub my robed fingers, kneeling. My wanting rides the night.

A tang of heavy knife freezes me in a tide. You.

What Stays?

written for and read at the wedding ceremony of Alfredo and Rayne Mathew, Summer 2005

I.

Breath in our booming lungs and heartgongs beating away,
Lives of redwoods and blueberry bushes and humans flashing by
As we spin in a rush and tumble over this delicate,
Durable, thundering sphere of water and air, flesh and stone.

What stays? What lasts? What is passed on?

Inhale the moment, exhale the moment,
This blissful, terminal, eternal press of moment after moment,
Faces in the crowd, drops on the dunegrass in the morning,
Rain in afternoon tidepools, orange clouds at sundown.

What stays? What lasts? What is passed on?

Today you will hold your lover’s hand
While rivers and tides roll in the wind.
Tonight you will hold hands and dance a samba
And stars in their ever-widening orbits will dance.

What will stay? What can last? What is passed on?

In every human moment, at the crack of the homerun bat,
In the millisecond that the camera shutters,
Comets in deep space slowly dissolve, bright in the void,
And the Himalayas are growing, and the Appalachias are crumbling…

What could you make that stays? What could you build that lasts? What could you pass on?

II.

There is one thing, the only thing,
That stays,
Though the cities we now make our lives in
Will one day sleep under oceans and sand.

As you hold your lover’s hand,
Dance that samba with stars reeling above you,
With every wild-eyed grin
And tap of your feet
And each thrum of your corazón
A great vibration of love goes forth,
To the unknown end of the universe…

And every moment that our hearts are full of that brightness
We build the real world.
For, even as the roots of roadside flowers
Dissolve the cement along the highway,
The rays of love are unbending and unbreakable.

We stand and sit and dance and kiss
In the eternal living history
Of all the love that ever emerged
From everyone’s blessed heart...and we pass it on...
And we use it to learn and to live and to love one another.

III.

So dance in the light of the dusk or the dawn,
And kiss in the kitchen with no clothing on,
And run in the ocean and roll in the hay,
And start revolutions that say, “Love is the Way.”

Your Dante’s and Virgil’s, Sappho’s and Rodin’s,
Have done what they could to make themselves last.
And in the unceasing rush of world cycles,
Their creations appear and flicker out
Like lights from summer fireflies.

And so our best strategy,
Now, and millennia from now,
Is to tune in to the unwavering wavelength,
Keep our arms and hearts open on the ride—
All the time knowing that when we gong with cariño
We shake the stars,
For ever and ever,
And love is what stays.

Love In The Asylum

by Dylan Thomas

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.