Archives Vol. 6 (2009)

Volume 6, Issue 13

2009-11-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

detail from Baby -- Cesar Ivan

--"Love is the extremely difficult realization
that something other than oneself is real."
Anonymous--

Unkle

421 Victims to Date

Walking Poem

The corpse metaphorically lives on

to taunt the living

while Buddha laughs at the pickled body in a box.

Empty gin bottle under the juniper...

Zen bottle is what we put in

without pouring.

We think love is outside ourselves

and say to the other,

"Figure me out and love me anyway.

Adjust your illusion to suit mine."

We put the burden on the dream

and then the dreamer.

While Buddha laughs at our blindness

and games

we laugh at his silly laugh

and feel better.

But we still don't see...

the body in the bottle or pickled box

or juniper zen stopper

beyond dreams.

Belinda Subraman

the tibetan book

in tibet in a book it is written in part
after centuries of silent observation
lifetimes given over to prayer and
contemplation of spiritual necessity
upon reflection on the mysteries of life
the journey of death itself is just that

a mysterious journey of epic proportions
the true accomplishments of life fulfilled
the final reward for a lifetime of toil and
those of us left behind must learn to
accept our loss by accepting their gain
in tibet in a book in part it is written

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite So Personal and Irregular Diary

8th and pearl -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 12

2009-09-08T01:30:00.000-07:00

dream keeper -- amy kohut, zzbaggins

--"Have the courage to live.
Anyone can die."
Robert Cody--

Moby

419 Victims to Date

In memory
of
George Edward Summers

Still Calling for Submissions

Aging

It would be nice to be
philosophical about it all--
the way the light hits the trees
or is it the way the trees diffuse the light?

Perspectives can only be seen
from a distance, looking back,
and then it's what angle
or metaphor one employs.
Light may be love.
Trees may be our minds.

Decades give, haunt and take away
until all we have is
a radiant, rich torture,
shadows to study,
smiles from nowhere
or stares,
until all we have
is how the light hits the trees
or how the trees diffuse the light.

(from Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights)

Belinda Subraman

father and son

and so i carry you this last time
to your exhausted bed of death
where words of hope faith fear
lock our eyes in a final salute
silent thoughts and old wishes
driving us to a familiar silence
no need to speak these words
the private ones never once
uttered in our lifetime together

(previously published in Ebb and Flow, Sketchbook and Poetry Victims)

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite so Personal and Irregular Diary

loving and dying -- amy kohut, zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 11

2009-08-04T01:57:00.000-07:00

bvispo13 -- Ed Baker

--"I live now and only now, and I will do
what I want to do this moment and
not what I decided was best
for me yesterday."
Hugh Prather --

Stevie Hyper D & Aphrodite

415 Victims to Date

Calling for Submissions

Recession

To stimulate the economy one has to spend,

the economist on TV, said looking directly at

me. Contemplating this I went for a walk, and

found on the road side a tiny mouse, on its

back pink feet in air, pointed snout, mouth

open showing cute little teeth; thought it was

dead picked it up, in my hand it came alive it

had only been stunned by rain. Roman soldiers

used to eat deep fried mice as snacks- must

have been lots of mice back then- This scene

that could have brought tears to the eyes of

harp playing angels, had been observed by

a craven raven in a carob tree, as I walked off

it swooped. Later that day I drove into town

moved the economy and bought a copy pen.

Oskar Hansen

ignoring history

we choose to do this
as a society
as a race
we clamber for bread
and circuses like romans
already corrupted
lounging in our spas
barking orders
throwing undesirables
to the lions because
we dont really know why
but we do it anyway
we live for it somehow
it comforts us
to wield this power
like crafty would be gods
creating chance
and circumstances
handing out candy
lording over life and death

J.A. Spahr-Summers

"What have the Romans ever done for us?"

ZZ Baggins Not Quite so Personal and Irregular Diary

bite me -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 10

2009-07-29T03:10:00.000-07:00

lazarus the tree -- amy kohut, zzbaggins

--“Anyone who lives within their means
suffers from lack of imagination.”
Oscar Wilde--

The Beatles

415 Victims to Date

Calling for Submissions

Instinct

It's the knowing before we know,
the doing before we think,
the dance steps we learned in the womb.
And it doesn't always make sense.
That's why we laugh when it hurts,
why we flinch for thunderclaps,
why children know things are good just because they're beautiful.

You walked into my life like a premonition of April.
Love at first sight is a survival instinct,
and your first glance held me like a newborn's grip:
tiny, and amazingly strong.
Two weeks later you pinned me against a public bathroom sink,
and that first kiss was like sucking a wasp from an orchid,
like a swig of cobra blood warm in my belly.
Stop asking me why I love you.
I have no idea. Call it a hunch.
Call it something in my guts; I never had to learn it
and I can barely name it
but it's been with me since my first word.
My first word, by the way, was "good."

Because you're more than a bad habit;
habits you can unlearn. I don't know why
I used to wake up with my fists balled into rocks,
why touching my ear in my sleep made me strike out drowning,
but I remember how I was like a soldier
reaching across the bed for my rifle,
and I found you
and I stopped doing that
because you threatened to kick my ass.
Because you took my tiny hand in yours like a crossing guard
and led me back to sleep.
No one taught you how to do that.

You've got me knee-deep in delirium.
You've got me making catcalls at sunsets, screaming,
Yeah baby, come over here and love me.
And when the sky is tight-lipped and stoic
like a guard at Buckingham Palace
I want to smother its face with kisses like some drunk tourist,
because I am,
because I've been sipping your neck while you sleep
and I'm a stranger anywhere but in your arms.

And sometimes we're mean,
and sometimes we fight like a carnage of scissors,
but in the morning, when we sweep the spent ammunition
from the corners of our eyes,
I remember that all of our sorrows come from ignoring
our best instincts,
that we were born knowing what is beautiful and we are it,
and I would scrimshaw your name on my bones
to remind me that only this matters
and everything else is something shoddy
I built before I met you.

Let's strip down
to just the perfect birdhouse.
Loving you is an animal born with its eyes open,
and sometimes being animal makes me thoughtless.
But I hope I can always love you without thinking either,
hope I can always come back to this instinct,
like a tree that shakes off the storm
and returns to where it never left:
my open field,
my April place.

Christian Drake

ZZ Baggins Not Quite so Personal and Irregular Diary

che jaque -- amy kohut, zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 9

2009-07-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

--"When once you have tasted flight,
you will forever walk the earth
with your eyes turned skyward,
for there you have been,
and there you will always long to return."
Anonymous--

Creedence Clearwater Revival

416 Victims to Date

it was forty years ago today...

top this television moment

i sat at my desk in school

like all the others

gorging on the greatness of it all

on this spectacle of vertical

liftoff from the earth

this reaching beyond ourselves

this voyage of all mankind

happening before our very eyes

we were mesmerized

by the seduction of the beast

the saturn five series rocket

the behemoth we

held our breath we

held on to each other we

were speechless in

fact in awe of it

of everything

every one of us

everyone wanting

to cheer out loud oh

cmon lets light this candle

lets do this and

lets do the other thing

lets soar to the stars

and beyond

lets seize the glory

we fucking rock

watch us walk

on the moon

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite So Personal And Irregular Diary

to the moon -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 8

2009-07-08T00:07:00.001-07:00

Everything Else #4 -- Sheng Wen Lo

--"First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do."

Epictetus--

Paul Simon
Ladysmith Black Mambazo

416 Victims to Date

Speaking of Bugs Issue

television audio text:

up to two to four weeks considering the season

ends two weeks

on and off adding Lipitor may help

often to leave behind as well and that is a sense

of security

quality and reliability

and then, then I, I lost her

that's Homer Simpson sir

_ we're now into _

actually right around here's

(accent)ma la litore

lanes of traffic blocked off here

(clapping)if finances are up there you've

(accent indistinguished)

television audio text are the transcriptions of audio recorded while the dial of an analog telvision was rotated through the UHF and VHF channels.

Edward Wells II

recombinant audio text:

on if indistinguished may indistinguished accent 's the Simpson blocked indistinguished lanes

often if may adding Lipitor off help

actually into as off 've two and here 's a adding up Homer

traffic and litore

if around ( around that _ that ends ,

there blocked traffic finances security

_ that 've up of )

off right now that leave

, Simpson , ma la traffic

weeks up litore adding often her

_ Simpson _ then quality is off you here are

( clapping _ two (

recombinant audio text are the results of classifying the words of the television audio text and then using those vocabularies in the computer program Random Verse Lab version 1.0b that chooses a random word of a specific classification to fill a field in a template. The templates were created to correspond with the television audio text transcriptions.

Edward Wells II

Anyplace worth being is a pain in the ass to get to

adventure -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 7

2009-06-10T01:23:00.000-07:00

4 of Cups -- Linda Kent

--"It's really beautiful how I want happiness"
Sarah Morgan--

The Wiseguys

415 Victims to Date

This is not to be missed

Dementia

Who will stand with me?

Who will remember

the things I have forgotten?

All the beautiful and terrible things?

The city frightens me.

I feel the harsh light

when I go outside. I live in fear,
quite the opposite from my

daring days when
I was a different person.

There are cracks in my foundation

and my voice lacks strength.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

my compass

lies broken on the floor like a wine glass shattered tossed

into the fireplace as if in celebration of something i cannot

comprehend the cold needle is stuck due west north west

not magnetic north where i want to explore the wilderness

(previously published in Unlikely 2.0)

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite So Personal and Irregular Diary

tree of life -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 6

2009-05-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

all you think about is sex -- ed baker

--"Lennon mixed some profound perspective with
some brilliant weed. He made statements that made
people uncomfortable and frightened
their small minds."
Candy Tothill--

--"For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart.
It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul."
Judy Garland--

John Lee Hooker

411 Victims to Date

Each of Us

Each of us a spider

spinning our own web,

each in our own purpose

and its own design.

Most spin to catch prey,

some to catch dreams.

Many spin in the dark places

where they are safe from harm.

The takers of risks

spin on garden paths

where creatures may walk

and, unknowing, destroy them.

But it is there

that the sun shines

and turns the dew

to diamonds.

(from The Poems of Dorien Grey, GLB Publishers)

Dorien Grey

you never give me your money

you give me blue

you give me yellow

and red

and green

and black

all kinds of grey

and all the other mysterious

and cupreous colours of the rainbow

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite so Personal and Irregular Diary

hand it over -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 5

2009-04-16T00:13:00.001-07:00

down down in the dirty -- amy kohut, zzbaggins

--"Treat people as if they are what they ought to be
and you help them to become what
they are capable of being."
Goethe--

The Waifs

411 Victims Today

In memory of Jerald Dietz
Eddie Two-Rivers
and
Russell McKlayer

Codebreaker

I never knew the name Alan Turing,
but I touch his genius every day
under my fingertips.
Alan Turing: mathematician, cryptologist.
At age 30 he saved a world which he owed nothing
when he broke the mechanized Nazi war code
called Enigma. He did it by building an opposite machine,
a machine the size of a bedroom
that cleaved the world neatly into two parts:
black and white, on and off, the jungle of language
arranged into an electric garden of ones and zeroes;
he invented the computer.
Alan Turing: inventor, codebreaker,
unabashed homosexual
in a time when England still outlawed his kind,
so he loved as only a fugitive can love:
quickly,
passionately,
and quietly, with an ear to the door for boot steps.
Handsome, but constantly disheveled,
he lived in a cave of numbers,
a refugee from a world that had no word for him
in it's pathetic language, but he surrendered to the one code
he couldn't break: love.
Love couldn't be encrypted or made simpler.
Love had no meaning but itself.

The police had no problem getting his confession;
he acted as if he were innocent of a crime. Alan Turing:
war hero, sexual deviant,
sentenced by the state to chemical castration.
The estrogen forced breasts to swell under his paper gown,
punished whatever flesh still called itself a man.
One morning, he soaked an apple in cyanide, took a few bites,
and let it fall.
Maybe he was trying to say something about forbidden fruit,
maybe about knowledge.
It was 1954.

Dear Alan,
I touch your genius every day under my fingertips,
even as I type this. But I would sabotage
every machine you ever imagined
for a handful of your shoulder. You idiot;
you perfected a binary world, and it crucified you.
These people- they still believe that things are good or evil,
right or wrong, man or woman. My Enigma,
there are boys with breasts who bleed to death in parking lots
for being undefinable.
There are still clinics in church basements
where they try to convert gay children
with the vengeful god of electricity,
switched on and off, on and off.

Codebreaker, find me in that place between.
Tonight, I will not be straight
and you will not be anything but human.
I want to kiss your improbable breasts.
Your ghost is always so busy in the circuits of the world;
Hush, while I smooth your eyebrows.
There is a kind of love
that no law have ever discovered,
and I will live there with you.
There is a love so simple
it cannot be deciphered.
It is unbreakable.

Christian Drake

at this weekends folk festival

nestled at the foot of the rockies
just after the flurry of rainfall ends
we listen to guy clark
we listen to the waifs
as the red sun goes down
we stand at the creek
watching children climb the canyon wall
secretly we worry that they will slide back down
we watch them splashing around
arms full of stones and hope
theyre building
dams and little stories in the sand
you might think what a strange place
to find a miniature replica of stonehenge
water trickling through and around it
so this is my life back in the mountains
back home again where we clap and
we clap and we cheer for kris kristofferson
underneath the big dipper
and orion
and we understand how lucky we are

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite so Personal and Irregular Diary

down in the dirty -- amy kohut, zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 4

2009-04-09T02:50:00.000-07:00

icy stream -- Michael A. Crowley

--"Hope is an agreeable thirst"
Paula McLain--

Leonard Cohen

412 Victims to Date

Demands from a Selfish Lover

write a love letter
on birch bark
with a hawk's flight feather quill
and corn poppy ink

find an ancient alchemy book
collect the morning dew
turn it into aquamarines, emeralds
garnets, sapphires
leave it on my doorstep,
wrapped in silk
you have spun yourself

gather robins and doves
to serenade me as i fall asleep
then perform an aubade when i wake

and when i wake,
on a day when the sky is bluest blue
arrange the clouds
to spell out our names
entwined

do something about that time-space continuum thing
turn back time
then fast foreword
then return to now
like a ride, you see?
just for us
from you, to me

Cindy Stell

seventeen broken things

broken dreams

broken rules

broken bottles

broken fingers

broken pictures

broken laws

broken beliefs

broken promises

broken wings

broken glasses

broken bowls

broken resolve

broken records

broken plates

broken windows

broken locks

broken deals

broken hearted

broken things

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite so Personal and Irregular Diary

sustenance -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 3

2009-03-14T01:40:00.000-07:00

Clouds my mind -- Ed Baker

--"Writer's aren't exactly people...
they're a whole lot of people
trying to be one person"
F. Scott Fitzgerald--

Brains

412 Victims to Date

close your eyes

we are not math
we are not red shoes
and the replacement
of the wide screen light bulb
burning at life

as if life were wet matchsticks
stapled deliberately and w/out accuracy
to your old roommate's dead couch

we are not the stars that fall
asleep thinking about the premature
cancellation of some of our most favorite
tv shows like:

Firefly
and Firefly
and generally just
Firefly

we are not your favorite
line from that one Tom Petty song
or the sum total of all of our
computer generated
spam porn related vs. non-spam porn related
myspace friends
lodged together

or the long, caucus lines of last night
that refused to let us through the election year door
on account of the fact that you are a libertarian

whatever that is

and I in the past have previously registered
as unaffiliated

we are none of these things
and we are not many
of the other things that we
say we are too

we are this love
that smells like the crotch
of a sleepy grizzly bear

we are the kitchen table
that has just slipped its pancakes
inside the warm 'I can't believe it's not butter' tub
of another late afternoon breakfast fuck show

and other postscripts to
the preface to another
30,000 word
paleon-togic type
illegible day

Rob Geisen

polythene pam

perhaps parading
pleasantly plush
popular pretty
perfectly purple
practically painted on
pricey petite
polythene pants
pausing plausibly
playfully plum
purposely pensive
potentially preoccupied
partly pretending and
plenty proud

J.A. Spahr-Summers

ZZ Baggins Not Quite so Personal and Irregular Diary

purposes -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 2

2009-02-25T01:09:00.001-08:00

re-inventing the wheel -- amy kohut, zzbaggins

--"Sadness is but a wall between two gardens"
Khalil Gibran--

Calling for Submissions

Kylie Minogue

417 Victims to Date

HOW I LIVE

and so we live, looking…
(William Carlos Williams)

I’m looking up to things these days
because things themselves are looking up
At least it looks like that.

I’m looking around, a long, slow look,
and looking things up, then looking
over them as well as into them.

I’m looking back, taking a backward glance,
looking over my shoulder, just
looking out for things in general.

Sometimes I look through someone else’s eyes.
Sometimes I look around me,
looking at what I’ve done.

I’m looking forward to looking after things,
looking for whatever I can find and,
as I said, it looks like things are looking up.

Robert King


this also is vanity

applying my mind to wisdom madness and folly
there is nothing new to be gained under the sun
there is nothing new to be learned and honored
nothing that i have not already loved and lost to
the business that god has given to sons of man

J.A. Spahr-Summers


Blah, blah, blah...
ZZ Baggins Not so Personal and Irregular Diary

eternity -- zzbaggins

Volume 6, Issue 1

2009-02-14T01:45:00.000-08:00

niyakutanda -- zzbaggins

--"love is not love that alters when it alteration finds"
shakespeare--

Happy Valentine's Day

parov stelar

418 victims to date

here are poems for you...

kritya
kritya
media cake
the houston literary review
sketchbook

(and some things here)
green tangerines

and here's more scattered throughout...

poetry victims

and here we are together...

unlikely stories
unlikely stories

and here's my thoughts...

diary

here's the thing!

got to get you into my life

all that i am is yours my dream
all that i have is yours my history
all that i want is yours my hope
all that i love is yours my truth

j.a.spahr-summers

ninapenda wewe -- zzbaggins