“Beer-crazed elephants face execution”

Silly writing endevors with jessie.

it was cold. jud tried to focus on the clouds of breath gathering in spurts around his tusks. he couldn’t get his eyes to work together. “focus” he said, in a voice that sounded like he was talking through a dirty sock. the ivory danced with the rolling vapor, doubling, tripling, returning. he let out another breath. it turned around to laugh at him before sliding to the other side of the room.

jud tried to remember where he was.

…

“this should do the trick,” said the zookeeper with a tight-lipped smile. “stupid elephants.”

the zoo keepers had wanted to get rid of the elephants for as long as anyone could remember. the elephants were so much work. the sheer size of their shit was enough to merit an execution. the zoo was going broke from the weight of twelve elephants. and they never came out to see the crowds, the whole lot of them staying in their rooms all day, reading, remembering things, planning. the zoo keepers didn’t know what the elephants were fixing to do, but they knew it was something. and they knew it would be big.

the zoo keepers had tried everything. they stopped giving them food (oh, the money they had saved in those few days!). the elephants simply ate through the walls. they didn’t plan on going anywhere – they were content to read and remember and plan, and have zoo keepers clean up their shit and not go outside to ever see the people and give them what they paid for. it’s just that they got hungry. so they ate through the monkey’s walls as well. and the penguin’s. and the snakes. twelve full elephants and a zoo with no walls.

the zoo keepers tried not cleaning up the elephant’s giant shit anymore. that was the only time that the elephants ever went outside. when they picked up their shit and threw it at the people.

there had been one hundred attempts to execute the elephants. all of them ended with the elephants back in their rooms, reading, remembering, planning, holding one hundred grudges.

it was the newest zookeeper, the youngest, the smallest, that had come up with the idea. he was just out of college. “beer makes people stupid,” he said. “it makes them forget.” maybe, just maybe, it would have the same effect on elephants.

…

paco didn’t care anymore. “toss me another toña, fool!” he yelled to whoever might hear him. it flew into his left cheek just when he’d swung his head to the right. he fished for it, snapped it open, lifted it to his mouth and slurped the spray while mopping up the falling droplets with his trunk. “e hud ‘nuff… ew hea meh?” he said, swaying, while trying to drain the rest of the can. finally, he crushed it with his limp, flapping trunk and shoved the entire thing down his throat with a burp.

the room looked like it had been ransacked by a dozen beer-crazed elephants.

it had.

…

the smallest zookeeper was gathering up his courage to peek through the window of the freezer. it was where they kept the fish. what the whales ate. the freezer was full to the brim of fish; the whales had been executed years ago. today, it was also full of elephants.

…

something was leaning on fran. she started. her stomach turned over once. twice. then it just kept on rolling. she moaned and lifted one flat, stub-toed foot to her head. with the other she laid a slap on the stiff weight of flesh next to her.

“what happened?” she said to the lump.

the lump rolled over and puked in her lap before falling limp. it felt warm. fran heaved. fran fought to get up onto her four cold legs, and screamed.

eleven frozen elephants, 678 empty beer cans and 48 bottles of tequila were scattered in the freezer.
 
“how did we get in here?” fran asked the incoherent room.

outside, the smallest zookeeper held a hand-written sign to the frosted window: “AND YOU SAY ELEPHANTS NEVER FORGET!”

…

later, a video was uncovered by someone in the monkey house. they laughed, screeching monkey laughs, at the stupid elephants.

in the video, the elephants were dancing. dancing with the zoo keepers. they had forgotten all one hundred grudges. “i love you man!” jud was screaming to the oldest zookeeper.

when most of the beer was gone, the zoo keepers suggested that they all head to a new bar, over by the penguin house, where the beers were kept colder than the elephants could ever imagine. the elephants thought it was a fine idea. “vamos old friends,” said paco.
 
the monkeys laughed. but they were next. what they didn’t know, was that the zoo keepers had grown tired of their laughing.

Life is no way to treat an animal

How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

I’ve been thinking about cynicism and poetry. It has to do with how we spend our time. (“we have all these instruments for slicing it up like a salami, clocks and calendars, and we name the slices as though we own them”) And what we notice when we get up and go outside.

According to the original cynics, all that you need to be happy is to get up, go outside, and search out where the hell the world hid its virtue. Not suffering is just a matter of finding value in what matters. I know that sounds redundant. It is. I suppose that’s poetry. 

To find value in what matters… tell me that you haven’t  intensely felt the difference. I don’t believe you. That’s poetry, too, I guess. 

Cynics today are pegged as cranky skeptics. This doesn’t surprise me. That the original cynics were compared to dogs doesn’t either. Both have a flat, ”yeah kinda” side to them. 

Let’s say that I’m a cynic. Each day I walk out my door, seeking virtue. Seeking happiness. Seeking value in a  proudly ignorant, surprisingly humorless, fantastically selfish, war-seeking world. It takes a poet, a hero – hell it takes a dog - not to return home convinced that virtue set sail for another, more deserving planet. 

Still, at times I leave the house. At times, I walk out into that same, infuriating world. And I see something beautiful. Not just that, though. That’s easy. But beautiful, in a way that kind of… matters.

In A Man Without a Country, 145 skimpily worded pages that took him five years to write, an 82 year-old Kurt Vonnegut said that there were only two things that made his life worth living: music and all the saints he had met, “who could be anywhere.”

Vonnegut was an original cynic, seeking virtue in a country where everything was pretty much crap.

“A sappy woman from Ypsilanti sent me a letter a few years back… She was about to have a baby – not mine – and she wanted to know if it was a bad thing to bring such a sweet and innocent creature into a world as bad as this one.

“Don’t do it! I wanted to tell her. It could be another George W. Bush or Lucrezia Borgia. The kid would be lucky to be born into a society where even the poor people are overweight but unlucky to be in one without a national health plan or decent public education for most, where lethal injection and warfare are forms of entertainment, and where it costs an arm and a leg to go to college. This would not be the case if the kid were a Canuck or Swede or Limey or Frog or Kraut. So either go on practicing safe sex or emigrate.

“But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile, for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere. By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.”

Decency in an indecent world. Tiny moments of perfect.

Sometimes language is evocative, and meaning is beside the point.  I mean that literally; it’s right beside it. The abstract is rendered. Moments when virtue either lives or dies are imprisoned and then freed. Breathed without giving a damn about logic, unless it’s the kind that is intensely human. Meaning is kicked to the side and only its entrails remain. Because logic – the inhuman kind – would tell you that virtue doesn’t stand a chance. Would tell you that there are no saints. Would tell you to stop going outside altogether.

In poetry, everything matters. Poetry is the stuff of entrails. That’s the point.

There is always some dispute about poems and what they are or what they should be. Modern cynics might say it doesn’t matter. Original cynics, I think, would say the same. My favorite is the Polish guy who thought it was either about two things finding one another other, or it was about a state of mind. Like most academic opposites, I think it’s both. Something that matters bumps up against something else that matters, giving spark to rage or joy. I know this from my state of mind, which suddenly gives a fantastically giant shit about something.

Virtue is either powerfully living or painfully dying, and I am its witness. I stumble upon entrails; I put meaning beside the point.

I want to go back to Vonnegut and why, at 82, music was one of two reasons for staying alive.

“That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today – jazz, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hop-hop, and on and on – is derived from the blues. 

“… The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country – an atrocity from which we can never fully recover – the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.”

Beating skepticism – not the cranky but the tragic kind that convinces us that we should probably stop reproducing – requires the faith of a cynic and the despair of a poet. It requires us to find and fight for something of value and then just flat-out refuse to watch it die yet again. It requires music. It assumes that we have felt the genuine value of something at least once in our life. So much so, that its death was our pain. Its life was our joy. Don’t say you haven’t felt it.

We still might not be happy. “Blues won’t drive depression clear out of the house,” after all, “but can drive it into the corners of any room.”

Farting around is the best way to find what matters. Farting around is serious business. Some people are experts in farting around, and I respect the shit out of them. You can be at the end of hope and still be farting. We’ve all heard music and met saints that remind us just how much all this farting and sniffing around matters. Let’s be cynics and skeptics and poets, and dogs.

Electronic communities are ok, despite what Vonnegut thought. But we need to also step outside, digging up virtue as it sinks into the ground. And when we come back here, like dancing animals to the keyboard, we need to fight for it.

Anyway, A Man Without a Country. Read it.

New York Times

disappear

what i love about crowds is anonymous. what i love about mornings is alone.

half-lit room. half-drunk coffee. chill on bare shoulders. mechanical washing of last night’s dishes; the morning demands nothing. tactical. silent.  no unresolved questions. there is, however, a fly beating its wings against the window. there is the low light emerging. there are my hands in front of me. there is you, there in the corner. there is you, before you notice me.

what i love about you is

 silent.                                                                                                                                                         

touch stutter

how.
how many times i.
how much i wanted to i.
how much i wanted but i.
how much i thought i could i.
how many times i.
thought that i would but then i.
was what wanted but i.
how many times i.
thought what i should have said i.

fuck it.

…

if she is old

if she is old.
will antiques fail to interest?

M. Ward / Chinese Translation

fully diggin this song at the moment.

v. the choice

searching is a rigid betrayal of intricate. a violation of love’s own lexis.

(or different)

so fated.
so lingered.
so ceased.
so accepted.
so disconnected.
so hid your knees again.
and waited.

she looked west along the water. as pink as the sky was soft.  her hat gliding on the wind, already too far off to try and catch it.

(smile)

iv. the hallelujah

“love is not a victory march
it’s a cold and lonely hallelujah.”

yes.

a man walks down a dirt road wearing a suit in the sun and carrying something that she can’t identify, cradled like a child. with lobbing glances, the women pass with drained expressions, pretending to be something other than what they feel.

on easter sunday, or any other day, a man tokes a fire in front of a stone cross, wearing a robe and a pompadour hat. he kisses her in her doorway, before riding away on his unicycle. she wakes, periodically, and realizes that she doesn’t look quite right in her old clothes. everything changes. she can’t help but hope that someday she’ll understand the words she has written; the songs she has danced to; the touch that made her, for a moment, forget.

and suddenly, a paint scar is a woven fabric, flapping above her cement ceiling. and although she forgot to throw water on the dust outside her window, three roses open on the patio. in the same way that she can still see the imprint of her sandals. and the dust is from esquintla and taxisco and denver and salcaja. and over it all is the dust from here, where she is standing. it is in her head, in her ears, caked in the small blonde hairs on her arms that he found so strange. she dances, only sometimes, and always carefully, and it is in her very shoes which at night she removes to hang above the three sleeping roses. when she walks off,  it is always barefoot.

leaving the dust behind.

iv. tatuaje

his smooth arms trap heat between her voice and the weight of morning air. liquid drops of snow float beneath the light, unnoticed.

a slow dusk; black pavement; a mid-morning dream. dust settles around objects but never beneath. she cleans quickly, methodically, again.

her dreams are made of ink to thick to turn under.

iii. la falta

contingency is nothing.
letters lounge passively on the table;
each day innate in its persistent record
that plays at the foot of whatever bed she
happens to be sleeping.

and if it is not her aridity
it is for another grain of dust to drop
that she is waiting.

a return flight in the fog; she waits
for the silent tears internal
that excite her anonymity. decides on
still gates of city buses; smiles that dust has,
for a moment, swept the streets of their intention.

at dusk she wills herself to be waiting still,
between afternoons, as if sleep could wash words from
her memory like the water that escapes between stones
on a slow, easy morning.

she dreams her dreams these dreams
while standing.