Bismi' llah!
Yours truly, dear readers, performed at The Cherry Street Brewing Company in Galesburg, Illinois, at the Slam! Poetry event hosted by Mark Kelly Smith of Chicago:
http://www.slampapi.com/I read "I laughed like a motherplunker that I was..." (rough word edited for the benefit of you minors and neopuritans). Got applause but the judges didn't rate it to high, not high enough for yours truly to get to the second round. But oh, it was fun!
Today, at Yahoo Answers, for Zachary and the reading audience, I wrote in answer to his question, "Is life too short to be reading?" I answered as follows:
I enjoy reading very much. Let me tell you, I also enjoy life. Reading good books, stories, poems, and articles has helped me very much to find my way in life, in the real world.
I have been a paperboy, served food at McDonald's, Subway, several restaurants, been a lifeguard, a nurses' aide or orderly, math tutor, French tutor, landscaper, day laborer, farm hand, migrant fruit picker, dishwasher, bus boy, bar back, gigolo, homeless hobo or "bum," convenience store clerk, artist's model, poet, free-lance writer, travel columnist, kept man, haberdashery sales clerk, music store clerk, historian, artist, performance artist, actor, radio dj, soldier, engineer, police dispatcher, systems engineer, construction worker, salvage engineer, and substitute teacher.
I can comprehend, read, speak, and write in Spanish, English, French, German, Russian, and Arabic. I enjoy good music, good food, good drink, and the most beautiful womyn. I am a father of a lovely lass and a strapping smart lad. I own a house in South Georgia and investments enough not to worry. I love life. And reading is one of the pleasures of life.
Rest assured, you, that learning to read helps to enhance your life experience. Trust me on this one. And I keep living, I keep enjoying la bonne vie, mon jeune homme.
Source(s):
http://www.cafegroundzero.blogspot.com... Am back in McHenry County. Hello all. Hello Wilma; if you happen to be reading this, please take it easy and do not be jealous please. Waste of time, dearie.
Okay. It's my birthday. Six and forty years old. For my birthday I worked, putting together rosettes for a dear lady who is the feline queen, so serene.
Now for some more pushups. Be right back.
___________________________
Aujour'dhui c'est mercredi, le 25 avril 2007. C'est temps de vous dire quelque chose autour de moi et mes copains:
Go along with my company's role in the war to win Iraq. I drove my lieutenant and managed our platoon's radio communications. Alpha Company 11th Engineers of the Third Infantry Division, we participated in the invasion and liberation of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
We also began the reconstruction, cleaning up wreckage, restoring electricity, clean water, sewer, and maintained security in the NE neighbourhoods including the banks of the Tigris and the market place of Adamiya.
I could have placed a request for a medical waiver, as I had before we went: flat feet, g.i. including acid reflux problems, tinnitis, chronic depression, and attention deficit. Oh, and very very bad eyesight. I wear coke bottle lenses. But I chose to accept what we had to do and go along and do what I can.
I carried a rifle equipped with a grenade launcher. We carried many many many number of NATO standard 7.76 mm rounds, a full complement of grenades, and more which I can't type here or I'd have to do something drastic I would rather not write out. (lol). Anyway, we were ambushed twice, fought three battles, and secured the government neighbourhood of Baghdad including the Olympic Village.
I'm glad to be back. Thank G-d almighty.
Am starting again at sunrise Wednesday, while a cool April rain comforts earth again.
A prayer for those experiencing sickness or hardship:
Be brave, have faith, never give up hope. Keep a stiff upper lip, don't whine, move out bravely to the light, always fighting your good fight.
*Friday, 20th April 2007.* Mum is now in a nursing home, close to my father's mother's old house, where mine uncle now lives. Also not far from "the old Blue House," and the mansion my sister and her hoity toity uppity husband bought a year ago, on the broad street north.
Not talking much at all, I regret to say. Doesn't have the use of her left side.
Dad's busy "decluttering" today with the help of a lovely CNA named Darlene. Oh yes, names are changed to protect the not guilty(?). Am in the Jailsburg Pubic Library right now, digesting a meal of buffalo fish and pizza dough sticks got at the Redemption Mission cross from Bi-Lo's.
Didn't sleep at all last night. Passed part of the night at the old Narrowpeak Hotel restaurant cross from the Round Square, and then listening in on the predawn koffee klatch at the Old Polack's Doughnut Dinette.
Got to hear some of the small businessmen and Republicans grouse about the recent elections and municipal politics.
14th of Fourth Month, XXVII
Hullo hallo hello:
How r u dear reader?
Hello how r u?
Hi!
Yes, I am the café ground Zer0--
Je suis qui vous écoute et qui vous regarde.
Je suis il qui vous attend.
Je suis l'homme qui reste en attendant vous autres, pour s'aggrouper ensemble et suiver le chemin vers le futur.
Je vous éspère.
---- jean pierre
Friday the Thirteenth XXVII
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, animals and animal lovers, allow me to present to you this evening the featured poem of café's page:
LEILA, WHO STOLE MY MOTHER BLESSèd LOVE, AND CRUSH'D IT LIKE A TOAD on a MIDNIGHT ASPHALT ROAD IN SEPTEMBER
Leila, I loved you lightly,
always liking only your luscious lips
and loose light lustrous locks.
Leila, I loved you with lunacy,
laughing loftily, loving lustily,
as we looped the loop
and shot the hoop
rewriting the very Kama Sutra.
Leila, you low-down liar!
You went out and lay down with another.
You larked and parked in darkened cars,
while I studied all night long,
at libraries and certain bars,
hoped some day to be the writer
who would not say he'd excite her,
as he remembered studying
to be a lawyer or a priest.
Leila, you lecherous lesbian,
why didn't you just TELL me the truth,
of who you really were or thought
you just might be?
You left me lonely,
lying on lustrous lava,
cold as a clock that stopped tick-tock-
ing in the last lounge left for lizards
who licked salt and lime lysergic drinks.
Lynx, you left me fixing sinks
when I dropped out of law school,
I couldn't cogitate worth a sheet
of legal yellow;
so I got mellow,
and called you, "Hello?
Leila it's I who loves you muskilly,
and wonders lustilly,
longing, lying left alone,
(
lustilly)...
You did the sane thing,
and laughed while unseen,
I lugged out my inner demons
with the lyrical moor lemurs
who led me to temptation
on the other new sensation
on the shady side
of some
enchanted
... . . . evening.
Thor's day, 12 April 2007
13:20, after having slept almost six hours. Reading Stephen Mitchell's translation of Rilke's Sonneten aus Orpheus. Here is Sonnet X of the Second Part:
All we have gained the machine threatens, as long as it dares to exist in the mind and not in obedience.
To dim the masterful hand's more glorious lingering,
for the determined structure it more rigidly cust the stones.
Nowhere dos it stay behind; we cannot escape it at last
as it ruled, self-guided, self-oiled, from its silent factory.
It thinks it is life: thinks it does everything best,
though with equal determination it can create or destroy.
______(From Sonnets to Orpheus, Engl. transl. 1985. Boston:Shambala Press._______________
03:00 Am as through fire, reborn, here there in new new life zealous fellow, hello! yellow gold shining highly burning mists away to wondrous sunrise.
My mother has since night before Good Friday lain in stroke, now in hospital, being transferred around from hospital to larger hospital, now in some unit I don't know... Spoke last night to her, hardly recognized her not voice but spirit yes. Sister is in care of elderly father; we hope for nurse very soon, G-d willing. --jpc
Monday 9 April 2007
Easter crept in on rabbit's padded feet, and went out like a silent owl floating in the dusk of yesterday evening.
And so I find myself, now that I been to court and paid my s[eeding ticket-- $145.00 !
So now... what to do, what to do. I revised two poems, sent five emails, and posted a revised poem on 43things.com/
What to do? I need a place of my own. Pray for me, once again soon to be a homeless poet.
___
Friday came and went, today is Saturday 7 April Holy Saturday:
I'm listening to this as I begin to type:
http://www.englishclub.com/listening/poetry-rune.htmAt Tara today in this fateful hour
I place all heaven with its power,
and the sun with its brightness,
and the snow with its whiteness,
and fire with all the strength it hath,
and lightning with its rapid wrath,
and the winds with their swiftness along their path,
and the sea with its deepness,
and the rocks with their steepness
and the earth with its starkness:
all these I place,
by God’s almighty help and grace,
between myself and the powers of darkness.
Who speaks the poem prayer I know not yet, but I would like to find out.
Meanwhile, I'm troubled of heart and confused of mind. Have already entered into the process of divorce, this for the first and hopefully last time in my life. I've grievously wounded my wife, and maybe tainted several lives. Right now the chldren play outside in the sunshine. Who knows how their minds are affected?
Yes, I did shahada yesterday and I went to prayer at the mosque. So much happening in my life, yesterday, today. The world seems about me so far below, surrounding me as if I'm on a tall peak or column looking down.
Friday 6 April, Good Friday 03:11
I'd best get in bed. My teacher is arriving later today to visit. I will make shahada, insh'Allah. The shahada is the formal declaration of Islam, in faith. I've done it twice before, but this time God willing I'll be pak, "ritually pure," G-d willing.
So much going on, so little time. Good night!
Wednesday 4 April
It's 21 minutes till 13:00 (I reject the a.m./p.m. system; it doesn't give you the same sense of the advancing of the hours toward a full 24). As I type this, I'm missing a poetry reading by Sidney Wade
http://www.sidneywade.org/)She's reading her poetry at AASU. I only learned about it as I perused the Living section of the Savannah Morning News.
I woke late, having gone to bed at 3 pm. Dont' feel much motivated. (Sigh). I ought to go running. A nap first, then go running. Yeh, that's the ticket. Man, I am lazy today.
Got fired from the job below, Saturday evening. I guess Ali and I weren't working smoothly together.
Fri 30 March
I drove back from my new store clerk job, after half past midnight, from Saxon to Hellville on the long gray highway in the dark. I drove back listening to jazz from the fifties, while I reflected on the conversation I overheard toward the end of the evening's business.
Some of our customers had seen five law enforcement vehicles in fast convoy, blueberries flashing. They figure that the car is going in to the Mexican trailer park to apprehend the killer. How they know this, I don't know. There is a killer on the loose somewhere, and everyone knows that the corpse found in the swamp beneath the bridge in Tattnall County was of an Hispanic woman.
«¬
Last week I lived in the big city, passing four nights in one shelter for homeless men, one night under an overpass, and two nights in another shelter, one in which men were packed on the floor, with scarcely four inches between mattresses.
During one of those nights, I got up, and not having any watch, came down to inquire on the time. The attendant told me since I had come down, I had to leave the shelter. It was three a.m. So I walked twenty four miles to Tybee Island.
Now I still have a sore on the outer right heel larger than a silver dollar.
ƒƒ¥
A man kept teasing my toddler and me about his long hair. He wouldn't let it go. I was getting my hair cut. My son had come inside to sit on a chair while the barber, a Baptist preacher everyone calls Junior, cut my hair.
The man went on to tell how the other boys would want to kiss my son when he went to school. I smiled and said, "Don't worry, he'll whup all their asses."
But when I rolled my boy home in the stroller, I went back with a machete and a pitch fork. I waited for the fellow to come out, and calmly told him not to talk to my son every again. He only said, "O.K." I said no more; just walked steadily over to the alley behind him and disappeared.
What café's been reading for the month of April:
1. Nazi War Criminals. 1998. Earle Rice Jr. From "The Holocaust Library. San Diego: Lucent Books. ISNB 1-56006-097-2.
2. James Patterson's Honeymoon. (I don't recommend it).
3. Revelations. I've begun the fourth chapter. I'm reading it in French and English.
"Voici, je me tiens a la porte et je frappe. Si quelqu'un entiend ma voix et ouvre la porte, j'enterai dan sa maison et je prendrai le repas du soir avec lui et lui avec moi.
"Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me."
(Rev 3:20)
Adult ADD: The Complete Handbook.
Comments