pith…

The soap opera organ announces
what we can hardly bear to hear.
A metal-aproned matron
summons the skin ribbon
she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500,
circa 1969. Her tremolo
is a casual torture. We mistake
her voice for a choir of a thousand
muffled mothers and wobble dutifully in
to an Easter dinner of wood duck
and greens. There are no roses
around our scarred 3D hearts
or arranged in the centerpiece
that absorbs what words we can pick
from our teeth. We are weary, heavy
weary, of managed creation and sick
from songs that tempt us simply
to silence. We scrape cold beards
of frost with manicured nails,
screeching at the April windows.
Our fathers were fools to store
their small-grained harvests
in such broad-slatted barns.
We watch the mess heap up
with the snow and the hyphens.
Nobody clears the faux-oak table
but the talkative furniture
does our screaming for us
and a phatic nation learns to curse
in shrunken frontier tongues.

.

joesmith

.

© joesmith, from “The Way the Worlds Comes In,” an upcoming volume of collected poems.

I save the spaces.
No, I’m no bent surveyor
with a three-legged stare
bent on destiny, unsettled
by innominate expanses,
undone by an absence
of fences, parsing the plenty.
We know how that was
manifest. I’ve never been
enamoured of wrought
geometries and plaid
is a bad parody of place.
I save only the spaces:

triangulate spans between
the bridge trusses where
swallows play no-touch tag,
the cracks under windows
where the wind wriggles in,
those gaps around the sink
where prehistoric beetles
pass like Hermes from world
to world, lulls in a song
where notes go to compose
themselves, the fissures
in a hammerhead stamped
out from tempered metal.

I make a man inhabit
the middle of this room
and wait to arrange nothing
but occasions to empty.
When he’s finished shaping
a proper container, we carry
slim air where it’s needed:
for earthquakes or murders,
to bend the paths of bullets,
to reverse the sad collapse
of width. Yes, I guess
I have to catch him first.
A space is a saving.

.

- joesmith
© 2010

When the planets turned ready
in slow-time abeyance for a rendition
of lives to clash, maybe Cherokee man
or colonial long hunter, maybe English renegade,
or would-be farmer plunging his hands in
black dirt to tease out a weed’s root system,
or maybe highland warrior who puts his
tired head to his suffering wife’s breast
assembled on this day, this ejection of red
and flesh, the gasp of Baby Boy Smith
for there was no other name.

Now there is the dark before the dawn
that brings the chirping of birds like those
within an ivy-covered wall of a university
building where we walked and my
umbrella snapped back continuously
in the strong wind like an animal trap
with sex and not death in its maw,
so on this morning the birds wake
for hours before the light and peep
out a missive for you today:
Look in your house, the nineteen year
old punk did not die. See all that
you have made, all the people of your mind,
all your broken, and all your gentle
are housed inside.

.

Jenny Benjamin-Smith, April 3 2010

Strip malls give way to strip clubs
One hundred fifty miles grind
Alongside mammoth motor homes

The land is changing
She is more voluptuous
Her sins secreted

While in dusty towns
Proud old resentments
Bolted to bricks shout

“Get us out of the United Nations!”

Greasy truck-stop trading posts
Stand between bands of green
Separating coming and going—

Out on the highway
Blue semi driver plays your game
Trading slots and making up stories

Regarding stiff-armed drivers from Illinois

-   Kathleen Eull

I

Here in the town of the common and the good,
only the flashes reach us. There’s no thunder
rumble, no sound to savor, no low music
to score the out-of-favor soul. No, first
it’s the din, carried air away east, then rain
broken in waves on main street curbs
where urges are nearly two blocks long.

Homines urbis mundi,
park in the lines diagonally.
Turn right or left one-way
at the pagoda that would be green.

At the Pix they’ re playing last year’s winner
of something like a fig leaf, somewhere in France.
A yo-yo in the hand of the boy on the bike
who ups and downs for most the day, metal playing
in his head and a knack, at ten, for squaring
every stimulus. Not much to do for the dudes
at Dave’s Music. They swap names of shared lays,
grow their hair pretty long and each one knows
where the other one lives.

Before the show, tattoos for all.
The low whir of the master
inking permanence to your arm.
We need this town
like you need that tattoo,
a black widow you designed yourself
for Bill the Renaissance Needle to etch.
An artist, says the ‘Nam vet
with the vulture on his knee.

II

A caudal of the flocked
hum hymnals to the wind,
grace notes for toothless grinding,
communal gurgles for the state.
We barter our hearts like borrowed garments
and run to each other as slow-mo lovers
in a misfed reshoot of a colorized film.

The town’s name came from their language,
not the painted faces, not the pox, nor
the slaughter, never the whooping fans of earth.

We must please the unseen
keepers of grids that plot
our soddled odds and finagled
every street. We watch parabolas
fall up across the sky, a tired arc
as rising star, as arbitrary schism
between ground and zero aim.
We’re gods, goddammit, less
their distant entertainments.

- joesmith

.

Copyright, joesmith. Please.

“It was intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed.” – Søren Kierkegarrd

The wind is against me
on my pedaled way to work.
A bus almost clips me
cutting in to its shelter at the curb.
A Benz would prefer to run the light
and me over to waiting one second more.
The finger inside shows off its white
length behind smoked sloped glass. Every car
would rather rattle my irksome bones
across the avenue (like bar dice slammed out
of their leatherette cup) than notice
I’m next to naked without their metal
to enfold me. I am only sure
that winter will be worse and that words
meant to comfort are drab impostures.

The wind again is against me
all the chilled way home. A horn
reminds me how much I need
a light to flash my presence. (More
would, of course, be better, but the bushes
here, if they burn at all, burn away to ashes.)
But I remember you said you had a “crush”
on me and I begin to wonder in spite
of the wind and the traffic and the cynic
on my bike how old is too old to feel like
a first-kissed kid getting red in public.
I can’t help but think this
Spring might arrive a week or so early
or listen when you tell me “It’s o.k. It’s O
K.” I can even believe you mean each letter.

.

joesmith

Alert as the light that changes color
with the weather atop the building
some mistake as electric, we’re mingling
our blood and juices without the dolor
that ought accompany a great big age
of disease. We are lovely here and welcome
the change we bring to each brown room.
In the phone booth, we tear our pages
from the musclebound book, feeding each
to the other our spare and crinkled names.
Ecstasy is this and we, we are sudden
and hairy on the fair political body.
We’re slick in the acidic rain, slippery
as a morning mood. We bite and wrestle
like wiry otters, loving mud and burning
wet without a stick of weathered wood.

.

joesmith

When I’m done, love, when
the impalpable me has made his sullen exit,
scrape clean the meat from my bones. String it
in ribbons in the back yard trees. Wait
for morning rain and hear the glorified pigeons
attempt to sing. Summon then the odiferous
ones, the shunned ones, the old utilarians
who speak to no one, but whose sense
of dread and laughter and occassion
are legendary, who are wise to abhor
what rots in vain and dirty remembrance.
Then turn and hum a tune of your invention.
Ignore the slight song at your back
and follow your salted path home.
Rend there my considerable fat.
Sow it along the mud-slicked riverbank
for the wading birds to pick at and increase
their wanting knees. Arrange the bones
in an open field in the shapes of some ruined
ancient alphabet. Change the readings
to the cycles of your joyous body. They may
amuse the high birds of prey, confuse
the headings of curious pilots or commune
with an alien moon. Reserve a single
fibula for sharpening the knives with which
you dice our daughters’ green meals.
Just make use of me, somehow. Please.

Tonight smells like April
Awake and coming hard against
March spaces—
Forward insistence falling
Upon those wakeful and reaching,
Touching the way to intersect
Before and Not Yet;
Navigating unseen language
Barefoot, yes!
Normal people stand in slippers
To drink a glass of warm milk—
Eat their days in tiny slices.

- Kathleen Eull

Half-full of someone like a mother
or her lover unbuttoned in dad’s
traveling robe, turned around
in an instant, to the strained grace
of pointed cameras. A kleptomaniac
of attention, eyes pinched in to lit
aluminum, hoarding the latest loss
of memory in a cipher nation of nervous
oblivion, entertaining what remains
of the children. Bozo is staring at his
shoes again, doing his damnedest
to pronounce gratuitous, scratching
lotto tickets at the high white counter,
slurping the last from his super monster
size cup, wondering where he can go
to cash in his principle and who made
off with his only Sunday suit. Conception
was a talk show. Celebrities appeared
from the workshirts behind the louvers
in accordian closet doors. He knows
he’s responsible for his bad reception.
He wants to edit his inheritance, stuff
his finger up an aperture, sleep through
the whole morning. No, make that afternoon.

While listening to BBC news coverage of Iran on the radio this morning, the words “Revolution speeds evolution” came to my head. At the time, the words fit the current Iran situation very well and time will tell whether there is a revolution, a new election, or crushed hopes and lives. Since it rang in my head, I scribbled it in my ever-present notebook for later reference. As I scribbled the, I thought this must have been said before.

When I got to work, I googled the phrase, searching various combos for 10-15 minutes, thinking full well that those simple words had been written before. By somebody, sometime. More likely many times.

I was surprised when I found nothing. It’s SO basic. Too basic. Certainly too basic not to be found. It strikes me as such a fundamental truism that it almost goes without saying. A bromide at birth.

The fact that I was pretty sure such a bromide had been born before is conditioned by the lateness of human times, the “been there, done that” attitude to which one is prone in these late days. The post- after the post-modern, if you will, or maybe the post-post-. Who can say? Even the identifiers of “ages” can’t keep up. All I can say is this old horse feels like he’s always chasing a moving post, racing to, but never reaching, the starting gates where a race should begin.

Nevertheless I wrote it. Maybe I should copyright it. But what does copyright mean any more? In this not-world yet hyper-communicative ether of twitter & ilk? Words are open source. Now more than ever. Once released out to the ether, the interwebs (as the clever kids call it), words are community property.

And, after all, they’re all already in the dictionary. Already written, already t/here. Been there, done that, as it were.

Been there, done that? NO. NOT that post-y, unearned cynical pose that may blind us (especially the pre-jaded young) to very fundamental, wholly non ironic, potentially useful TRUTHS.

When we’re too jaded for fundamental truths, small or large, bromidic or aphoristic, we’re truly lost.

But I’m joesmith. A bromide at birth. What the fuck do I know that hasn’t been known already? Too basic to bother, but still do. Too common to claim ownership of anything, let alone three simple words. But yet…

Sometimes a bromide fits the bill.

Revolution does speed evolution. I’m with you in spirit, people of Iran. If I can, I’ll assist however a common man can. May your God be with you.

I can divine these brambles.
Or these gnarled flowers at my feet.
They obscure my heels as I
float on yellow horizons.
Tip the diagonal of my arms into
the numbers of years set down like dust.
I can, you see, lead you somewhere,
over rock and highland green.
I can conjure stone from earth
to make a window to another world.
Come with me. Take the tips of my fingers.
Interlace the leaves and set down
your sword, your wand.
You have no need for all the people
who make up your mind.
You have no need for the lily or rose
jabbing between your legs like a crude
lover. Walk this way with me,
and I will tip the stars down your throat.
Drop the grapes and roll them over the skin
of your neck. Only then will you have
the idea of splendor. Of the eternal.
All you need is this staff to guide your way.
All you need is to follow the shift
of my eyes. I may lead you somewhere,
or you could go the other way.
Sit down at my table. I’ll flip forever
like a figure eight. I’ll let you look
at me for as long as it takes.
Let’s begin. I promise. This is something
you won’t forget.

- Jenny Benjamin-Smith

Recently, New York Times reporter Motoko Rich wrote an article about how during a recession, what people want is a happy book, with a happy ending. Incidentally, book sales have soared in the romance novel genre, and, as the masses know, the vampire love story genre. Mass-market paperbacks fly off the shelves of your Walgreens, Walmarts and Kmarts, while large trade paperbacks suffer at your Barnes and Nobles.

I understand that the heart may be a lonely hunter during this tough economic downturn, and some may feel the need to inject some escapism or sentimentality into their lives. But for the incredulous, a romance novel may not be plausible.

Thus, I’ve assembled what I believe to be 10 “thinking man’s” books to read during an economic slump. Rather than picking 10 books solely dedicated to economics, I’ve tried to be diverse in representing the general tone of this recession. In addition, I’ve incorporated a few books that may not evoke the tone of the recession, but will hopefully encourage you about overcoming it. Most of these books are not de facto “feel good” reads (with the exception of one indispensible comedy), but they are relevant and rewarding in many ways in regard to how one views world discourse. And when the world is in trouble, these books are what I consider food for thought, or reexamination, if you have read them before.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Adam Smith was a strong advocate of a free market economy, and this was in 1776, before the term economics was even coined. Smith argued that a free market economy is more beneficial to society because it promotes healthy relationships with employer and employee, as well as makes people responsible for their choices. “If a nation could not prosper without the enjoyment of perfect liberty and perfect justice, there is not in the world a nation which could ever have prospered”

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is an obvious choice because Marx opposed bureaucracies and the bourgeoisie, and was for the proletariat. With the crisis on Wall Street that propelled us into an even deeper global recession, many (most notably, Christopher Hitchens) have argued that Marx is still very relevant in the discourse of our nation, and the world. “Working men of all countries, unite!”

ATLAS SHRUGGED

Ayn Rand’s gargantuan novel about free enterprise, free market and laissez-faire capitalism, uncannily evokes the tone our current recession. It shouldn’t surprise you that this anti-bureaucratic novel has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the last 18 months. As some recent bumper stickers have pointed out, we may have to modify Rand’s question from: “Who is John Galt,” to Where is John Galt?

ON LIBERTY

John Stuart Mill echoes his Utilitarian philosophy in this famous essay on civil and social liberty. Mill believes that political actions are necessary and right if they benefit the majority of the people, and provide happiness to the majority of society. Similar to Thomas Paine, he believes that the rights of individuals should be safeguarded or if necessary, fought for by the government. John Stuart Mill was a liberal-minded thinker, and his tone certainly resonates with us today: “the disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.”

THE AUDACITY OF HOPE

With the subtitle: Thoughts for Reclaiming the American Dream, The Audacity of Hope serves well as a manifesto for change in politics. With Obama in office, he is finding out how difficult it can be to overcome partisanship, but many historians agree that although his first hundred days have been challenging, they have been effective and highly productive. As Obama once said, and as we found out in the detail of his latest press conference, “Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.”

FAHRENHEIT 451

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel on censorship and how television destroys interest in reading literature creates a world of paranoia and little choice. Bradbury’s “fireman” work as book burners who burn books for the “good of humanity.” The novel takes place in a future American society run by self-interest and indulgence; critical thought through reading a book is outlawed. Disturbing? Yes, for: “we must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal.”

RIGHTS OF MAN

Thomas Paine’s polemic asserts that the rights of man should not be taken away by any government. Paine believed that government was there not to interfere, but to safeguard the individual and their inalienable rights, and this is the central thesis of this work. “Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man.”

LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM

I didn’t want to get too partisan with any of these choices, but Al Franken’s book offers some important insight into the changing spirit of America’s political discourse. And it’s funny as hell. Although Franken’s book is subtitled, “A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” it is still biased to the left. This, however, shouldn’t stop anyone from reading it, whether you’re left, middle or right. Al is just full of staggering wisdom, for who else could put things so eloquently: “it’s easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.”

LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN

Christopher Hitchens’ witty and educational book is written as a series of letters to whom he calls contrarians. Hitchens uses his incredible knowledge and reason to advise people to question the things they were taught. Question your religion, your politics, your education, your society; question everything. Hitchens’ allusions to politics, literature, history, religion and even pop culture and current events are beautifully integrated in each letter. A lesson from Hitchens that can be applied to all vocations: “write because you have to, not because you want to.”

BANKER TO THE POOR

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus discusses how $27 lent out to a village of 45 people spurned his idea for Grameen Bank, a bank that has now lent out about 4 billion dollars to over 7 million people – 95% being poor women. Yunus will inspire you to make a social entrepreneurial difference, whether it’s with $10 or billions of dollars. As Dr. Yunus says, “today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world – out of six billion people, more than three billion do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.”

In a bold sign of thawing relations between the countries, Presidents Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez announced today that the state of Texas would be traded to Venezuela for Jesus Moronta, a slick-fielding, hard-hitting 14-yr-old shortstop phenomenon, cash considerations and an undisclosed amount of raw, premium coca.

The lavender aroma of her apartment lends itself to musty carpet and stale cigarette smoke to the eventual car exhaust and bad food smells as she follows me out, heavy glass swinging shut behind her to the morning orchestra of traffic. Her short stature belies her Miss America gait. She is a scarved, lithe stack of fabric, beaming eyes and waking smile, She reaches for my hand, glowing in the new spectrum, dulling with adjustment. I am angry salt and olfaction. “I don’t wake up handholding.”

“It’s the culture, sweetie.”

“The woman was stoned to death! And for… ”

“People are idiots everywhere.” Her casual interruption lent her free hand to my arm.

I wasn’t disagreeing but that she would ever challenge my epistemology without putting her matter to the fire and find her metaphysics lacking… burned to a crisp in the morning chill, biting at her regalities.

As her digits enclosed my own, the amoeba of her cold grasp halts my own undoing as we race across the newly busy morning’s avenue.

“You know that’s not Islam, right?” she asks. She doesn’t plead. Ever. Meaning is meaning.

“I am not convinced.”

The car doors shut like two muted barks and it’s lavender again and she’s reaching again. She drives. Screaming, as she says I have taught her, at passersby, short buses and hipsters that dare to make the mad dash in front of this apparently raving Honda, across our outstretch of hard, cracked gray. She is adorable.

Her shoulders moving to the morning music and I am a captive of my own being. Aghast at the separation between her Monday and mine, agape with what normatives that cannot meet in the middle, we are again with the approved yelling and yuppies – a honk or two. We make our way into the furthering of April. Nothing green yet.

“You’d better run!” she screams, laughing wildly and looking to me for extraneous approval.

I can only nod. Smile.

- Gordon Bruce Solomon

It seems there is a shortage of gods in the universe today. Here on earth, if you mention the name Baal, Njord, Horus or even Krishna, people will look at you like your nuts, or like you’re alluding to someone out of a fairly tale. These gods, now considered to be blatant myths, are basically extinct. In a day and age when people can recite at least a dozen basketball players, it’s all too interesting that most people are only familiar with their one god, and sometimes that’s even a stretch.

If you ask a neighbor, coworker, friend or family member to name their god, you will find confusion and ignorance. Seriously, try it. At work a few days ago, I took it upon myself to ask this question to ten colleagues. Most people responded by saying, “My god is the god of the bible” or “Jesus Christ” or “I have no idea” or “The Judeo-Christian god.” Out of the ten, not one responded, “well, obviously Yahweh is my god, and he is the great god of the New and Old Testament.”

Shouldn’t one at least know the name of the god they choose to worship? I personally wouldn’t want to pray to an invisible manifestation I don’t know the name of.

The problem with this new evolutionary juncture regarding the few gods still worshiped on this planet is that we have used up all of the gods. Gods are not evolving like they used to – Krishna is not transforming into Jesus (both stories are presumably taken from the same myth). We are stuck. Once these remaining few are christened as myths, what will we do? People are not as superstitious as they were in the past. I don’t see people propagating gods out of thin air. Maybe the Catholic Church will offer a few new gods (as they always have good responses to crises). Maybe alien life will be referred to as gods.

As for now, however, we remain in our comfortable world with our comfortable myths. But the myths, and therefore, the gods, are becoming more and more obsolete.

Currently, we have less than 5 prominent gods to work with. The three-headed monster consists of Christianity’s Yahweh, Islam’s Yahweh and Hinduism’s Krishna and Rama (Hinduism is polytheistic and worships other gods as well, but Rama and Krishna are the main culprits). Add Mormonism’s Yahweh, and we are still only at three gods. These gods are so popular that nearly 5 billion people adhere to them.

So there they are, the three gods the average person should know, but doesn’t. Will these gods continue their reign through child indoctrination, perpetuation of organized religion, and other popularizing techniques, or will they fade into the realm of reason? With the rise of secularism, agnosticism, atheism or other nonreligious groups, it seems as if reason is on the way. Over a billion people in the world today consider themselves secular, agnostic, atheistic or nonreligious – and one can only hope that these people tell (or have told) their children the beauty about the cosmos and the fantasy of the mythos.

It is reassuring to think of the extinction of these gods, and maybe, just maybe, reason will prevail in our future.

the reverberation of the garage door opening tickles me from below,
i can’t wait for you to come back up after your morning smoke.

i miss your warm breath against my shoulders, your arms around me,
the tip of your toes protruding from the blanket’s warmth
on an anonymous wisconsin morning – is it sunny, raining, snowing?

i hear you downstairs: checking your e-mail, eating cereal.
i know what your doing – routine runs our lives.

i hear you upstairs now: changing into your clothes,

you knock on the door: “honey, you still in the bathroom? its been ten minutes.”
i answer, “i’ll be right out, after i finish this line.”

SUNDAY SERMON I

In these godless days of the year 2009, of which a quarter has already been gnawed away by the dredging samsara of day to day, week to week workhorse life and the lust for lifelessness swimming through glass after glass of liquid anesthetic and the drone of satiating conversation and howling guitars while The Blues seeps from morning pores like single-malt perfume and the leaden weight of another handful of crumpled beer cans and dollar bills in my back pocket keeps me holed up in the attic of my own reeling mind.

The Ides of March has slithered by with no trace and ill Irish luck only brings out the wrong kind of green-eyed girls who drink black beer and drool long winded lines of nothingness instead of telling fortunes and reading weathered palm lines with needled gypsy fingers the color of molasses.

Restless Sunday afternoon haze in my church where Jesus’ blood is oily haloed black coffee and his body burns down to a filter with a camel stamped on it, ah’ men. 

John Dick

Times are hard, money is short, things seem to be spinning out of control. The new President is trying to fix things but these solutions may be too little too late. There is something the President has brought to the table that has been lacking….a sense of cool.

Look back to the old Hollywood movies and you’ll see it. The person who has things, but isn’t controlled by them. The hero who doesn’t need to brag or show off, cause the losers who oppose him aren’t in his league. Plays by the rules when he should, breaks them when they are silly, but does it for a reason always. Smart, quick with a joke….but when he’s pissed, its a bad situation. Not the out of control rage of the villain, not the ranting and false bravado of the rascal, but a tightening of the eyes, the sudden leadness of voice…and the impression of deadly concentration and seriousness.

President Obama knows the power of cool. After a decade of blaring false bravado and irony, the States may be ready to reimbrace its old self-image. Things may be going to hell, but the hero of the story (who is always us in our minds)? The hero’s got it together, man.

Milwaukee, WI         3/22/09

A middle-aged Milwaukee man cannot stop saying fuck after hitting what he claims to be his thousandth pothole. “I am fed up with the fucking potholes in this city,” Raymond Smith said today. “Paying over one-thousand dollars for new shocks, a tire alignment and new brake pads was the last fucking straw.”

Ray claims that he has tried to dodge countless potholes, but because “they are fucking everywhere, your odds of not hitting one is fucking slim.”

After sending letters to his alderman and mayor with no response, he feels helpless to this unnerving situation. “Screaming fuck every time I run over a pothole is the only thing that calms my nerves anymore,” Ray said.

He recommends that all Milwaukeeans give this method a shot before they seek other, possibly more harmful forms of dealing with this “fucking bullshit.”

Raymond Smith used to be an alcoholic.