Some St. Germain

This is a poet my wife introduced me too when we still lived in Texas. I love the way she writes- so revealing, honest, unflinching- just so damned good! Here is her website: http://www.sherylstgermain.com/

Here is one of her poems that I really like.

Addiction
The truth is I loved it,
the whole ritual of it,the way he would fist up his arm, then
hold it out so trusting and bare,
the vein pushed up all blue and throbbing
and wanting to be pierced,
his opposite hand gripped tight as death
around the upper arm,

the way I would try to enter the vein,
almost parallel to the arm,
push lightly but firmly, not
too deep,
you don't want to go through
the vein, just in,
then pull back until you see
blood, then

hold the needle very still, slowly
shoot him with it.
Like that I would enter him,
slowly, slowly, very still,
don't move,
then he would let the fist out,
loosen his grip on the upper arm--


and oh, the movement of his lips
when he asked that I open my arms.How careful,
how good he was, sliding the needle silver and slender
so easily into me, as though
my skin and veins were made for it,
and when he had finished, pulled
it out, I would be coming
in my fingers, hands, my ear lobes
were coming, heart, thighs,
tongue, eyes and brain were coming,
thick and brilliant as the last thin match
against a homeless bitter cold.

I even loved the pin-sized bruises,
I would finger them alone in my room
like marks of passion;
by the time they turned yellow,
my dreams were full of needles.

We both took lovers who loved
this entering and being entered,
but when he brought over the
pale-faced girl so full of needle hole
she had to lay her on her back
like a corpse and stick the needle
over and over in her ankle veins
to find one that wasn't weary
of all that joy, I became sick
with it, but

you know, it still stalks my dreams,
and deaths make no difference:
there is only the body's huge wanting.

When I think of my brother
all spilled out on the floorI say nothing to anyone.I know what it's like to want joy
at any cost.

The recent spate of school shootings has got me pissed off. The last two weren't even students killing students but adults killing students. Unfortunately school shootings aren't new and we haven't heard the last of them. However, what's most disturbing is that the perps of the last two school shootings were men with sex issues.

This doesn't speak well for our society. We have televison programs setting up sting operations to capture men who want to have sex with children, every couple of months we hear of female teachers having sex with a students, hell, just recently there was a politician (Foley) who was busted for sending inappropriate emails to teenage pages.

We need to "out" sex. We can't keep it locked up in the bedroom any longer. We can't keep it a taboo subject. It's all over tv, radio, and books; it seems like everyone is laughing about, joking about it, writing about it, singing about, everything except TALKING about it.

Sex is fun and it's great. It isn't some dirty thing to be ashamed off. Sure this great country was founded on WASP values, but those values just don't apply anymore. We can't keep suppressing, ignoring, evading our feelings about sex. Does this mean that men should rape little girls and boys, that women should be allowed to prey on kids? NO NO NO! What I am saying is that we have members of our society that have problems with sex and they feel too ashamed to get help and to talk about their problems. Our society doesn't want to hear it. Our society thinks that by not talking about sex, it isn't happening.

Well, the consequences of that line of thinking is quite evident.

one of my favorite Octavio Paz poems

With eyes closed- Octavio Paz

With eyes closed
You light up within
You are blind stone

Night after night I carve you
With eyes closed
You are frank stone

We have become enormous
Just knowing each other
With eyes closed

This is something new, I'll be posting this as I write it. Tell me what you think, be brutally honest. Thanks!

Otis Blue

Confused and sitting straight up in bed, Otis was mesmerized by the nighttime orange sun humming soothingly outside of his window. What the hell is goin on here? Otis looks over his shoulder, behind him, pushing aside the paisley window curtain and reaches back into the deep corner of the window sill. Both grape juice cartons are still there.

Still cookin. That fat Mexican Junior aint found these. Son of bitch aint gonna get these neitha, he says.

Turning back around, Otis sees himself in the window and doesn’t recognize the man staring back. He’s gaunt, cotton topped, and thin.

That cancer ain’t gonna leave nuthin, he says.

His overlarge blue and white striped pajamas fall away from his body, nearly standing on their own.

Too much damned starch. I tell them wimen, but they ain’t listen.

He looks like a sail boat. He reminds himself of the ship in the painting in Hubert’s room. The painting Hubert made with a brush in his mouth after his stroke. It’s a small sail boat, with a blue sail, the sky is dark and there’s nothing on the horizon.

Just driftin man, he’d told his roommate Lovitz after he’d seen it, Ain’t nowhere to go, ain’t nuthin ta see. Just a yellow boat with a blue sail, looks like a storm comin to.

Otis checks behind the curtain one last time, satisfied that his contraband is safe, he lays back down and closes his eyes and says a prayer.

Lord, just give me back 5 years, that’s all I ask, just 5 and I’ll whup Juniors ass up and down these halls with his own mopstick. Thas all Lord, I ain’t askin for mercy or salvation, just strenth enough to get that fat bastard for stealin my hooch. I know he ain’t turned me in Lord cuz there ain’t been no warnins from the nurses. Junior just be stealin it. Just 5 years lord, only 5. That’s enough. Amen.

Books I Can't Forget- Response to David

At around the 3rd or 4th grade I read White Fang by Jack London and it blew all of that Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Hardy Boys shit out of my ass that was force fed me in elementary school. I still indulge in fantasy and comic books, but not like I used to. Mostly they help me to remember to not take life so seriously.

I have to agree with Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. I was about 14 and I let those two books consume my waking life until girls came along a year or two later and took that coveted spot. That Bananfish story invaded the space in between my cells and colored my view of things for a long time. Almost 15 years later I can still see the images of that story, they sneak up on me. I have to read that story soon, but maybe I won't.

I didn't enjoy Blood Meridian like I did No Country for Old Men. But Child of God still haunts me however, like those Bananfish. That guy is somewhere inside me, plundering the mountains and valleys of my soul, looking for dead meat. That book reminds of the Pleco fish in aquariums. They have a dirty job to do, but when they it, the tank sparkles. It's unfair to think of a book in those terms, one so beautifully written. That book just won't quit, it's eating up all of the rotten pieces of me in me that need to go. I need to free up some space it seems.

Another book that has had the same affect on me as White Fang and Child of God has to be 100 Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez. I read that book about 8 years ago and I fell in love with it. I've only read it once and that seems to be just the right amount. The way that Marquez plays with reality and magic and faith. We all have to believe in something, God, Enlightenment, Capitalism- I choose to believe in the magic of people and what happens when they break through the illusions of this life and come back with a bit of wisdom like MLK, Tupac, Ghandi, Jesus, etc.

Last but not least, I must pay hommage to the Brown Buffalo. Oscar Zeta Acost also came out of nowhere during my late teens and early twenties and kept me company, along with Los Lobos, and kept me sane. Acostas books Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People remind me that it's ok to have brown skin, speak two languages, and to write about personal stuff no matter how cultural or unappealing I may think it to be to general audiences. When I think of Acosta I think about not giving a fuck and just writing!

This too!

The last 6 weeks or so have been hectic beyond belief. Driver's Ed and Cheerleading for the teenager, summer classes for me, my brother's wedding, the tomatoes that are late . . .

My brother was married on August 5 and the affair was put on by family. I am now experienced in putting up a 100 person tent and am considering starting a circus. It was a beautiful thing, however, when it finally happened, and I got all choked up when I gave the best man speech.

I have say though that family is a beautiful thing. Sure, most Mexicans are undereducated, overfed, and ILLEGAL- but damn we know how to do family. Most computers are tagged with Intel to let you know what powers them, my life is tagged with Familia in the bottom left hand corner just under my heel. Family is wealth. The value manifests itself when we come together, even when times are tough and we have our own personal demons that we're wrestling (or drinking with) and our lives are consumed with so much stuff, to lend each other a hand, the shirts off our backs, or a pot of beans.

Sometime ago the media was exploiting a study about American's growing lack of a close circle of friends. I have to admit that my close circle of friends is my family. Not that I don't have many friends, I just don't have many that I keep in contact with ( I am a horrible friend when it comes to that kind of stuff) and family is always at arm's length.

So a big toast to Familia . . . and beans.

Dream Time

As I sat at the breakfast table the other day, enjoying pancakes, bacon, coffee, etc. my wife and foster daughter were gabbing away at a mile a minute as most women tend to do and then I remembered . . .

The dream from the night before-

I got out of bed and walked past a mirror in the bedroom. I was shirtless and I had ABS! They were wonderful. I rubbed them and patted them and baby talked them. I marveled at the David I saw in the mirror. But instead of marble white skin I was an Aztec god. . .

I was immediatley sad as I sat at that breakfast table stuffing my face with the egg, bacon, and pancake sandwich I held with both hands. I told my wife and kid about the dream and they thought it was funny. Three bites later I wasn't sad anymore.

I still dream about my dream . . .

Not so funny. . .

So. . . I made this blog back in Abril cuz a writer said I should. Then I did the thing that I always do and got lazy and never published. But now I feel that I must cuz other writers I know have started publishing theirs.

Here's my first piece of ridiculousness:

A couple of weeks ago I was surfing the net at work and came across a headline that went something like this: " 2 die as inflatable art floats away." After a couple of "what the hell's" I decided to click and read. I read the story and laughed out loud. At people dying. Death.

It isn't my fault that the story was so . . . surreal? Basically some "artist" decided to make a fancy "Moon Walk" birthday party bouncy thing. It was made to float and for the walls to change colors and best of all people could walk through it and interact with art.

And so people were walking through this floating, technicolored cube, and then a mooring breaks and the floating Moonwalk begins to float away . . . with people inside. Said people panic and the floating art begins to list and tilt and soon people pour out like animal crackers from an animal cracker box and a poor old lady dies. (How do you tell the kids that grandma died at an art exhibit?)

Yes, I laughed when I read this! I was imagining some crazy Monty Python animation thing! Come on!!! This floating art was built by an artist, not an Engineer! Why would you go in! Why do I have so many exclamation points in this poorly written paragraph!

And by the way, the only reason they were able to retrieve the floating art was because it got stuck on a pole. Jesus!

So this is my first real posting, I hope to post more stuff when I can. Maybe some fiction, some observations, some mushy feeling stuff . . .

Uh oh

I've got a blog now. . . so what the hell should I write about?