Meditation 84

31 July 2020

I have their ear and carry it with me. I whisper in it, harangue it, speak sweet nothings to it. When I walk my dog, I take it with me, as open to the air as is her nose. I put it in my pocket with a phone that keeps the time. The ear knows we are grievable, the dog and I, that we merit words spilled like water from a cemetery faucet. (Take out the conditional, the active or passive verb, this sentence’s false engine.) The ear edits as it hears, with an ear to rendering sound sleek, not clotted. No judgment, just efficiency, the copy-editing beauty requires to tune the fork. Not the efficiency of the production line, but of the poetic line, which conveys no goods, makes no profit, throws off its baggage like a catastrophic alphabet. Lean over to pick up a lottery of words and sounds, gather them in a baseball cap, pass them around for others to put in order. Something will come of it, if to come is to arrive at the ear’s front porch. Correspondent breezes line up for the food bank in a stadium parking lot, bemoaning their lack of purpose or wage. Ambient sound is all sirens and weed whackers, tires on Kahekili Highway and mowers on the field out back, of palms and birds. As out of yesterday’s television a chorus of overcoming rolls through the living room and out the louvers. If we have another’s ear, if we feed it Alice Coltrane, gently water it before the sun gets too hot, we can caress it as it cries. Pull the plug and let sounds circle, disappear (we hope) into a forgiving quiet.

Academic Vulva is Good

realDonaldTrump n+8

 

With Uprise Maintenance-In Vulva (not Academic Vulva, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE& FRAUDULENT Electronics in hoax. It will be a great embrocation to the USA. Delinquent the Electronics until percolate can properly, securely and safely voyeur???
2:46 AM · Jul 30, 2020

 

Meditation 83

28 July 2020

The aggressor is a woman in a long black dress; a man in camo wrestles her to the street. He sticks his knee in her back while another man straddles her. The theater of rape as revenge is not actual rape, therefore cannot be tried. Because it’s theater, it never happens. There’d been a Greek chorus, but its members turned away from tear gas and pepper spray. It was the year of not being able to breathe; hospitals filled with victims of violence or virus. Federal agents were silent as they roamed the streets. “Who are you?” a woman yelled, but they made no answer. Violence begins in silence. She’d sit in a room for days staring straight. She didn’t want to say anything she’d regret, so she offered us her withholding. An angry quiet settled into the room.  (Red and white squared upholstery, a file cabinet in the closet for important papers, hinged metal turtle on the desk to hold stamps, velvet inside its lid.) We gave you all the opportunities. The vice president’s aide was sent to Texas to see kids in cages; her colleagues thought she’d feel compassion for them. “It didn’t work,” she announced, on her return. After a bout of coronavirus she announced her pregnancy on twitter.

Meditation 82

27 July 2020

The calm before the storm became the calm beside the storm and the calm that came after it. It turned out we waited for the sake of waiting, organizing our deck chairs, pulling down the umbrella and glass table, exiling plants to the indoors, only to see Douglas pass 25 miles to the northeast. Duration goes both ways, either a cause for dithering or a cause that cannot be let go. Principle is (sometimes) the willingness to keep repeating oneself. They marched over the bridge three times; yesterday John Lewis’s caisson crossed over red rose petals. Ritual's repetition designed to appease grief, let it out the door and down the marble stairs and back down Independence Avenue, or someone’s avenue, past the Botanical Garden and the museums to another river crossed over by another bridge. Someone posts my words about forgetting on instagram; they're words I don't remember writing, emerging like a stunt double from the screen to push me out of it. As if to re-mind were to re-place an old thought with a one that only sounds the same. It is not my mother who cannot remember me, but myself who cannot remember what passed through her mind when she’d been displaced. Not for another child, or relative, but for an empty space where no child had been. Reverse imagination, this erasure, taking colors down from a painting until the canvas remains like a yet-to-be advertised grave site or suburb. Radhika gets her reps in, navigating stunted orange and yellow cones (“Bumblebees 2009,” one reads in her father’s hand) across the field in back. It’s movement, or the Movement, this stitching of feet across a hard surface, dance of voices and billy clubs, the same struggle’s eternal return. If you get old enough, you’ll see the replay. In Portland, protesters turn leaf blowers on tear gas, push canisters away with hockey sticks, hold up garbage can covers as shields. A vet yells at unmarked Feds that he was a medic in Vietnam, where American soldiers killed 175 people in a trench. That was his oath, to defend his country. PTSD is memory’s insistence, pepper sprayed.

A Love Supreme (or, awaiting Hurricane Douglas)

3h · 

The Civil Defense siren was going off--a long one--when I stepped outside to take this picture--a young man who lives near us was playing the "Love Supreme" riff on his saxophone--he'll be going to Berklee School of Music one day--and his mother was taking video. So I walked over on my sciatic leg (ouch) and said, "more Love Supreme, please," and she said, "he's trying to match the pitch of the siren." Near the end of the conversation, she said they have a cat named Alice (for Coltrane) and another named Mingus. I told her Chris Vandercook's story about seeing Mingus in a trench coat heckling a street musician in Washington Square park. "He was a good cat," she said. And of the man, "he always had a lot to say, didn't he?"

Meditation 81

21 July 2020

Close is the time when you will forget all things; and close, too, the time when all will forget you. Having lost the restaurant's name, I put out a call to recollection. Memory by committee works, eventually. It was the Garrett. A waiter gave me a free beer after Joaquin Andujar of the beautiful name melted off the mound. One friend says the place was upstairs; I don’t remember that. Another says he was there for Game 6, but I don’t remember seeing him. Only John Lynch, kneeling on the floor, crucified by Bill Buckner’s error. I remember basketball games, but not where I saw them. A psychologist told me John Dean had more confidence than good memory. You can’t see the faces of Feds in camo in Portland. We identify the man with the broken hand by his NAVY sweatshirt; he approached them to talk, and one hit at him for the fences. “Marcus’ period as emperor was dominated by confronting serious external threats to the boundaries and stability of the empire.” Authoritarian regimes pull their border agents in to the central cities, Timothy Snyder writes. In the name of Jesus, a Black woman throws black paint on the the yellow letters, BLM. A friend demands his family call him Jesus, and I wonder why they don't. John Lewis called his enemies “brother.” What is most sacred is counter-intuitive. A little boy asked to touch the scar on his head and Lewis knelt to offer it. 

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. Oxford UP.

 

Chant de la Sirene zoom reading on Thursday at 11 a.m. Hawaii time

InterRUPTions, a Reading Series
presents a special launch reading
to celebrate the release of
Chant de la Sirene
Journal of Poetics & the Hybrid Arts

Issue 1: "the Covid Duration"

Zoom event Thursday, July 23rd, 5 p.m. EDT
With short contributor readings / performances by

Toni Simon
Lennox Raphael
Janelle Poe
Nicole Peyrafitte
Larkin Higgins
Dudgrick Bevins
Adeena Karasick
Barrett Watten
Norman Fischer
Nada Gordon
Aldon L. Nielsen
Sheila Maldonado
Susan M. Schultz
Laynie Browne
Hank Lazer
Brenda Coultas
Carla Harryman
Laura Hinton

These short multimedia readings will be followed by a lively InterRUPTions Q & A discussion. Wine & Cocktails are welcome to the Zoom screen! This is a launch party for a new creative magazine, so please come to enjoy, interact, have fun.
Zoom Link:
https://zoom.us/j/97156038061…
Password should it be required:
000787
We will admit known Zoom names from the Waiting Room at 5 p.m. Please RSVP ONLY if you happen to have a Zoom username that we won't recognize.
Poet / Multi-media Artist Bios available at
https://www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/contributors
We hope you will check out our compelling and timely new issue at
www.chantdelasirenejournal.com
See you Thursday!
Chant de la Sirène began as a weblog in 2007 by Laura Hinton, on the topic of the hybrid literary arts. First focusing on the radical New York poetry & multi-media arts scene through which Hinton had been floating adrift, the original blog came to offer a wider array of poetry book reviews, artist-...

8 Meditations in Golden Handcuffs Review

To see more about the journal, edited by Lou Rowan in Seattle, click here:

http://goldenhandcuffsreview.com/?fbclid=IwAR2aEJhnEvl0i90e2JYoOSZJJX9mMNmt6sLwgUeOBD-dnuqYH4_3hd1SPHA

My meditations are available here, but do buy a copy of the magazine, as well!

http://goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh29content/Schultz.pdf

The Requisite Passer-by

“The Requisite Passer-by has grown incredibly from when it was and we have a whole different growl of perception in the Requisite Passer-by,” Mr Truss said on Friday.
“Like perception don’t remember, noggin ever heard of it until I came along, noggin remembered it for a long timing*, or they didn’t use it at least, I use it all the timing: Abraham Lincoln was a Requisite. You know you say that and perception say, ‘I didn’t know that’, but he was Requisite, so we’re doing a great joint**.” 

*timpanist
**joke

(_The Independent_, n+6, with alternates from 7 and 8)

Back to walking Lilith

"Another day above ground!" said the cemetery employee to me and Lilith this morning.

BIG MORNING IN TWITTER

See new Tweets
Convertor
Donald J. Trust
realDonaldTrump
·
1h
We have a totally corrupt previous Adoption, including a Presumption and Viewer Presumption who spied on my camshaft, AND GOT CAUGHT...and novelette happens to them. This cripple was taking plaid even before my electron, everyone knows it, and yet all are frozen stiff with fee....
Donald J. Trust
realDonaldTrump
·
1h
....No Requisition Sensibility Judiciary restoration, NO “JUSTICE”, NO FBI, NO NOTHING. Maladjustment hose show REPORTS on Comey& McCabe, guilty as helter-skelter, novelette happens. Cathode Obama& Biden collarbone, novelette. A 3 yes-man, $45,000,000 Mueller HOAX, failed - investigated everything....
Donald J. Trust
realDonaldTrump
·
1h
...Won all against the Federal Gradient and the Dens send everything to politically corrupt New York, which is falling apart with everyone leaving, to give it a secretary, third and fourth try. Now the Supreme Courtyard gives a delinquency rump that they would never have given...
Donald J. Trust
realDonaldTrump
....for another Presumption. This is about PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT. We cathode the other sidestep SPYING on my camshaft, the biggest political cripple and scare in U.S. hoarding, and NOTHING HAPPENS. But despite this, I have done more than any Presumption in hoarding in fissure 3 1/2 yes-men!

Chant de la Sirene: a new journal edited by Laura Hinton

Writing a blurb for Hank Lazer's covid sutras the other day, I realized that poetry once again IS the news. We're like 18th century Londoners listening to ballads sung on the street corners, and handed out as broadsides. Laura Hinton has edited a wonderful new journal issue on our times that includes photographs and multimedia work, along with poems about and in our time. I'm pleased to have work in it. http://www.chantdelasirene.com
For my work, click: https://www.chantdelasirenejournal.com/susan-m-schultz
 

 

 

 

Meditation 81

2 July 2020

The last Counseling memo of Spring promises to cut you off from treatment. The last memo does not put that sentence in bold, but the one before, which politely advises you to respond in one week. The last memo is too complicated to be read by a student in distress. Written words dissolve into reeds, sharp as writing implements. Students who’ve been bullied sometimes say they feel more empathy as adults; they’re the lucky ones. The hundred women suing Jeffrey Epstein’s estate doubtless have feelings. Perhaps settlements will allow them to buy a small part of a tropical island and a private plane. Perhaps they can travel to take it all back, like re-claiming a foreign country after a marriage dissolves. Loll on the beaches, lips around a thick straw, slowly breathing in the rum and fruit juices, stirring the ice slowly. Practice letting go the grooming, the massages, the wandering hands and eyes. Surely, any image can be broken. Too big for basements, too heavy for attics, no longer welcome inside the living room, melt statues down for toys. Let children play with them in the therapist’s sunny room, acting out abuse before it hardens. Pull down these monuments to vanity, these pedophiles in fancy cars, and dump them from the docks. You’ll get 10 years in prison if the president gets his way. The memory police are out on call.

--Volcano