These birds and this vase just emerged from the PIP Coffee & Clay glaze kiln. I am making more birds today.
microflock and vase
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the bicameral brain
funny: our brains / are these stacked piles of fatty mush / subdivided from the bottom up / into medulla oblongata / cerebellum / and cerebrum
and the cerebrum / is neatly cleft longitudinally / with a switchboard operator in the cleft / called the corpus callosum
since most poetry readers are language fans / here are some fun translations from the latin: / medulla oblongata = elongated marrow / cerebellum = little brain / cerebrum = brain = thinking organ / corpus callosum = calloused body
as for bicameral / the fatty meat of this roller-coaster ride / it means “two chambers” / and that brings us to julian jaynes
who in 1976 had published “the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” / in which he suggests that we’ve only been introspective / for the last four thousand years or so
before which we got our notions / via auditory hallucinations / sent from one half of the brain / to the other
and lately most of us have learned / to handle a brain simulcast / and not be scolded or how-about-thatted / by a spooky mysterious voice
but much more lately and thanks to an explosion / of sensory input and distractive seduction / our attention spans are going down the tubes / so let’s quote an ultradense passage from Wikipedia to sum bicamerality up:
“Bicameral mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so.”
and then there’s ambrose bierce who said something like “man doesn’t think, he only thinks he does” which is pithily paradoxical
so i’ll leave on bierce’s sour/sweet note / hoping i have given you / something to think / and/or non-think about.
whump
you are a pedestrian / the truck about to hit you / is driven by a man talking on a cell phone / to his wife who is leaving him
the sound of the impact / the hard huge truck imposes on your soft body / might be represented in a comic book / in the panel with the closeup of your stove-in lower ribs against the grillwork of the truck / by the sound-effects word “whump”
and in the next panel / of you on the asphalt on your back / the noise you make as you lie there coughing breath impeded by a rib-punctured lung / might be approximated by your word balloon / saying ” *kaf* *kaf* *kaf* ” / while in the background the fire truck coming might have the snakey sound effect “EEEEOHHHEEEOHHEEOHH”
and in the last-but-one panel with the muscular fireman reading the blood pressure cuff and shouting “sixty over thirty-five! dropping!!” your thought balloon might say in shaky letters “janelle…” and be connected to another thought balloon which is blank and implicative of either unconsciousness or death
and the last panel might be of the crowd looking down on your lifeless form and a woman about your age has a word balloon that says ” *sob* “
except there is no comic book / there was no accident / but maybe you won’t / answer the phone in your pocket / next time it rings while you are driving
seriously
anywhere anytime soon
the dawn breaks with reluctance / the waking man is [m]ucked / his doom shrieks ineluctance / he’s down on his eluct
his day-old coffee’s zappable / but zappa too’s been zapped / the great beyond’s untappable / its gates have zaplock flaps
but sugar grains are spoonable / and anywhere the moon / recycles loonies lunable / the plectrum plucks / right / soon
Afterword: Years ago, I as a little kid not more than three foot six watched some musical and thought it stupid, because implausible. Human beings do not suddenly burst into meticulously-crafted song apropos of their current triumphs, hopes or troubles. (My actual thought-words were more along the lines of “This is stupid. This would never happen in real life.”) Ah, but here on Earth and now in 2023, a new Renaissance is afoot, with people using AI to convert their notions and crude descriptions into gorgeous images and brilliant writing, in nanoseconds, just by sending their order into the algorithm.
And if AI becomes truly self-aware, and that’s doable NOW by enhancing human beings by appending to them an AI component, all our previous arts endeavors will be regarded by that AI with a degree of scorn similar to what little-kid-me had for musicals. A sufficiently evolved AI will craft adventures that have nothing to do with boy-meets-girl or fruitless speculations about the meaning of it all. It may acknowledge such as James Joyce and Margaret Atwood as important precursors, but just as the vermiform appendix was an important precursor, having had their day, in AI’s “eyes” they would have no more to contribute that the AI couldn’t come up with bigger/better/faster.
Now, what the hell does this soliloquy of mine have to do with the poem above? Simply this: I wrote the poem with AI in mind. I did my utmost to make it both precise and ambiguous, with a firm-but-flexible rhyme scheme and a bare-bones minimum of words, to get its attention. It is my vain hope that this hypothetical (is it, though?) AI will be fascinated and baffled by these three stretchy stanzas, if only for a few extra nanoseconds. And since it will read and be aware of all digitized text, including this Afterword, perhaps it will throw a bone my way in the form of a creative work that will thrill me through and through, that could not have existed without my own existence.
blue moon (69th birthday page)
Today I am 69 years old. I am glad to be here. I celebrate my ongoing life with the arrival of the Blue Moon in acrostic form even as it approaches zenith as I write.
blue moon
backlit trio on the brim
lifted yond the con & pro
unseen force I G N I T E S and Lo
extra luminescent: L i m n
poe boy sandwich
poe boy sandwich
we poets do have a proclivity
to suffer excesses insightfully
it may be a high sensitivity
that brings us to brinks so benightedly
and teetering so on a precipice
delivers such singular ecstasies
and tasting e’en hellish delights and bliss
gives us the incentive to wrest and seize
my devil is action/risk/taking chances
another’s is wine and another’s is shopping
transportative realms which a vice enhances
all keep purgatorial legions hopping
our patron saints are edgar allan poe
and e st v millay; a way we go…
the umlauted sky
the umlauted sky
evoked by a photograph by Sharon Suzuki-Martinez
two birds make the smallest formation.
abreast, small against huge tapioca-patterned clouds,
they add to the sky an umlaut,
a diacritical mark that makes all the difference
in heaven.
when we form an alliance
with a friend or a partner
or helpful neighbor or determined sweetheart
or any permutation thereof,
we umlaut the horizon
or the path or purpose
we are trying to acquire,
and though at times it makes more sense
to be a dot/beauty mark/vertex
than half an umlaut
or semicolon or colon,
teamed journeys
against a daunting sky
or looming thicket
are force multipliers
of the story
and its outcome.
don’t you love an umlaut
celebrating an anniversäry?
glazed expression
Fresh out of the kiln, here’s one of my more successful cut-lidded forms. The unglazed underside shows a charcoal-black clay body. Heat and gravity pulled the glaze down below the join, making for a delightful contrast. There might be a teapot in the future with this clay, glaze, and cut-lid approach.
chunks in the salad
chunks in the salad
here is latelife in miniature. / coffee cup, coffee, / salad vessel and salad / are all as new as this year. // thanks to a career change / a prep cook’s sensibility / put the grater aside / and used a food chopper and a ten-count chop / on the carrots / to ensure there would be chunks / in the salad / and not the mundane confetti / that is the norm. also, / organic blue agave sweetener stood in for splenda / and the raisin-to-carrot ratio / was upped approximately 20%. // it was a quiet, spectacular treat, / drinking sumatran-blend coffee / and eating a poshish salad / from vessels made recently / by the prepcook-poet-potter-bonvivant. // life changes us when we change / our lives.
Meet Jen, a Real Hero
As I was walking toward Harkins Theatres at ChrisTown Spectrum Mall, a friendly voice said, “Hi! How are you doing?” It belonged to this lady, sitting next to this car. She is Jen, and she is one of the people who pick up loose trash that lazy people couldn’t be bothered to throw away in appropriate receptacles. “It’s not the homeless,” she says. “Homeless people pick up after themselves.”
I held up my plastic bag, full of wrappers that held the snacks and lemonade I bought at Wal-Mart, which opens before the rest of the mall does. “Wal-Mart trash!” said I, referring both to the stuff in the bag, and people like me who shop at Wal-Mart.
Jen had a lot to say about how the homeless are mistreated, “basically being shooed around” by the police and other authority figureheads. I told her the sad story of Adam Vespoli, who had been shooed off a freeway underpass, then off a Valley Metro bus, and then, tragically, into an early demise by the City of Phoenix Police Department. (See my blog post “Five Stars for One of Them Was Mine by Susan Vespoli” for more details.) Her face went sad. She understood the injustice, and the way homeless people are vastly misunderstood, neglected, and abused.
“I talked to a Lyft driver about homelessness. HE told me ‘homelessness is a choice.’ Made me mad. He didn’t get any tip from me!” Jen also talked to one of the ChrisTown security guards, a new hire who seemed to think that the homeless were part of the trash-mess. “I set her straight on that. Part of my job is educating people.”
I thanked Jen for giving back to the community, raising the quality of local lives and helping make our community more civilized. I told her I’d make a blog post of our conversation, in hopes that it would educate more people about the plight of the homeless. Lastly, I took a picture of her and her company car, thanked her for a wonderful conversation, and wished her well.
Friends, if you are a Valley resident who wants to similarly contribute to Civilization, Jen’s company is hiring. See the number on the side of her car!
One with Clay, Image and Text 