Friday, August 24, 2007

All Rise


What has come to me?
When I have watched the universe
The discovery
That everyone
Gets common
So strange
And perfect again

From "A Day"
by Inara George on the cd "All Rise"


'To hear the record is to understand. Inara's thoughtful lyrics and optimistic, vulnerable voice offer a wisdom and sense of irony that can't be served by the naïve and ambitious youths who dominate today's airwaves. Her phrasing is unique, yet strangely reminiscent of male singers, like Leonard Cohen or Nick Drake. And how the record sounds seems to defy context, gracefully blending the nostalgic and the contemporary, the organic and the synthesized into an immensely palatable, and wholly consistent, soundscape all it's own."
Review from CD Baby.
For more info visit:

Thursday, August 23, 2007

The Biologists Have Arrived


The great extrapolator has drawn up the map

That which you deny
You bring into existence
Those endless novelties you seek to destroy
Are brimming and budding
They’re bursting the seams of your neatly sewn conclusions
Circumnavigating the globe
For the sea you left behind
With your succinct and drastic closures
drawing up your belts of life
As if they could contain us
You place the azoic at will
As if you could move hemispheres
We fail to understand the middle depths
Living within our own smallness
The ocean is calling our bluff
I allow for the primordial slime
To bring us to terms with regions
Immeasurable and unexplored

That which you cut down to size
Falls neatly into your hands
A lamb for your iron
A stone for your enduring mark
Easily crushed and scattered
You boil down your conclusions
A reduction of syrup
A minor treacle
And jar them like bottom mud
A novelty for your shelf
A conversation piece

The biologists have arrived
With sea bed in their hands
That which you deny
They bring into existence

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Plight of the Moderately Gifted

…simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that.

A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness.

A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers.

We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.”
How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”







Excerpt from the book "Bluebeard", by Kurt Vonnegut

Bold Dizzy Joy of Childhood Playthings

Dorit, Bronze, Double Ring and Couch by Franz West



Ypsilon by Franz West


Laube, Meeting Point 3, Ypsilon, Dorit, Bronze, Double Ring, Couch by Franz West



My heaven holds the bold dizzy joy of childhood playthings

Forms larger than life

Fantasies molded into cheerful towers

which greet my easy soaring

as I glide past their tops

coming to rest

on a luminous shore

So happy so warm

A blanket of wind

Clouds weaving their shapes for me

forever and ever
the bold dizzy joy
the sweet air of love



Sculptures by Austrian sculptor Franz West on display at Lincoln Center in NYC in 2004.

For more information see:










Monday, August 20, 2007

Hello Lemon


Hello lemon
This wide life opens
Tingles like money
The smell of heaven
Clean with hope
Always
Beginning, beginning
Re-beginning
A bright spot
A burst of lemon
This new day


Poem inspired by the song "Hello Lemon" by Mike Andrews, from his cd "Hand on String."

See more about Mike Andrews at his website:



Hand on String, by Mike Andrews






Friday, August 17, 2007

Riki Tiki Tavi - Mongoose Is Gone



Everybody who read the Jungle Book
knows that Riki Tiki Tavi's
a mongoose who kills snakes

When I was a young man
I was led to believe there were organizations
to kill my snakes for me

ie the church
ie the government
ie school

but when I got a little older
I learned I had to kill them myself

Riki tiki tavi mongoose is gone
Riki tiki tavi mongoose is gone
Won't be coming around
for to kill your snakes no more, my love
Riki tiki tavi mongoose is gone

From the song, "Riki Tiki Tavi", by Donovan

Images are Diana Rigg as Emma Peel
in the TV show, "The Avengers".







Thursday, August 16, 2007

A Chilling Message From The Tupperware Liberation Front


The ladies are melting down their ore, melting down their ore
Before the big Tupperware meet tonight
They’re sharpening their irons
Preparing for the slaughter
They’re out to preserve the status quo
For their sons and daughters
They want their avocado kitchens
In a more tender shade of green
They’ll race to bake their Alaskas
In their new Hotpoint machines











Visit the The Tupperware Film website: http://www.thetupperwarefilm.com/









Tuesday, August 14, 2007

When You Die, Can You Marry the Beatles?


Of Course!

So a ten-year old girl was told,
when she gave a fortune-telling toy a spin.

Who says ours is not a benevolent universe?


"Limitless undying love
which shines around me like a million suns
it calls me on and on across the universe"

- The Beatles

Monday, August 13, 2007

Oh Happy Meat! Oh Happy Soul!




From the novel, "Bluebeard," by Kurt Vonnegut:

If I watch two people talking on a street corner, I see not only their flesh and clothes, but narrow, vertical bands of color inside them—not so much like tape, actually, but more like low-intensity neon tubes.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.
‘”So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.”
“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”
“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off their skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

….”your meat made the picture in the potato barn,” she said.
“Sounds right, “ I said. “My soul didn’t know what kind of picture to paint, but my meat sure did.”
“Well then,” she said, “isn’t it time for your soul, which has been ashamed of your meat for so long, to thank your meat for finally doing something wonderful?”
I thought that over. “That sounds right too,” I said.
“You have to actually do it,” she said.
“How?” I said.
“Hold your hand in front of your eye,” she said, “ and look at those strange and clever animals with love and gratitude, and tell them out loud: ‘Thank you, Meat.’”
So I did.
I held my hands in front of my eyes, and I said out loud and with all my heart: ‘Thank you, Meat.’”
Oh happy Meat. Oh happy Soul. Oh happy Rabo Karabekian.







Wednesday, August 8, 2007

When Seasons Go Bad



When Seasons Go Bad

The June bugs are in bloom
the heat a red-cheeked stranger
panting at my side
the yard is brown
and full of treachery
a garden hose coils
menacingly
a sprinkler chases a child
a plastic soldier left for dead
shoulders his bazooka
the sun gives up its cloud and moves in
the neighbors have retreated
doors shut tight
on their factory-cooled spaces
a Jenn-Air clicks on
a metal island
of machine breezes
its whirling hum
incubates
drowns out
the fire, the brimstone
beating down from the cauldron
hissing up from the grass
boiling, boiling
the violence
of hell descending


Catfish

Running through uncut grass
in dirty feet
stopped short
by an old tin bucket
back of the house
smells like creek water
emits small slapping sounds
the dank metal coming alive
dimly visible beneath dark water
are ghostly shapes
that suddenly spasm and grow eyes
their protests against the sides
weak and intermittent
are lost against the largeness
of a summer evening
heard only by myself
and the indifferent squirrels
who rule the yard
with their casual comings and goings
and know the fate that awaits catfish behind the tool shed

Thursday, August 2, 2007

To Hell With The Bluebird



"I don't think there is happiness. I think that is something cheap and plastic that they sell from cereal boxes. I think the real McCoy is made from pieces of all the other items, the grief, the fear, the anger. There are moments, possibly months at a time, when everything we are fuses and we are there. We are real and it is so much we haven't the words for it. Certainly not happiness. You can't bottle this."



Excerpt from the book, "The Extra Large Medium," by Helen Slavin.



Artwork from: