Dress/Girl
I’ve seen that dress before.
I just saw it last night
crammed on the metro
thanks to the workers’ strike
General Strike in Madrid - March 29, 2012!
smashed up against hot breath and breasts,
mostly focused on the breasts...
I’m getting away from myself here.
The dress.
It’s a spring dress
just above the knee
in style
“de moda” they’d say here
lacy
swirly
designs in white
vintage in every sense of the word
20’s vintage, well done
topped off with a thin brown belt
wrapped around fun looking hips
the dress has never looked nicer
than it looks on you.
Starbucks
I’m a strange looking man.
I’m a blue looking man.
Head to toe in it
swimming in denim and stripes
sitting in Starbucks on Paseo del Prado,
the first one ever in the city,
the flagship
the Mothership
writing poems furiously in the corner
about a girl in a dress
I’ve seen before - the dress -
then Memory and Michigan
then the dress
then the girl
my pencil not even moving for a sec
why do they come to me all in one day?
the girls and the dresses and poems
I cannot choose these times
but I can choose what I wear
and today I decided to be all blue.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Granada Part III
III Short 1’s
I
Play on boys
sing and clap on
rough gypsy sketches
of flamenco
echo a live demo
before the valley
in Granada
flowing to the Sierra Nevada
warm and dry
“Free as a Bird”
I fly
between the palace and
San Nicolas
to the white sun
II
I’ll never be a king but I’m content in my own dream
reaching out to touch you on the ledge where you sit
legs dangling like a dance
long-haired queen.
III
The clouds make the mountains grow higher
snowy peaks growing brighter
old Irving the damn statue writer
following us all day.
But, Washington!
that’s O.K.
I
Play on boys
sing and clap on
rough gypsy sketches
of flamenco
echo a live demo
before the valley
in Granada
flowing to the Sierra Nevada
warm and dry
“Free as a Bird”
I fly
between the palace and
San Nicolas
to the white sun
II
I’ll never be a king but I’m content in my own dream
reaching out to touch you on the ledge where you sit
legs dangling like a dance
long-haired queen.
III
The clouds make the mountains grow higher
snowy peaks growing brighter
old Irving the damn statue writer
following us all day.
But, Washington!
that’s O.K.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Granada: Part II - Cats and History
We did this and that and walked through the city up to a dry olive grove until we were no longer really in the city limits anymore because we could see no man-made borders from so high except a crumbling wall running along the hill from Muslim days. In front of us here were mountains that I earlier in the day mistook for clouds, their peaks were that white. It really looked as if the whole powdery top could trail off into the sky. Sitting on a rock big and flat enough for just us two, close to the orange-red soil in the parched, out-of-season grove, we took everything in like the first tourists: contemplating the Alhambra below; in awe of its imposing structure and gardens and all their exotic embellishments; on top of the world with only the Sierra Nevada more mighty.
“You go to these places,” motioning to the landscape ahead and sky “and you don’t think about anything. Nothing. You don’t even feel.”
“I’m thinking right now.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking about Cats.* ”
“..........”
“...the little one we saw coming up here?”
“You see, you’re thinking about nothing, it’s great. Genial.” I throatily proclaimed.(It was a word I was and still am very fond of in such situations.) “You know, I hate cats. Almost as much as I hate Washington Irving.**"
“Oh I get mad at my cat all the time.”
“I think if I had a cat, I’d punch it in the face all the time.”
“Have you seen that kitten YouTube video?” She just kept on chugging along with it.
“No.”
“It’s a little girl narrating a kitten’s picture book. It’s called Kittens Presented by Kittens.”
(Long pause here, much longer than the one before, such an amount of dot dot dots would be insulting.) “If we lived here and had an open-air place, I’d let you have a cat.”
“Yeah, I’d want a pretty independent cat, like it’d get its own food and be free-roaming. I think that’d be the ideal cat. And Life Partner.”
It was an absurd conversation in an inspiring place. And this was the best we could come up with? Cats? The big rock alone in the grove there for just us two, the cracked orange-red soil close enough to taste, the wide blue sky and the stony confusion of the clouds and mountain tops. The view.*** I mean, this was a serious, historic site, some fucking holy ground, and we were both inward looking enough people. It didn’t make much sense. But then neither do many events when we’re busy living them.
It seems to be a reoccurring motif in my travels these days too more than it used to be, the inability to take what I need - or what I think I need - out of a place while “in the moment.” You want it to be all its worth, right? Because there’s careful planning and preparation involved, anticipation for the sites and sounds and all it will be, an investment. At the time, up there on the mount, from those lofty heights in the white light where we could peer into the fortress palace below, I didn’t think about much of anything (though I do remember noting that the soil had the same tinge as the cocktail**** I had drunk the night before in a little burn-out bar on Elvira street.)
So, finally we descended down to enter the Alhambra, purely giddy from the sunshine and wine settling in from lunch and each other’s presence. Although, of course, as usual I did not know this then until much later when she had left at the bus station in Granada and I had gotten back to Madrid.
*Not to be confused with the musical Cats; she really did make it sound like it was capitalized.
**American romanticist reference resulting from said author’s surprisingly steady, if not static, level of fame and the subsequent cafes, bookstores, vendors and even tobacco shops throughout Granada that bear his name and sell his acclaimed 1832 hit Tales of the Alhambra.
***We also proposed the landscape as suitably Jurassic - a perfect setting for dinosaurs to roam - then imagined c. 1200 AD Arabic warriors saddled atop them and what an even more formidable place, the Alhambra that is, really would be.
****a negroni
“You go to these places,” motioning to the landscape ahead and sky “and you don’t think about anything. Nothing. You don’t even feel.”
“I’m thinking right now.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking about Cats.* ”
“..........”
“...the little one we saw coming up here?”
“You see, you’re thinking about nothing, it’s great. Genial.” I throatily proclaimed.(It was a word I was and still am very fond of in such situations.) “You know, I hate cats. Almost as much as I hate Washington Irving.**"
“Oh I get mad at my cat all the time.”
“I think if I had a cat, I’d punch it in the face all the time.”
“Have you seen that kitten YouTube video?” She just kept on chugging along with it.
“No.”
“It’s a little girl narrating a kitten’s picture book. It’s called Kittens Presented by Kittens.”
(Long pause here, much longer than the one before, such an amount of dot dot dots would be insulting.) “If we lived here and had an open-air place, I’d let you have a cat.”
“Yeah, I’d want a pretty independent cat, like it’d get its own food and be free-roaming. I think that’d be the ideal cat. And Life Partner.”
It was an absurd conversation in an inspiring place. And this was the best we could come up with? Cats? The big rock alone in the grove there for just us two, the cracked orange-red soil close enough to taste, the wide blue sky and the stony confusion of the clouds and mountain tops. The view.*** I mean, this was a serious, historic site, some fucking holy ground, and we were both inward looking enough people. It didn’t make much sense. But then neither do many events when we’re busy living them.
It seems to be a reoccurring motif in my travels these days too more than it used to be, the inability to take what I need - or what I think I need - out of a place while “in the moment.” You want it to be all its worth, right? Because there’s careful planning and preparation involved, anticipation for the sites and sounds and all it will be, an investment. At the time, up there on the mount, from those lofty heights in the white light where we could peer into the fortress palace below, I didn’t think about much of anything (though I do remember noting that the soil had the same tinge as the cocktail**** I had drunk the night before in a little burn-out bar on Elvira street.)
So, finally we descended down to enter the Alhambra, purely giddy from the sunshine and wine settling in from lunch and each other’s presence. Although, of course, as usual I did not know this then until much later when she had left at the bus station in Granada and I had gotten back to Madrid.
*Not to be confused with the musical Cats; she really did make it sound like it was capitalized.
**American romanticist reference resulting from said author’s surprisingly steady, if not static, level of fame and the subsequent cafes, bookstores, vendors and even tobacco shops throughout Granada that bear his name and sell his acclaimed 1832 hit Tales of the Alhambra.
***We also proposed the landscape as suitably Jurassic - a perfect setting for dinosaurs to roam - then imagined c. 1200 AD Arabic warriors saddled atop them and what an even more formidable place, the Alhambra that is, really would be.
****a negroni
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
What was intended to be the "About Me" section but was "more than 1200 characters."
It is ironic that I finally scramble to write this “about me” section and officially create this blog on the last day of February of a leap year. For reasons which are completely senseless and of my own personal agenda, I had set off in 2012 to make a blog “before March” (quoting an entry from somewhere between Michigan and Madrid in the fading inspiration of a New Year’s resolution, unable to sleep on the flight.) And so here I am, and any other year it would be March.
I also find it bold to say that from this point forward every piece you find here will be drawn entirely from the present. That’s not to say that experiences we cannot fully grapple with yet because they are so new should not be drawn from; look no further than sound journalism, for instance. Chronicle by it’s very name, though, is a snapshot from everywhere, all time, past and present. And everything you find here - poems, pictures, songs and lyrics, and other short writings - comes from somewhere profound: The hand-me-down rust-colored swivel chair in last year’s Ann Arbor apartment; my favorite rock formation I spent many a Sunday afternoon at in Segovia back in 2009, buses, lectures, trains, cafes, jets. Jets*. Kundera says “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.” I saw that the other day, like when I saw the name Chronicle on a bus stop outside the Retiro Park advertising a movie of the same name and hurried on home to finally put up a place to document and store these time pieces from when the stage was black and the audience was both familiar and unknown.
*cool word
I also find it bold to say that from this point forward every piece you find here will be drawn entirely from the present. That’s not to say that experiences we cannot fully grapple with yet because they are so new should not be drawn from; look no further than sound journalism, for instance. Chronicle by it’s very name, though, is a snapshot from everywhere, all time, past and present. And everything you find here - poems, pictures, songs and lyrics, and other short writings - comes from somewhere profound: The hand-me-down rust-colored swivel chair in last year’s Ann Arbor apartment; my favorite rock formation I spent many a Sunday afternoon at in Segovia back in 2009, buses, lectures, trains, cafes, jets. Jets*. Kundera says “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.” I saw that the other day, like when I saw the name Chronicle on a bus stop outside the Retiro Park advertising a movie of the same name and hurried on home to finally put up a place to document and store these time pieces from when the stage was black and the audience was both familiar and unknown.
*cool word
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