Two Broken Legs and the Walls of Jericho

I am hijacking my own space!
I typically use my blog as a platform to get a bit artsy, and share some poetry. However, I wanted to use my blog to share a bit of my journey over the last year. The struggles, the lessons in hopes you will join me in the next immediate step of my journey.

I am currently packing to head up to UC Davis tomorrow with the track team to compete at the Big West Conference Track and Field Championships. I will be running the 10k on Friday evening. (And hush hush maybe also the 5k Saturday afternoon.) After the last year it seems crazy to me that I am packing to go race! In the last year I have struggled through two stress-reactions in the same left femur, numerous illnesses (including getting sick the day after I ran pain free for the first time in three months) and set-back after set-back.
When I arrived at UCR I envisioned season after season of All-Conference performances, which would lead to numerous individual conference championships, and some All-Americans along the way. It has been anything but that. A year back or so my dad asked if he thought my purpose at UCR was perhaps to grow spiritually more then it was to run fast. I insisted I thought God put me here to race well, but time has made clear that my time at UCR has never been about breaking records and all about God shaping me for what's next in my life. By sharing a few songs that have really shaped my meditation in the last year I hope to share a bit of my journey.

+Finish what He Started- Steven Curtis Chapman
I heard this song for the first time right after my stress reaction in my femur had been diagnosed for a second time. I was one week away from going to race indoor track and race for the first time in about 9 months. I was in the midst of a massive training block and was in the best shape of my life. Then my leg begun to hurt and within a week I couldn't run at all.  I felt like months of work were stolen from me. As I heard this song in church I wept, and yelled back at the worship team that this song wasn't true. I felt like I was working toward finishing what I had started and then it was gone. It is easy to believe the words in this song when things are going well. But to truly believe God is going to weave every thread together when the threads are disintegrating is almost painful. I have listened to this song nearly everyday for the last six months as I learn to daily trust the Lord. God will finish what he started, I just need to realize it may not be what I thought we were starting (its always better!) and the journey to finishing is going to be unclear to me. All I can do is daily trust the One who is guiding the journey.

+Desert Song- Hillsong United
I have discovered in the last year that when you are truly desperate to hear the Lord he often speaks. The last bit has been a time of desperation, and every time I cried out I heard from the Lord. It is sad to me, that it often takes us being shaken to become desperate to hear the Lord. I want to be desperate to hear from the Lord in seasons of plenty and seasons of drought. This last season has been one of drought. I wake up desperate for the touch of God to make it through the day. And every time I have asked God has touched me. Last week I was on the track for the first time since January, working through my first time really running fast in months. It was extremely painful, my body was not use to running fast, and I was in considerable pain trying to click off K's on the track. I finished the workout nearly in tears, my body was broken, and my heart was heavy. I didn't want to go race the 10k if it was going to be nothing but pain, and feeling absolutely defeated, I heard the Lord speak to me right on the track. I head him say, "Give me your brokenness, I can carry it all for you." My personal desert song today is: take it all, carry all my brokenness!

+Glorious Ruins: Hillsong United
This song is the victory I am praying for this weekend! The last year has been very much about letting go of the victories, letting go of the racing and giving the results to God either way. God has created me to compete, my moments of deepest personal communion I have had with God have all been while I am competing. At times actually racing, or at  other times training while I compete with myself, or my watch. Unfortunately I often manipulate this desire to compete and let it become god. Much of this season has been spent wrestling through my desire to make my gifts my gods. My trust of my body, of my ability to train and race, have been stripped away, as I have learned to truly trust what I should have been trusting all along and that's the One who gave me the gifts. As I pack I feel like I am entering this race in ruins. The training, the time on the track, and the preparations are simply not there. But I am not stepping on the track on Friday night to race for a time or a podium spot, I am stepping on the track to enter the Throne room of God. Doing what God has created me to do, race, I want to take that opportunity to bow down and look toward the Cross as my failure is lost! I am stepping on the track in faith believing that ruins have been brought to life!

I need your help! The last few weeks I have been drawn to the story of Jericho. I have spent some time studying it, and really feel as though my 25 laps around the track are like the laps around the city of Jericho. My prayers for the last week have been that as I race lap after lap the Lord would tear down the walls of this Jericho season. That the walls of this dessert season would be destroyed. But I need some trumpets! Just as the Israelites blew trumpets everyday as they marched around the city, I ask that you would join me in spirit Friday night and pray that the Walls would come down. I would love all the prayer and support I could get.

As I step on the track Friday night (8:35 pm to be exact) my goal is not to win, but to offer my Heart completely to the One who gave it ALL.

The Promised Return to CAConrad

I have to finish the CAConrad sequence I started on quite awhile ago now. Two Post ago I introduced CAConrad as the lyrical Chuck Norris. Boom! I also posted one of his exercises and my poem that followed from his exercise. But I was tired of being Robin and stole the keys to the BATMOBILE! (Or  more accurately just wrote my own Somatic Exercise.)

The

Rub-a-dub-Grub Exercise

            Go to your local super market, the store you shop at regularly where you know exactly what you need on each aisle without even making a list. Preferably go at a time when you are not extraordinarily famished. Spend a bit of time aimlessly wondering the store, shop with no needs. Shop with no shopping list. What does the grocery store feel like when you need no groceries? Pick a smaller section of the store, one aisle that contains one of your dietary staples. Observe all you can about this aisle. How are the foods grouped? Do they all look the same? Are they all the same product just with different brands? Pay attention. Write. As you study your aisle try and find something you have never noticed before. An item you did not ever see sitting right by your regular stop on this aisle. What is this item? Describe it. Really describe it. Think about all the people that mindlessly zip down your aisle grab this item and run past your go-to food. Do you think lots of people have missed this item or just you? Purchase said item and bring home for part B.

            As you bring your new food home think about all the people who cannot leave the store without this item. Who do you think puts this item at the top of their grocery list every week? Now open the food. Close your eyes and smell. Write. Does it smell familiar or foreign? Stick your finger in the item, what do you feel? Does it feel weird to play with this food? With your eyes still closed try the item. Be aware of the full orgastic pleasure palate of eating. Texture, temperature, taste, write, write, write. Where do you think this food is made? Are the workers happy to be making X, or is the kitchen it is made the pits? Who is working in this kitchen? Can you taste the temperate of those who prepared it? Now eat it with a few things you typically eat with say lunch or dinner. Make it a part of a normal meal. Now eat it with what you think the people who regularly buy this item typically eat it with. Who are these people? What does their dinner look like? Do they eat alone? In front of the TV? Full course meals or frozen meals? Imagine, be the voyeur of voyeurs. Be Whitman magically flying table to table. Be them. Eat. Imagine. Write some scribbles. Transcend one final time away into the world’s dinner table.

            Now write a poem.

Usually I detest Puns, but its Friday...

And here is what my own Somatic Exercise lead me too....

Skinny Love

All the hands that touched—

a hand for every curl

my hands empty

hearts bare

your hands scented

hearts bare

The last of a generation that believes

it IS a truth universally acknowledged

spritzed and stacked on the hour

motion sensor lights and desire on the first aisle

we are not allowed to be here

only what I can carry in my two hands for every curl

Will you stand still

open yourself to the gentle indifference of the world

native moments             our indecent calls

                                                                        Silence           

            pour a little salt

            we were never here

all my hands for one curl

to which you reply:

“yours is a responsive part in the litany of love”

A hand for every curl

Crawling back and the Ukraine

Well.....
Posting every Friday lasted about as long as I expected it to.... not very long. School got real, training increased and writing sadly is often the first thing to go. I was also bummed about breaking my every Friday promise (even if it was only a promise with myself). But I am back, and with a new shame-free promise, to post as often as life allows.

 To Kiev....

Freedom Square-Kiev
or
"Freedom Square"

I want to post a poem that is not as urgent now, but none-the-less I believe very important still. I watched closely the violent protest that rocked Ukraine over a month ago. I was heart broken as I watched video's of people protesting for their freedom being dragged out of the Square riddled with bullet wounds. Hotel lobbies lines with bodies of dead protesters. As I scrolled through news stories it also became apparent to me, that not all that the "freedom fighters" claimed was true. They claimed peaceful protest, yet nearly every news clip shows men firing make-shift shotguns and throwing Molotov cocktails toward the soldiers. It was violent all around. And it broke my heart. So I wrote a poem.

A video that went viral and I have thought a lot about. Yes fighting for freedom, but by what means, Ukrainian Angel Headed Hipster?

I read this poem out-loud at a poetry event. As I read I had the image of Freedom Square seen above projected on the screen behind me. About a third of the way through the poem I turned and began directly speaking to the image, with my back to the audience. It was extremely freeing and cathartic. There is not much I can do about the freedom of Ukraine, but say what I feel must be said. And this is what I feel must be said.

I was reading some Pablo Neruda at the time and the poem is heavily influenced by some of his poems on a similar protest in Chile. The italicized lines are directly from his poem, "The Dead in the Square".

The Dead in The (Freedom) Square

-Reflections on Pablo Neruda’s The Dead in the Square

This crime took place right in the open Square.

Not in the forest was the innocent blood spilled,

not in the thirsty concealing and sand of the pampas.

No one made any attempt to cover it up.

This crime was done in the very heart of the country.

I do Not come to weep here where they fell.

I do not come wearing the war relics of our

grand-fathers, tin hats and car-door shields.

You have been screaming in the square so long—

you have forgotten your voice.

I have come to speak.

I have not come with a Molotov Cocktail,

I have come with a voice. Kiev:

Tune your ears to my voice.

To those dragging bodies out of the Square

I have come to speak—

To those dragging bodies into the Square

I have come to speak.

You have burned Freedom Square—

the angelic topped hallmark of your nation,

chard black—

            grieving Square

                        grieving Kiev.

With your hands you have torn

down the monuments

of your Oppressors but your hands

would tear down heaven if only they could grasp.

But you cannot grasp—

only shout.

You shout out in the world’s newspapers:

Look at the President he fired LIVE

ammunition.

Your twenty-five year prophet says:

            We want to be free.

I want to live a moral life

            We want to be free

Build this freedom in our country

            We want to be free

It is the gift of a free Kiev—

We fight for the gift of a free Kiev

But you have forgotten the blood

that gushed forth in the middle of the street

right in front of the palace,

your red stains remain there

like stars, fixed and implacable.

The blood that built the square you burned.

A Kiev freed with a bread-basket

of Molotov Cocktail’s  and

improvised munitions is a

dead Kiev.

I speak to the old generation:

In the name of those dead—

I demand punishment.

You have given them life but on

the rim of hell. They feed on roots,

while yachts sit moored outside

your courts. Your ceilings reach toward

the heavens, but surly you are not above

the angel that crowns the Square.

You sent the men with loaded rifles—

with orders to kill without mercy,

then you ran from the blood that

ebbs to your feet—

I demand punishment.

Kiev tune your ears to this voice.

O fallen brothers, out of the silence

your voices will rise in the mighty shouts of freedom

when the hope of the people flames into paeans of Joy.

CAConrad (Soma)Tic Excersice

It's FRIDAY and I am listening to Prince's '1999' (Go dance to this!!!)so feeling like getting a little weird. And no better poet to get a bit weird with then CAconrad: The contemporary lyric Chuck Norris

He will intimidate poems right out of you-
The Lyric Chuck Norris

I don't want to get too much into just telling you about CAconrad, I put the WiKi search bar on the right to encourage independent research- or check out his poorly laid out blog. What is immediately important to us is his (Soma)Tic exercises. The idea comes from the mashing of two words, Soma and Somatic. Soma is a ritualistic drink (in the simplest of terms), the word is derived from the Sanskrit and Indo-European tongues meaning "to press and be newly born."Somatic is a word derived from Greek, meaning the body. He describes the mashing up of these two words:

My idea for a (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration.

He then writes crazy exercises to help the poet into this "infinite space". I want to look specifically as (Soma)Tic exercise #29 the shopping mall tree exercise.

 Go to a shopping mall parking lot with trees and other landscaping growing between the cars to create this poem. Find a tree you connect with, feel it out, bark, branches, leaves. Sit on it's roots to see if it wants you OFF! These trees are SICK WITH converting car exhaust and shopper exhale all fucking day! Sit with your tree friend. Don't pay attention to the cars coming in and out of the parking lot, you're here to write poetry, not to worry about what a lunatic you appear to be. Remember what our QUEEN poet of merging celestial bodies Mina Loy said, "If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction." Public Space is not easy in shopping mall parking lots, but calmly explain yourself to the security guard like I did when creating this exercise. They will train a camera on you, but the sooner you get rid of them the sooner you can train the camera of your brain. Take notes, feverishly at first. Use a magnifying glass to study the dirt, trunk, to look carefully at leaf veins and bark structure. Notes, take notes, writing quickly, as if you've just discovered a sleeping creature that may wake at any moment and ATTACK YOU! Smell your hand, smell a branch. Study then the sky and buildings and people and everything, every detail. Face one direction and stare for a few seconds. Close your eyes and while they're closed imagine what you saw. Open your eyes and notice what you missed when imagining what you saw. Study what was missed and where and how it exists in relation to your tree friend. Take notes. If you are right-handed then touch the tree with your left hand, for your left hand is the hand which absorbs the world. Then walk to other trees in the parking lot and touch them with your right hand, for your right hand is the hand which sends your messages OUT of you. Touching your right hand to the other trees sends OUT of you the message your tree friend put into you through your left hand. Take notes on what was said from tree to tree. What message were you carrying? Take notes while leaving. Later, at home, close your eyes and remember your tree friend, take more notes from this visit with your memory. Now take all your notes, and using THE FILTERS "TRACT" and "INITIATE," shape your poem.

Semi-happy middle class mall trees 

And not so happy leaky flat tenement mall trees

Quite the task master and quite the task. But after getting over being bossed around by CAconrad I went out and spent 45 minutes in my schools giant parking-The Disney Land lot, Lot 30 and befriended a tree. And yes if you read the whole exercise I did walk around and passage messages from tree to tree. Here is the poem that resulted from this treeship (breaking my personal no pun rule) and this (Soma)Tic exercise.

Here is Lot 30 photo-shopped to look half-way friendly

Parking Lot Trees

At a Supermarket in California

This is a note carved in the death

of a moment in the memory of the memory of you.

            A jealous connection, its all over this paper.

Dear Margie, I couldn’t help

                                    but think is this is someone else’s home.

There’s black rivers lined with people

            trees

hacked mid-limb, growing and decaying.

Some things are black stop and see:

168 mid-drifts—two-third with pierced belly buttons

(only a quarter sterile).

18 dozen tank-wearing            club beat blaring            snap back/fresh tat

no class but the off-brand-six pack

frat rat, homeboys, yelling—                                                            SHITS REAL LIFE

Young Menace of Society tatted on 9

unshaven-boot wearing-ball-point-waving prophets

Angel headed hipsters—raving, rhyming, rapping, Howling.

Black trees have branches that fall in just a way too.

To shelter you from the total animal soup of time.

—So we beat on, trees against the tide—

             walking on the highway across America

            to the door of my cottage in the Western night.

Margie I couldn’t help but think

                        this is someone else’s home.

While you are out and about this week, take a moment to notice the tree's in your target's parking lot. Asking him if he has anything to say to you. And if he does, write it down! And write a poem!

The Sonnets Part II

Here are Sonnets IV-VI which round out my mini-collection of Barrigan style sonnets. (Sonnets I-III are up from last week) Hope you enjoy. Next week going to get a bit weird with a CAConrad exercises.

IV

Dear Susie Asado-sweet tea-sweet sweet tea

Sweet Susie, This is that room. The one

with the yellow wallpaper and the Parriot,

“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!”

I am the boy breaking glass.

We ran to the sea with a bed sheet and a bucket—

Hot sand on toes, cold toes in sleeping bags

A bucket for dreams to drain. This is that room.

The note on the door: ‘I have eaten the plums,

But the present is clearly here to stay.’

I am the boy breaking glass. Whose

Broken window is a cry of art.

Forgive me they were delicious

so sweet and so cold.

V

I do not celebrate myself!

There is that in me- I do not know what it is-

but I know it is in me- This is that.

This is my 14^th grade hand scribbling:

When we danced last night I could

only hear the beat enough to know I was off.

Dear Margie, I am with you in the Lime Tree

where you’re madder then I am.

Your poetry makes me have particularly

emotional reactions on Tuesdays that rain.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

No one knew where I was and now

I am no longer there— Only this and

nothing more.

VI

Where are we going,                                    ?

Listen to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox.

This is the courage to say what I couldn’t

say in the 4^th grade. The only people for me

are the mad ones. Mad to live.

My hands scribbled the ending you read aloud:

“The last word he pronounced was -- your name.”

The Horror! The Horror! Forevermore.

Mad to talk, mad to be saved, “How to even begin to get it all down.”

Just hold on we’re going home.

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.

While the Weary Blues echo through my head

I sleep like a rock or a man that’s dead.

shantih            shantih            shantih

Sonnets Part I

Last quarter I had the opportunity to read Ted Berrigan's "Sonnets". Which was one of the most fascinating and perplexing books of poetry that I have read. In the collection Berrigan re-imagines the sonnet form and creates a poetry that is "inhabited by acquaintances, family, poet friends, and well as material stolen directly from said friends". 
Here is the first Sonnet of the collection. One of my favorite of the whole collection and one I came back to time and time again as I fumbled with writing my own:

The Sonnets: I

His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze

Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.

In the book of his music the corners have straightened:

Which owe their presence to our sleeping hands.

The ox-blood from the hands which play

For fire for warmth for hands for growth

Is there room in the room that you room in?

Upon his structured tomb:

Still they mean something. For the dance

And the architecture.

Weave among incidents

May be portentous to him

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

Wind giving presence to fragments.

Its both poetry of chance and re-imagining while being poetry that is deeply tied to the community around it. In many ways it embodies what I desire the re-appropriating of my blog to be. So let's begin with Sonnets!

Writing my mini-collection of Sonnets was  one of the more enjoyable projects I have undertaken. What I am reading, poems I love, music, bits of conversation are always creeping into my poetry. I am always trying to balance how much I let these things creep in and how much I try to "shut" them out. With the Sonnets I threw open the doors to creep. My desk and the floor around my desk was covered with anthologies, books, old notebooks, pages of poems, hand scrawled notes, it was sheer chaos and the energy if this chaos is apparent in my sonnets. Enjoy, and maybe write a few poems fused with lines from your favorite poems, your favorite song, what the person in front of you at the grocery store said and what over else creeps its way in.

Sonnets

I

No, No, No.

There is no room in the room that I room in.

I never met you there that time. When

I chose to instead live in the wasted dream

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.

This is not Tomorrow.

Dear Neha, be careful about rooftops—

how quickly your heart beats the faster you climb.

This is my 4^th grade hand scribbling

What am I suppose to do?

Crush her heart or crush mine?

Then Pancho Villa came to town, hung the mayor.

These scribbling hands are good for climbing.

Tomorrow I will start to be happy

Today is almost yesterday.

II

No, No, No. Yes.

There is room in the room that I room in.

A campfire Girl,

Only a part-time mother and father

You told me no one ever falls in the Grand Canyon

We lost our virginity at recess.

This is thee lunch hour, a chain between your thighs,

a cut down chandelier, a book of poems

I hid from my mom— notches on my bed post.

This is supposed to be an independent thought

But it is just a strained leash.

Dear Margie,

Friendship and Love are not in my blood.

They are there for you.

III

Even the Lover Poet knows that

¿El sueño de la razón produce monstruos?

Do you hear this babe—

My voice is a carousal of lies.

Your scent saturates this, hot breath

bands with the beat— smell of sperm flushed

by men with Orange shovels.

I trembled the first time I rhymed our story:

She will always be just a kiss and a hopeful idea.

A single lie lays in the line.

dear Son of Man, its 5:15 GMT

We are the sleeping fragments of his sky,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images.

*Next Week: the rest Sonnets IV-VI*

The Prelude

It is just a few month shy of three years since I last posted in this space. I forgot it existed. But I love re-invention and re-appropriation. That is why I am here, to take back my own space!

Over winter break I had the time and opportunity to take in lots of awesome art. The highlights included:

• Francisco Goya at the Norton Simon Museum, which has one of my all-time favorite pieces of art: 

"El sueño de la razón produce monstruos"
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

• Childish Gambino's new project Because The Internet. The script, the album, and all the little bits in-between make it a multi-media masterpiece that deserves a look even if you are not a hip-hop fan. 
• A bit of a warning the work is rather dark and gloomy,which is why I like it, but it sat heavy on my heart for a few days as I digested it. It is also quite explicit. 

• The architecture of downtown Los Angeles, specifically the post-modern mind benders The Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Westin Bonaventure Hotel

As I took in all this art over break I found it brought me great joy and stimulated new ways of thinking in my mind. Which is what I believe art should do. I am re-claiming my blog space because I want to inject a bit of art into the small community that will stumble here. My goal is to publish a poem a week here on my re-claimed blog. I hope my poems will get you the reader thinking, writing, searching for actually good poetry its mostly all here and maybe even discover a bit of joy in art. Its a journey I am committed too and hope you will join me.