Big Tree

Only Halfway Home

2009-02-26T17:29:00.002-08:00

Besides eating life-sized chocolate penguins, few things make me happier than the idea of airing something like this short film about Levon Helm on MTV in primetime, preferably in between episodes of "True Life: I'm a 16 year old pregnant basehead with a million dollars" and "like, watch me barf or whatevs." Levon Helm must have had millions of dollars at multiple points in his career, which may or may not have all been spent on treatment for his throat cancer, which almost cost him his voice entirely- but is Levon tooting pounds of flour up his nose with Robbie Robertson and sleeping in an inflatable pool of mardi gras beads and big, american breasts? Maybe. But i see him up on the tractor and saying things like "where'd you bring that buick in from, buddy" and i'm in it 100%.

This is the man that brought you The Last Waltz, the undisputed greatest single rock movie/concert in the universe. And he's harvesting grain. He's having a can of coke. He wants to.

As a side note, i don't know when or if i'm coming back to this blog, but do check in once a week or month for project updates from the flight deck, if you're so inclined. I'll do my best to see that there's at least a howdy-doo for you until i've settled on the next big thing. Until then, hang tight. Keep the faith. Gracias.

City Hall

2008-09-19T00:33:00.004-08:00

running for the rooftop
through a darkness in the spiral stairs
we heard it pulling seams
out of our honest skies

and throwing wide the final door
we came to see the skyline gleaming
under bursts of circles, streaks of gold and white

as our countrymen beneath us crowed
a century tugging at our shirtsleeves
this is our belonging to the city,
we all sensed it then, as one

fireworks over city hall
echoes over canyon suburbs

Royal Road

2008-08-21T14:21:00.004-08:00

An Improbable Ride Through America's Heartland, In The Name Of A Tough-Luck Baseball Team

“You road I enter upon and look around! I believe that much unseen is also here.”

-Walt Whitman, from Song of the Open Road

In the summer of 1804, the first tandem team of American explorers trekked across a largely uncharted nation, passing through what would become modern day Kansas City, Missouri on a two year expedition from Camp Dubois, Illinois, to the Pacific Northwest. In doing so, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark became essentially the first of a prosperous line of American duos to traverse the continent, paving the way for a rich culture of eccentric pioneers to follow. A century and a half later, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady burned across the same continent, wide-eyed and freewheeling to accept the offerings of small town America in a blossoming cultural epoch. Kerouac’s books that followed forever romanticized the act of cross-country passage, laying the foundation for a tradition of road trippers and every type of liberated wayfarer, and will likely continue to do so until the price of gas exceeds 8 dollars per gallon.

Now, 204 years after the first duo crossed the rolling plains of Kansas, I found myself compelled to tack my name to the bottom of the list of those who have voluntarily subjected themselves to the mercy of the road. Having seen the stretch of countryside whip by from the open windows of speeding cars to and from Denver to Kansas City over long weekends in college, I acquired a taste for the open air of America’s heartland, the tranquility of summer nights under skies of bright stars, local diners that time forgot, and above all else, a baseball team that has buried its head in the sands of the American League Central for the last twenty years. As my burgeoning interest in the Kansas City Royals blossomed into a full-scale obsession at the start of the 2008 season with the team making their first legitimate efforts to improve a spiraling reputation and reintroducing their powder blue uniforms of the prodigious 1980’s, I knew the time to act had come.

Here I saw the opportunity for the convergence of three storied American traditions. A tandem adventure hinging on teamwork and collaboration, a road trip through America’s heartland, and a pilgrimage to the ballpark at the peak of summer. How it came to be that I decided to do it all on a tandem bicycle, I may never fully remember.

Ad Astra Per Aspera: To The Stars, Through Difficulties

The tandem bicycle has been around as far back as the early 19th century, as man came to the conclusion that walking wasn’t good enough, then furthermore, that neither was simply biking alone. Though frame strengths have improved in the last two decades to the point that cross country tandem trips are commonplace, like so many other niche sports, the learning curve has been gradual. Early model tandems were no more practical than the original big-wheeled penny-farthing bikes, cumbersome and irrational. In the 1970’s, as Americans sought progressively more ridiculous ways to spend their money, tandem bicycles became an easy answer. While a high quality tandem bike that might support the weight of two full grown adults across a distance of at least five hundred miles might cost in the neighborhood of four thousand dollars these days, older models are still circulating, collecting dust in damp garages, fondly remembering short rides around the lake on countless failed first dates.

To me, the very concept of a tandem bicycle in itself captures the essence of an American idea. While by most accounts it defies all practicality whatsoever, it offers an exclusive luxury with undeniable appeal. To share in the act of basic forward progress, to work together toward a single goal, united. To the untrained eye, the tandem bicycle may appear as graceless as the dodo bird, adding the additional challenge of having to cope with the general public’s absolute dismay toward the spectacle of modern ingenuity that is the tandem cycle. Like any great sport, tandem biking has developed its own limited vocabulary of terms, references to the aspects of the sport that set it in its own class. The front rider is often referred to as captain, as pilot, or steersman. The rear rider is known as the stoker, the navigator, or even rear admiral, for those riders with a keen enough sense of humor.

As soon as I’d secured my rear admiral in Sam Huntington, a dynamic and exceptionally nimble Denver-ite, the search was on for the right tandem cycle that might carry us the 600-odd miles to Kauffman Stadium, home to the Kansas City Royals since 1968. Though a world of knowledge awaited me, sifting off on the distant horizon line, I had but two requirements at the time: cost as little money as possible, and be blue. Sam found our match in a garage in suburban Westminster, where he liberated it for a meager 375 dollars following a successful test ride. After some basic tune-ups, we deemed our vehicle ready for success on the basis of nothing whatsoever other than its successful carrying of our weight for rides of shorter than twenty minutes. This would prove to be a journey of faith.

In early hype for the trip, we were fortunate enough to pick up the interest of Tom Kenning, a true visionary from Ouray, Colorado, who pitched an attractive proposition our way: in exchange for the sponsorship of our vehicle, riding gear, and personalized royal-blue jerseys, we would bear the insignia of Team Tom, a grassroots party of progressive thinkers based out of the western slope. On the conditions that we spread goodwill throughout the land and maximize any and all opportunities to have Tom’s name on our chests on live television, we received generous imbursement for the acquisition of top shelf gear. Namely, matching blue helmets, black spandex pants with padded butt-shorts, blue fingerless gloves, and cool bianchi racing hats, to make us bona fide.

We tossed around ideas for the jerseys, and how best to pay tribute to our boys in blue while upholding the name and signatures of Team Tom. We decided on a hand-drawn image of Tom’s spirit animal, the almighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, a creature many believe him to be a direct descendent of. Sam made it as menacing as possible, and customized our dinosaur not only with number 85, for the lone year the Royals captured a World Series championship, but a miniature #2 for our favorite player, the fleet-footed Joey Gathright, now famous for his ability to leap clear over parked cars and/or Japanese Dodgers pitchers. We decided on a name for our bike, Lil’ Philly, though nobody could really pinpoint how or why. Lastly, it was important we bear Tom’s trademark motto as well, a phrase that would, over the course of the journey, prove all too appropriate: Shouldn’t you have thought of that earlier?

We set forth from Denver on the 10th of July, bright eyed and generously weighed down, having equipped the bike with two large saddlebags flanking the rear wheel. On top of those, two large backpacks strapped down with bungee cords, teeming with sleeping bags, camping gear, baseball gloves, sunscreen, jackets, journals, spare tires, and a weird cornucopia of energy bars. The bike was hefty with our overzealous packing, and we struggled to accommodate the new weight as we took our first turns through the shade of downtown skyscrapers. We took our place where a bike lane should be but isn’t painted on Colfax Ave, the longest commercial street in the United States. As the downtown skyline faded behind us, giving way to bodegas, gunshops, and Popeye’s Chickens, the sweat began to fall.

Through a network of freeway overpasses and mystifying suburban offramp exits, we took a wrong turn leading us out of our way to a dirt road, forcing us to backtrack. We decided against good judgment to peddle up a vast freeway onramp, where we were promptly pulled over by a disbelieving highway guard. Turning us back yet again, he pointed to a dirt path beyond the railroad tracks that might lead us to the smaller two-lane highway we’d been searching for. Grudgingly, we hiked off the freeway with the bike on our shoulders, feeling the wrath of an afternoon sun as we high-stepped through parched bushes and onto the path. A half-mile up the trail, we found our road.

We rode a total of forty-five miles the first day, stopping in Strasburg, Colorado, where we’d already decided to allow ourselves the luxury of a mattress that night in reward for the distance we’d accomplished. Securing what would be the cheapest room of our entire voyage, we enjoyed two separate dinners at the only two restaurants on the single row of buildings “downtown.” Retiring to the motel as the sun fell below the distant Rockies, we yelled at the television as the NBA finals began, and fell asleep with our mouths gaping open, still short of breath and aching from the four hour opening ride.

Getting an early start the next morning, we limped downstairs to load the bike, and found the back wheel slightly crooked. It was slight enough to think we may have overlooked it all along, but I had a suspicion it was worsening as we took the snaking road further out of civilization and into the desolate prairies of eastern Colorado. Land opened into pastures, grain elevators sprouting up as the mountains faded out entirely into heat waves, rising off the summer pavement. Hills stretched out for miles, so that we felt the burn of lengthy gradual climbs, and urged the pedals down with difficulty, muscles struggling with what we continued to ask of them. As the hills wore on, we found ourselves twenty miles between towns, passed only occasionally by soaring eighteen wheelers, unstoppable giants that pushed us further toward the grassy shoulder. As the heat of day caught up to us, some thirty miles out of Strasburg, we realized the bicycle was doomed.

Five miles outside of Last Chance, Colorado, some eighty miles from Denver, we finished our last water bottle, and trudged slowly up another incline. Legs exhausted from the mileage, unsure of how much road remained, we climbed back up to coast a ways, and felt the wheel frame buckle underneath us. Eighty something miles from Denver, Lil’ Philly had rolled its last. Being the iron-willed navigator that he was, Sam took up post in the center of the empty highway, intent to stop a vehicle large enough that we might carry the bike with us to the next town, to survey our options for its repair or abandonment. Five minutes later, a pesticides truck came over the hill, and pulled over to the shoulder. Two minutes after that, we were in the back of it, bound for Last Chance.

Last Chance, Colorado is a town of 17 residents, at least five of them being under the age of ten and belonging to Traci Weisensee, the sympathetic schoolteacher that had seen us riding on her way out of town, and stopped for us when she saw Sam’s dancing. Tracie was amused at our notion of a “city” ahead, Last Chance lost its gas station years ago, and no longer lives up to its namesake as the last fuel stop to the Kansas border. Having picked up her fair share of hitchhikers, lost bikers, and American nomads, Traci, to our amazement, offered to drive us all the way to Limon to the nearest civilization some 40 miles south, and refused any form of reimbursement but for the promise that we return the favor someday. She dropped us at the South Side Diner, where framed pictures of John Wayne littered the cigarette-stained walls, and alligator heads sneered down from the top of an ancient bar. One hour later, after another huge meal, our waitress was involved enough with our story that she offered to drive us all 90 miles back to Denver that same evening, so long as we just paid for gas.

The next morning, waking bewildered in Denver, we set out to educate ourselves on our options. Locating a tandems-only shop on the far side of town that we’d never troubled ourselves to even notice before (see: shouldn’t you have thought of that earlier?) we wheeled the bike through the air conditioned doorway and pitched our story to an apathetic woman who makes a living selling 5 thousand dollar tandems to Denver’s elite. Among the racks of newly engineered, titanium alloy rimmed bicycles worth more than my head, we came to the immediate conclusion that our vehicle was a relic, a product of whim in the 1970’s, probably constructed to the soundtrack of “Get Down On It” by Kool and the Gang, as the builder repeatedly planted his face down into a huge pancake of Colombian blow. We were shunned from the modern cyclery, and sent packing to “Cycle Analyst,” where they dealt more intensively with prehistoric-era parts.

Sure enough, the owner of Analyst, and perhaps a direct descendant of Santa Claus himself, took a look at our frame and returned with a 48-spoke that might magically fit on our ancient drum-brake ensemble. We came to the crossroads then and there: to fix the old bike, and try again with the danger of crumpling a second wheel, surely the last of its kind on the Western Slope for a thousand miles- or abandon the dream of the tandem, for two individual bikes that would almost guarantee us our distance by our deadline of June 23rd. One brief argument with the rear admiral later, the wallets were drawn at the promise the bike would be ready that same afternoon. Claus delivered on his promise, and we mounted the bike to immense relief, riding home whooping and screaming.

With Lil’ Philly back in the picture, we came to the task of finding our way back to the scene of the breakdown. The next morning, with a rented budget truck illegally piloted by Sam’s license-less roommate, we jetted out to the Kansas border to St. Francis, where we unloaded the bike to the shoulder of the road and said our prayers for the second voyage, this time without the burden of saddlebags, or any extra weight whatsoever. A single backpack filled with one change of clothes, one extra jersey each, a small bottle of sunscreen and a journal would be all the precious cargo we’d have for the next ten days. We dipped below the horizon line, losing sight of St. Francis and the rental truck behind us, pushing cautiously down on the pedals. A few hours into the state of Kansas, we rode harder, newly convinced in our vehicle to carry our weight across the eternal plains.

O public road, I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air,
I think I could stop here myself and do miracles.

We arrived in Atwood, Kansas by early evening, coming down a large incline and setting a new speed record at 33mph, steady on our new wheel frame. We met with Mick at the “Motel It’ll Do,” where a white sign sits along the highway offering their motto: “It ain’t the Hilton.. but it’ll do.” Mick was a relatively embittered ex-Denverite, a one-legged golfer who sped around on his cart, kicking up dust and offering us beer from his teeming refrigerator behind his swivel chair. We asked for the cheapest room, and were given a double for the price of a single. Mick sped off again, back to the distant fairway by a small lake in the distance, and we set off to find the main street. As would be the case in most small Kansan towns, the main drag was host to a number of smaller than small businesses, a Mexican restaurant, a mini-theater that offered a single showing of a single movie per week, and an assortment of antique shops, all perennially closed.

We found our way to the municipal swimming pool, where we waited through an elderly women’s pilates workout class, until open adult swim. After a few failed attempts at throwing backflips from the deep end and a massive, inauthentic Mexican dinner, we retired back to the It’ll Do, to watch the Royals lose.

The next day we passed an army battletank outside a Sinclair gas station on the road out of Atwood, setting out on what would be our biggest ride to date. We would come to rest some thirty miles into our ride that day in Oberlin, Kansas: Where Friends Meet On Cobblestone Streets. This sounded good enough a place to rest and find some food, which we did at the Reload, a smoky restaurant adorned with antlers and dusty moose heads, strange chandeliers and young men with mustaches in heavy cowboy boots, who looked at our helmets and jerseys like they had their mother’s names on them. Before long we were finished, and napping in the shade of the gazebo in Centennial Park, a small plot of shaded grass behind an abandoned grocery store.

Getting back on the road reluctantly and lazy, for the first time on the trip I found my legs unwilling to continue, lethargic and empty of any will power as we took to the sloping hills. We had to walk the bike a great deal, wasting energy and complaining, until we settled on just riding slower, and quieter as the water supply ran low again. At the next town, a speck on the map called Norcatur, we rode a quarter mile out of our way in hopes of refilling our bottles. Coming to a dusty assortment of silos and empty looking farm houses, we found one sign of life in the Cardinal Café. Stepping through the doors into the fluorescent dining room, an elderly couple swiveled to take in our arrival, and one dumbfounded waitress stared at us with her mouth hanging open. Their soda machine had broken, but the waitress fetched a pitcher of water, which she clumsily began pouring into our plastic bottles when a raging red face popped out from the kitchen door and began screaming for her to stop. The chef, and apparent king tyrant of the Cardinal, then proceeded to chew me out for the next two minutes about how if “the state” were to catch them filling up our bottles in there, they’d be put out to pasture. While in any other condition than complete dehydration and drained mental health I might have said really anything at all, I accepted the wild man’s fury in astonishment and left, one and a half bottles filled with lukewarm and evidently highly illegal water.

We rode the rest of the distance in a hypnotic exhausted trance, as the hills continued to rise and fall, coasting down long stretches of farmlands, wild birds taking off from the tall grasses when they heard our approaching velocity. After sixty-seven long miles, we arrived into Norton, a town slightly larger than Atwood, but shorter on charm. The Motel 36 would prove to be the shoddiest of our entire trip’s accommodations, with ominous ketchup-stained walls and inflatable mattresses, which we may have noticed had we not instantly passed out into a death trance. Large bugs swarmed around the low green lamplight as we marched out for dinner, dragging our feet in search for a Chinese buffet. I began to worry for the first time that I might be asking my body for more than it had to offer, a concept I’d allowed no consideration for whatsoever. The water in the room was disgusting, I slept like a sedated baby.

Waking in Norton, we dragged ourselves from bed to sluggishly prepare for the next day’s ride. On our way out of town we encountered the first other bikers we had seen all trip. Nelson and Weston, a father/son team, were riding their way from Oregon to New Jersey, over the course of the entire summer. After charging through the Rockies in late May and camping out in snowstorms, these guys were exponentially tougher and far more severely farmer-tanned than we were. We would have crumbled entirely under the weight of their majesty had they not been so pleased to encounter two like-minded ambitious morons like ourselves, and on such an unlikely steed. They had been averaging roughly 100 miles a day, towing a small trailer behind them full of camping gear and basic necessities. They were just coming in for lunch as we headed out, so we said our farewells and peddled out of Norton.

Aching from the previous ride and starting later than we’d hoped, we rode about ten minutes before things started getting bad. The wind outside of Norton kicked up to 20mph gusts, as anyone familiar enough with Murphy’s Law would guess, directly against our angry faces. Our tempo was pathetic as we dragged through the relentless wind. Whereas we’d averaged 15-17 mph on our hottest paces in previous days, we were down to a dismal 9 mph, barely enough to keep the bike headed in a straight direction, and enough, when coupled with the slightest incline, to make me yell at the top of my lungs in frustration every 2 minutes. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I first imagined blasting across the flattened plains, corn stalks rattling in applause of us, wind at our backs. This was terrible, and again we had to walk the bike, marching uphill sweaty and furious.

By the time we got close to Philipsburg, a town we’d originally hoped to use as a halfway point, we were settled on staying, as dark clouds closed in on us from the north and the wind maintained its fervor. We had ridden for nearly four hours, and gone a total of 36 miles. While my borderline psychotic rage dissipated the moment we spotted signs of civilization, our bodies were worn down, spirits deflated. We pulled up to a Subway on Main Street, and left the bike. We would eat a total of four and a half feet of sandwiches by the time we left. Mid-feast, the door opened, and in stepped our friends from Norton, who had made noticeably better time than us, but were equally famished and jaded. We got to talking about the staggering amounts of food we’d been eating since we left Denver, and Weston blew us all away. What had they been eating, riding 100 miles a day from Portland, Oregon? Dollar menu, he said, with an evil grin. McDonald’s.

The men of steel left us in Phillipsburg, intent on making it another 30 miles before nightfall, as the clouds gave way to a decent afternoon. We backtracked a half mile to the motel Mark V, where we secured a room and enjoyed the 8 x 10 foot swimming pool, decorated with thousands of assorted dead bugs, and an inflatable yellow dragon. After our previous night’s accommodations, the Mark V felt like the Four Seasons, and we retired to scream at the television as the NBA finals rolled on. Bent on leaving bright and early to make up for lost mileage the following day, we called it an early night. The next morning, we parted the curtains, and found ourselves in a thunderstorm.

After a long deliberation regarding the pros and cons of a freezing cold rain-ride, we donned suits of black garbage bags and left Philipsburg behind. Whether it was due to morning calm or the freezing rain, the wind was temporarily at bay, and we made good time, streaking across the wet pavement and down a series of large hills, as nervous trucks flew by us, kicking up tidal waves of cold water. Anxiety pushed our feet down for us, and the rain provided a nice distraction to the mileage. We rested for the first time after nearly 20 miles. The rain let up on our second push, giving way to a mild sun in the late morning, as we said our farewells to Highway 36 for good and rolled into Smith Center, dripping and hungry.

The morning ride had been a success, a refreshing first half and reinforcement to believe the previous day’s wind resistance had been a fluke. After a long lunch, we set out South, with the wind at our backs for the first time. The difference was marvelous, we rode through a waving landscape of amber fields, farmers nodding from enormous John Deer’s, the sun burning down on our necks like a hard earned reward. After an afternoon set of another 30 miles, we rolled down the last of three massive hills into Osborne, a quiet town of more antique shops, (always closed) a municipal swimming pool, and a local diner. The diner consisted of an empty bar, and one loaded round table of WWII veterans, who, like most small town Kansans, observed us like a wildfire in their refrigerator. We’d become accustomed to telling our story, in varying lengths and with inconsistent enthusiasm, depending on our level of exhaustion or hunger, and we embarked on a particularly long and repetitive version of which that ended somewhere around the arrival of our food.

We were always given marginally more respect if the recipient of our story wasn’t aware of the nature of our vehicle. If we managed to get through the doors of a restaurant without being spotted on the tandem, it was assumed we were two rugged individualists, just friends looking out for one another on a cross country ride. Perhaps we were raising money for a cause, maybe just crazed athletes. Maybe we were heroes. However, for anyone new entering a restaurant with our bike parked outside, the shock of seeing two grown men dining together in identical uniforms was enough to produce the raising of a red-state eyebrow. You could actually witness the connection being forged between their expectations of who might be riding the bike, and the stiff reality of Team Tom. Nobody bought our actual cause of riding for the Royals whatsoever.

Osborne was particularly good to us, we shacked up at the Camelot Inn behind the Pizza Hut and made our way as usual to the municipal swimming pool, always deserted but for a couple teenage lifeguards, who we could never gauge as being happier or unhappier to have us swimming there. This pool actually cost two bucks a head, and, determined to get our moneys worth, we climbed up the diving boards to attempt the elusive backflip once again. A lifeguard volunteered a perfect example, executed with a quick tuck and minuscule splash, ready for Beijing. Ours would not be so pretty. However, after a triumphant day on the road, spirits rejuvenated by rain and progress, and nearly a week of riding east for Kansas City, we were ready for the consequences. After two or three ugly ones, we got the hang of it. Three hundred backflips later, we retired to the Pizza Hut and ate until we were sick.

The next morning, after too many pancakes, we ascended back up the three hills out of Osborne, and retraced four miles to the junction of Highway 24. On a straight and flatter highway, we began to loosen up and put our mileage down with ease. Hills were fewer and further between, instead the road gently curved left or right, for miles at a time, allowing for more reflection of the act of riding itself, the sounds of bugs that circled us, confused, smacking against our sunglasses till we batted them away. Cicada’s jumped from bushes, narrowly escaping death from our front tire, drifting along the shoulder of the road as we absorbed the golden prairies as they slowly changed to cornfields. As we rested, sought out shade under small trees, or yelled at cows that eyed us piteously.

After a relatively short ride, we began seeing signs for Cawker City, known best for its hosting one of the “8 Wonders of Kansas,” The World’s Largest Ball of Sisal Twine. We’d anticipated a stop there from the earliest stages of mapping our ride, what we hoped might be a quintessential landmark in our never-ending hunt for inimitable Americana. We blew by the twine at 20mph, screaming up a hill at a savage pace when I realized we’d overlooked it completely. Backtracking, we parked our bike to absorb the spectacle, which sat under a large gazebo, protecting it from the elements. We stayed at the ball for hours, reading up on its creation, poring over decades of entries scribbled in its guestbook. The ball weighs in at seven tons, and is added to each year in a festival involving the entire county. As we left, we took special note of its sign from the highway:

Thrift + Patience = Success.

Another 19 miles from Cawker City was Beloit, where we would stop for the night. We were making better time, more consistently, aware of the rhythms of the bicycle, and had memorized the five available gears, when to use them, when to transition without expenditure of energy or valuable speed. We’d been riding over a week, near 300 miles total, and had been given an early estimate of nearly 5,000 virtual high fives, though a vast majority were solicited by Sam, reaping the benefits of a non-mandatory rear handlebar. In exchange, he was given a view of my back for twelve days, but the debate as to who was contributing most to our progress was generally fruitless.

About this point in the trip we became acutely aware that there were really only one or two things anyone would ever say to us regarding the bike. Kansans, as a people, are relatively like-minded, and never has it been more apparent as when they attempted to come up with jokes about our bike. By far the most common was the joke that the guy in back could, at any moment, stop peddling, and somehow screw me, the front rider, over for miles and miles. That is, until I look back and realize, to the soundtrack of a rusty trombone, that I’ve been peddling alone for god knows how long. This was an idea that people really loved, and we loved it along with them, until we’d heard it ninety hundred times. People were shocked to hear that we didn’t trade off on the front and back seat, there seemed to be an injustice in that, leading them to want to come up with an equalizing joke. It also might have been that we looked gayer than rainbows, and they needed something civil to say before rolling up the windows and really speaking their minds. But people weren’t mean to us whatsoever- they stopped in their cars, pulled dangerous u-turns on the highway, put their own vehicles in danger to offer us help. From a speeding car, we might have appeared as a single rider, until the very last moment, in passing. By this point, Sam would be grinning and waving, and it was tough for the Kansans to resist.

Beloit is the last stop for a long stretch of empty highway to Clay Center, a ride of over 60 miles with no rest stops to refill the bottles. We found ourselves without a choice of rival motels to choose from, and had to settle for an expensive “family suite,” the last available room in town. With the extra room we set up the ironing board for a photo shoot, and took some aerial action shots before screaming at the television for the last time, as the Celtics manhandled the Lakers, and Kevin Garnett proclaimed to the universe that “anything is possible.” The next morning, we got an early start on what was to be our second biggest ride of the trip. For the first time, we managed to ride 20 consecutive miles without stopping, in just over an hour’s time. The landscape had flattened completely, so that we rode for ten miles without the slightest turn, through fields of low-grown corn and lifeless threshing machines.

We rested 35 miles in, celebrating our newfound stamina and sleeping in the shade of small trees by the shoulder of the road. We sweated through a hot afternoon ride, coasting into Clay Center for a late lunch and taking in the sights. Slightly larger than we’d become accustomed to, Clay Center had at least three restaurants, a library, billiards hall, and theater offering more than one movie, more than once a week. We found our motel on the outskirts of town, and promptly fell asleep until dinner, when we wandered to the Hidden Dragon to absorb a lifetime’s serving of MSG and fortune cookies. Clay Center had the first hint of suburban existence, abandoned basketball courts grown over with crabgrass, and liquor shops open past nine. After wandering the side streets back to our modest motel, we crashed, knowing that when we awoke, we would say our farewells to small town Kansas for good.

The next day’s ride was out of Clay Center, another 40 miles east to Manhattan. Aware of our departure from truly rural Kansas, we stopped more frequently for photo shoots in cornfields and abandoned silos in towns of fewer than twenty people. The shoulder became narrower as we reached the halfway point, and we began to see another shift in landscape, as larger hills emerged with four lane highways, indicators of larger civilization, a college town on the horizon. By now our legs were well tested and rose to the occasion, working against the steep grade and holding to a hot pace, coasting down wide waves of concrete in excess of 30mph. We came to the outer suburbs of Manhattan, and made our way around the Kansas State University campus to the downtown center. Presented with our first real dining and entertainment options in weeks, we were wide-eyed and eager to explore. Not ten minutes later, the sky opened, and a massive thunderstorm dumped down.

We sought refuge in what looked like a college bar with dark mahogany walls and cheap chandeliers, hosting about ten locals on stools underneath a large screen broadcasting the Royals game. With the rain coming down in buckets we proceeded to hole up for some three strange hours, riding high on a $1.50 drink special and making fast friends with our tales of the highway. Emerging relatively plastered around five in the afternoon with the rain cut to a drizzle, we foolishly maneuvered the bike down the wet streets, across a large highway to the Motel 6. By some miracle surviving, we scored a cheap room and proceeded to pass out until dark. Waking for dinner back in town, we got a pasta dinner and retired back to the motel, resting up for a particularly long ride the next morning to the state capital, Topeka.

The next day’s ride would take us out of the countryside for good, highways opening up to eight lanes for the first time, and with it a much more aggressive flow of traffic, pinning us to our narrow invisible lane on the far shoulder. In these circumstances we always rode well, motivated by anxiety more than anything, but an inspiration to ride harder nonetheless. Thankfully, the road shrank back to two lanes for the majority of the ride, until we came to the outer suburbs of Topeka, and traffic became more questionably intense. We followed an offramp in hopes of discovering a parallel side street, only to find ourselves on the massive shoulder of screaming I-70, trucks blasting by at 80mph and kicking up waves of gravel. We got off the bike and ran it across to another ramp on the other side, where we mapped out a route along local streets to the financial district. We rode through lower-income neighborhoods, kids alternatively waving or chasing after us, over potholes and countless bumpy railroad tracks that jostled the frame for the first time since our Last Chance disaster.

Arriving stressed and tired after 64 long miles through every level of country and urban scenery, we found the downtown strip and some lunch. We had generally learned that the best source for directions was a local policeman, and as one directed us the four odd miles back out of town to the cheapest motels, I fought to stay awake. The stress of city riding multiplied any exhaustion tenfold, and we were eager to get off the bike for good after our most demanding day. The motel was inconveniently out of town, up a series of small, intense hills, and down a seedy older downtown strip, abandoned but for bail bonds and neon liquor stores. When we finally rolled to a stop at the Motel 6, we were done in. Leaving the bike a moment to locate our room, I took note of a scary-large hole in the back tire, evidently a casualty of a particularly bad hop over the tracks.

That night, intent on never putting our legs to use again, we ordered in and passed out around ten. Sometime after midnight, in the dark and obscure nether-hours, we sat upright simultaneously in panic. Somebody was pounding with both fists on our door, for a good ten consecutive seconds. We looked at each other, mystified and sleepily unsure of what was even taking place. We resolved to write it off as some passing maniac or preteen terrorist, exorcizing the frustrations of growing up in the slums of Topeka. We sat still in our beds in the dark for another minute before it happened again. This time they pounded away, hammering down on the door so that the whole strip of rooms must have awoken, thanking god it wasn’t their door suffering the weird wrath. Sam reached for the bike pump, the only remotely blunt object suitable to use as a weapon against whatever threat awaited us outside, and opened the door in his underwear.

A minute later, he came back inside and flipped on the lights. He’d found a cardboard sign outside our door, adorned with drawings and the word TOPEKA in big block letters. In his other hand was an assortment of trading cards, at least one of which of Ricky Martin, with our names written on them. In a foggy and half-terrified trance, we began to put the pieces together. We opened the motel door and looked down from the balcony to the parking lot, where, sitting in an empty space, grinning like a madman, sat Roddy Beall.

Over the course of the next two hours, laughing crazily with relief and surprise, Roddy proceeded to catch us up on his previous week, during which he’d decided to abandon a longer stay in Buenos Aires, Argentina, catch a flight to Denver, and begin hitchhiking from there all the way across the state of Kansas. Over the course of three days, camping out in cornfields with his backpack and tarp, he’d retraced our steps all the way to the Motel 6 on the outskirts of Topeka. He’d ridden with truckers, been passed over in the rain for hours trying to hitch east, and jogged the four miles from downtown to find our room, where he’d somehow convinced the motel attendant to divulge our information at one in the morning. We labored to fall asleep in the excitement, one day out from Kansas City, and with the surprise company of our best friend, who had traveled thousands of miles just to find us.

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and west are mine.

We set out from Topeka fat on bad breakfast and sore from the previous day’s work, retracing our way to the highway, where we kept to the shoulder as cars blew in every direction out of town. We made it ten miles out before the hole in the back tire began to pronounce itself with a limp, a hiccup with every roll of the wheel that made a flapping sound as we gained speed downhill. Half infuriated with our luck, breaking down on the last day of riding, and half entertained by the turn of events in the last 24 hours, we decided against risking the bike’s permanent health, and began to walk it. We were out on country road again, cars appearing infrequently, none large enough to carry our bike. We flagged down a number of trucks in both directions, but none willing or able to take us.

After a half hour or so, a smaller truck loaded down with mulch and tree branches stopped for us, and a young couple from nearby Lawrence offered us a ride to the bike shop downtown. We strapped the bike down in the branches and sped off, trading stories with our rescuers and thanking our stars. Sunflower Cycles in Lawrence fixed our bike over lunch, and Roddy hitched into town to join us, before mapping our approach into the greater Kansas City area and setting off again, refueled and rolling smooth. We took a series of frontage roads, under shady overpasses and around fields of newly planted crops. The sun wore down with the afternoon, hot in the seas of pavement surrounding us, our destination looming somewhere out in front of us. While I’d hoped to be in the best physical shape of the trip rolling in to the city, fists pumped high in the air, I was tired as ever, wasted from the previous day’s mileage, and chugging up the final hills.

As we merged into larger roads in the western suburbs, we came to the largest hill we’d seen all trip, a huge downward slope with a steep upside, over which we knew from the odometer was our final destination. We tucked ourselves in for the coast down, and, screaming in the middle of speeding downtown traffic, we hit a maximum of 40mph, an all-time land speed record. Our momentum carried us a good ways up the hill, but we lost speed dramatically as it steepened. I had flirted with the thought of announcing that we had to make it up the hill, but abandoned it when I realized just how terrible it was going to be. Quietly hoping he might not care to finish the ride with such a grueling bang, Sam announced it to my chagrin: We have to make this hill.

Shifting into our highest gear, we slowed to a painful 9mph, then 7mph, so that we struggled to keep the bike on the road’s meager shoulder. We yelled and reached down into every painful hill we’d ascended over the course of over 500 miles of rolling country terrain, into every reservoir of every ounce of remaining strength. I was 70/30 sure I was going to barf— but we made it. Pulling over to a grassy patch at the top, we celebrated in pain, an entire state behind us, a hill that had looked insurmountable. The landscape shifted yet again to mowed lawns and gated communities, chain restaurants and large SUV’s. We rode into the suburbs of Lenexa exhausted, but in the highest spirits.

In Lenexa we met with Sam’s cousin, also named Sam, who happened to be a season ticket holder with the Royals. This seemingly extra-terrestrial knowledge unfolded for us in the span of three or so days leading up to our arrival, so we had become more than eager to make contact. Arriving at Sam’s luxurious suburban digs, we retold our story for the extended family and were offered a free place to stay, bearded Argentinean hitchhiking friend and all. For the next few days, we relaxed, slept in, took in the sights of Kansas City and enjoyed the greatest Royals game I’ve ever witnessed, the second largest come-from-behind win in franchise history, over the San Francisco Giants. The next day, June 23rd, was the day we’d all been waiting for.

After two days of marvelous, marvelous leisure and rest, we donned our uniforms for the final time, and set out from Lenexa for the last 20 miles to Kauffman Stadium, just east of downtown Kansas City. We rode along a crowded highway, anxious city riding through yellow stoplights and a myriad of local barbeques. We took Troost Ave. through older, soulful neighborhoods of faded red bricks and roaring buses, bewildered children’s faces mashed against the windows staring out at us. We peddled through progressively lower income neighborhoods, people out on porches looking increasingly more surprised to see us, but waving nonetheless, on the final home stretch. We came to the top of a large hill, and looked out to a sea of parking lots. There, not two miles in front of us, sat the stadium, lit up like a lighthouse, a beacon, an oasis of dirt and grass. We had made it. The final mile was a blur, through the entrance to the surprise of the parking lot attendants, and down the final hill up to the gates. We stopped there, silent, and took it in. The odometer read 571.5 miles.

We were ushered through a side gate, walking the bike down to the ground level, where we were led into a room full of powder-blue clad cheerleaders eating garlic fries and nachos. Here we stored the bike, and sat down with the Blue Crew, a team of twenty-somethings whose job it is to launch hotdogs through blue bazookas to fans in the upper decks, facilitate mid-inning entertainment, and get people jazzed about the baseball game they’re trying to watch. The Blue Crew were gently excited by our arrival, and offered us dinner, while we waited for Kasey, the Royals entertainment coordinator, to show.

Kasey, an attractive fellow twenty-something year old woman with extensive headsets and walkie-talkie belt attachments introduced herself with four blue backpacks loaded full of free Royals gear, which she repeatedly warned us not to open in public, as jealous fans might tear us to shreds upon seeing their contents. Buzzing with mysterious excitement, we left them with the bicycle and our sweaty helmets, and followed Kasey up through a series of marble hallways to find our tickets for the rest of the family. After securing those, Kasey was given the affirmative through one of her many headsets to lead us through a security-protected lobby and up an elevator to a hallway of closed doors, all labeled with small, golden stars bearing names. We were led down to the Frank White Suite, where Kasey revealed, to our surprise, that we would be introduced to the general manager.

Putting on our calmest game-faces, we were led through the door to the box, a smallish room with ten or so different screens, and roof-to-floor windows overlooking the field. Four men in black suits turned to face us, and Dayton Moore, standing at all of about 5’6’’ and wearing a golden embroidered Kansas City Royals tie, offered us a handshake. We chatted with Moore and his advisors, whose names escaped me the moment they were introduced, as I attempted to accept my surroundings as a result of having ridden to them from Denver over the course of two weeks. The guys were entertained enough, but had their business to attend to, and we graciously left back down the elevator, sneaking looks at each other like we’d licked the president’s silverware. Kasey led us to our seats in the second row behind first base, where we sat fifteen feet from our favorite players warming up, and called out to them, waving like kids in the back of the short bus.

The rest of our crew arrived, and the game began, as the Royals took an early lead and we soaked in the view from the phenomenal seats. The images we’d taken in over the last few hours were wallpapered over my eyelids, and the warm summer night washed in like the tide. In the fifth inning, Joel Goldberg, an announcer for Fox Sports Net, came down to the row and tapped on my shoulder. The broadcasters had gotten word of our arrival from the almighty Kasey, and had decided to do a live-televised interview during the game. We slid down the row and briefly rehearsed what Joel might ask us, as he pointed to a camera in the distant outfield, and waited for a lull in the game to get the go-ahead. When the time came, we went through a two-minute recap of the adventure, the reasons why we’d done it, the hardships we’d encountered on the way. The on-air broadcast team of Paul Splitorff and Ryan Lefevre were amused, and before we knew it, it was finished. While the details of our answers are hazier to me now than my classmates in first grade, I know it went well.

The grand finale was still before us, however, as we awaited the eighth inning stretch, when Kasey had informed us we’d be interviewed live on the new 106-foot high-definition jumbotron, the largest screen in North America, in front of some 30,000 fans in attendance. Tim Scott, the designated “game host” who oversees mid-inning entertainment such as dugout dance-offs and trivia giveaways came down with a camera crew to find us in the seventh, and began going over the 90 second spot we’d be up onscreen. Tim was exponentially more nervous than Joel, a smarmy made-for-TV host who insisted we practice his prescripted jokes over and over again, cracking his neck from side to side every twenty seconds. Before he could turn me into an anxious monkey, the inning ended, and the camera light clicked on.

I remember intentionally avoiding the screen with my eyes, in the case that my mouth would fall open and I’d die a frozen death, but I heard my voice resonating through every row of seats at Kauffman Stadium, answering why we’d ridden 600 miles to see the boys in blue, and why through such eccentric means. Tom executed his jokes mock-spontaneously, and I became aware of the thousands of eyes pinned on us from every direction, a sea of blue shirts staring down at us, our section buzzing with people confused and excited, leaning around us to dip their kid’s faces on screen, offering high-fives and calling their families at home. The interview was over in a heartbeat, and we said our farewells to Kasey and Tim, to settle in for the ninth inning, as the Royals closed the door on the lowly Colorado Rockies.

In that inning I sat stunned, flanked by a friend that had traveled 600 miles across the American heartland on a vintage tandem bicycle with me, and another that had traversed whole continents to be there at our side. It dawned on me, in an almost cinematic epiphany, that I had caused this great, wild thing to happen, through a series of outlandish letters mailed out from my desk in San Francisco, letters I never imagined might be returned to me. I sat in my chair under the thin veil of stars beyond the stadium lights, and watched the stands erupt as the Royals notched the victory. The grass has never, ever been greener than it was that night.

Our mild celebrity was good enough to get us recognized as we rode up the spiral walkway and out, shouting in victory through the gates amongst a sea of blue shirted fans. Sam’s great uncle, at the age of 90 and sporting a blue KC trucker hat, proclaimed that he would never, ever forget it. We had been given more than we could have asked for, when it had been enough in itself just to see the stadium lights from the crest of the final hill. In a hail of handshakes and last congratulations, we hugged, and left the stadium behind us, bike strapped to the racks of Sam’s jeep.

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe, I have tried it, my own feet have tried it well—
be not detain’d! Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten,
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! Let the preacher preach in his pulpit!
Let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law,
will you give me yourself, will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Afterthoughts

While I’ve unconsciously omitted a thousand small, wonderful details from this 20-page screed about our ride across America, I think I should mention a few final things that should have found a place somewhere:

Over the course of the entire bike ride, Sam never washed his jersey once. We each brought two, and while I traded off between whichever of mine seemed the “lesser of two evils” he stuck boldly to his one. He got a great amount of pleasure out of bragging about how nice it was going to be to don his brand new, never-worn jersey for the final ride to the stadium. I doubt I ever admitted it to him, but I know I was jealous by the end.

The amount of food we consumed over this 12-day period may be a Guinness record that goes forever undocumented. With a workout regiment of biking roughly 50 miles a day, two human beings can consume the equivalent of a fully-grown panda bear in roughly three hours. While I was tempted to exercise our pal Weston’s dietary suggestion of three double cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, I never had the nerve. We always ate local when we had the chance, and probably did more to actually execute the purpose of the governmental-issued stimulus package to the economies of rural Kansas than anyone else in the world. The universe, even.

This trip became possible with the commitment of two foolish individuals, but it became a reality with the help of our sponsor, Team Tom. With the cost of our supplies and customized T-Rex jerseys, coupled with the unforeseen breakdowns and subsequent motel bills, we truly could not have accomplished this feat without the commitment of Tom Kenning and Doug Price, whose Team Tom moniker was proudly displayed not only on the largest screen in North America, but on live television, for all to see and wonder about.

While I may have joked at least once about the “red state” of Kansas, for all its Cardinal Cafés and apathetic teenage lifeguards, it is an American treasure, a time capsule, a scenic and charming way of life for a great many people. Riding across its plains and encountering its inhabitants instilled a faith in me for the American people, who looked after us as their own, slowing down to offer help, tipping their hats as we took up their highways with our idiotic bike. While we may have earned our share of strange looks, not one person insulted us, serving us with a kindness one might only discover in that part of our vast nation. As two modern-day explorers of the 21st century, we embarked on an unforeseeable adventure, and have returned with a legitimate American tale for the ages. Kansas, in your endless amber waves of grain, this captain tips his hat to you.

Go Royals,

Will Weston,
San Francisco, California.

Chin Music

2008-08-16T22:47:00.005-08:00

I wake up sweating in New York
and hit my head against the grand piano
good morning, last night’s broken bottles
sing into the dumpster bound for Jersey

And you’re climbing up the red bookshelf,
where clouds of dust mites hover
like my next words for you

This town is all rafters, I notice after buttered bread,
and all our hopes lost up in them—
pale maps and gravel rooftop secrets
embedded in our neon scaffolding

The sunflowers died and their season left,
the fruit ripens faster than anyone can eat—
sirens carry someone else off as we smoke
on the roof, wishing we were high enough to see
the reason for the car alarms

Blue windows long for faces pressed against them
please, take more pictures of me young
for when I wonder

This Happens In My Fridge

2008-04-14T23:42:00.002-08:00

Notes from the Sky Lounge: 32 Hours on the California Zephyr

2008-04-04T22:39:00.007-08:00

Some scattered thoughts from a recent ride on the California Zephyr, an Amtrak line that snakes its way from San Francisco to Chicago. The whole trip takes roughly three days, and i was on board for two of them, as we casually made our way up into the Rockies. We had a special treat for the first quarter of the ride, a historian on board from the Sacramento Locomotive Museum, on his way to Reno. Every fifteen minutes or so, out of nowhere, he would arrive on the intercom, to enlighten us with facts and histories of American ghost towns, abandoned mine shafts, and alkaline flats from the 19th century. These are some scribblings from along the way.

Mcnish, Party of Two

As we pass through the longest tunnel of the Sierra's, over four miles of consecutive darkness, which train conductors have dubbed "the big hole", we emerge into sunshine and snow-capped firs- our historian informs us that we are nearing the site of the ill-fated Donner Party, who were lost in these cold woods for five months, half of them falling victim to the icy fork of George Donner..

We've gradually snaked our way up to over seven thousand feet from sea level in Emeryville, and have made a 180 degree turn to the other side of the mountain, which will bring us back down into the far less romantic deserts of Reno. Our silence is alternatively interrupted by our fair narrator, or the blaring siren of "Sheila, from the Dining Car" who barks out names of those whose reservations for meals are getting stale.

The lounge is a 70's era orange and brown hallway, lined with retro swivel chairs, where senior citizens play scrabble and kids run up and down the corridor, singing at the top of their lungs and snapping picture of nothing on single-use cameras. Half frozen lakes and lumber processing yards from the 1860's, a town that was "burnt to the ground six times in eleven years, it was so wild and lawless" the historian remarks. Sheila periodically interferes, shaking an elderly japanese couple from their slumber. The australian man behind me mutters to no one in particular, "it appears the elusive Mcnish will go hungry.."

The enchantment wore off as we descended from the snowy hills into the suburban, concrete wasteland of Reno and Sparks, Nevada.. Indulged in a few self-made cocktails to savor the afternoon sun, and now approach the 24 hour mark. At this point exactly, tomorrow afternoon, we should be pulling into our destination of Granby, Colorado.

With our intercom host bidding us adieu in Reno and inviting each and every one of us to come visit in Sacramento, the train takes on a quieter quality, as the sun slinks lower and we patiently speed across the desert landscape. This is cooked earth, uninhabitable. This will be the truer test, no amicable host or frozen lakes and fast tunnels- just the lounge, the meandering tumbleweeds, and the manifesting universe of elderly people, grouping together like gray magnetic particles, to discuss real estate dilemmas, the government, bingo games, schoolbuses, anything at all..

"But you think you'd see jackrabbits, or something..." I wake up half-fallen off three slanted seats in the lounge, the landscape sucked completely dry into salt flats, the old people running out of subject matter, but for the bizarre, conspicuous observation now and then.. Here comes another now, with cocktails in hand. Nothing lives out here, as far as the eye reaches, out to the Richter-scale shapes of the most distant ridges.

Morning

Following a restless, shifting night of Japanese snore-torture and shuddering boxcars, shivering in the open plains of Utah, we are awakened to the ever-more familiar screaming voice of Sheila, from the Dining Car. Six thirty in the morning, and breakfast is served, if anybody would like to make their reservations. We are in another mountain pass altogether, surrounded by the snow again, and the sun and moon flank the train windows on either side.

After another four hours of better, sideways, more creative sleep, we arrive in Grand Junction, and deboard for a moment to be struck by blinding sunlight- it is 11:30 in the morning, 28 hours from the point of departure in San Francisco, and everyone is having cigarettes and stretching.

The euphoria is beginning to return to me after the long dark hiatus, and i'm thrilled to be back up in the lounge, soaking in the light and cool reflections of the snow-melt rivers, following our endless tracking with every bend of the rumbling boxcar.

Royals Report Card, 2008 Opening Day

2008-04-02T13:34:00.008-08:00

After four seasons of floundering in the dregs of the American League Central, the Kansas City Royals are poised to elevate their game with the introduction of a brand new manager and much improved roster for '08. Here are some early season requirements/predictions to see in this upcoming season, none of which have been accomplished by the Royals organization in five long years.

*Finish the season within 5 games of .500 (or better, obviously)

*Finish at least 3rd in the AL Central (i realize the Tigers and Indians play here)

*Somebody on the team must hit 25+ homers

*Two players must hit 20+ homers

*Alex Gordon, rookie sensation, must hit 20+ homers, OR 70+ RBI's.

*Somebody on the team must hit 100+ RBI's

*Three players must finish season batting .300 or higher

*Two starting pitchers must earn 15+ wins

*Two players must be voted to the All Star Game

*Jose Guillen must hit 20+ homers, and use absolutely no steroids

*Joey Gathright must steal 25+ bases, harm no old ladies

*The team must post a winning record at home at Kauffman Stadium

*New manager Trey Hillman must be ejected from at least two games

*Two starting pitchers must finish season with ERA of 3.50 or under

*Closer Joakim Soria must earn 30+ saves

*Two different pitchers must strike out 150+ batters each

*Royals must slaughter San Francisco Giants on June 21st.

And, last but not least, all Kansas City Royals must have higher batting averages than Will Weston, playing left field for the SF Dirtbags this season in the San Francisco Adult Leagues. So far, i'm hitting .000. Follow my progress HERE. and HERE. And always, always.. Go Royals.

Last Night, Beneath the Freeway Onramp

2008-03-17T22:17:00.004-08:00

i tried to begin a new city.

(this is just another way into the poem
i’ve been meaning to write)

not a skyscraper, not a statue of a founder,
just a reference point, not a radio tower,
not a park where people might share
a cold sandwich, just something

that might have a long way to go,
i’ve learned not to expect things overnight.

i’ve been meaning to tell you
more of these things that have accumulated
like the loneliness of phonebooks
out on the front steps

the constant deliveries
of wheelbarrows of questions,
arriving sans signature, without any notice

for example, do you wonder how many
moths it might take to black out a streetlamp
as you stand underneath, waving upward
into the widening mouth of dark?

which ones are stars? which ones are molars?
and do you sense that unnamable closeness,
as though its been revealed to you

that somewhere, on the outer edge of town,
a great barn door is periodically swung open
where out pour the next vast skylines of footprints
leading off to a blinking beyond?

Je Voudrais Un Croissant

2008-03-10T00:11:00.001-08:00

Life of a Bathrobe (Part 1)

2008-03-04T10:57:00.003-08:00

Since its founding at the tail end of the Black Hawk War of 1835, East Dundee, Illinois had been a fine American town, and home to a great many different things. Though the first settlers to stop along the banks of the Fox River may have dreamt of founding a town to accompany the hopeful towers of nearby Chicago, they may have known, in the corner of their hearts, that East Dundee was destined for smaller things. With the development of a railroad north to the city, founders set out to manufacture products to aid construction and secure a purpose for their small community. By the time of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, East Dundee was producing the majority of the very bricks that would rebuild the great city, instilling in its residents an even larger sense of pride and purpose for their modest factory town. By the early 20th century, brickbuilding had expanded to include the production of teaware, and Royal Hickman Crystal glassware won high honors at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1934. By now, the few thousand residents of East Dundee knew that they were onto something. No factory could fail, it seemed, and no business would be left for dirt, as the Pottawatomie Indians had been following the founding of what was once their glorious open range. Entrepreneurs eyed Dundee like flies to a cow pie, and not until Glenn Holland erected a Kris Kringle-based theme park in 1959 named Santa’s Village would East Dundee come to understand the crustier taste of failure.

Molly Cooper was the best kind of native East Dundee-an, in that she was a dreamer, true and true. While the rest of her high school class fell into the tragic habits of the bored and overprivileged, cooking methamphetamines and disco dancing, Molly knew that she was born to produce something. That something wasn’t just children, as her elder sisters had produced, nor a firecracker bomb, as her prom date had produced on the night before the event, singeing off all hair from his face and making for an embarrassing photograph Molly’s grandmother would not soon let her forget. No, Molly felt herself magnetically drafted into the ingenuity of her forefathers, the men and women who saw the need for things, and met those needs with a little bit of good old fashioned work. After failed campaigns to be elected school treasurer every consecutive year from sixth to eleventh grade, Molly decided that politics wouldn’t be her inroad to the procession of great figures to emerge from the muddy soil on the banks of the patient Fox River.

Molly’s grandmother, while severely alcoholic and even more severely preoccupied with Jimmy Carter, had imparted a few wisdoms to her granddaughter, whom she raised from the moment her own daughter ran off with a slick Buick salesman from Poughkeepsie. One of these wisdoms was a divine knack for knitting, knitting to waste hours watching Carter’s forehead sweat over hostage crises, knitting for keeping one’s fingers from arthritic pinches. Molly inherited her grandmother’s fingers, slender and elegant like tiny, elongated balloons, blown out from the gently cupped base of her palms. As we so often do, Molly rejected her natural gift, and not until the very end of her fruitless campaign for the treasury did she allow for the notion of a career in sewing to seep in.

On that fateful day, Rudy Halberstam was sworn in as treasurer of Hickman High, and Molly cried in the driver’s seat of her Chrysler LeBaron. The gradual piling up of small disappointments felt like the earth beneath the historic brick factory she passed on her way home, grounded with the weight of those hundreds of thousands of rectangular anchors. At home, she found her grandmother at her usual post, saddled up on a barstool twelve inches from the white swiveling television, licking her lips at a visibly distressed Carter, like a lioness awaiting the sickliest caribou. Her hands moved fast between the sweating glass of Tanqueray and her latest project, a pair of socks that didn’t appear as though they would soon cover even the tiniest toes of the preterm births at the Dundee Medical Center maternity ward. Though the disappointment in her face was clear as a rainy Saturday, her grandmother was well aware that no time pitying oneself is rightly spent. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it. You know and I know what you’re made of, and that’s that. Now take a shower, and come back down for some soup.”

Perhaps the extra generation between children and grandparents allows for such a dialogue to exist without dispute. Molly took a deep breath in the shower for every letter in the name of her hometown. East Dundee. Ten letters. The same number of fingers and toes she’d been given by God, all along, to create something truly special in the world. By the time she’d toweled off, it had weaseled it way into her head. That’s it. She would sew. Specifically, she would sew bathrobes. A need in the world that she saw would remain constant, long after bricks and St. Nicholas were forgotten from this world. No matter what the circumstances were on earth, until man smoked his final cigarette and called the whole of civilization off, people would need something nice to slip into after a hot shower. This would be Molly’s true calling.

With the help of her inebriated grandmother, Molly pieced together the rough draft for her first robe, the prototype that would be perfected, and most likely later preserved in a museum alongside the most famous robes throughout history. The robe worn by Jesus on the day of his crucifixion, the silk robe of Qin Shi Huangdi, first emperor of the Qin Dynasty. Molly’s prototype would sit alongside these relics. And, because it was the only thing she could get her hands on from the top of the closet that night, it would also be purple.

How is it that when we are so sure of something, we look upon its failure as a child, expecting the dead bird to reanimate with the prodding of a long, crooked stick? Molly’s first robe was no Mona Lisa. It was no Starry Night, nor a clay pot in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; it was not Neil Armstrong’s wide bootprint in the moondust. It was neither Tom Edison’s first light bulb nor the marble left buttock of the statue of David; it was not the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. Molly’s first bathrobe was not the Treaty of Versailles, but it was nonetheless debuted on the gleaming wrinkled body of Molly’s dancing grandmother at 1:09 in the morning the following night. It hung a bit low on her, purple as the bottom of a Castro flag, and appeared to be a good two inches shorter on the right arm than the left.

Regardless of its shortcomings, the robe wished above anything else to be free of the grandmother, who stank of gin and the memory of sixty odd years of Irish Spring bar soap. Though reasonably proud of herself upon its completion, Molly knew that a number of swift changes were in order to perfect the product she would one day be synonymous with, and, after taking careful measurements, she decided it should be donated to the nearby Goodwill.

From the moment the robe had been tugged on the eroded shoulders of Molly’s grandmother, it had been filled with more than the wrinkled arms of an alcoholic Carter-lover. It had been imbued with a number of wishes, and like so many of us, an even greater number of unanswered questions. Now, sinking to the bottom of the green plastic bin, it wondered why it had been abandoned, left to wilt in the company of shami cloths, mesh trucker hats, and bras with half their latches. It wondered what its place was, an orphan and an only child, hugged lovingly but tossed through the invisible particles of the East Dundee Goodwill parking lot’s afternoon sky. Still, some inexpressible vestige of the town’s great spirit clung to the very microfibers of the robe, as though Molly’s nimble fingers had imparted on them that same intangible, universal longing to truly mean something to the world.

When the robe awoke the light was bright fluorescent. All around were stacks and folds of clothes and blankets, being sifted through and tugged by fingers tough with callus and swift as beaks, pecking from the heaping pile and tossing every mad direction. Things were being given sniff tests by the wise and seasoned noses of three quick and generous volunteers. As it came to be the robe’s turn, a large, brown nostril twitched at the lingering essence of Molly’s grandmother. Into the wash pile it went. In this pile, the robe was in the company of garments that had traveled great distances and years to share the fate of all discarded things. The robe felt young in the company of faded polo shirts and stained beach towels. For the first time, it encountered another, smaller beige robe of elegant material, and even tried to reach out to it as the pile was lifted and heaved into a supreme washer. “Ni hau, ma,” the smaller robe responded back, as it began to snow detergent. “Yo soy un toalla,” a shy voice near the back whispered out. The sky went dark as the lid fell shut, and the wash cycle began.

On an octagonal rack on a clear plastic hangar, the robe waited in the company of other bath-related garments. After numerous, intimate cycles of tumble drying, it had become increasingly aware that nearly all of its peers and counterparts had been manufactured overseas, traveling vast continents and dark oceans to be sold at cheaper costs. While the robe enjoyed the sounds of the languages from the Far East, it was something like listening to rain fall on a tin roof, there was no further comprehension to be had but the gentle delight of the experience.

Time passes stiffly in such waiting rooms. It had been tried on three times in four days when the robe first began to despair. How had it come to be, when its very birth in a town of moderate historical importance once felt enough in itself to hurdle the initial doubts we all confront in recognizing ourselves as different from the rest? Two Chinese robes had been claimed and taken, and the in-store music playlist was becoming insipid and predictable. It was nearing closing on the fourth day when the robe began to consider unraveling. Perhaps it could simply reverse its formation, into a small purple pile in the shade at the base of the rack. Perhaps it could unwind itself entirely, and blow across the whole of the Midwest, like an endless dental floss, until it found a place worth settling, to consider restoration. If it could catch the right draft, it might at least reach as far north as Chicago, to tangle itself in the antennae atop the Sears Tower, where it might think things over awhile, observing the pale shoulder of the earth’s curve.

While it no longer held that ineffable quality of never having been through a turbo wash cycle, the robe still knew in its microfibers that it had the potential for new life elsewhere. The octagonal rack was a kinder type of purgatory, and there would only be a number of times that it could be tried on and put back before someone discovered it for its greater purpose.

Quiet, Sirens

2008-02-05T00:47:00.000-08:00

some of the best things
are predictable and lovely.
i might fall asleep right here,
next to the old desk lamp

but your lap looks nice,
i want to say
in French

we have nothing but pages
and pages of dark
turning with the traffic
around the corner.

and what else out there is so guaranteed?
a warm cassette deck in an old pickup truck,
white painted porch on a Delta house—

that postcard of yours, lets just go there!
i’ll be the reincarnated Civil War general,
and you, you can dress like Onassis.

there are only so many chances left
for the taking

don’t you sense its slow closing,
that great sliding door
to the curious warmth?

From the Blogotheque Vault

2008-01-23T20:58:00.000-08:00

For President?

2008-01-13T19:37:00.000-08:00

From The Desk of Dayton Moore..

2008-01-12T22:07:00.000-08:00

if i could build the bridge

2008-01-06T23:54:00.000-08:00

(from here to there)

i’d use the arc and fabric of a jet trail
tracing the earth’s curvature like
a sleeping lover’s shoulder blade

wander the vast lobby of clouds
below the dark blanket of the troposphere

and i would come back down, for you
whole freeways crossed like sidewalk cracks

to find you there, bathed in the pale glow
of a monitor screen, looking for me
where i never truly am, say
turn around-

Death of a Lapdog (In Four Floors)

2007-10-24T22:09:00.000-08:00

Nobody liked Grandma all that much when she was alive, which made it all the weirder to stand at her funeral in the company of over twenty complete strangers, none whom were half her age, plopping drugstore carnations on her wood-paneled casket. “It looks like our old TV,” my sister had said, when we were flipping through the catalogue of coffins. “We shouldn’t speak of such things” my mother said, sounding like the obese librarian I used to harass about not having an adult film section. “What happened to that TV, anyway?” I had, of course, dropped it off the diving board at the YMCA, in a project for a friend’s movie we were making on World War II. I told Dad I had given it to Pete, the homeless bard who sold puppets outside of the grocery store, so he could watch TV while he figured out how to get his life back together. Besides, Dad wasn’t going to be a man much longer if he didn’t spring for a flat one that stuck to the wall.

Grandma didn’t give a crap about anything those last couple months that she lived with us. She couldn’t cook her own toast anymore, and Dad was too cheap to put her up at Silver Lining, the nearest retirement zoo. His announcement that she was moving in went over about as well as my burps in church. Mom threatened to move out, and Dad looked almost excited about that for a second, but I could see the terror in his eyes. He’d be back on the once-a-month laundry boat and living off Hamburger Helper, like he did when Mom took her trips to see Uncle Zambutu. From the looks of it, they came to an agreement resulting in him apparently never touching Mom again, and that seemed good enough for the time being. I was immediately put off by her moving in, as it meant I shared a bedroom with my sister again, which hadn’t been forced on me since Zambutu was with us for that strangest of summers.

Grandma slept more than the cat, and when she was up, she was meaner than Slobodan Milosevic. She ate nothing but candy, and smelled like Goodwill furniture. “I’d sell you ingrates in a heartbeat to be twenty-nine again,” she’d say. Then she’d take a bath for two hours, and spill about half the tub getting in and out. Mom refused to clean it up, and we got used to taking our shoes off to use the bathroom, because at any given time it looked like a tsunami had just washed over the cracked-tile landscape. The only thing older than grandma was our apartment, which we moved into illegally when a coworker of Dads left the country to pick up his mail order bride in Slovenia and never came back. After a few months and some paperwork he refused to talk to Mom about, he decided we could take it. The rent was low, and it had a great view of the abandoned sausage-rolling plant. We had the top story of four floors, with no hope of an elevator in the near future. The apartment was older than God, but with rent reaching obscene heights in the city, we were lucky to have as much room as we did, and tried to tread lightly and ignore the stairs when they sounded like ghosts on a sex trampoline.

Before the funeral, I wasn’t familiar with the majority of the strange cast of people from our building. I’d seen Father Fred on the front steps, where he sat with the newspaper and his lapdog that refused to shit anywhere but in the wheel well of the faded green 1986 Camry that sat out front, collecting parking tickets like a snowball. From what we understood, Father Fred had given up on his profession, and instead occupied his time watering geraniums behind the apartment and using foul language. After he called my sister a “tramp” on Halloween the year she decided to be Christina Aguilera, my parents banned us from knocking on his door. If I hadn’t been unconscious that night from trying to plug my lamp costume in to an actual wall socket, I’d have come to her defense. He still dressed for church every day in the whole getup. Everybody had their own speculations on how things got so bad for Fred, but nobody knew for certain. From time to time we’d also see the newlyweds that lived below us, trudging up the stairs with Drano or toilet paper, but they didn’t say much in passing. We could hear them yelling at each other under our living room at night, but that hardly passed for entertainment after the first few months.

On the day it happened, Grandma was particularly irate, and flipped off every member of the family individually over the course of her half a grapefruit. She made a sucking face when she ate it, and I pitied the grapefruit more than anything in the world. Mom had come to treat her like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, and ignored her as well as she did my sister and me for the past couple years. The apartment fell into an unthinkable state of disrepair, so much that the cat eventually started living with another family somewhere below us. That day, Grandma went through her usual routine of leaving a disgusting trail of garments snaking its way to the bathroom. I almost made the mistake of picking up after her, but touching any of the alien accessories that mysteriously held her together would likely have caused me years of therapy and/or homosexuality, neither of which sounded as good as Dad having to do it.

When she filled the tub, she filled it to the brim, “like a proper drink,” she’d say, before dousing the rotten floor with another gallon. She eased herself down into it, gripping the sides of it and displacing another huge splash with a heavy sigh of relief. She sat there for a good twenty seconds, quietly closing her eyes and thinking cruel thoughts. That is, until the bathroom floor beneath her caved in.

3^rd Floor

When my Grandma rode that ceramic canoe through the sinking crater of our bathroom, she rode it naked and screaming, with remarkable velocity. To the rest of us, it sounded like the swallowing of an extraordinarily heavy pill, down a throat of tunneling termite wood. The hole she left was no larger than eight by five feet, basically the circumference of the tub, and its most soaked-through perimeter. She went almost straight down, without much of an angle to speak of, though I imagine there must have been a slight forward momentum, as though she spilled forward, as a barrel-rider down Niagara Falls. That was the description Geoff and Judy downstairs gave, and they had a better look than just about anybody.

As luck would have it, our bathroom was situated directly above Geoff and Judy’s kitchen. At the time, they were cooking ravioli and fighting about Judy’s failure to notice Geoff’s new work shoes. According to them, things were getting heated over what felt like nothing again, and Judy was beginning to imagine a life without Geoff, and how that sounded a lot nicer than when she agreed to stay with him until death did them part. Geoff was wanting Judy to know how little he actually liked ravioli, and that he suffered too for the good of “the team,” when my grandmother came crashing through the ceiling in her claw-footed chariot. Judy later said it all happened too quickly to really assess the situation, but that my grandmother was in what looked like a state of absolute terror, white-knuckles grasping each side as she flew, with a trail of lukewarm water and shattered yellow tiles dating back to the Taft administration.

The tub landed directly on top of the stove, sending the pot of ravioli flying, a non-issue considering the cacophony of flying pipes, roofing, and one particularly upset nude elderly woman. For the longest two seconds of their lives, the tub halted and rested there upon the stovetop, rocking almost casually as a duck on a pond. My grandmother turned to face the newlyweds, and as her eyes locked theirs, the weight of the tub on the stovetop pushed the lot clean through the floor of their kitchen, and down into the next story of the building. Geoff and Judy stood on the remaining half of their kitchen for two minutes before either one of them said anything. They had takeout for dinner, and Judy didn’t mind.

2^nd Floor

The velocity of the second drop was more significant, but my Grandmother was no doubt more prepared for it, having already done it moments prior. I doubt her wrinkled hands ever left the sides to the tub, and paramedics most likely had to use the Jaws of Life at some point to remove them from her awkward vehicle, but the medics didn’t answer any of my questions about that. What we do know is that when she left Geoff and Judy’s kitchen, she entered Jake Plummer’s living room at about fourteen miles per hour, but passed right through the ceiling and floor without much trouble, as Jake didn’t have any solid furniture set up outside of a small television and a couple of beanbag chairs. Jake was the quarterback for the Denver Broncos in his prime a few years back, but had been replaced by a younger, more pass-efficient prodigy, and had slipped into a more reclusive lifestyle, listening to loud rap music on his headphones and reading autobiographies of famous retired athletes.

Jake had been careless with his money, and was saving up through public speaking jobs at local high schools, living cheaply and unnoticed in our dilapidated complex. I didn’t recognize him until the day of the service, but he had probably been using disguises coming in and out of the property, understandably avoiding the attention. He was out of the room at the time of the crash, and according to police reports, failed to notice the sound of my grandmother screaming through his ceiling and floorboards, thinking it was only another part of the rap CD that he hadn’t given proper time to yet. When he came back in to check the score of the game, his television was missing down a small, rectangular crater in the floor, and a banged- up stove rested, smoldering like an overgrown cigarette on his favorite blue and orange beanbag chair.

Ground Floor

Father Fred had begun his day like any other, washing and shaving his face like the congregation might be studying it all morning. His tie affixed itself to the center of his chest almost magnetically, as though the Lord had granted it that simple, miniscule power. But Father Fred had gone years without feeling the Lord granting him anything, let alone powers or answers to the real questions that he needed. “Why should I even water these geraniums,” We’d hear him mutter, while religiously watering his geraniums. “They’re as doomed as the rest of us.” It didn’t help that his lapdog showed such distrust for the outside world that it refused to shit anywhere but in the wheel wells of the rusted Camry. The two of them together had become a neurotic pair, and neither was contributing to each others’ overall sense of growth.

This particular day, Father Fred had finished getting ready, and, over his depressing bowl of Cheerios, something gross and demanding weaseled its way into the confines of his head. “I’m going to kill myself today,” he said out loud to his lapdog, who was also lapping up Cheerios from a nearby dish, but not nearly so unhappily as Fred. “I’m going to kill myself right here and now, with the biggest and nearest kitchen knife I can find, and there’s nothing and nobody out there, not God himself, who can stop me.” He couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth, but the dog ignored him, and his arm reached for a knife, possessed by his wild new thirst for damage. He held it at arms length from his shining black shirt, and imagined how sharp it would feel when it poked through his white tie.

The lapdog slurped cruelly on, ignoring his masters’ final dramatic monologue. “This is the last time I ask you for a sign, Lord!” he screamed, raising the knife even more dramatically into the air, so that it gleamed like the climax to a bad film. “A SIGN!!” It was then that my grandmother made her grand entrance through the final floor’s ceiling, careening her canoe through Father Fred’s roof at thirty miles per hour, and landing with a tremendous crunch directly upon the lapdog, selfishly digesting his last gulp of Cheerios. For a second, the sounds of debris and termite shit littered the scene like sick Christmas snow, but soon everything was still. Father Fred blinked at my dead Grandmother, for the first time peaceful in her porcelain throne. He calmly set the knife back in its drawer, and gingerly walked out of the ruined kitchen, careful not to peek at my Grandmothers gross nakedness, and walked straight out of the building to the nearby church.

Ends

Father Fred was kind enough to perform the service for us, and spoke highly of my Grandma, though no one in the family could imagine why. Geoff and Judy brought more flowers than we did as a whole family combined, and Jake Plummer showed everybody up by having a dump truck deliver a hundred thousand blue and orange tulips to her grave. Judy confided in my mother that since the incident, she and Geoff hadn’t fought once, and she had come to appreciate his taste in shoes, just as he had come to accept her affinity for ravioli. Jake started using my grandmother’s story as a side note when he sensed his public speeches were growing too tedious, and he started making a lot more money and listening to less rap music. My Grandma’s trip through four floors on the way to her screaming death brought a surprising lot of different people together, and changed a lot of people’s lives for the better. She saved a marriage, an athlete’s second career, and the life of the best new reverend in town. I should also mention that she ended the life of a grossly understood and severely introverted lapdog.

equinox

2007-09-23T20:00:00.000-08:00

the last day of summer is pronounced
with an abandoned volleyball net in the park
sagging into a meek smile over golden, napping bums,
no one notices a newspaper unfolding itself in the wind,
painting the grass grey

the afternoon lowers itself upon us like a warm curse
as we watch solitary neighbors climb their fire escapes to the roofs
clutching dusty atlases and staring out to the boats
drifting across the freezing bay like magnetic particles
lost in the ether of a cell
stuck circling, waiting to come together for the first time

what room is left for myth in the city?
it sometimes feels as though we’ve witnessed
every inch of moveable space—

light endangers itself near the lip of a black ridge
ducking away without so much as an over the shoulder
as darker balloons let themselves in through a tear in the
low-flying fog, the sound of weak chords strummed
on ill-wound instruments at the curb—

the subtleties of our corrosion,
mildew blooming like a veiled monet
from beneath the purity of our bathroom ceiling

and i can hear all the rotten poems out there unfolding,
coughing their way back up the trash chute to my stairway,
and strange threats dangling themselves out of high windows
while a distant car alarm cries out for someone, somewhere

step out to the balcony (under the pavement, pavement)

2007-09-15T18:03:00.001-08:00

this morning the cranes delivered
a metallic finger the size of a schoolbus
outside of our apartment, pointing stubbornly
to the east, as though yearning for missing digits-

there’s hardly room as it is for our slender architecture
in these trenches of modernity, conversations of shins
clamoring up escalators to the skylight cataracts-

we sewed this city like an iron quilt,
speedbumps sang a harmonized collision
laying over medians of evergreens-

high-fenced promises of suburbs sprout like sunflowers,
as we wrap our calluses in sunday papers
displaying names of budding skeletons,
and miscarriages of abandoned construction sites-

we’re governing a state of reconstruction,
paving one-way streets around the artery,
scaling fire escapes of our blushing facades
and squatting over pyramids of spare parts-

From the Desk of Sony Headquarters..

2007-08-31T20:30:00.001-08:00

From The Desk of Joe Posnanski...

2007-08-23T17:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Makers of MLB’06 The Show,

2007-08-13T23:29:00.000-08:00

I write to you today as I’m experiencing significant problems with your game, Major League Baseball 2006, The Show. I’m currently two seasons deep into Career Mode with none other than the Kansas City Royals, one of the greatest franchises in the history of the mid-eighties, and I’m beginning to formulate a few questions following my first few seasons from the farm leagues to the majors. My primary concerns lie with the newest addition to the Royals, a hot rookie first baseman/shortstop named Will Weston, coincidentally. The Royals drafted Will after a decent showing at Spring Training last season, assigning him to the AA Wichita Wranglers, where he began the slow gnawing process through the ropes of minor league baseball.

Who would known it, but Weston turned out to be one hell of a hitter, amassing multiple homerun games, and baffling AA pitching to the point of near-ridicule. The manager decided it was time to bump the kid up a notch. Off to Omaha, suitcases teeming with blue socks, Weston showed up as the newest addition to an already smoking-hot Omaha Royals AAA team. Here, Weston honed his defense among part-time major leaguers, and fresh talent awaiting that special phone call to whisk them away to the big time. Not only did Omaha make the playoffs, but behind Weston’s 12HR and 58 RBI, they captured the AAA title against hated rival Roswell. Weston was even called up by the real Kansas City Royals for a few games, where he made a noteworthy impression on Royals skipper, Buddy Bell. A few hot performances in the majors, and Weston was sent back down to Omaha, where he began the next season with a tripled salary, a one year signing for $167,000 (a far cry from the $45 million, ten-year contract proposed by Weston’s agents.

Weston began splitting his time between Omaha and Kansas City over the course of the first half of the following season, amassing slews of RBI’s in both cities. When Weston was chasing biplanes in the Nebraska clouds, Bell would get on the phone and have him sent up for a few games. A few weeks. Eventually, Weston’s face was almost a regular sight at shortstop. Teammate Mark Teahen, speaking for the press, touted Weston’s abilities, saying he made first place Anaheim’s all-star pitching staff look like “batting practice” in a three game sweep. It seemed like things were really clicking. Local papers in Omaha declared Weston was gone for good, a shoe-in for the Royals’ starting lineup with his Major League- leading .613 batting average, higher than both George Brett and Bo Jackson’s career batting averages COMBINED.

As Weston became settled in his bigger shoes, the hits began to roll in with more consistency, and balls began to carry to the depths of the water fountains in Kauffman stadium. Weston was hitting homers at the professional level, and the team was heading toward 2^nd in the AL Central, behind the perennial-bastard Tigers. Fans in the Midwest were already fashioning pontoons of hope that the ol’ Royals might even make the playoffs for the first time in twenty years, with two months left on the season. It’s true, the Royals were looking good. Backed by the 28 RBI’s knocked in by Weston in less than 30 games at the professional level, the Royals were firing on all cylinders.

Enter scene, a three game road series vs. the AL Central rival Cleveland Indians, at Jacobs Field. The Royals are near topping the perennial-beef Tigers in the standings, and are 2 games ahead for the AL Wildcard, three weeks left on the season. The series is split 1-1, with the rubber game scheduled for 1pm on Sunday afternoon in sunny, grassy-green Cleveland. The boys of summer hit the field, and it’s a game to remember. Weston, for the first time, looks like a real star in the majors. He smashes a home run into the left field stands, snatching the lead early. The Indians fight back, but Weston gets two more hits, keeping the Royals in the fight into the late innings. With the score 7-5 Indians, Weston comes to bat in the bottom of the 9^th inning with two runners on base. Dave Dejesus stands at second. Joey Gathright waits at first. The count is loaded. Weston appears poised, looking for his fourth hit of the game, the stadium literally hushed in anticipation for what comes next. The pitch, and Weston sends it flying, back to the opposite field, and into the second tier, a monstrous two run homerun, his second of the game, to come from behind and lift the Royals to victory, not only for the game, but the entire series. His name is in hot ink on front pages of every paper across the country.

When Weston hits the locker room in a flurry of excitement and champagne bubbles that night, his teammates mob him, officially freeing the rookie from the confines of his initial reputation as “newbie” or “fresh meat,” and he is treated like a true brother. Mike Sweeney, captain of the Royals, hits the podium for a post-game interview. In regards to Weston’s performance, he offers the most insightful sentence to summarize the rookie sensation: “he (Weston) really helped the team today.” Weston’s phone rings, it’s his father on the line, son I’m proud of you. Thanks Dad. Weston packs up his cleats and heads for the door, when something catches his eye. He slowly approaches a yellow post-it note freshly pinned up on coach Buddy Bell’s corkboard. It reads:

You have been sent down to the AAA Royals. Your next game is 9/3.

Now, in all honesty, because I’d genuinely like to know, why the fuck would that ever happen? Are you shitting me? I just cranked not one, but two taters at Jacobs, and salvaged my team from the dregs of the American League, and you mean to tell me, MLB 2006 The Show, that after two seasons, and thousands of at-bats in hundreds of American cities, that I’m really going to be optioned down to AAA after the kind of month I’ve just had? I’m batting .670 with 6 home runs last month for Christ’s sake! Fuck you guys! What more do you want from me? If I were batting over .600 in real life, coaches would be lining up around the stadium to kiss my dick.

But no, after I plainly saved the day, perhaps the entire season, I’m back in the shitty minors. The midnight bus rides. The cheap hotels and apathetic waitresses. I’m supposed to refrain from buying games where I can run over dead hookers in a stolen jetplane, or reenact Normandy for that matter, so I can sit through three entire seasons of minor league baseball, game by game, just in hopes that an above .700 batting average impresses virtual Buddy Bell enough that he thinks about putting me on a 40-man roster for a team that can’t even get their heads out of the Minnesota Twins’ ass? What the hell is wrong with you fuckers?

If you know what’s good for you, you’ll make it a little easier to make the god damned Show, if you know what I mean. I’m basically surpassing every batting title in the history of baseball when I’m up there, and they just keep sending me down, without the option to “request more playing time” for 60 tiresome days. So don’t wonder why ratings for baseball video games are so low, because who wouldn’t go crazy listening to Matt Vasgersian’s predictable, perpetually disparaging calls against my ground balls trickling up the middle, “this could be two!” Every double play I ever hit into, that same voice coos out from behind my left ear, announcing it like a proud, adulterous lover. This could be two, my ass. I’m Will fucking Weston. You’re all dumb as hell.

Will from America, August 13^th, 2007.

1930 Hyde St. #8
San Francisco, CA 94109
(720)-480-8401

Dearest Joe

2007-07-25T15:01:00.000-08:00

I have my doubts that you ever received a genuinely ridiculous letter I wrote to the Kansas City Star a couple months ago in regards to the upcoming renovations at Kauffman Stadium. It began with me drifting in a deckchair suspended by 1985 royal blue balloons, and gradually morphed into an uninvestigated, superfluous rant directed loosely toward the organization in general and the stiffs upstairs about how to really revive 85, bringing back the powder blue, investing in somebody better than Odalis, things of that nature.

In truth, I am a monumental Royals fan. I was one year old when they won the World Series. I have witnessed only suffering in my short lifetime. It’s in my nature that with every loss, I manage to find a way to love the Royals even more. It’s difficult to explain, but the feeling I get sitting down at Kauffman Stadium is basically equivalent to how Neil Armstrong must have felt after winning the most important rock-paper-scissors tournament in all of history against Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July of 1969. Or perhaps it’s because the spirit of open space is alive and well in Kansas City, where Bank of America hasn’t yet conditioned people to wave their credit cards in the face of God in feeble attempts to earn upgraded seats, as they do in my new hometown of San Francisco.

Falling in love with the Royals over the course of the last few years has brought me to the conclusion that baseball truly is among the finest institutions on earth, and a passion that no amount of graduate school might suppress. Here I am in San Francisco, a second year MFA student in creative writing, with an empty typewriter and no Whitman-esque manifestos to spew out, no beat culture seeds to sow, and one year left on a silly degree that may or may not land me in front of a classroom in the next 25 years. Over the course of the last year, I have come to terms with the fact that I may just love to write, and have little to no interest in pretending my stuff is worthy of a new 101 course for snot-nosed, bong-hitting freshman.

The thing is, there aren’t all that many things I love more than baseball. It’s outrageous how much I feel like I have to say about it. It represents an endless progression of American histories, not to mention it’s the best damn game invented. I eat statistics like Chips Ahoy, and it goes without saying that I eat a ton of those. I follow your blog and very recently finished your book, which, like most good books, I found sad and wonderful. The sport of baseball is a harbor for myth, and as a writer you allowed a book on a great man to write itself. I think it succeeds in harnessing some of the great characters, mysteries, and legends of pre-instant-replay baseball, no easy donkey to pin the tail on.

So Joe, I write to you because i moved to San Francisco to think about being a writer. I want to be a creative writer, but never imagined I’d stay a poet longer than a few more years. Now that I’ve reached the conclusion that I love baseball enough that I could spend a lifetime taking it seriously, I have more than one question about what it’s like to a sports writer, and more importantly, what it takes to be a half decent one. While I’ve heard my fair share of don’t-do-what-i-did’s since showing an early interest in writing, I’d still love to chat in some fashion.

While I might be content sending absurd letters to The Star for a few more years, I realized that I had a unique opportunity to contact you on your Barry Bonds quest, which happens to be taking place just a few miles from my apartment. I care more that the Giants are doing worse than the Royals in the standings, but appreciate the milestone about to be splintered, as well as any still-active heroes from my childhood, Rocket included. While I waste a large amount of time as a part-time manager of a clothing store downtown, I intend to get to as many games as possible as Barry seals the deal.

I thought I should drop you a line to say that, if you’d be interested (or bored) enough, I would really and truly enjoy meeting you sometime, be it during a seventh inning stretch at the ballpark or for a cup of coffee (which I don’t drink) to ask you a thing or two about sports writing, baseball, or the boys in blue. I don’t know which games I’ll be going to, or if you even consider the company of twenty-three year old/graduate student/displaced Royals fans, who send odd letters, but if you’re around in the city, it would be an honor to buy you a hotdog. Plus, I bought your book. Needle needle. I’d love to have it signed.

In return I have a baseball autographed by Tim Salmon my stepmom gave me once, a stuffed raccoon from Chinatown, or my gratitude. If any of those sound remotely appealing, please get in touch. Also, I’m including a poem of mine that’s going to be published by a sports journal in Tennessee called Aethlon, about the Kirk Gibson homer off Dennis Eckersley, and what it was like to be a four year old boy in Los Angeles that night. Keep up the great work, and always, always, Go Royals.

Will Weston, San Francisco, CA (720)-480-8401 or westonwr@sfsu.edu

P.S. If this is too much to ask, please forgive me. Maybe next time. That I’m living in a city where you’re covering the biggest newstory in recent sports history on the hometown hero breaking the most eternal record in the greatest game on earth. No biggie.

An Open Letter to The Kansas City Star:

2007-05-26T00:46:00.000-08:00

I write to you from a proverbial deck chair suspended by one thousand, nine-hundred and eighty five bright blue balloons drifting 3 miles above scenic Kansas City, Missouri. While I might easily lose myself in the finery of Kansas City’s stately landscaping and architecture, surveying the many fountains that adorn this metropolis of the Midwest, or concern myself with the odds of survival from a fall of this awful distance, I choose to direct my downward gaze upon one, definitive landmark that absolutely spellbinds me. I speak today of Kauffman Stadium, third smallest baseball stadium in the country, stemming boldly from the endless asphalt of I-70, one and only home of the Kansas City Royals. You, of course, are all more than familiar with this team, as you represent some of the most prominent figures in the Royals’ venerable 38-year history. Fellows, I write to you today in regards to something of utmost significance.

As I study the brilliant, oval-shaped stadium that forms a tremendous eye that seems to oversee the passage of immense trucks heaving thousands of pounds of the very produce we as Americans live off from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean, I see a great many things. A revolutionary park built ahead of its time, capitalizing on one of the most appetizing climates and backdrops to host the American pastime across the entire fruited plain. A ballpark at the vanguard of American cultural progress, home to the longest running franchise in the history of Negro League Baseball, where Jackie Robinson himself played shortstop before expunging baseball’s color barrier. A home to a World Series Championship, one of the most unlikely in history, as the Royals came from behind a 3-1 series deficit to upset their in-state rival St. Louis Cardinals in 1985. Home to three generations of Kansas City’s great people, undeniably die-hard fans, and one of the most aesthetically pleasing fields to be erected in the 20^th century.

In October of 2007, at the end of this very season, provided the Royals do not make their first playoff appearance in 22 years, renovations will commence on Kauffman Stadium, transforming it into what is currently referred to by initial press reports as “a ballpark of tomorrow.” With the installation of high definition televisions, seating mounted in the grassy expanse of the outfield, suites developed behind home plate and cement lain to provide a 360 degree walkway around the park, Kauffman stadium will be what legislative chairman Dan Tarwater deems “brand new.”

What Tarwater fails to see, essentially, is that this renovation is easily the biggest mistake proposed in Kansas City since the unmentionable Jermaine Dye trade of 2001. How 250 million dollars might be thrown toward gearing Kauffman Stadium up for a best-in-show vote by robot judges of the future when the team is currently suffering through its ninth losing season in ten years is beyond me. The truth of the matter is, there is no flatscreen television large enough, no definition high enough to teach the Royals how to refurbish their win-loss record. No alteration or enhancement of what has already become a quintessential, historic host of baseball tradition will teach our pitchers how to win 20 games in a season, as Saberhagen did in ’85, or earn 45 saves, as Quisenberry did two years prior. No Dodge truck perched inanely in left field will bring a .400 hitter back to the K, and every one of you knows it in your heart.

Why is it so important for Kansas City to boast one of the most technologically advanced stadiums in baseball for a team that posts the worst record year after year? Has it ever occurred to David Glass, owner of the Royals for seven of the worst seasons in their history, that perhaps his affiliation with Walmart, the Soviet Union of business, suggests potential for a more generous payroll than the 67 million Glass shelled out this season, for seventh lowest in the MLB? Mind you, this is the most generous year yet, as Kansas City just a few years back stooped to third lowest in the majors, behind the two pitifully impoverished affiliations in Florida. Coupled with notoriously bad trade records and an unapologetic reliance on unverified rookies, the Royals have earned every loss in the past ten years, allowing themselves to be surpassed in nearly every facet of the game. Without the undying love of hardnosed fans that have donned t-shirts with catch phrases such as “revive-85,” Kauffman stadium may easily have been trundled away by now on the backs of massive mack trucks bound for expansion sites outside of Orlando.

But it hasn’t. Kauffman is the same stadium now as it was when George Brett fell to his knees and literally kissed home plate at the end of his legendary career. Every home game Brett ever played was played right here. That great crown overlooking the bustling traffic and proud fountains have remained unfettered for the posterity of the future, and countless generations to come. So why now, when the Royals most need an injection of star-power, a new Bo Jackson, a new Frank White, do they propose to add bigger wings to this penguin? What consumer-oriented mind believes that shining, glassed-in hall of fame walkways are vital, when in truth there aren’t enough retired greats to fill the picture frames? Baseball commissioner/marionette Bud Selig has indeed given Kauffman the go-ahead to host the All Star Game between the years of 2010 and 2014, provided the city pass basic ordinances. While this momentous honor would most certainly require extensive scrubbing of the Hi-Vee upper decks of eighties-era relish residue and the installation of new urinal troughs, who exactly are we trying to impress?

Not that 250 million dollars shouldn’t be invested in some way, shape or form to the team, because we can use it. The Royals shouldn’t need the Steinbrenner “cure” of a magical stuffy wallet, nor should they endure antiquated facilities in the modern age, but that simply isn’t the case. Kauffman is one of the most beautiful parks in

America

, and its modesty presents its most appealing quality. The feeling of unoccupied space, a wide-open range, and endless possibilities inhabit this park, gracing it with a serenity that no major city will ever again replicate. Call me conservative, but what sets baseball apart from more antagonistic, consumer-oriented sports like football is the fact that bigger rarely translates into better. The Royals are an underdog team, always have been, and likely always will be. Kauffman Stadium is the only home built for this distinctive team.

Observing the newly publicized animated fantasies of what the future of “the K” might look like, one has to wonder where these architects pledge their allegiance. Will there be anti-missile defense turrets mounted along the new bullpens to ward off alien attacks? What future are we preparing for? The concept of highlighting the rich culinary culture of barbeque in Kansas City is a worthwhile development, however easily accomplished for less than the pricetag of the movie Waterworld. Unless Buddy Bell is having a hard time reading the pitch count off the fifty foot screen already erected in left field, the last thing the Royals need is a new television set. Before we realize what’s happening, Kauffman will be joining the ranks of commercially named parks, a trend that must be universally recognized as a bad, bad progression regardless of your affiliation to baseball. May we all rue the day that Tony Pena’s son stands up in class and proudly proclaims “my father plays shortstop at Exxon Mobil Park.”

If Dayton Moore is genuine in his campaign to “revive 85” and reinstate the glory of days passed, why is it that we seem to be chasing trends of every other faded ball club across the country? What have renovations done to help the Pirates? The Phillies? These were the parks the architects claimed to have emulated in drafting their designs. But the question nobody wants to ask is how much longer will we wait before the powder blue road uniforms made famous by the greatest Royals to walk the earth are brought back to the lineup? Who the hell is Sluggerrr? Is there anyone perched in the presidential skybox remotely aware of what it actually takes to turn a team around, from the dregs of the American League into playoff contention, or are they deliberating just how many more dollar hotdog days “the K” can afford before Mark Grudzielanek’s girlfriend has to start doing the team’s dirty laundry at home?

Everybody but the Tigers wants the Royals to get better, some of us with the passion of a thousand suns. We have been down for longer than anyone stays down, and still the suits at this organization direct their spotlights on excruciatingly frivolous priorities. The last thing we need in center field is an eighty-foot tall robotic George Brett talking head that spews ketchup over the outfield every time Alex Gordon is hit by a pitch and reaches base. We all need to stop, look inside ourselves, and latch desperately onto that inexpressible force that keeps us rooting for the Royals, and really think about how to turn this ship around. I doubt that spending close to 300 million dollars to seat people in the fountains is the right place to start. From the very cheapest seat in the lowest tier of my round, blue heart, Let’s Go Royals.

Will Weston, San Francisco CA.

A Bowl of Silk

2007-04-14T14:25:00.000-08:00

Scully peels the static curtain back
to Los Angeles, eighty-eight. The windows
are all open. October flies descend into the salsa,
the Reagans are nearly packed.

You can almost taste the pressure mounting,
the living room a woods of tall legs
through which i’m peering at a wood-paneled
television set, broadcasting a sullen Bulldog,
draped over the dugout like a soppy towel.

My father chews his fist, Lasorda sweats
and it rains in the suburbs. Lasorda sighs
and the wind howls up from the Ravine, the last
of the river is drying, the decade along with it.

Gibson hobbles to the box, neither leg supports
his frame, toothpicks under a boardwalk pier.
Every swing and America winces. Some can’t look
as the count goes full, all the fear of what might happen,
the awful knowledge that something must.

For an instant, the smog over downtown is pure belief,
freak energy in defiance of all odds.
I turn to watch the dog encircle his shabby pillow,
biding time for the right approach.

And every one of us is flung with that same velocity,
rushing and hopeful, splintered in improbable faith
and sent packing, shot like a bruised white star
sailing out over a packed parking lot.

2007-04-01T22:08:00.000-08:00

Every night is the same story. The ground is laced with seeds; the staff is stuffed with notes, the sky a mess of black balloons. Neighbors in the distance cough expensive drinks up in the toilet. Their barking rounds against wet porcelain. Another balloon makes the sky fuller. It is difficult to imagine this life doesn’t go on forever. I found a shovel and decided on a spot to dig in the park. It would be as good as any. Four nights I spent sifting through the earth, in its layers of wetness and hard tissue. Small mountains grew behind me, watching quietly with the stars. I pushed the dirt back every time I abandoned the hole. Nobody thought anything about it; my neighbors reassemble their interiors in the bowl. They cry on the telephone and I become the floorboards to hear it. I want to know what’s happening. On the fifth night I hit something solid. The moonlight made it look like silver, but i am not a pioneer. Pioneers are buried under skyscrapers. I am buried under knowledge. Black balloons are contagious. What I found in the park were bones of things that used to walk. Everything we hide is still intact. The ground is laced with seeds. Nothing grows of its own accord. Another balloon makes the sky fuller. There is little room left to dig inward for peace.

2007-03-15T22:26:00.000-08:00

Everything is overhead at this very moment. Biplanes
and constellations drag lazily through the ether,
unhinged fixtures on a dark, static-free channel.
Down here, empires of voices inflate to be noticed,
brushing up against tidal waves of newspaper,
old lingerie escaping from tall clotheslines
dreaming of power outages and fresh elastic bands,
the car horns agree to sing awfully in tunnels.
It’s hot enough our windows are open for anything
to break up into small enough parts and sneak
through the screen to reassemble, alive
and twisting in the living room.
Night’s mask is of cleanliness, wool for the
wandering eye. Unpronounceable shadows parade
into dawn’s blooming furnace, brushstrokes
of new dirt in the old alley, the one named after
the famous writer, what's his name.

Beaconsfield

2007-03-07T21:14:00.003-08:00

last night in bed was dark
and confusing, and i thought i became a cornfield.
i was locked in place by the square shoulders of the midwest,
my pillow gone.

i couldn’t run as a cornfield, only lean,
subjecting myself to the occasional breeze
and when i balled my fists a light began
that spread like crickets to my nose’s tip

and there i stood,
in the undressed hours

until a scarecrow on the alabaster horizon
began to shake his tambourine
and he stumbled across the blues
in the rhythm of our aging in open space

loud enough that farmers sprang from their beds
to put their ears to the dirt
and listen to our rising

Plaid Is On Its Way Back

2007-01-27T19:15:00.001-08:00

sometimes i’m positive that all the whiskers in the world
couldn’t save me from the revolutions
of the world’s turning, like a selfish lover
with all of the blankets
my toes are slouching toward bethlehem
dancing in dark morning velvet
my wits are sprinting for a paper in the driveway
narrowly avoiding sprinklers and purse dogs
and everyone else is having cigarettes with breakfast
like it’s going to bring the rams back to the coliseum

Should Be Here By Now

2006-12-30T00:55:00.000-08:00

where are you do you se
e what i see are you stop
ping to look up the build
ings ate half of the sky it
s still blue though don’ t
worry should still be the
re when you get to me d
on’t let go again it’s hard
er to find my way withou
the gaps between my fing
ers filled in with your fin
gers and i always forget t
o stop to look at everythi
ng like how the statue’s e
yes follow you no matter
what angle you are starin
g from and the sun introd
uces itself like a stranger
down the canyon of your
back in the morning whe
n you’re first sitting up w
ith the posture of a newbo
rn and i think to myself th
is moment could hold like
plaster in a cast you don’t
have to say anything at all

Those Of You Who Came Late This Is An Animal Trap If You’re Loud Enough By The End Of The Show I Will Stick My Hand In It

2006-11-30T23:55:00.000-08:00

i imagine the trees have all become bones
on the far side of the country,
but here in the western world
seasons turn slower than red rotisserie hens
strung up overnight, pale and lethargic
in the butcher’s finger-printed window—

november skies are stained as painter’s pants
as the inevitable, obscured collective sadness
of the approaching holidays
circles around us like an old dog,
waiting to snuggle down with the fresh batch of fog
creeping under the bridge
like nobody is checking anymore

but every one of our leaves will hold,
white stems of the bougainvillea
will continue to spill from the balconies,
blooming like diminutive constellations
and we’re left
to conceive our own gestures of winter

hark! chimes the falling oar!

2006-10-27T22:43:00.000-08:00

haven’t been dreaming lately so i bought a case of energy bars now i have triathlete dinners with plastic knives wash it down with nitroglycerine in miniature cans iamarocket iamarocket and the burning fuel spewing out behind me like a phoenix tail is spreading fake rainclouds in the atmosphere like dirty lies it took me some time to learn to sleep as a rocket but rockets can sleep too it just passes through my system nervous like electricity under green water have you seen the sharks that keep swimming even when they sleep that’s me iamarocket i’m dreaming i am in the jungle and the ground is moving alive is dancing black snakes like rope like hair curled up conditioned writhing canopy so thick there are only potholes of sky like stars like in your bedroom when we tried to cover every inch of your ceiling but realized we’d never have enough to reverse the darkness around us thick like sunscreen on your nose’s bridge, they make spf one hundred in asia now but slowing the sun is exactly that never ever stopping just like me iamarocket running on water i am turning seas of fish into a single fish gasping like the women on gurneys they wheel through the hospital doors from the ambulances outside your apartment that sing down the streets like everyone is dying at once make us hold on to each other tighter put your fingers on my neck there are clocks inside all of us wound up

Matters of Keeping Up

2006-10-22T00:34:00.000-08:00

hot moon surfacing in the slender alley,
like a dorsal fin cut from the asphalt—

tailing us home, tracing the widths
of our shoulders in dark chalk—

feels as though it’s hot after us,
your strides are so long and deliberate
between the potholes and gaping mouths of the street
opening wide, just begging for the tips
of your high heels, as schools of silver fish swim
against the current of waters along the curb,
flashing and fighting to stay in place
like children stomping up the escalators
ecstatic in the wrong direction—

letters blaze out in electric shop signs
O’s blink on and off, as if tickled by lost lashes
or pursing neon lips to harmonize with car alarms
singing up windows of the sheerest buildings—

this moon follows, swollen and unapologetic
like a fruit, landed at the roots of its tree
branches of unconditioned curls for leaves,
shoelaces and vines of stranded kites
hanging from their tails—

when we begin to put our hands on each other,
i catch its shape leering
like an obese woman sprawled out on the futon—

all focus is stripped, you are redressed in clasps
and streetlamps shudder,
sparking on again like indignant birthday candles

Don't Worry, It's Me (Revision)

2006-10-22T00:30:00.000-08:00

our immeasurable potential is a flock
of fat blackbirds, frowning a telephone wire
with the weight of caked feathers, second-hand silk
as a hundred thousand voices stream through
the thick wound cable, sagging and patient,
voices saying i am sick
i love you so much i am vulnerable
perhaps tomorrow buenos dias
look for me i will be there,
sedated hums and wet gasps,
the current hurries through a body of dark veins,
a suspended nervous system
threatening to ground itself with the weight
of each new bird, until the first tail feathers touch
down, detonating the migration out
like a flung pack of cards, spades like rain,
hearts in a low flying cloud

It’s Dollar Night In the Best Part Of Town

2006-10-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

to be stabbed.

mojo is bent out of shape outside popeye’s
engaged in dialogue with his other half
the name is self-appointed, because who needs mothers
in this transitional year of our lord
stuck in the low gears of the middle chunk of the decade
pedaling uphill, like the yellow man in frowning france,
mojo, we all need to be made new again.
it can’t possibly be your fault, and i am sorrier
than the last person to pass by and say the same.

if you don’t have anything nice to say

2006-09-26T14:04:00.000-08:00

move to los angeles.

it must be her voice saying that,
i could watch her mind at work
like a crippled rube goldberg machine
built entirely out of bowls of goldfish
and hammers

if i recall

2006-09-21T01:53:00.000-08:00

on the rooftop
the sky was a mottled sheet
of rough-grade sand paper
made with pieces of what looked like everything
as it scraped down against the steeples
rounding off the scissored tips before
poking clear through to the other side,
and unwieldy things began to tumble out of it,
oven-shaped and leaky wheelbarrows
of condensed thoughts and clouds
caught up in the tangled blankets, splashing
down into the tolerant, surrounding waters
and every window was a small television
into different people’s lives, people
slouching inward, watching smaller televisions
broadcast news of weather systems shrugging
like pale rocks sulking just below
the clear ceiling of the tide.

2006-09-18T01:52:00.000-08:00

Roswell!

Invasion & Abduction in Small Town America

Last week, I came to a startling conclusion. I was perched in the passenger seat of a sleek, speeding black automobile, destined for Roswell, New Mexico when the entire nation flashed before my eyes. The past six months alone have found me a passenger in cars crossing twelve thousand miles of hot American landscapes, midnight superhighways, and twenty-one welcome signs of unfamiliar states of the union. Being a reluctant driver and ex-island inmate, the stats are outrageous, for they accentuate what appears to be the height of my fixation with the role of “passenger.” What can it mean that I haven’t owned a car for six years, have driven less than five hundred miles since, and yet am indirectly responsible for rolling through roughly thirty thousand odometer clicks of naked desert, buggy bayous, and miles of malls? It suggests a love for leather, conditioned air, and deep-fried dinner. It hints at an inexplicable gratification from speeding into the unknown, heavy investments in Conoco, Valero, and Unocal. Impermanence. Transit. Dynamics.

As an early twentysomething, I have spent a decent chunk of unemployed “loiter” time in the comfort of plush upholstery. An undergraduate in the age of pneumatic swivel chairs, and victim to the great digital abduction of a generation into cyberspace. One thousand and one ways to spend a year seated. But my affinity for land travel has sprouted like ambitious wisdom teeth, tucked away in the recesses of my head. An urgency that boils when I imagine myself working “with paper” along the river Temps, an ever-growing concern with the arrival of our graduation. The meaningless voyages from Pacific to Atlantic coasts and every desert in between have served as evasive maneuvers, epic distractions and senseless burns through the land and night in the name of youth and coffee and fear. But they have also sired a sense of our nation as a contiguous whole, one terribly long road, an American spectrum, if you will.

Images and archetypes of small-town America are as diverse as the assortments of memorabilia bearing our illustrious stars and stripes on shelves at your nearest Walmart. The “Walmart Problem” is perhaps the most American dilemma to define our nation that I’ve witnessed from the sock-smudged passenger window seat. A question of freedom, ethics, the infamous moniker of “moral values” and a chain that has divided and conquered small town USA with 3,389 stores across the fruited plain. This says nothing of the 2,688 Walmarts now established internationally in swelling nations such as China, where 90 percent of the products are created. Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine the “old glory” headbands and beach towels being processed in Zhanjiang, and not sewn by wrinkly white grandmother fingers in Tuscaloosa.

Forgive my magnetism toward the subject of the greatest retailer in history in an essay allegedly regarding travel and the dynamics of small town America, but the collision is inevitable. Cities of ten thousand and less are home to multiple Walmarts, where the growth of our last decade has executed small businesses with Napoleonic leverage. In the wake, we are left with graveyard malls, orphaned stores, and a brand new flavor of mulishness and allegiance to the god of lowest prices. There are towns named after single buildings, for post offices and french fry slums. There’s good ol’ Dish, Texas, named solely for its free satellite television provider.

In all honesty, one cannot claim to have “seen” or far worse “done” the country from the humming tunnel vision of interstate freeways. Real towns truly exist miles from the artery, from the mammoth signs projecting names of better known cities with movie theaters and runways. I won’t avow to have “experienced” most small towns in my travels, for I have always moved on when I became fearful, or finished urinating. However, I actively pursued Roswell, New Mexico, in hopes of unlocking the secrets of a classic American fable, exploring the aftermath of a dated claim-to-fame, and in response to a barf-green flyer advertising the annual “Roswell UFO Festival” during the first weekend of July.

Upon arrival into Roswell, following hundreds of miles of desert regardless of your approach, you run a familiar gauntlet of mega-chain grease eateries for miles before hitting Main St. Sure enough, Walmart is the first definitive, decorated establishment in Roswell, featuring smiling, verdant martians welcoming both “earthlings and aliens” to the air-conditioned epicenter. And like so many other Walmarts in the middle of nowhere, the parking lot is inexplicably full. Our New Mexican hosts brought us to Walmart not only to run errands and buy groceries, but also for the simple fact that people gravitate toward it, whether or not they have anything to do at all. Teenagers park their glossy pickups in the grey ocean of a lot, lounging around in their truckbeds, some with pitbulls moaning on chains. They receive phone calls and beckon others to join them. The new American tailgater needs not a football game. The new American hangout needs not a Playplace with plastic ball pits, purple mascots, or happy meals. No, people are inexplicably flocking as the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson once famously predicted.

The sensation of entering a Walmart is undisputed phenomena. It is the same in Roswell as it is in Boston as it is in Chihuahua. Perhaps this only inflates its appeal. There is no hint of the outside world, no windows, no triple-digit desert, and certainly no eminent danger. Not since casino-hopping in Las Vegas have I known such disorientation, navigating through sterile pottery isles and warehouses of prepackaged noodles. But the more time I spent in Roswell’s Walmart, the more I began to see in the corners of my blazing contact lenses. I honestly believe to have witnessed a baby girl take her very first steps. Family members circled in on her, crowing out proudly and lifting her by the teeniest hands in celebration. This would always be the place she did it, I thought. I will always have been standing five feet away, contemplating stealing a pair of dumb sunglasses. Why was I here? What exactly was happening around me?

This report is already a failure, for a number of reasons. I would like to say that Roswell’s extraterrestrial tales are stunning, that upon finally entering the UFO museum I was stunned by brimming evidence that tainted my entire perspective on life beyond the great marble. (After all, I couldn’t sleep for two nights after watching “Signs.”) But the UFO museum more closely resembled a fifth grade science fair, where children swarmed around construction paper and rubber-cemented altars of newspaper and internet clippings. Dads in Earnhardt jackets and Elvis shirts assured their progeny that hundreds of people have indeed been abducted and enlightened/tortured by aliens. There are wonderful pockets of belief in the minds of children, which allow for such things to exist long after the chimney comes up empty. I too went in hopes of being abducted by an American fantasy, of being captivated by a definitive time of widespread confusion and animation in a conservative cowtown.

But walking the dusty New Mexican streets I came to see Roswell as yet another world’s largest ball of string, earwax candle, or five-legged gopher. The novelty attractions that don’t combine in all their strangeness to the allure of a second-tier European monument, or Incan rock-ruin, in my opinion. Then again, there are millions of educated, interesting people from every continent on earth that would choose, above anywhere else to visit in the entire United States, Las Vegas Nevada. Whether or not it makes me squirm, it is the cheap-crap-make-a-huge-deal-about-nothing novelty factor that drags millions across the interstates every year, despite gas prices climbing toward the four. It goes without saying that the “Winnebago days” of jumping in a family-sized home-on-wheels to tour the nation these days is about as financially sound as investing in a private gulf-stream. (For those of you considering, the nearest strip to Mt. Rushmore is in Rapid City.)

But it shouldn’t be about that, should it? Shouldn’t our top engineers be working to invent fuel efficient, solar-powered mobile homes? Lord knows the desert sun is enough to kill everything but cacti and rattlesnakes. The great road trip is Kerouac’s American legacy, Guevara’s tire treads, and the poor man’s key to a sense of what lies on the other side of the mountain. Without the capacity to “roam” the endless roads that span our country, are we truly free as Americans? Or trapped in our own financial gopher holes, digging for China?

Knock Knock

2006-09-14T00:14:00.000-08:00

there was a time (dark)
when the words refused to come.
like disobedient dogs, they milled
about the house, begging for prime rib
and pissing at the carpet.
i could never leash you, i said.
it is against your religion.
and i would occupy the writing chair,
but writing would not occupy me.
instead i had to listen to the sound of birds
not hitting the windows
and tongue-inspired waves
lapping at the plastic walls of dishes,
empty pockets full of fingers.

words to wake to

2006-09-11T23:29:00.000-08:00

you are most yourself this morning
with your hair leaning east for kansas city
right before you touch it
and become everyone else again
they are all contained in the television,
ads for booze, the flaming circus tent sex,
they cannot touch you in that moment
not like i can.

dont worry, it's me

2006-09-09T03:08:00.000-08:00

our immeasurable potential is a flock
of fat blackbirds, frowning a telephone wire
with the weight of caked feathers, second-hand silk
as a hundred thousand voices stream through
thick wound cable, sagging, patient
voices saying i am sick
i love you so much, i am vulnerable
perhaps tomorrow buenos dias
look for me i will be there,
sedated hums and toe tickles as
the current hurries through the body of dark veins,
threatening to ground itself with the weight
of each new bird, until the first tail feathers touch
down, sending out the detonated migration
like a flung pack of cards, spades like rain
hearts in a low flying cloud

Chimes

2006-09-03T21:34:00.000-08:00

for every day that he was gone
she built another, fashioning them
from hollowed tin cans, flat rocks and shells
brought back from the lake in velvet bags
empty bottles beads and bells and pipe
and when the supplies ran thin
she took to the cupboards, he was away
still
so forks and plates and tiles
were strung up to knock against each other
in the loudening wind, the noise was
gathering around the small house, almost as if
he were there, ricocheting off every part of it,
each bare wall and her tongue-wet lip
waited until the entire house was
bickering in constant chatter with the breeze
and commotion replaced all previous normality
so that it gradually became quiet once more
and she would wonder if ever
this wall of sound sent out across the country
from her porch would reach those absent ears
and would he know it when it hit him, and if
he did in fact trace it all the way back
would she hear another word of his
and moreover would it matter in the middle
of that magnificent hush

Tuna and Rye, Thoughts On A Brief Lunch Break

2006-09-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

San Francisco looks as though she weighs fifty pounds
this afternoon, as if i could reach two fingers under a crack
in the pavement, and lift the street right up with a single hand
to see the hidden face, flesh beneath the underside,
the batteries and organs like a clock, a spitting engine,
rubber bands and reflective pools of grease—
ruins and splinters of wagon wheels strewn about, as if the
skyscrapers landed intact on the settlers, too busy plotting
squares of slanted land to notice them falling from above—
or perhaps they were lowered gently by cranes, tethered
by hair and dental floss, every available rope on hand...

and the cats

2006-08-31T00:48:00.000-08:00

the cereal sounds like sandy bones
this particular thursday and the writing prompt
awaiting is something along the lines
of describe a bird on a limb from the limb’s perspective
but all the limbs that come to mind
are those breaking in my bowl, wet mouthfuls as
entire armies perish in the course of a runny breakfast
and who has time for birds when they’ve shit
so much rusted roman green it’s quite difficult to make
out the faces of the statues downtown, is that
Jackie Robinson or Martin Van Buren i wondered
out loud the last time i was around those parts
if i remember correctly, and what little birds
have done to contribute to our society beyond
dispensing greed throughout the suits and ties forced
to ride the elevator in the morning, instead of flapping
as the horizon gives birth and the cats are sleeping.

The Untimely Eviction of Mr. Brown, Page 1

2006-08-28T23:36:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been kept awake by the sound of your own heart? Like a stubborn salesman scratching at the door?

As though every beat ripples through you as a penny in a puddle, resounding like waves circling out and expanding like the ever-blacker universe itself?

And isn’t it peculiar how the rest of the body seems to involve itself? As if to support the growing tumbleweed of sound, thunderous thumps in your chest. It generally begins with the ears, as they project the mumblings and thuds of your assiduous heart through to your pillow like an ill-smothered megaphone. It is a sound that simply cannot be repressed. It may as well be a deaf high school marching band beneath the box springs. As soon as that song takes off, your eyes will follow suit, and crank themselves open like Venetian blinds at noon. In the Sahara. Hot. You will see in the dark as you never have. Each knock and bump of your chest will open a larger hole that will form in your ceiling. It will eat your potentially radioactive glow in the dark stars from 1985, sucking them up into naked space. It will be entirely impractical to close them again, what with the band and celestial activity overhead. But this phenomenon is by no means limited to your head. Inevitably your fingers are tapping your pale thighs, and you have flopped to your back to avoid the megaphones pressing any harder into the traitorous pillows. The fingers are picking up pace, filling the missing notes between syncopated beats, until they seem to sprout minds of their own and generate heat from the speed of their drumming. Each finger becomes an oversized matchstick and ignites, sending you into a flaming frenzy and kicking around sheets like a devil child. You extinguish the flames, but not before loosening every cover of your mattress sheets, so that you must stomp to your feet and reconstruct the bed entirely before you might make a second attempt at sleeping. It is then that the flood lamp of a harvest moon behind the bars at your window begins to build its own case. As you walk to your window you drop the burnt sheets and forget the smell of charred arm hair entirely. All sound evaporates from the room and your eyes would once more be free to close, had they not just been witness to the only thing on earth that might have silenced the largest, most ambitious muscle in your chest.

Before the Hotel Blackout

2006-08-24T12:36:00.000-08:00

we held to each other like cuticles to the nail
and brushed the hours aside
blonde hair, straw broom—

words are heavier since,
stumbling down
from the lip
collecting like hail in a lead pan at the floor
to be thawed, refried, and leftover
in stained tupperware casing

before the hotel burned to the dirt
our hands were like water
yet we stood still to watch it
blazing and kicking up light
as if it were already morning-

Not Waste

2006-08-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

the metro makes haste
this is modern transportation
hot, dirty cars brimming with short people
and the elderly needing seats
the whole thing sounds
like the first few bars of
Coltrane’s acknowledgement
and stinks of orange chicken

Expose The Negatives

2006-08-20T01:26:00.000-08:00

today when i come across the woman
in blue plumage stapled to the subway sign
and cross the metal zoos of market street to grant
where business meets pleasure over plates
of hot lunch and blooming wet orchids
i will write what i have always wanted to write
across her immaculate canvas of a forehead

Top Floor

2006-08-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

the quiet of the lights below

our toes

the nothing said

between

us

Negative Fourth Street

2006-08-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

the afternoon is growing its wispy beard
as the blankets are pulled up over our heads
and the night tent is pitched as the sun is gently stuffed
into the next ostrich hole—

and i’m halfway up the rungs to the rooftop,
from where we count the street numbers
all the way to the water, where they continue
out of sight and mind,
seaweed hanging from the streetlamps
like mistletoe, or so we assume—

Crutches and Crosswords

2006-08-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

bees, a face full—
i wake, clapping two hands to life and coughing
like chalkboard erasers

and when i’m restored
i find that someone spilled sunlight
down the back of your dress,
along the tapered canyons of bone—

they too have been eroded, nibbled at,
sculpted by insistent waters, skin yawning as if to say
this is how you are, and must be.

and the ceiling blades repeat the chorus
drawing you up into the white vacancy above the bed
the most naked of space

again i wake, and even you have retreated
into the corners and silhouettes
of the furniture, hat racks, empty clothing, everything—

and i am the fraction’s remainder
when divisions of dust and skin have settled
the residue of the hard to reach,
awake and absent and sorry.

One, Another, The Last

2006-08-13T16:45:00.000-08:00

one sleeps sitting,
the suit was teeth white
long before it was his—
long before the thirsty floors
of the subway filled it like a canvas
with the murky insignias
of the underground

another trudges stacks of stairs
black bags in tow, dark bulging tail—
innumerable cans and shrapnel,
each crushed beneath a different
heel in the red gutters of chinatown-
a nickel each at the end of the line

the last is hunched on a plastic pail
harmonica hands, singing to clouds
i know all of you can see me,
i know you hear my voice.
saying stop pretending i don’t exist,
as pools of tourists begin to collect
at the corners, signals turning
to wash them all away again

On The #15 Today

2006-08-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

eyebrow horizons
bow like playing dogs,
archers bows discharging—

the mandarin billboards
advertise like inside jokes
and i keep to myself
however ironic that is

considering how the inhabitants
of the black accordion alleyways
and drifters of the dusk grey towers
scuff their wilting shoes to the
same tempo as my eager heart.

Liner Notes

2006-08-06T14:38:00.000-08:00

Let's light this apartment in fifteen watt bulbs
and squint at each other like christmas eve-

so that i can't define you by what shapes you take
outside of the bottleneck shadow and liplines

that feast on the glow of the dry harvest moon
and outline your teeth like two freeways.

Tales for Teaspoon

2006-07-17T22:48:00.000-08:00

i wish that someone else would drive tonight
so that i could really watch the road
and how the miles between mountains and cities
and bodies
begin to melt like margarine in copper pans
and how the desert fills in the blank
and the night sky is one big rorschach test
where it’s impossible not to see butterflies
and how the streetlamps and telephone poles
become marionette strings, and raise
the freeway up to meet the heavens
so that we traverse the black sky like satellites
in the comfort of our own upholstery
through the braille of buggy windshields,
close enough
to make the constellations shy.

The Wheels on the Bus

2006-07-16T16:02:00.000-08:00

go round and
white men in black suits
ruffle newspapers like nervous birds
and black men in white suits
appear only on select channels
in high definition
at Best Buy.

Precaution and Cauliflower

2006-06-30T23:21:00.000-08:00

a washed white ambulance followed me
on my bicycle today, down my driveway
windows tinted, rolled up, safe
from my mailbox to the supermarket, sirens shouting
where I assumed it would divert,
but no
it followed me right through the automatic doors,
leaving a cartoonish car-shaped cavity
and chased me down the frozen vegetables,
babies shrieking, misters misting,
through corn and cubed ham, I began
to fear for my life, for the irony,
for the snowpeas
but just as I surrendered to fatigue
dropping to linoleum knees
it skidded to a rest and three men leapt
to my aid, hut-hutting and telling me
you should really be more careful sir
anything can happen these days, what with
wars and bees and you without your helmet.

St. Marks

2006-06-26T23:54:00.000-08:00

How many dead poets does it take to build a real coffee shop? To spin Belle and Sebastian records past one, entertaining the crash actors and artists that wander in from the fattened veins of the flatlining suburbs? The city has a pulse, quieter than the oscillating plastic fanblades, but alive and hiding in the sighing walls encasing this liberal locker. The Tuesday clientele. The European hats. There are enough cigarettes lit at all times to conjure up the ghosts of Sal Paradise, leaning against the ground-up counter and slouching over the typewriter, recalling hot whiskey nights and reenacting them with drafty, callous hands. The cigarettes fold into themselves, surrendering to styrofoam ash-catchers, fuel for Philosophy minors and big hair. I want to eat off the table in a joint like this. I want to taste coffee stains from the earliest eighties, and the sweet, cold residues of Denver.

The Soft Divide

2006-06-25T12:55:00.000-08:00

i want to build the new great wall.

to stir the cement with ashen fingers,
become visible from outer space
and keep the hoards at bay-

to divide the room, the mattress,
a Berlin Wall of bedsheets.

east and west.
you and i.

keeping from the Cold-

a meridian through the kitchen
your soy, my sugar
our Gaza strip,
displaced loves of war-

i want to build it high enough
to see the horse wheeled to the iron gate,
and watch it come down piece by piece

so that eyes will meet
from opposite sides,
and tourists buy up chunks as souvenirs-

i need the photo opportunities,
the laugh of hammers,
and to reach for you
floating somewhere out across
the soft divide.

Deformations and Translations : Familiar Poets in Foreign Forms

2006-06-18T21:14:00.000-08:00

In poetry, names so renowned as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are comfortably recognized, by their familiar definitive styles, techniques, and characteristic form. Names like Percy Shelley and Friedrich Hölderlin bring to mind distinct, recognizable forms (or lack thereof) often capable of distinguishing the author’s identity merely through their physical presence on the page. What then is the result when form is revoked of a known poet, and familiarity nullified? Is it feasible that a poem may adopt entirely new definitions and character when dressed in the style of another? Techniques in defamiliarization and deformation have been used for centuries to redress poems in eccentric and reinventing ways. Dickinson herself an advocate for rewiring works to challenge new horizons, poets have long experimented with formal and tonal shape-shifting. Here, easily discernible poets are put to unfamiliar forms, their words rebuilt in the shapes of others. Whitman is cut to stanza, Dickinson stretched to free lengths. Not only may a poem lose its surface-level authorial identity, but the adapted shapes of these new "translations" offer insights both to the writers themselves and the measureless possibility for fresh interpretation.

In deconstructing the shapes of an accomplished poet’s work, one must dismantle all formal intention and implications. To craft intelligible work in its reconstruction, one must assemble it prudently, to maximize the potential for new meaning. It must be a believable whole, with respect to the quality of the writing regardless of its new "identity." For example, the concept of Whitman’s poetry divided into conforming segments goes against the very essence of his revolutionary, expansive style. One aspires to achieve a proportionate quality, so as not to surrender the worth of a writer’s words, simultaneously bending them to challenge new horizons of understanding.

The following passage offers an example of such a translation:

Two butterflies went out at noon, and waltzed
upon a farm, then stepped straight through the firmament
and rested on a beam,
Then together bore away upon a shining sea,
though never yet, in any port their coming
mentioned be,
If spoken by the distant bird, if met in ether sea by frigate,
or merchantman, no notice was to me

On first glance, the poem offers itself up with ample evidence to suggest that it belongs to Whitman. The lines are characteristically expansive, challenging the boundaries of stanzaic form and pushing through with persistent images, those of the natural world and its interaction with the author. The lines embody the spirit of the poem, freewheeling as butterflies, dancing on air. They provide representation of the material, the second line pushing limitations of line length as the butterflies challenge the boundaries of the firmament. Whitman’s style consistently worked to unify author and environment, to depict oneself as a component to nature, within an endless space to explore internal and external worlds alike.

In actuality, this poem belongs to Emily Dickinson. In its original form, it adheres to strict stanzaic form and Dickinson’s famous affinity for punctuation. (see end pages) It is divided into three stanzas, with relative line equality, and strong emphasis placed on the slant rhyme. Overall, it manifests Dickinson’s trademarks; calculated and meticulous in form, with lines carrying up to as many as three dashes each. Translated into forms more analogous to Whitman, the poem adopts entirely unfamiliar mannerisms. Minor alterations in punctuation are made, replaced by line breaks or capitalization where possible to retain the basic relationships from word to word in order to maintain continuity.

What may be noticed first is the removal of an emphasis on rhyme as closure to the line and stanza in general. In their new framework, they play upon each other rhythmically, but no longer bind the poem in corresponding shapes. The poem specifically addresses topics popular to both Whitman and Dickinson, in attempting to set free the subject to explore the realm of the known, and to soar beyond. In its original format, there is a visible conflict between form and content, as it delves into notions of infinity and an expanding firmament within the confines of a rhyming quatrain. The poem addresses subjects that set out beyond the body of a "shining sea," never to be heard from again. In its reshaped mold, the poem now explores the endless firmament of the page, generating a closer relationship between content and form. This presents an altogether separate atmosphere as the poem is dictated, and defamiliarizes most identifiable essences of an exemplary Emily Dickinson poem.

A translation is more than applicable in the opposite direction as well:

A mask - a perpetual
natural disguiser of herself-
concealing her face-
concealing her form-

Changes and transformations-
every hour - every moment-
falling upon her-
even when she sleeps-

An introductory student to poetry would most likely be capable of recognizing the characteristics of this style as suggestive of Dickinson. The trademark punctuation alone, dividing the poem in rhythmic and exacting stops, is enough to consider it a signature piece. Fittingly, the poem delves into themes of transformation and change, certainly a fixation of Dickinson’s, in measured quatrains and referencing multiple faces of a woman, presumably the famed author. The poem disguises identity, and deforms the familiarity of countenance. It actually belongs to Walt Whitman.

The poem is dislodged from Whitman’s free-flowing verse, and divided into rhythmic segments, relatively balanced in length. In its new formation, it is forcibly slower in pace, and requires new emphasis at its divisions. The reader is paused to contemplate meaning in individual segments, rather than carry forward in roaming lineation. The repetition of consecutive lines beginning with "concealing her" presents an interesting rhythm of its own, perhaps shedding more light upon its original author. Whitman’s listing technique adopts new character when stacked within a stanza. Physically, they generate a sameness on the page that appears to accumulate above the material in the following stanza, appropriately stating that these features "fall upon" the afflicted subject. Also interesting to note is the juxtaposition of subject and form again, as the poem addresses the uncontrolled nature of this "masking" and a woman’s inability to control it, in the context of a very formally controlled poem. It is reminiscent of Shelley, who worked consistently within the boundaries of measured verse while attempting to free the minds of his audience. Both examples are altered tremendously by their translations, swapping characteristics and blurring lines of interpretation between two very distinct American visionaries.

Translation and reinvention in poetry swears no allegiance to nation, time period, or law. Possibilities are infinite, and authors conventionally viewed as stylistic opposites share the same great potential. When transferred away from all familiarity, words take on unobserved meanings and venture free of previous convention or label. Perhaps the greatest challenge in this would require the juxtaposition of authors of separate styles, nations, or even languages. In crossing these boundaries through translations, a poem most certainly adapts to a foreign environment, presenting itself as entirely refitted.

Thy lips are on me.

I hear!
I feel!

and their touch
runs

Down
even to the adamantine
central gloom

Along these marble nerves.

‘Tis life!

‘Tis joy!

And through my
withered
old
and icy frame
the warmth of an immortal

Youth

shoots

down

Circling.

This poem, in its bounty of unoccupied space, recalls a technique of late eighteenth century German poet Friedrich Holderlin. In his now-appreciated writings, Holderin drafted what are known as his "fragments," a collection of scattering and spacial poems, recognizable for their eccentric dispersal on the page. An easy candidate for a title among the predecessors to the avant garde movement, Holderlin was widely considered to be mad in his method. The selection above presents a poem feasibly lifted from his fragments, a vast piece that spirals from concepts of the known to the larger-than life on a physically distinct journey down the page. Its sporadic but undeniably rhythmic arrangement brings meaning out of intentional placements, and extensive use of open space.

It is hard to imagine a "form" further from the conventional, further from a calculated formula or continuous pattern. It is harder still to imagine that this poem actually belongs to early 19th century poet Percy Shelley. The selection is sampled from the third act of his epic "Prometheus Unbound," where it serves as the voice of the earth in response to an address by Prometheus. How is it possible that this spatial, fragmented poem belongs to a poet so known for his lyricism and fettered form? Like Holderlin, Shelley was no stranger to presenting work that challenged horizons of the known world, and human capability. However, he pursued his lofty themes in the context of concrete formulas. Shelley’s everlasting conflict between form and content defines his groundbreaking work, transcendent yet lyrical, somehow boundless within the cage of a stanza.
In this passage, nearly every recognizable physical dimension of Shelley’s style is revoked. Beyond that, it is spliced and peppered onto the page in patches and spots, blanketed in white space. As a writer fascinated with greater-than-earthly concepts, it is intriguing to witness his words in the guise of such abstract form. What certainly does remain intact throughout the translation is Shelley’s characteristic barrage of solid imagery. Standouts such as "icy frame" and "marble nerves" retain their quality, regardless of the poems contortion. In its new form, there is a perceived marriage of content and form, that goes against all basic knowledge of Shelley’s style.

To see words enacting and manifesting their meanings on the page truly reinvents the poem. The poem becomes capable of touch, capable of freezing, shooting, and withering. It is granted rhythm that demands to be read separately. It dons the same tone of the fantastic, but in the tangible context of a lovers invigoration. Tangents of life and joy spring forth from the poem, as the author declares them. Concepts of rebirth and energy animate the syntax. Spaces in the language offer fresh opportunities for interpretation. The poem is entirely unfamiliar, but beautiful in its new dress. This deformation bridges gaps of entirely disconnected styles, time, and language. The result is an unexpected but altogether promising reinvention of the great writer’s work.

In their various forms, translations and deformations of poetry are capable of breaching unseen realms of interpretation and understanding of previously exhausted work. They challenge familiarity, and open doors to comprehending the essence of an authors style, through the dissection and reassembly of form. We confirm that looks can be deceiving, and fail to recognize world-famous poetry in its new setting. With these methods, emphasis is effectively removed from conventional knowledge of a poets particular style, and minds are unlocked to the endless possibility for reinvention.

THE POEMS: EMILY DICKINSON

Original
(pg. 133, #216)

Two butterflies went out at Noon -
And waltzed upon a Farm -
Then stepped straight through the Firmament
And rested, on a Beam -

And then - together bore away
Upon a shining Sea -
Though never yet, in any Port -
Their coming, mentioned - be

If spoken by the distant Bird -
If met in Ether Sea
By Frigate, or by Merchantman -
No notice - was - to me -

In the Style of Whitman

Two butterflies went out at noon, and waltzed
upon a farm, then stepped straight through the firmament
and rested on a beam,
Then together bore away upon a shining sea,
though never yet, in any port their coming
mentioned be,
If spoken by the distant bird, if met in ether sea by frigate,
or merchantman, no notice was to me

THE POEMS: WALT WHITMAN

Original (Visor’d, Poems from Leaves of Grass, pg. 231)

Visor’d

A mask, a perpetual natural disguiser of herself,
Concealing her face, concealing her form,
Changes and transformations every hour, every moment,
Falling upon her even when she sleeps.

In the Style of Dickinson

A mask - a perpetual
natural disguiser of herself-
concealing her face-
concealing her form-

Changes and transformations-
every hour - every moment-
falling upon her-
even when she sleeps-

THE POEMS: PERCY SHELLEY

Original (from Prometheus Unbound, Act III, pg. 261)

I hear- I feel-
Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down
Even to the adamantine central gloom
Along these marble nerves- ‘tis life, ‘tis joy,
And through my withered, old and icy frame
The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling.-

In the Style of Holderlin

Thy lips are on me.

I hear!
I feel!

and their touch
runs

Down
even to the adamantine
central gloom

Along these marble nerves

‘Tis life!

‘Tis joy!

And through my
withered
old
and icy frame
the warmth of an immortal

Youth

shoots

down

Circling.

Home Despot

2006-04-07T00:46:00.000-08:00

i thought looking for animal shapes
in the clouds was only for children,
until i woke from my customary nap
to find Joseph Stalin's mustache,
drifting across the checkered night sky.

There was no mistaking it as Chaplin's,
or Ulysses S. Grant. It was his all right,
floating above the treeline, as if hoping
to collect the rest of the missing freatures
and assemble the great face back together
before the red sunrise.

i am ready to write again.

2006-03-30T02:04:00.000-08:00

i know it because when i left the house
this morning, the trees had all become wiry people
with the complexions and fingernails i used to recognize
back when i was writing poetry.

and because on my way to the dry cleaners
i finally fit my problems with love
into a metaphor that i can understand.
i decided my love life should in no way resemble
my mounting pile of dirty laundry.
that i'm going to need it to be like a new pair of socks
every morning, if i am to continue getting dressed.

and because when i finally sat down
i stayed there, sinking into the sighing chair,
inventing out loud jumply madly
into the darkest corners to chase
the perfect words out with my machete.

Classified

2006-03-30T01:51:00.000-08:00

This morning i opened the paper
to find my photograph, plain as day.
there i was, staring back at myself,
frowning in black and white-
looking as though i had some judgment
against my shirt, my english muffin,
i looked mysterious enough.

It appeared to be a want ad,
with a number at the bottom.
the hostile woman on the other line
said i had some audacity, calling-
soon enough i had lost her.

The next day, there i was again.
buried deep beneath a flowing beard,
a mountain range of wrinkles,
i hardly recognized myself under it all.
they must have blocked my calls,
it’s been so hard to concentrate since.
i can’t stop wondering what i’ve done,
or if i may as well quit shaving.

Weather Report

2006-03-30T01:42:00.000-08:00

The clouds are retreating tonight
together in the same direction-
like bulging, sad parade floats
with degenerative maladies,
leaving patches and potholes
in the checkerboard firmament-

and the accumulating murkiness
somewhere near the horizon
is clapping its thunderous hands
to the fatuous music of war-

and still we sit, measuring the moon
between our slender fingers,
passing it to and from our open mouths.

Stubbornness

2006-02-07T23:28:00.000-08:00

The first thing I did was chastise her for being afraid.
Nothing to fear out here, I had said, though I knew
I assured myself more than I did her- to prove my
point I ventured into the black stalks a few steps deeper
than I had anticipated. I had a point to prove, after all,
and waited a moment longer than my shivering limbs
had hoped. As I returned to where we had been standing,
I found her pink hat and nothing more. I knew she must be
playing a prank, and shouted into the void- she must think
she's so clever running off and perching in some tree for
me to worry about her- years later, I wonder how she insists
on furthering her point, even after the authorities continued
my search for a full 72 hours and scotch-taped her pictures
to the ghost windows of the local post office.

2006-01-16T18:52:00.000-08:00

The Wiseacres Live in Tokyo Tour, 2006-2007

Butterfly Net

2006-01-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

Lately it seems, i’m fishing for words
with a butterfly net.

Just to capture these notions of beauty-

Just a shred of that great gravity of art
that escapes through the mesh
into the exodus of dark

I only want the perfect word tonight
to frame this splendor,
to put it in a crystal jar
and sit in its company-

before she folds her painted wings

and dives for the bottom.

Lunesta

2006-01-01T20:36:00.000-08:00

against all practicality
as if art itself is blooming
beyond any welcome or reason

as if symphonies are orchestrated
in melodies undeserving to the human ear
or the mysteries of our expanding lives
revealed themselves in foreign tongues
for just a single, condensed moment,
before skittering back into the trees
in a twilight laugh of branches

as if time were not only tangible
but an ally, as the fireflies sweat
to skywrite letters in the night
and spell our names out
as even we may not decipher them.

Bottom Feeders

2005-12-30T19:40:00.000-08:00

at the bottom of oceans
there are rumored to be fish
lurking;
great fish who are capable
of producing their own light,
electricity from their pale-boned frames-

you read about such things
in glossy magazines
between
getting your teeth cleaned,
or restraining your children
as theirs are-

whether you believe it or not,
for it may or may not be true,
you have to hand it to the imaginations
that con us into such science-

or dream to chase it
down
to its meaningless,
sandy
floor-

Age of Aquarius

2005-12-24T02:08:00.000-08:00

This is the age
of aquarius and curly fries
and my mouth is a
harmonica (slash) ocelot
and my drive-thru life
consists of sexless saturdays
and the jelly
of a work week donut

This is my vehicle
of cardboard airplane shapes
of ceiling fan propellors
that can't spin fast enough
to taxi

This is a sci-fi movie
featuring people i know
dressed up as people i dont know
pretending to fall in lust
and dissect one another
(here's an appendix)
((another one))

This is a universe
these are hard boiled eggs
that may have once
housed lives in yellow

These are also stars
(and breakfast)
There is bacon elsewhere
we're toast

The Snorkel and the Pope

2005-12-08T03:05:00.000-08:00

He’s got a snorkel, and he’s making a b-line for the bathtub. Hold on. It’s going to be important to establish he’s in a terrible hurry. He’s probably going to knock over a lamp along the way, he’s so reckless. If he’s a lawyer, he’ll knock over the modern lamp with the tasteful bluish shade. If he’s an artist, he’ll knock over the bowling pin-shaped lamp he discovered at a yard sale a few months back. If he’s the pope it’ll be some gaudy, golden African lamp he felt obligated to put in his personal chamber.

We’ll assume he’s the pope. The gold trimmed red-fez lamp hits the marbled chamber floor and splashes out into pieces, an expanding universe of shattered ceramics. Perhaps he hardly notices. The prime minister of Niger may be visiting Rome next week, and he could most likely bring a replacement lamp along with him. Then again, to request such a thing implies that he may have been careless with the first. It is assumed the pope hates to come across as careless.

So he’s headed for the tub, and in this case it’s an elegant, highly decorated tub, freckled with mosaics of rare gems and precious tiles. Perhaps the tub isn’t important. The fact that he’s carrying a snorkel and in such a terrible aforementioned rush seems much more pertinent. By now the reader is curious. Not only desiring further knowledge of the most prominent religious figurehead in the world stripped to his birthday suit, the reader is piqued by the mere suggestion of a snorkel in the tub. The combination of the two are bringing the reader to an intense need, so that they are most likely cracking their toes in anticipation.

It may be known that the pope has a particularly bad case of agoraphobia. Upon receiving such unexpected news, one may initially recoil in wonder. How on earth could the figurehead of the Catholic faith, who stands upon the balcony overlooking millions in St. Peter’s Square, be even the slightest bit apprehensive about facing the outside world? The reader must keep in mind that we could just as easily be speaking about a carpenter who is afraid to climb a ladder, or a swimmer wary of the cold. This particular character, who is decidedly a pope, happens to be agoraphobic. He also happens to be stripping off his heavy robes and spelunking his toes into the bubbling bath water.

The reader must wonder if the snorkel itself is adorned with jewels, and whether the extent of the popes exquisite amenities include personalized diving gear. It may be said that in fact this particular diving accessory is quite ordinary, no different than the type the reader may or may not be familiar with. This might help to bond the reader to the character, the common ground of a typical snorkel may work wonders to unveil similarities between protagonist and patron. It may even inspire a sense of camaraderie or conviction, making the reader feel differently about themselves, or their faith perhaps. If the reader is Hindu, they are most likely abandoned by now. The author must be careful of such things.

It may be said that the pope is entirely submerged by this point, and is experiencing a sensation only conceivable within the territory of his own embellished tub. The water is assumably hot, but not too hot to scald his buttocks. He may be more sensitive to such things from the exorbitant amount of sitting required in his field. This, of course, is entirely up for speculation. It could be said that the pope is now reaching a raisony hand from his resting place and grabbing hold of the snorkel. He may have alternate purposes for using the device, but it may be surmised that he intends to breathe through it, thus remaining submerged in the water. The reader may question if the water inhabiting his tub is in fact holy water, but this is most likely rash and unfounded. Perhaps with enough research of the greater Vatican area, one could make an educated hypothesis as to the nature of the water most likely surrounding him.

Now this is where it might start to get important. There may be revelations of purpose, layered with symbolism that derives the cause of the pope’s current position. They may outline, in various fashions, the possibilities that have led to such a scenario. Methods may be employed to aid the reader in the developmental process, perhaps utilizing postmodern literary techniques. (among others) The author may wish to challenge the boundaries of typical character development. Sequences and/or flashbacks may be activated, segments may be pieced together by eccentric means.

Perhaps they are arranged backwards? (Backwards arranged, are they perhaps?)

In this particular case, we may learn that the pope uses his bathtub as a transportation device. Not for extra-terrestrial purposes, of course, though this is not entirely outside of the extensive realm of science fiction. Perhaps this particular reference to ‘transportation’ refers only to its capability of removing the pope from his current surroundings. It may be that his primary means of escape from his taxing papal duties is a long soak in the holy tub.

Others may be presented, surely, such as the possibility that the pope is intent on drowning himself. Upon careful consideration, claims as these are opposed by such evidence as the previously introduced snorkel. The reader must calculate this possibility in determining a purpose, especially if it is made vague by the author. Calculating the signals provided, the reader is apt to assume the pope’s intentions lie well outside of drowning. While it is still admittedly possible, the story will likely continue on an alternate course.

It may be revealed that the pope is in fact breathing regularly through the snorkel, and staring up through an inverted world of water to the painted facade of the domed bathroom roof. This perspective, while elegant in its description, is assumed to only scratch the surface of its true appearance, from the eyes of the sunken pope. It may be that he sees clearer through this upended outlook to the contour of the sculpted architecture. The reader may assume that the distortion of images underwater is similar for all people, therefore very imaginable to the reader, from the pope’s perspective. The reader may also assume that the shlupping sound one experiences when ones snorkel accidentally slips below the water’s surface, forcing one to toot it out in a sharp blast of air, is universal as well.

Whether the pope is embarrassed by such happenings is entirely speculated as well, as he finally has his privacy, safe in his freckled gem walls. With the knowledge of his agoraphobia., one may postulate that he in more prone to be embarrassed by the vacuum shlupping sound, followed by the trumpeting blowhole sound. Further exploration into such analysis of character may press to expose the pope’s more personal interpretations to universal phenomenon’s. Whether or not he engages in private discussion with rubber ducks, or debates the ‘fate of Poland’ with his scrub brush, such details are not only impertinent, but entirely unnecessary to plot development.

Perhaps it is revealed that the pope is at peace. It may be that the atmosphere of the bathwater floats him far from the hardships and stresses of his papal duties, and allows the man to dream. The reader now must wonder what constitutes the dreams of the religious icon, and whether they transcend horizons of a typical dreamer. The author is granted an opportunity to interject his own interpretation, or to allow the reader to explore his own imagination. The reader may be quite frustrated.

The pope, however, is presumably not. The pope is presumably in heaven, and the reader is offered an amusing play on words. The author has granted access to a forbidden site, unlocked closed doors, and utilized literary devices to write home about. The pope may be free now to end his soak, on his own terms. Perhaps he remains as long as his frail lips can suckle at the snorkel (blatant) before picking up some undesired rash, or inhaling too much water in the tooting process. He may nearly fall asleep, and realize his folly, thinking he could drift into the dreaming world, submerged in heat and tranquil warmth. He may chuckle to himself, but this may cause more spillage.

The length of his soak may not be measured, but is it assumed he towels dry with the finest of cloth, perhaps once presented by a sheik from Ankara. He has most likely accumulated such lavish gifts over time, as his line of work most likely permits. It may be speculated that he sighs in relief of the terrific burden washed down the holy drain, and out through the holy pipes. The last image the reader might witness is him returning leisurely to his candle-lit chamber. He may or may not notice on his way that the broken scraps of lamp have been cleaned from the polished chamber floor in his absence. There may very well be another lamp en route from Niger.

Nixon's Curse

2005-12-07T00:30:00.000-08:00

excavating my backyard,
turned up some soil
and thought i might start a garden
of carrots, perhaps radishes,
but on the second push of the spade
hit rock, at least what i believed to be rock-
and as i knelt to heave and pull
the rounded stone from its resting place
i realized that sure enough, it was a skull-
not of some civil war forgotten,
not of Yorick
but my long lost dog "Nixon"
who i had believed to have run off
in 1973, after i had cursed him for
vaulting his hefty paws on the dining room table
knocking over my nice dinner salad-
he had, after all, ruined it-
the irony is crippling now, Nixon.
bad dog.

Mind's Eye

2005-12-06T00:30:00.000-08:00

my mind’s eye
is a wandering--
a lazy dancer, tired dervish
or dradle, off it goes
(happy hanukkah)

2005-12-05T00:38:00.000-08:00

Immersive Studios

FM

2005-12-04T03:45:00.000-08:00

this morning, at approximately 7:34am
a baby was born on the radio.
There it was, for everybody to hear,
we woke from our withering dreams
to the coos and caterwauls, drifting through
the speakers, the frequencies of every station-

parents woke to their rusted instinct,
meandering half awake to the abandoned
bedrooms of their now-grown children-
pregnant women woke in horror,
fearing they had missed their own delivery-
those of us who weren’t yet fathers
felt a temblor beneath our waists
that burped a numb acknowledgment
of what we could not know-

we heard it shriek, the baby on the radio-
like a wet kitten, or defective fire alarm,
but didn’t turn it off, we kept it there.

we dressed for our days and heard it crawling,
heard it claw and nibble at the microphone,
we determined it must be adorable,
and left our radios on to fill our homes with the sound.

Something was missing as we drove in silence,
a void we had not yet encountered, and so
we turned the dial to find it, fumbling through the static
to find that as quickly as we had come to need it
the baby on the radio was gone.