Ozzentao by Edward Mycue

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OZZENTAO [oz, zen, tao]

James Broughton in 1977 saw his SEEING THE LIGHT book on film published by City Lights, San Francisco.
He wrote oz is a different order of nonsense from zen.
zen is the moment of awareness.
tao is letting the moment go.
zen sees everything that is.
tao moves with everything as it flows.
“When the zen master pointed at the moon he said, why are you looking at my finger?” James wrote,
“Zen as an art of seeing does not follow a script.
I make my own oz just as i make my own zen.

Should your dream sounds realistically a bit dreary
i wonder if you might consider joining in OZZENTAO.
yes still the world will end. The scope & how we approach the end and it reaching us we don’t know.
Yet how fine to have had dear companions. & whatever is hopeful.
as it is having love in an unknowing.
OZZENTAO!.

(Translantion: james broughton in 1977 saw his book on film SEEING THE LIGHT published by city lights. he wrote that oz is a different order of nonsense from zen. (p.5) that zen is the moment of awareness. tao is letting the moment go. zen sees everything that is. tao moves with everything as it flows. (p.72) james wrote that when the zen master pointed at the moon he said, “why are you looking at my finger” and that zen as an art of seeing does not follow a script. (p.43) he also wrote “like my poet friends who are also devotees of oz (duncan, mcclure, brakhage, jonathan williams) i make my own oz just as i make my own zen.” (p.52) should your dream sounds realistically dreary and i wonder if you might consider joining OZZENTAO. though the world will still end. but how we approach the end when it reaches us we don’t know. but how fine to have a dear companion. so that is hopeful. it is love in an unknowing.) © Edward Mycue 6/VI/2016

p.s.(note to Joseph Duemer) James Broughton and I had a running joke between us: when some folk would ask what’s that poem about we’d say “let me translate it for you” and then just repeat it as we might speak sensible prose. We called that ‘translation’ and it seemed to satisfy. Richard Steger, painter, said it was one of the doublings you’d get from people reading haikus where they repeat each one. And of course James Broughton was often reciting his “Hi Kuku s”. We had lots of fun because we were pretty simply to start with, and to end with, but somewhere mid-muddle there was sense. Ed
(c) 6 June 2016

eded

EDWARD MYCUE, born Niagara Falls, New York, raised in Dallas, Texas. Earned a magna cum laude BA from North Texas State. Teaching Fellow at NTS, Lowell Fellow at Boston University, Intern at WGBH-TV Boston, Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Peace Corps Volunteer teaching in Ghana. Upon return to the US entered a period of intense Civil Rights (SCLC, URBAN LEAGUE, NAACP, naming a few from those days) activities & immersion in the counterculture & working for six years for the Dept. of Health, Education & Welfare in the 5-state Dallas southwest region office, then Washington, DC.

In late-sixties in Europe, worked in shipyards and warehouses in the Netherlands, harvested grapes and vegetables in southwest France, and delivered washing machines in West Berlin. Also tutored American writers in Elsinore, Denmark and immersed himself in London’s poetry ferment, and on June 1, 1970 moved to San Francisco. Joined the Gay Liberation Movement. Began working for Margrit Roma and Clarence Ricklefs’ The New Shakespeare Company-San Francisco.

Met painter Richard Steger on Memorial Day in 1971. Both joined literary/ artistic conversations in English and in translation, publishing poems in the explosion of small-circulation literary magazines and presses that provided the ground for a literary life. Ed was drawn by George Oppen into a writers’ group that met first in Lawrence and Justine Fixel’s living room that evolved into in Ed’s living room with poets Lennart Bruce, Laura Ulewicz, Jack Gilbert, Shirley Kaufman, Ray Carver, Josephine Miles, Nanos Valaoritis, Mort Marcus, William Dickey, Frances Mayes, Honor & Wayne Johnson, William Talcott, Adrianne Marcus, Jim & Eleanor Watson-Gove, Elizabeth Hurst, Jules Mann, Helen Sventitsky, Andrea Rubin, Carl Weiner, Sybil Wood, Marsha Campbell–and more now–over the last 41 years. First as a partner with Lawrence Fixel in founder/ proprietor/ publisher Dennis Koran’s Panjandrum Press, and later with his own Norton-Coker Press (with Laura Kennelly’s MRS JUNG book as first of dozens), Ed published with Richard Steger 19 issues of TOOK, a free magazine.

Since 1970, Ed’s published works in addition to poetry, criticism, essays, and stories have appeared in 2000 literary journals, magazines, zines, broadcasts, fliers, broadsides, and broadsheets. Publications (often with artwork by Richard Steger) include DAMAGE WITHIN THE COMMUNITY (Dennis Koran’s Panjandrum Press, San Francisco 1973); HER CHILDREN COMME HOME, TOO, Sceptre Press, England 1974); CHRONICLE (Mother’s Hen Press, San Francisco1974); ROOT ROUTE AND RANGE (Gary Elder’s Holmgangers Press, Alamo, CA 1976); ROOT ROUTE & RANGE THE SONG RETURNS a 88-page poem (Walter Billeter’s Paper Castle, Melbourne, Australia 1979). In the 1980’s: THE SINGING MAN MY FATHER GAVE ME (Anthony Rudolf’s Menard Press, London, England); THE TORN STAR (Larry Oberc’s Opposm Holler Tarot, Indiana), EDWARD (Michael McKinnon’s Primal Press, Boston, MA). NO ONE FOR FREE (SF,CA); GRATE COUNTRY (split chapbk w/Lainie Duro, Chicago); IDOLINO (SF,CA); NEXT YEARS’ WORDS (split chapbk w/Andy Lowry,Chicago); THE SINGING SURGEON (Colorado); 1990’s PINK GARDENS BROWN TREES (Bernard Hemensley’s Stingy Artist/Last Straw Press, Weymouth, England); BECAUSE WE SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE (Paul Green’s Spectacular Diseases Press, Peterborough, England); SPLIT, chapbook w/Jim Watson-Gove, Mycue’s half titled LIFE IS BUILT FROM THE INSIDE OUT. 2000 came NIGHTBOATS (Jim Watson-Gove’s Minotaur Editions, Oakland, CA ). Then, 2008, MINDWALKING: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1937-2007 (Laura Beausoliel’s Philos Press, Lacey, WA ).

September 2009, Jo-Anne Rosen’s Wordrunner Press of Petaluma, California issued online, Edward Mycue’s first Echapbook http://www.echapbook.com of 25 selected poems, I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION. A television program featuring Edward Mycue is on the internet and also here…

15 Replies to “Ozzentao by Edward Mycue”

  1. PEACE IS A PLACE IN EVERY BREATH — GREAT MATTERS THAT RE-ARC THE BRIDGE
    HOPE AND RE-MAKE THE RAINBOW:

    I believed in progress, in the basic goodness of persons.
    There was a stranger within me, an intruder who was not

    me, yet part of me, who swallowed as I drank.

    I’ve lived as if it will die when I die.
    I now begin to see that my ‘stranger’

    inside me is the sharpie fine-pointed pen

    “I” wrote with, but really is a life force who led,
    encouraged, lifted me through my nights.

    This is not mythic: it is here now. I pass

    out of history: this continues. While I live
    I am steward, mechanic, actor, helper.

    I matter; my actions matter; my thoughts matter.

    In my ending my beginning is organized into this
    great matter. Peace is a place in every breath.

    We need to utter it ‘now’ while we can.

    We didn’t invent ourselves nor get it off the grass
    way back down that long winding longing line.

    We have been seeking to be a people from the

    beginning of our supposed origins. Will we end
    before we have exploded and regrouping merged?

    Staying home doesn’t mean some kind of surrender.

    New definitions for older versions are visions bound in blood .

    Toil can re-make the rainbow to re-arc the bridge hope.

    © copyright Edward Mycue 17 June 2016

  2. NOVEMBER BY Edward Mycue
    As in November when we plant
    tulip, hyacinth and daffodil
    (pointing
    as old bonds grown dull
    among mutable
    imaginary satisfactions,
    like those meiotic moments
    in dreamed carts of hay)
    those things remembered
    trail, reflect
    attractions.
    The torpor brought
    from the soft thocking
    has gone and left us only us.
    It is time and nothing waits.
    It is soon and nothing waits.
    It is late and nothing waits.

    I hear in the wind long-gone voices
    who knew the language of flowers
    tasted the bitter root, hoped,
    placed stone upon stone, built
    an order, blessed the wild beauty
    of this place. Can you hear
    in the wind whispers, crusts
    of soul-insulted soul, scattered
    ages, decided, gone yellow, thin?

    I hear in the wind those old sorrows
    in new voices, undefeated desires,
    and the muffled advent of something
    I only define as bright, new angels.
    Can you hear in the wind independent
    people who never depart, have no time
    for friends, who want to go and want
    to stay and never decide in time?

    I hear in the wind old phantoms
    and the swirl of the released mustardstar
    and the cry of innocence.
    It is soon September.

    What was finished, celebrated is almost finished again. My life is your story.
    Your story a submarine skin envelope holding my story in worlds, walls dividing
    my story, your life. The where’s and when’s keep turning on a spinning plate half-dipping into the Pacific Ocean and we on this tilting/raked stage where great ships
    foundered with their great sentences of life and death—unfinished symphonies for the future out there that is our audience and who’ve driven-in to watch thinking that they
    today have cast-off the overcoat that stifled thought for us, not realizing that thought
    was the marriage of these rocks of experience this broken glass these diamonds in
    exciting shapes the rising sun fallen where the rainbows arch over beehives.

    Ugly is just a sharp paradigm shift. Praise for a red tractor. Dancing for chump change. Death an epistemological rupture.
    Between lust and first folly is misspoken weeping. Ice skater on the glass of love.
    Apple hooking into taste as it pours from the roofs of mouths.
    I’m hitched to a string,
    the shape of a heart. If I pull it or yank it, it comes apart. My past fell apart, it fell on the
    floor. Do nothing, be smart, you’ll hollow your heart. Go to the end, jump in, take a
    swim around your island. You’ll learn that the noose comes from within.
    On an island
    in the Bay—tears, anger, snot, spit; born, unborn: love, pre-intentionalist, is a soft
    sunrise. Twitching. A covenant drifting. The dead are among us. Tactile interface of
    memory: the dead are a lifetime buried in every moment. Baghdad heart, brick-red, done
    in the antique style of rooted standards, outlaw blues, kiss of troubles. Is it worth it? In
    the crosswalk on Oak Street near Gough (rimes with cough) where the red and dusky
    San Francisco night before the dark looks upward for birds flying south from Canada the
    earth is a body of interconnectedness. Life’s a daily scavenger hunt as the helicopter pushing air down lifts and the shiny lacquer of a left-out lawnmower partners seven little
    boy and girl pirates at the toy red plastic barn offering evening-pardon from bay wharf
    to a barn owl with tufted ears north over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sonoma County and Bartlett pears, Gravenstein apples, Blue Lake green beans, new squash. Memories to come lemon green of the young dad in sandals on a bike with his kid laughing. Their
    names are Joe and Julian who’s lost sandal, blowsy as jimson weed, was found again.
    Clemency, concord, representation of peace. Although in this old book the one of our lives everyday has a scream in it, mental garbage but not every syllable for misery. The
    bacteria of emotions are domed spires, sample rooms and surrogate rumors that saunter, propagate invective, treasure, warning saddling ships of joy on angry hooves.
    Strange shapes appear, macular degeneration, summer youth play-out, bumpkin, yokels, book clerks, truck drivers, anxiety to alienation, old chestnuts, aggregations of barnacles
    force allusions, disassemble adolescent abstractions flipside to windows on hell with
    bell-bottomed deep passages, bright chambers. Pulpy earth curdles its muscle dandling
    rose red morning. Ethics reason a new bed, authorized desire, enzymes’ unction for the day’s comma is the crossover moment that says: “Take me, give me, send me away.” A
    Mexican mango with champagne flesh light as a feather fluttering like ash once awkward and now terrible. We are fish in a net where roses of soot silt down into a lake of sleep. A woman came up to the edge. Pilgrims knelt to each other. Fiction can’t erase the teeth marks. Salmon pink, a slice of tomato, annihilated rendezvous-silkiness. Picnic. Drip pan. An unknown subtext beckons tumult in lavender flames. Enchantment: a dark speaking through a megaphone to this woman who bites her hair and code-breaking the gates of dreams that quench beauty red as blood, soft as cream. Light is amber, lantern-lit, catenulated halos drifting over riptides toward dawn gloaming. Surf is a pale tan woman, a green silver surging, a blue yellow renunciation. “Wkhah” “Wkhah” says the wind in the mind. This is action’s rose with green streaks of diagonal light igniting the garden in Tumbletown. Stardust a diminishing gusher of milk as it pinkens becomes a slight wicker coracle. The scar of full daylight has you crawl some days and boil each third. The old Queen Grandmother rages. Baby hummingbirds long for the cap and cowl
    of a trumpet bloom. Slippery bridge this silver fire and blueberry cream: these are lost lessons and an inner journey where deer in a protected park flood the experiment’s unity.
    Slowly. Glow. Earth jimjams a jungle under diamond skies as long-nailed dogs cut bark, tree rats scurry in canopies and ungrounded creation sticks hard red grease into fault lines, a welter of cherry-wood, linen, grass. Then rain. Guts erupt with reason, choices, the trigger of harmony, of Edens envisioned, never actualized, echoing gunk, churning and gurgling hope.
    Memories, notes, glints, glances, baroque voices that carry love, sorrow, dancing images into the evenings of tall reeds that stand in moving waters sinking with the waters into the soil absorbed, evaporated to crust to dust that under later rains give over to damp earth ripening with memories that come from whatever life will press upward for the death ship for new sowing.

    Telephone call then a summary a sea change, something more masochistic than divine.
    Playground happenings, pals, thin, tough, jittering with velocity, high horses: they are scattered and buoyed by discipline, some say a high art whose escutcheon has low pay.

    The wheel is round and childhood desire turns life’s wheels, these large hoops, propelling them with sticks under the tall park elm trees. Movement of wheels.
    Everyone there is here now within you and all of your kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to flower and to fly and to sail this sea of thickening light. Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering of parts, rationing of emotions: I hear voices: they live here now without forgetting the way back under the surface of consciousness, the bungled aspirations, of leprosy as a model, and grim ire. Life pushes, photography wins over time, and over the mind a brown shale. This is November.

    © EDWARD MYCUE 30 June 30, 2015

    EDWARD MYCUE
    APT 320
    3595 GEARY BLVD.
    SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118

    TELEPHONE 1 (415) 387-2471

    E-MAIL mycueed@YAHOO.COM

  3. EDWARD MYCUE P. 1 OF 2
    IRIS GARDEN WITH A PINK ROSE TREE FOR MEMORY
    Irene, your cucumber moon has a piece bit-out.
    There are clouds scudding, wind kicking the iris.
    I have a dream of you eating strawberry lemon ice
    because I know you love pink.
    You just forked-over your dinner – jewls of
    little red potatoes, Blue Lake snap beans, a
    vinaigrette-drenched butter lettuce, scapegraced
    bouillabaisse (unlike your mother’s, the Marseilles)
    and you are laughing, promising Dan you’ll eat
    “maybe a few of those gnocchi al pesto” and
    “a GOOD Louie with lots of crab-leg meat, capers,
    half a hard-boiled egg…maybe a devilled egg…IF
    Philip makes it…and maybe finish-off with (this
    woman has no eating disorders) a little crème broule.”
    From now on no more weariness, Irene. You’ll rest.
    You move to join your father John Perrou; toward

    EDWARD MYCUE P. 2 OF 2
    your Tron and Maytre ancestors. Louise, your mother
    (a Maytre-Tron born in a summer mas high-up in July
    on the rugged/ ragged French/Swiss/Italian border
    of the Piemontese—longer than a century later now—
    stretches out to you her arms and smiling says:
    “The old Valdese welcome you.” And eight centuries
    of Waldenses sing the name “IRENE” who’s come home.
    Go, Irene, join your father John Perrou, join your
    ancestors, join the Maytres and the Trons. Louise
    your mother lends to you her arm, her four-star smile.
    All through the valleys the Tyrian purple floats
    because Irene has returned to the bosom of the family.

    © Edward Mycue

  4. INCLUSIONS
    Inventors
    innovators
    copyists

    Abditories
    are places to hide things

    Fragments included in host rocks
    are called inclusions —
    older than the rocks themselves
    trapped in formation
    INTHRALLED
    You might say
    (C) EDWARD MYCUE 12 November 2015
    Edward Mycue, Apt 320, 3595 Geary Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94118 tel (415) 387-2471 email mycueed@yahoo.com Author of poetry — I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION, SONG OF SAN FRANCISCO, MINDWALKING, SINGING MAN MY FATHER GAVE ME, DAMAGE IN THE COMMUNITY Born in Niagara Falls, NY, resides in San Francisco, CA

  5. Mycue, Edward writing method description–fragmenti
    (after the fact, after the first acts, pressing onward)

    I am never finished and my words and phrases and themes are always incomplete. I am a tinkerer and inventor and innovator just like my grandad William Oliver Mycue BUT IN words. And TO MIX IT UP I consider my whole work as it rolls-out a tapestry where I weave and reweave — and unlike and also like a Penelope REWEAVING and improving and changing and adding-to.
    I have started from where I began and moved into my history as I began to understand it as I moved forward into new experiences that I might not understand when they happen. So my tapestry with its growing vocabularies of words and phrases and themes gets fattened, thinned, combed and reconfigured and even recast. Just sayin’, as is said, and just nattering on.

    © Copyright Tuesday 11 Nov 2016 Edward Mycue

    • Hi Ed. I submitted to you in the ‘90s and you referred me to Jim Grove and that’s how I first got into print. I am very appreciative and glad I found this site with your work.

      Best,

      Richard McNally

  6. Edward Mycue says: PEACE CORPS ARCHIVES AND MY GENERAL ARCHIVES
    November 13, 2016 at 3:04 pm
    Several years ago Yale Univ’s Beinecke Rare Bk & Mss library bought 120 boxes of papers from me. Most of them cover 50 years of literary publications, activities, correspondence — some naturally about my Peace Corps History. I was born in 1937 in Niagara Falls NY my family’s homeplace and grew up from age eleven in Dallas TX. In 1960 I became an intern for WGBH-TV, the center of the New England Network (NET) that preceded the PBS.
    The Lowell Institute fpr Cooperative Broadcasting brought me up from North Texas State University graduate program in constitutional government to study at Boston University’s Graduate School of Public Relations and Communications AND to work as one of 14 interns at the WGBH-TV station then in Cambridge on the MIT campus. During that year, June 1960-June1961, ONE OF MY JOBS was with the program that Louis Lyons, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism Curator at Harvard, helmed. Candidates for the US Presidency, primaries and later the parties’ candidates, came to our program and I met the lot of them, and they were many.
    I retain core materials of my life and my family’s history and correspondence and publications many of them from more recent years. I also have memories of my time in Ghana as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1961 Ghana 1 first abroad group. Although I early-transitioned, ‘ET’d,’ within that first year, because with my father’s death I had to become the sibling needed to financially support the rest of the family. I kept connections over the years with my group.
    © Edward Mycue 13 November 14, 2016

  7. Just another hello after turning 80 last week. I recall saying that I grew up (under my brother David Mycue’s guidance) from William Faulkner’s and Alan Sillitoe’s stories with joy and amazement as I headed to William Butler Yeats, Lorca, Brecht, Laura Riding and Gertrude Stein.

    • For me the he is ‘I’ and eye where time sails so soon behind the mast and where there are too many too’s and also’s because difference isn’t years, difference is the evaluation and experience where so very often words themselves are simple the way a pane of glass appears simply transparent and only maybe for light to come through keeping the birds and the bugs out. But other times the words are the light. I’ve learned that there is little that man can do to reproduce his skull and what is in it past impression, ignorance and that you don’t need contrition for being who you are and not who you were thought you should be. Home is who you are.

          • One still living (I think) writer I feel close to is Ruth Fainlight over there in London. If you read a small poem by her called “My Mother’s Purse” you will get an idea of who she is and what her young world was like.”

  8. James Broughton was the last of the line probably of the quill dippers who moved on to pens and pencils and typewriters and I wonder if he got to sample facebook the online site before he ascended into the lovely sky. Sure he’s up there laughing and shaking his head at us calling it faecesbook or some such jokey word token.

  9. From I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION

    Cell Damage

    Fury injustice abyss ashes
    All the animals
    Forgetfulness
    Innocent beasts
    Wild horses wild water
    Splash flesh tackle
    I drag land
    Fierce horses

    Terrible beings from below
    Get rid of the bones
    Snapping sounds
    Dry cinders
    Pests is what our worth is
    Weight and curses
    Scurrying rats
    Broken back

    Such are the birth tales

    Back to top

    Translucence

    as we rose, we changed — birthslug, toddler,

    kiddo, preteen brainiac out through serious
    awkwardness, bootielateral-liciously present

    into some normatively developed willfullness
    termed “transom,” “conduit” — symbols for such

    flowering forms transversing to any seedy end.

    the who we were and are will swell, seek, range,
    swim within the scale our mature notions permit

    wading through them conducting translucent lives.

    Back to top

    Slap My Eyes

    i know you are supposed to say you thought it would be easier than this (given all strived and labored for), and where is the sweet leisured payoff. (it is still “in the mail” and “the sun will come out tomorrow/ tomorrow/bet your bottom dollar…come what may”).

    that’s life: when you come up for air you find you are underwater.
    there’s no retreating back up the birth canal.
    amid all the plod ’n grovel there has to be a secret santa.

    well enough soon enough then enough. enough?
    the where’s and the when’s keep turning.
    we are like that teenager in the gulf of aden clinging to the airbuss wreckage.

    hang in there,
    help is on the way.
    or maybe sometimes help is in the way.

    keep the hope light on.

    love is what the clouds send your way

    living today yesterday.

    Back to top

    Valleys of Departure

    As in November when we plant
    tulip, hyacinth and daffodil
    (pointing
    as old bonds grown dull
    among mutable
    imaginary satisfactions,
    like those meiotic moments
    in dreamed carts of hay)
    those things remembered
    trail, reflect
    attractions.
    The torpor brought
    from the soft thocking
    has gone and left us only us.
    It is time and nothing waits.
    It is soon and nothing waits.
    It is late and nothing waits.

    Back to top

    The Great Wave

    This is bitter
    Life is brief
    Friendships passing
    Time’s the thief

    Life is bitter
    This is brief
    Passing friendships
    Surpassed by grief

    Time is liquid
    Each sun sets
    Sunset renews
    Our floating leaf

    Back to top

    mood is

    a mind-map as if the mind covered
    the whole body and its feeling and emotions.

    the state of the world
    and our u.s.a. contribution
    of messing it up has me brooding.

    those wasp galls sometimes
    ping pong ball size
    (and sometimes more tiny than a pea)
    on numerous kinds of oak trees
    mirror me to myself the way that
    “power of ten” idea of out-of-the-body
    visualizations re-imagines me to me.
    zooming in/out from insignificance
    and responsibility to not even
    the painted face of a clown.

    Back to top

    Knowledge of a Single Rose

    The five-petaled regular corolla rose
    has sorghum fingers that play with your nose
    from the inner envelope. This is not
    the Rose of Sharon: that spindling hollyhock
    is as near to a rose as a hemlock.

    The rosary is a Roman Catholic devotion
    that has five sacred “mysteries” and five
    sets of ten “decades” of Ave Maria prayers
    and each begins with an Our Father prayer,
    and each decade ends with the Glory Be one.

    It’s all repeated like the rose, like some
    magical-mystical charm or enchantment “OM.”
    It’s meant as more a path than a pastime:
    each rose a single step pilgrimage, window,
    colored hope, and compass pleasingly rote.

    I know you now, rose; I know you not, rose.

    Back to top

    We Remember Magnolia

    Trip down memory lane.
    In deed. Last year’s magnolia.
    Time machines march on.
    View the past. Only.
    Scanning for answers.
    For suggestions.
    If any are disclosed or uncovered.
    The machine never talks “future.”
    Only scans backward.
    Without any updates.
    And the time machine memory
    only blurs the velvet picture
    in any future re-scan backward
    because the most recent past
    is the foggiest of what was
    (having no historical certainty
    validated by memory because
    those mists seem more real
    than today’s blindered confusions
    we stumble in right now).
    Magnolia once white darkens.
    But we remember how it was.

    Back to top

    Yesterdreams—Star Light

    for Chandan Bono

    — bronzed pair of booties holding down a sagging telephone line,
    — picture from a gone time but one that is still just out my window
    here on fulton and octavia streets next to olive trees with plastic bags caught in them
    — “witches cowls” — filled with passing breezes

    amid caws of crows & occasions when sea birds escape east from ocean storms & west
    to California from the Sierras when calmer,

    settling in our parking lots deciding maybe east or west again, birds moving, passing,
    pausing; only flitting hummingbirds silent so far

    — & my mind’s bronzed booties imaged there from pairs of tennis shoes often caught on
    lines where drug runners marked territories;

    my San Francisco mind marked with long densely-textured decades written, cared-for, polished, discarded, & somehow are written again

    because the mind wasn’t finished with them & i was unable to find a step-down program
    to get free from voices, visions. where when i’m

    dead will those booties go? will there be telephone lines & poles?
    will it all sink as sediment under risen shores scraped, lathered by

    empowered tides with only birds on their ways in their days that alone continue while
    below fish swim above our yesterday silt

    in fogs, rain, wind & sun without anyone until “time” arrives as
    earth itself fractures into “space” that collides beyond my deeming.

    Back to top

    Everything Is Bending

    Paths lead up, down. Day’s not east. All’s traffic.
    In these necessary hours, a man lifts his arms,
    stretching a ready, signaling crimson. A long

    shadow adds you. The you adds with. And all
    night, love. Bending everything. So, if numbers
    inquire, tell them we are the ones, they are ones,

    I am one: awe-filled not a turned-brain knob.
    If the numbers inquire, tell me you are a one, I
    am your one, we truckle, burnished, roan now, in
    submarine confusion, swollen, last guest, happy
    proclaiming life is the insult. Even when it’s not.
    If the numbers inquire, you can say how differing

    drummers relive, repeat lessons of pilgrimage,
    malaise, the hungering decline of allegiances,
    how to fill a numb center, to reshape the line.

    Night is a dream and I am dreamt by trees. Trees
    are like words. Words are veils. In the forests,
    the stones are moss-covered. The trees sign to the stones.

    Between two there are lichens. Between things, words.
    Words are the things. But we don’t grow wise. Last
    night, trees dreampt me, you took me into your arms.

    The chill on the night is a path. We don’t grow wise.
    Hold me. Night is a dream. Permission varies, a person
    changes, no fiction’s real. The lovers, joined, were

    separable. Indistinguishable. Not to themselves: so
    neither could extirpate the memory? How could they
    be true to their natures? It made them like numbers.

    In the jail of San Francisco a gardener’s more beautiful
    than his roses. That odor of decay in tender flesh.
    In the Johnny Neptune Bar where the Sunset guys shout
    “lemme have a Bud, I need a bud” a man is fucked.
    “Queer” is a family where since they spoke the same
    language all the people understood each other as they

    wandered looking for a land to like. When they found
    it, they began to change it into a great decorated city.
    With decorated walls, courtyards and a tower to make

    them famous as Babel because that beckons a proud
    people who although overweened and confounded with
    a curse of voices were one family of bending numbers.

    Here cross-dressing is transpersonal. The drag’s hero.
    Here the mix and match malebox is full. Check it out
    You can’t order tools for living. Cross-dressing for

    counterfeiters, ersatz, fake, actors, novices, postulants.
    Pass. Received, recommended. Each an encore. Awe-
    some is not the word. Try another body, try clone, truly

    yours, try genetic position, try engineering (impotent
    mission) try to change anything. Change your whistle!
    Divent, divest, invent, invest, enter the second journey

    moving through to dis-embody, trans-body, cross over.
    Try to change your lord: memory. Go to another planet.
    Drag-queen’s hero, transpersonal. Check it out. Try.

    Back to top

    We Leave Nothing Behind

    What we experience we are
    Much passes through us
    But we leave nothing behind

    What we are we are
    What we have been is us
    What is left is nothing

    We leave nothing behind
    An earthworm caught in time
    Much passes through us

    What we have been we were
    What is left is nothing
    We leave nothing behind

    © Edward Mycue 2009

    • THE GREAT SMOKIES
      Jazz jism, cool rhythm, band and
      sticks, so-slows
      & quick-quicks:
      I an it’s-ready-Eddy
      U a quit-jerk-fool –
      in a melancholy pool, balloons,
      draped body parts, soft
      crowns, hard glories
      and the red refusing
      the insults, itching
      for luck that IS the grease
      as the slack drips
      up bottom vales, top
      ales, fearful perhaps
      but aimed from fog.
      O dreamer, dive in to me.
      © Copyright Edward Mycue

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