Relevant
Current mood: amused
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural

Buenas Noches,

There is an interview with me in June's Relevant Magazine

http://www.relevantbcn.com

and download the issue with the fishies or pick it up all over BCN.

Spanish on page 29, English on page 30.

The English translation is a little avant-garde in spots, but I love the fuschia backdrop, it reminds me of nana's borscht.

2:26 PM - 8 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

Drawing Dead*

We ran far
and fast
from the fires we started
to keep warm
in the villages
of our ancestors,

along the corridors
of smoke,
up
and
down
the stairs of light.

We fled
to islands
we found in the wine,
the kicked down doors
the endless drive…

right down to where
the ocean
was your mirror

and the strand
that separates
our truths
and our mistakes
was still safe
in the other hand,

out of sight…

with the
golden scalp
of those
burning fields
in distant
highway lights.


(* I heard when drunk that this is actually a poker term signifying to continue a hand when no cards remain in the deck that can help you.)

9:25 AM - 13 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Carmine

Carmine’s eyes
are filled with ice,
her smile
is filled with wine;
She is standing over
the candles of time…

tonight
she is holding mine.

I flicker
at the ribbons
of her conversation,
I smoke
to set fire
to her driest kisses,

and I feel the wind
through her bones
and teeth,
between her
buildings
and her trees.

On the balcony,
where her face
is thrown;
a bright, pale stone,
high in the sky
of my mind…

she leans out
and calls
for all
she has lost.

3:12 PM - 13 Comments - 28 Kudos - Add Comment

Bantam

Beneath the petals
of your anger
I see you wet
and small
and perfect.

Threatened
by the insects
and the walls
of all
those fingers.

Never
will these
falling
feathers
ever fly again

and still they bring
your thoughts
to me when
black cars
leave without you.

Years
and all
their flowers…

since our silence
lost its voice.



I was just interviewed for the relaunch of www.relevantbcn.com - it will be out online and in print in the May edition. A big thankyou to the extraordinary editor, Jon Lane, who sat with me for hours over a thousand already-cold coffees while we meticulously calculated the quantum physics of the croissant crumbs.

11:25 AM - 12 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Our Color & Emotions Book is out!!!

Eeeeeeeee!


Color & Graphics by Ana Labudovic & Sairica Rose is out, published by Maomao Publications.

You can find it at www.maomaopublications.com - Look under Graphic Design and scroll down.

It is 240 pages long, in English, and contains much musing about color and emotions and some really fab images. The book will shortly be available in Spanish, French and Italian.

"Color & Graphics delves into the symbolic meaning of colors and the resulting emotional reception. Including interviews with designers and scientific theorem to pique the interest of professionals and students alike."

Ana Labudovic is about the most talented young designer I've ever met. Keep your eyes peeled for her...

So far I love 2008!

2:01 PM - 5 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Glacier

Your winter of words
will not settle here;
not even
on the highest
branches of my longing.

The tunnels of the evening
are slowly losing light;
tonight your face
is made
of a thousand white candles

Our name is melting down
to nothing on my tongue;
my mouth (your old gun)
dissolves in the sun
behind your shadow…

…with all of your wafers
and all your holy songs

The birds have found new land
in the tide of our ovation;
a nation broken
free

…from the continent
of memory.

7:25 AM - 11 Comments - 20 Kudos - Add Comment

The Stalin Joke (from People in Glass Houses)

And she will tell you stories about Tolstoy, (the brain of Russia), and about Dostoevsky (the heart). Lifting her chin and straightening the hem of her skirt with tiny unchipped fingertips, she will confide in you that the heart of Russia floated in vodka and that it's only joy was born of epilepsy. She won't expect you to know that Dostoevsky had suffered from a kind of temporal left-lobe seizure, a disease that was arguably sacred as it chose only a few. That Freud had deemed it to be a psychogenic condition, daubing his contemporary an ¨hysterical epileptic" . The first attack had come at the age of twenty five, during Dostoevsky's mock execution at a prison camp in Siberia. The murder of his father, his own traumatic childhood and the 50 lashes he received that day for daring to complain about the food, had overloaded his senses, and started stones rolling around inside of him. So the heart had grown nervous and melancholic, and Dostoevsky had unravelled into a fraying hypochondriac and a self-sabotageux, obsessed with God and writing. His fits had led to visions: crystalline, prophetic auras had become ambassadors to the attacks, from which came unprecedented raptures. By the time you know all of this, Rita will be standing up, with her skirt perfectly straightened and her palms and eyes upturned. Her posture will assure you that she belonged in Russia, and that from the minute she had arrived, she had wanted to give her face to it. More than that, it will stop you from asking if she's read all of his books. She will lean on the dark lacquered, bean shaped dresser where the crystal glasses are gathering dust and tell the Stalin joke the same way she always does: The one where on a day like so many others, they are queuing in separate lines to buy the bread or wodka and one Russian says to the other Russian:

Davai Nickolai!, I could go and kill Stalin in the time its going to take us waiting here!

So off he goes, and some hours later he returns to the same queue, where his friend has barely moved up a place.

"Did you kill him?" asks the second Russian

"Nyet, you gotta be kidding…" Says the first Russian, "…You should see how long the queue is to kill Stalin!"

…Never mind, she'll assure you. You had to be there at the time.

4:42 PM - 5 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

CARTE BLANCHE

(For PJR)


I am writing to tell you
that for the longest night,
I thought of you
and nothing else happened.

I slept in your room,
under loud
florescent lights
and when no-one came in,

I was afraid he would
touch something.

Then slowly, the hours
turned to punctuation,
until my hand
became a train…

…and you grew
shorter and colder.

I am somewhere else now
and I'm writing you back
in black lines and red paint,
from the mirror.

I have taken down
your face and hands,
and this time
I will not reframe them.

Here, on the other
side of the world,
it is warm;
and I am longer…

…I am brighter.

5:01 PM - 6 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

Naked Sandwich Board Announcer Required.

Subtitles for A Silent Movie, by l'il ol' me is now available here:

www.reactorpress.net

and here

www.amazon.com

It's the first in a series of three itsy-bitsy poetry books, and is available in a bilingual English-Spanish version. This is largely due to the huge heart and meticulous eye of Pedro Donoso, a dear friend and admired scribe, who knows where to live in another language. He helped me no end in ironing the creases out of the Español, and sat up late at night by my side as we tirelessy argued over palabras precisas.

Reactor Press sell the books cheaper than Amazon (and don't skin you over international postage). They have been a huge support and great inspiration to me, and please do check out their other publications. The founders believe in producing very affordable poetry, essays and short stories in highly portable editions, that can be read during a journey, over a coffee, or waiting for someone or something. They also make unique gifts, and the idea is also to leave them in places they might be picked up and appreciated by the next person. I've been really surprised by how well they are doing, and really touched, and glad I made the decision to do it their way.

If you buy from Reactor, you can get two and national postage for little more than $5 (within a certain radius!). Even Brando couldn't refuse!

The next collection, Urban Amber is being put together by the Reactor crew, and will be monolingual with illustrations by the uber-talented Layil Umbralux, who did the cover for Subtitles...I've never met another person quite like her, nor art quite like hers, nor found a striking enough word for either.

I am so blessed to be surrounded by a fleet of eccentric, talented people.

Here's a poem from Urban Amber.

MAZURKA

I hold you/I do not hold you
I ask only that you
remember my hands...
Holding you on a different night,
bathing you
in some distant temple.

I will not betray your statues,
to bring down these walls.
It's dawn and
I do not see the flags
of either army.

I told you/I have not told you,
I made an alibi from a lullaby,
strung where your body,
strong and primed,
once poised like a pause,
and drew back to conquer mine

I hold you/I do not hold you
I will remember asking for your hand.
You were never more beautiful
than you are in this darkness,
defying the deadlines
of night upon light.

And the air grows so still,
when you've scaled the last flight
I hold my breath
and in my hands it starts to ignite,
till we're just still-born light
in immortal night.

3:40 PM - 3 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

Schon Obtzon (from People in Glass Houses)
Category: Writing and Poetry

Sunday afternoons passed like flies as he sat in the lime green velvet chair with the oily hand-stained brown marks on the arms. He always wore his stiff, charcoal Soviet coat, even though he was indoors and the state had declared that giving up his freedom meant that he didn't have to pay for heating. Gernowski preferred to be independently warm, and the coat and the vodka kept the frost the other side of the curtain. Beside this, he was determined to be dressed to meet death; He even kept an eye out for it, peering through the faded lace on the bulletproof window and over the crooked grey teeth of the communist skyline, now pricked with the points of newborn skyscrapers. Addressing the horizon, he described in elaborate detail, what Rita's great uncle wore, what he ate, the mattress upon which he slept in Matthausen, the shape and color of the medals that glinted from the SS uniforms, the color of the dust….

In the late '30s, Gernowski had been a young pharmacist in Lvov, a Polish city near the Ukranian border that he would later argue no longer existed. Soon after its liberation, Lvov had been eaten by the Soviet Union and renamed Lviv, and since that time, towering cranes and demolition trucks had ensured that the centre of its name was efficiently replaced. Back then, much of his clientele was Jewish, and he and his young wife, Klara were often invited to Shabbas supper in the warm, opulent houses of prominent community members. Once Poland began to curdle, and the SS hounds began sniffing around, he was hauled before a tribunal and ordered to state where his sympathies lay. The inauguration of the Lvov ghetto in 1939, and the whispers of smoke at Belzig saw his clientele dwindle, fuelled by the increasing number unpublicised whisking offs of any spreader of "enemy propaganda", who so much as muttered "konzertlager" over supper. So, fearing first for his livelihood, and then for his life, he told them what they wanted to hear. The next day he signed a contract of allegiance bearing the seal of leading Nazi doctor , Dr Hermann Pfannmüller. The pact implemented Gernowski's services in the T4 programme, where he would test first sterilization drugs, then euthanasia injections, sometimes on his former clients, and sometimes on their children, recording any deaths, accidental or intentional as nothing more than "pneumonia".

With the invasion and division of Poland was in full swing, the framework of assessment of these cases quickly became less… rigorous, and Gernowski was called upon to help curtail the existence of 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'. As Klara, his wife, grew round and ripe with their first son, he became ever more reluctant to test on the children. Before, scraping a few brain cells, conducting a full autopsy and using the evidence as research had consoled him as he applied distorted Darwinism under SS orders. As time passed, his hands had begun shaking uncontrollably, his sleep littered with the debris of discarded syringes and scarred signatures. So they scraped up what little they could carry and fled to a safe house in a monastery near Kiev only to be detained at the border, returned to Lvov and charged with desertion and conspiring with the enemy by the same SS tribunal that had shaken his hand and welcomed him to their purification programme, less than a year earlier. Ania Gernowski was born in Belzig, and immediately confiscated, while Klara, lactating and malnourished, contracted typhoid. Anton Gernowski's resilience and strong constitution earned him sterilization through the very drugs he had been working on, and passage to Matthausen in the summer of 1941, where he was put to work in the photographic labs, under SS Kommander Kornatz, and alongside fellow prisoners, Garcia, Bosch, and Antonio Civit, Rita's great uncle. Ever since that day, Gernowski had spent Sunday afternoons staring out of the window, attributing his survival among the enemy to being "too useful to be thrown away ".

6:03 AM - 2 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment