Open D Tuning and Poetry

sitting here listening to some wonderful guitar playing by Michael Hedges who's open D tuning and fusion chords have always served as my own personal acoustic Prozac. while i am doing this i am smiling to myself because one of the things i missed about life in America is access to fairly inexpensive CD's and here in Italy they often cost as much as your first born male child and now that i am sure that the RIAA isn't going to have me arrested for file sharing i can get some of the things i missed via the internet.

at least so sayeth Judge Ginsburg who writes......

"It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite the DMCA in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry or threatens . . . the motion picture and software industries."

i feel a little less leery about swapping files and so i have spent the wet and rainy afternoon jumping from link to link exploring some new things and becoming entranced yet again by this artist and cursing the fates that he died before i really had a chance to get to know his music. why is it so much of the music i like comes from performers or singer-speakers who are dead? i mean really, if i just tick off a few of my favorites, Hedges, Bob Marley, Eva Cassidy, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jimmi Hendrix...... their are all dead and gone. which brings me to that melancholy....... what will i be remembered for mood......and so i start tinkering around with this poem a friend and I are writing that i just cannot seem to stop tweaking and pretty soon it is going to be unrecognizable......


As a child
I measured my calamities with rolled up pant legs.
often picking,
absentmindedly
at some freshly-made gash.

“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours!”
I challenged Hector at recess.
And with nervy arrogance
I’d smile at each criss-crossed scrape,
tracing the red raised road maps of blackberry briars,
or the grey green bruise that spread upon my knee.

Back then
My tumbles and spills were only written on the surface of my skin.
I still remember the feel of his moist breath on my breasts,
listening to my chest as we played doctor.
Like those childish kisses momma’s magic lips gave,
I was so sure she could mend the world and all its ills.

and somehow
his gentle ministrations made me feel better,
perhaps even loved.

Maybe it is for that reason, I turn to you now?
the denial of my illnesses embedded deep in my psyche.
And so I joke with you in your paneled office
and plan my next trip to the Isle of Capri.
Suggesting that perhaps we could suture my frayed vessels
with fine laughter instead of silk.
rather than accept your bleak prognosis of my possible pending demise.

I wonder,
as a practiced surgeon ready to wield a scalpel,
what first you saw, as you dispassionately peered at the map of my world.
And if I let you open me from neck to navel,
would you actually be able to save me?

What would you interpret of the trauma within?
Would you shake your head with knitted brow
and concentrate like a master mechanic,
tinkering under the hood of a favorite roadster?

I can almost see you
kneading my soft purplish heart.
Accurately noting,
each crack, healed
each fissure, closed
each time, failed
that I allowed her to be broken
or failed to perform preventive maintenance.

And if I let you probe deeper,
examining my psyche (to save a soul),
Would you thoughtfully untangle the wire;
remove the staples and blue;
of my sincere yet botched attempts
to mend and gird

And would you knowingly understand
that I had done the best I could,

under the circumstances?

Just so that I could slip and fall and love

Again,

and again
and once more,
just this once more, again.

Maybe you could make me famous.
"patient, female," the subject of an important medical treatise:
having understood the mechanism of why the brain shuts off conveniently
when the body needs to find its own solace
or why what faculty and reason one seems to possess
conveniently escapes
like butterflies distracted to a flower garden
each time I stared into the eyes of love.

If you do, I will send you long letters of thanks
and smile when you are published in the Annals.

So trustingly I let you trace this line,
thoughtful fingers tenderly remembering
the paths of your own injuries,
And as your tears splash among my bowels
I am not surprised that you let the bloody scalpel clang to the floor.

Knowing, as you examine me,
knowing, as you try to save me..
knowing, like the good doctor Luke
that a physician must first heal himself.

Losing my Position

ok found out round about midnight last night (that is 6 pm USA time for the rest of the hamsters on the hamster wheel.....that my position with the great and all powerful OZ e finito! subito. just like that. i am ,as the Brits say, redundant!, insert colorful metaphor here!

spent last night having a pity part for myself and feeling like a total loser only to have about 15 phone calls today and a contingency of supportive friends show up at my house carrying supper fixin's (don't think there is an Italian equivalent for that phrase) and doing their best to cheer me up.

i know i don't have riches, or even a bank account to handle this shortfall but some things are worth more than euros in my pocket. in less than one years time i have managed to make a solid group of friends here that even in the middle of the trappings of Christmas, have taken the time to make sure i don't slit both my wrists. i am 41 years old, living in a strange land and will be jobless in less than one month. some people would be terrified, but these people have made me feel solid enough to face tomorrow. like my grandma always said. when life deals you lemons.....make lemonade. here's hoping she knew what the hell she was talking about.

ps...Jaap Stijl.....don't push my buttons....if i can write after a day like yesterday (even if just whining about the state of my own personal union) don't bust my chops about not keeping this blog active.

ok so I am functioning on three hours of sleep and 7, count them, s-e-v-e-n espressos as a major act of compensation so as my eyelids keep telling me “sleep is good” we interrupt tonight's regularly scheduled programming for, you guessed it RERUNS!!!!!!! (Just like on TV!)

read this Henry Miller piece while waiting waiting waiting for a ride on Gus – the wonder bus this morning. (you wonder if the heat will be working, you wonder if it will show up or if there is a sciopero, you wonder if the guy who invented mortadella got the idea from being sandwiched inside one of these big orange suppositories) . it made me think….still making me think…but reading stuff this good just makes me want to take everything i have ever written and pile it in one big pile (ala bonfire of the vanities) and strike a match.

i will never, not even if i live to be a hundred, be able to express myself this well…..

~sparrow


Today it is the third or fourth day of spring and I am sitting at the Place Clichy in full sunshine. Today, sitting here in the sun, I tell you it doesn't matter a damn whether the world is going to the dogs or not; it doesn't matter whether the world is right or wrong, good or bad. It is - and that suffices. The world is what it is and I am what I am. I say it not like a squatting Buddha with legs crossed, but out of a gay, hard wisdom, out of an inner security. This out there and this in me, all this, everything, the resultant of inexplicable forces. A chaos whose order is beyond comprehension. Beyond human comprehension.

As a human being walking around at twilight, at dawn, at strange hours, unearthly hours, the sense of being alone and unique fortifies me to such a degree that when I walk with the multitude and seem no longer to be a human being but a mere speck, a gob of spit, I begin to think of myself alone in space, a single being surrounded by the most magnificent empty streets, a human biped walking between the skyscrapers when all the inhabitants have fled and I am alone walking, singing, commanding the earth. I do not have to look in my vest pocket to find my soul; it is there all the time, bumping against

my ribs, swelling, inflated with song. If I just left a gathering where it was agreed that all is dead, now as I walk the streets, alone and identical with God, I know that this is a lie. The evidence of death is before my eyes constantly; but this death of the world, a death constantly going on, does not move from the periphery in, to engulf me, this death is at my very feet, moving from me outward, my own death a step in advance of me always. The world is the mirror of myself dying, the world not dying any more than I die, I more alive a thousand years from now than this moment and this world in which I am now dying also more alive then than now though dead a thousand years. When each

thing is lived through to the end there is no death and no regrets, neither is there a false springtime; each moment lived pushes open a greater, wider horizon from which there is no escape save living.

- Henry Miller, Black Spring

ok i admit it.....i suck at blogging

ok i admit it.....i suck at blogging. i started and then i stopped. just couldn't bring myself to write about the wonders of living my dream in Italy when so many people were (are) living some pretty hellish moments in many corners of the world. i mean really.....i felt guilty......i kept telling myself i cannot write about how pretty the olive trees are or that i think i have found my home away from home enoteca, Le Volpi e l'Uva (where the sommelier Ciro knows what i want even before i do) when everyone else is struggling so hard just to survive. i mean hell, the people of Baghdad wait in line 12 hours for a liter of gas dodging suicide bombers, itchy finger soldiers, and rebuilding their country from the ground up.....who is going to be interested in one woman's journey towards self discovery...especially when Francis Mayes and Hollywood seems to have beat me to the point.

but then today I got an e-mail from Raed......the missing half of Salam Pax's "Where is Raed". i mean if he has the time to answer e-mails from strays like me... then what sorry excuse can i give for not having enough time to at least try abd make an effort? i mean really, he gets how much access to the internet and at what cost?

ok Raed....i'll make you a deal, i will keep writing about the crazy, sweet world of living a life in Italy if you keep Salam in check and help him remember that being salty is ok and that just because the Brits love him...he needs to not forget his Iraqi roots.