As fellow poet/citizen of this inevitably doomed coastal City,
Ed, the textures are lovely here. And may they survive you and me, too!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
edward mycue <[log in to unmask]> wrote: --a short verse here apposite w/a westcoast robinson jeffers twist. edward mycue
YESTERDREAMS—STAR LIGHT
-- 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.
Edward Mycue rev. 12 December 2007
for Chandan Bono
--- On Thu, 7/3/08, Judy Prince wrote:
From: Judy Prince
Subject: Re: Hatches, Matches and Dispatches
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Thursday, July 3, 2008, 1:35 PM
Dom,
I feel your pain, as someone here in the USA frequently says. When my son
was the age I think your children and Janet Jackson's children are (very
young), all I did was rush from home with kid to babysitter, then to work,
then to babysitter to get kid, then home with kid, and repeat that pattern
each workday.. . . . with the occasional homicidal urge that had pretty much
everyone in its sights as a target.
When my son was 11, I suddenly recognised that he was A Person. It was his
lovely sense of humour that awakened me to his humanity. My decision not to
have another child had been necessary, I thought, for maintaining a modicum
of sanity in order to keep my job. An exemplary parent I was not. I was
better at being a kid. And, sadly, I was monumentally ignorant at being a
wife.
I tend to agree with Ken's "pet" theory that USAmericans are not
especially
pleased with having kids and having to take care of them. I suspect that
this is a very old, very global feeling. Children as necessities (for farm
work, factory work, dynasty-enhancing) aren't news. The view of children
as
nonworking darlings by parents who must work to support themselves and their
children does seem an odd chapter. But it's one in which we figure.
Yet, sex aside, ------ ok, that's too tempting to quip to. I'll leave
it
alone.
Let me just give you the URL for Iceland's practical (and apparently
historical) treatment of moms, dads, and everybody's kids:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/18/iceland
And here's a book my son recommended years ago: +Are Males
Cost-Effective?+. This is the same son who, that semester at U of Illinois,
signed up for a course in Women's Literature so that he'd be the lone
male
in a class of females.
Judy
2008/7/2 Dominic Fox :
> I think the nuclear family is a nasty economic prison, and getting
> nastier by the minute as exploitation deepens and the battle for free
> time (time not consumed by either selling or reproducing one's labour
> power) becomes redder in tooth and claw. I don't think sex is that
> much of an issue in itself, although I understand that everyone gets
> antsy now and then. People use adultery first as an escape valve and
> later as a wrecking ball. But the real goal I think is not sexual but
> economic freedom: getting out of an absurdly inefficient and
> psychologically stressful domestic arrangement. For that matter, if
> the pressures of paying the bills, raising the children and keeping
> the place from turning into a complete pigsty were significantly
> relieved, I think many people would be a lot more easy-going about the
> occasional extra-marital sexual/emotional excursion - as the moneyed
> classes in fact have always been.
>
> Dominic
>
|