Lost in Translation Version 3: Let’s Table This Discussion

table

Lost In Translation Version 2: Monoglot Remix

On that Summer day,
with scabby knees, shirtless and tanned brown.
I pitched the wiffle ball.
Close as I was,
close enough that my not yet ten coordination could find the strike zone,

It bulleted back at me,
wiffling, Jabberwocky-like
through the suburban street
too fast. It dropped me. Like a rock.

Translated into French and back again:
In summer day
with scabby knees, brown and tanned naked torso.
I launched the wiffle ball.
Close as I was,
close enough that my coordination was not yet ten find the strike zone,

He chips to me,
wiffling, Jabberwocky-like
   through the suburban street
too fast. He dropped me. As a rock.

My words:
Some years later.
The camp counselor instigated a game
of telephone.

I think she wanted us to learn about the power of words.
The malicious destruction of gossip.
The way that words come with a radioactivity, a half-life.
They are dying, like us, the moment that they are born.

Transated into French, back to English, then to Latin and back into English again:
After a few years.
Camp counselor incited a game
Phone.

I think we must learn it.
Malicious rumors destruction.
Radioactivity pitches when liberated middle of life.
Die, so that we, in the time they were born.

My words:
Going on grown, now.
It takes me a while.
To get past the idea that the professor
Has the most enormous eyebrows that I have ever seen.

When I get past thinking about Edward Scissorhands.
Weed whackers.
I hear his words.
At least, I think I do.

Socrates, he wasn’t talking about virtues.
Like eating all of your vegetables.
It would have been better.
He says.
If we had translated that word as excellence.

Translated into French, back into English, into Latin, back into English, and then into Greek and back again:
Now grown up and done.
I need some time.
La, a doctor has a reason
A great eyebrows 1’ve ever.

For when you think of the expenses of the one’ve Edward Scissorhands.
Whackers weeds.
1 heard.
At least one can imagine.

But Socrates is not speaking of the virtue.
Like to eat all the vegetables.
How much better it would have been.
Said.
If the word translated as excellence.

My words:
An adult. Now. Or atleast, that’s the rumor.
I keep thinking somebody is going to figure me out.
I stand in front of the photocopy machine.

I am copying a copy of a copy of a copy.
I notice how it picks up these imperfections.
As time goes by. It does not lose them.

I think about how this generation.
It will not know so much about imperfect copies.
I used to make tapes of tapes of audio tapes.
It would pick up these squawk garble hisses
across the generations. Like me.

Translated into French, back into English, into Latin, back into English, into Greek, back into English, into Khmer and back again:
An adult. Now. Or atleast, that’s the rumor.
I keep thinking somebody is going to figure me out.
I stand in front of the photocopy machine.

I am copying a copy of a copy of a copy.
I notice how it picks up these imperfections.
As time goes by. It does not lose them.

I think about how this generation.
It will not know so much about imperfect copies.
I used to make tapes of tapes of audio tapes.
It would pick up these squawk garble hisses
across the generations. Like me.

My words:
enjambment, as it happens.
Is not the state of strawberry slathered toast.
And Sting,
he sang about the aesthetics of chance.

I bring a meaning to these things here.
It is not what I wanted to say.
The final translations:
The scope of what happened.
With artificial strawberry is salvation.
and antibiotics
And the blood is the aesthetics of luck.

This will bring about the location: it is here.
This is not what it means.

After a busy day

Adam named them all.

that done, he lounged.

Naked and unashamed.

In the Garden.

He contemplated his help-mate.

Considered locating her.

He realized that she was nowhere to be seen.

He realized there were these rules.

He’d never told her of.

By the time

he worked up the enthusiasm

to go find her.

She

was already mid-conversation

with a thing

he’d recently named serpent.

(He was especially proud of that one, serpent.

It starts soft and ends hard.)

One wedge had been chewed out of the fruit in her hand.

Its juices ran down her chin.

Adam took it from her with a shrug.

But also a feeling of wonder and horror.

He contemplated that he’d mastered all the nouns on that warm afternoon.

He reckoned that he was ready

for the knowledge of good

and the knowledge of evil.

Found and Lost Again at My Local Library

I stroll these aisles in almost-silence.

and forgive the guy at the keyboard

for his unlibrary-like cell phone jabbering.

My flip flops thwack thwack thwack

a metronome beat between my bare soles and the floor.

The air isn’t heavy in this place, but almost.

I was looking for something

when I got up and began this stroll

But now? Now I am hypnotized.

I am hypnotized by the samenesses and regular differences

row upon row upon of shelf after shelf after shelf.

Endless variations of differing proportions of rectangles and squares make up the shelves’ occupants.

Here, the volumes of a series on home improvement:

obediently lined up like a family for a potrait.

Identically sized and fonted as it is.

And now the art section,

burdening the nondescript shelves.

Some stretching up, some reaching out, and drawing my eyeball with dignified arrangements of colors.

I am surprised that I could not take more than a few steps

with out finding Oprah Winfrey in this place:

Diet books, fiction backed by her, biographies pros and cons.

I am only slightly more surprised

by the sheer vastness of this place.

How many volumes times how many pages times how many words on a single page?

There must be an answer to this place.

I thrill at the thought

If there is an Answer there must be one in this place!

But I am pulled from my reverie, and I look around.

An answer? Most certainly…

But how am I ever going to find it?

A young radical on the evils of blueberry muffins

It is so easy and sanitized in that kitchen.

A trail of misery, a web of terror.

The baker’s disconnection does not absolve him.

It does not change the fact that he is the arachnid at the center of it all.

Consider the blueberry muffins he is making this morning.

The sun is not yet up, and yet…

Already the brutality, the brutality.

The powder clings to him like blood on Macbeth.

The smell, can’t you smell death beneath that sweetness?

The ingredients come together

and lose their independence,

that last measure of dignity.

Somewhere, in the wilds of Maine.

Stand blueberry bushes stripped of their fruit and their dignity.

The fruits that they were once so proud of…

They are now in a glass container on a stainless steel shelf.

Waiting.

And there are fields somewhere that are now barren.

It was not enough, that reaper-like

We scythed them all down.

We crushed them up next.

Boxed them up.  Called it flour…

A homonoym to a symbol of living beauty.

We robbed the cows children of their mothers milk.

With uncaring machines.

Can’t you hear that haunting, pained, longing

“MOOOooooo.”  Trailing off into nothing,

because it is pointless to resist.

It is all so pointless.

When they come and take your milk away.

And the eggs, oh the eggs.

They could have been somebody.

They could have been some chicken.

If only they’d been fertilized.

They would not sit in that styrofoam container,

terrible in their simalarities.

And the sugar…

We did indeed raise Cane.

Only that it might be chopped down, down, down.

It is speciesism only

that prevents us from calling it what it is

Vegetable Genocide

How could something so sweet come from this.

Do not hide

behind the fact

that it was all made for this and raised for this.

Does that make it better

or worse?

Your blueberry muffins.

They are a symbol of your decadence.

They are the epitome of your arrogance.

They

will

be

your

undoing.

We must stand with our muffiny brothers.

We must rise up with our confectionary sisters.

Join me!

The revolution is now.

Sometimes

Sometimes, I feel like those trees:

Naked, exposed, stripped of those leaves,

rooted to the dawning Spring’s thawing soil,

my arms,

like branches,

held up toward the blue and blue and blue sky.

held up so long

that the tips have been bleached by the elements.

 

And sometimes this waiting is all that I can do.

Sometimes knowing that Winter is over,

it’s hard to really believe

Sometimes knowing that Winter is over

is all that keeps me going.

Sometimes, despite this doubt.

The truth is also undeniable.

untitled

I would be reassured

Almost

If you took

Some sort of metaphorical

Sledge hammer

To that little part of who you were.

 

I am no great lover of violence

But I do know that passion is our only hope.

And if, at least there was passion…

 

If at least there was passion

you might rebuild after you tore it down.

what is coming might be better than what was…

 

It is too easy.

It is too easy and that is our doom.

I want you to smash the place.

I want you to burn it up.

I want you to be a dervish,

A force of nature,

The epicenter of something tremendous.

 

There are no metaphorical sledge hammers,

No symbolic tornadoes, here.

 

It is like you are turning off the flueroescent lights.

Perhaps unscrewing a bulb.  Latching the door. 

The click is a quiet click.

It will fall into disuse and disrepair.

 

There are things that you can not see anymore.

They will take up residence in this place.

They will fornicate with each other.

They will become this inbred thing.

They will not leave because you will never let them.

 

Where did all your dreams go?

Where are your passions?

There was this adventure once.  It called to you.

But you closed the door.

And I’m supposed to tell you that it’s not to late.

I’m supposed to cry that it’s never to late.

 

And I hope that is right.

But when you open the door its eyes will be burned by the sun

It will be a thing that color of internal organs.

We won’t want to recognize it anymore.

 

If you’d only knocked it all down

Way back then.

It would’ve run free.

And I think maybe

Once it grew strong.

It would’ve come back.

The Problem With Our Kiss

The problem with our kiss.

Is that I could taste our first one

when we shared our last one.

 

The problem with our kiss

was that when we shared that first one

I knew already

that the last was on its way.

 

The problem

was that their was a first kiss.

 

The problem

was that their was a last kiss.

 

The problem

was not so much

that I kissed you like my mouth was an escape hatch

I kissed you like the very most inner-secret parts of me

might escape out of my lips

 

and into you.

 

And the problem with our kiss

it was not so much that you did the same thing.

 

It was that we both did it

at the same time.

And the very best we could hope for

was a crash on our way out of ourselves

a colission at the boundary between us

Thrown back where we began

from the place we fled…

 

Or worse:

I might leave myself

and end up you

and you might leave yourself

and end up me

and there we would be

alone

still.

 

The problem with our kiss

is the rythmn to them

there is a give and take

a push and pull

 

When I tried to be the moon you were the moon too

and when you tried to be the waves I was trying to be the ocean.

 

You said that the problem with our kiss

Is that it was a metaphor for everything else.

 

I say that everything else

is just a metaphor for that kiss.

That choice

In that time before:

before my grandmother was sent to that place

where they all were just waiting for death,

where they slept two to a room and where we pretended it did not smell.

before the indignities and disease had ravaged my grandmother,

in that time when the Parkinsons was just begining to form her smile into a rictus

When it was atleast an option– though frowned upon–

to ambulate without the walker that you hated so much.

 

In that time,

before,

I would watch my youngest child and I would watch my oldest child.

With blocks.

 

The wisened preschooler

eyed the toddler warily.

Sometimes he would stack them upwards, upwards, upwards.

always, uneasy, a corner of an eye on the loved-hated sibbling

Teetering, tottering, the blocks would settle.

 

And then the baby-ogre would come in,

the tiny tyrant.

The infant Godzilla.

Crattering smacks, a bowling alley thunderclap!

 

Rectangles, triangles, squares, wooden

down about the bare ankles of The maker and The Destroyer.

 

And then she would crawl away.

Leaving the architect in the aftermath.

Sometimes, discouraged,

he would simply push them around the dusty floor.

in that aftermath, silent now,

but for his baby sister’s babblings.

 

She would be off, then…

Watching preschool nonsense TV

or pulling at the hem of somebody’s pants

or devising ways around the babyproofing

to finally off herself.

 

Sometimes, though,

in that Great Before

he would stack them again.

 

From where I sit now

I see this as an act of great courage.

An act of faith.

It is so much easier to knock the tower down

than it is to rebuild the thing.

That we are built in such a way

that we might sometimes build it back up

this is the deepest argument

that there is a God after all.

 

And so here I am

On the other side of this

My grandmother is gone

she is gone and gone and gone.

 

I remember the choice that he was faced with.

and I know that I am faced with that, too.

The Neo-emo-Goths

Where did they come from…

this army

of adolescent

androgyns

 

Where did they come from…

with the zippered hoodies

that look like the skin

of neon zebra.

 

Where did they come from…

Probably

they identify

themselves with a name I’m not cool enough to know, let alone speak.

I think of them as neo-emo-goths.

 

Where did they come from…

Wherever it was

there must have been no sun.

They are so pale.

And they maybe played the paino.

With those long boney white fingers.

 

Where did they come from…

With these elven-waif features

and collar length hair

too apathetic for naturally-occuring color or texture

 

Where did they come from…

It must have been a place

where men only

were allowed product

for fingernails and eyes, lips and cheeks.

It must have been a place

with a surplus

of Nightmare Before Christmas

paraphenelia.

 

Where did they come from…

was it an underground dwelling

with roots poking through the low roof

where they were lined up

bony hip jabbing bony hip

where they were in a catatonia

unblinking

unmoving

until some

unspoken signal

triggered the Great Emergence

of the Gothic Groundhog Patrol?

 

Where did they come from…

Countless suburban closets

where they hung

upside down on pull-up bars

in silence

for years

patiently waiting

for the whole rap chic thing

to run its course?

 

Where did they come from…

perhaps they arrived from

some faerie world

on magical ships

with long sails unfurled…

Were those shopping malls deemed

as good a beachhead as any?

 

Wherever they came from

There is this cross-generational connection

It only last a moment.

 

(S)he is buying a stack

of C.D.s that evoke my childhood:

Oingo Boing

Morrisey The Cure

Madness, Pixies– of course the Pixies

and Sinead

 

The purchased is bagged

(s)he turns to face me and ruins the moment

with a Billy Idol whiplash smile

I realize this great confusion:

Is this schmaltz or for real

Is this camp or a home in the 80’s…

When you live

in a world fortified with irony

The sarcasm soon becomes

the very air that you breathe.

 

(This poem was my submission to Randy Elrod’s Wednesday Watercooler.  Click  here. to read the great posts at this gathering of great posts.)