Chris Mansel

In The Strangeness of Infernal Dreams

2010-09-08T23:07:00.003-07:00

in a land where the angels sleep in the road
and mothers shout with ecstasy
a hundred more years will not corrode
I'll be in the hollows of a noisy sea

and now December is hidden
and poverty swarms
someone has poured alcohol
on my heaven in the middle of a storm

madness is my ambition
and madness is my decree
I have medicated the orchard
and bottled the trees

I'll tear at my soul like a lover
on a nail in the ground by a shoulder blade
over this flagellant I will hover
and the mark will be made

Chris Mansel

Taxonomy Illustrata

2010-09-08T23:07:00.001-07:00

I'll show you silence
says the corpse in the window
his chest sprouting birds

imagine he says, a torn elbow seperating the stairs
or the life of a maggot once his insides hit the open air

chrysomya rufifacies here, he gesturing towards where
once his heart beat...one after another, he laughs

this silence I am speaking of you find as they feed,
I find the movements of deformities...unceasing and exquisite

this he said and his species shook until it was smoke

Chris Mansel

Anaplasia

2010-09-08T23:06:00.001-07:00

the mirror collapses
it falls but the image
does not

the sound of the glass
breaking
is archaic, it's an ancient sound
the amplitude
carries over into silence
it is a mutation

the timbre is unfounded
undifferentiation occurs
the image
is dominant

- Chris Mansel

Dear Sigmund

2010-09-08T23:05:00.002-07:00

dear sigmund, accept into your uncharted lands
an emisarry, young Cherkovski, aged sixty-five
he will be arriving on the Oceanic line carrying prints
of Hammershoi and papers of introduction from
his travels
as you open the window and greet him as he strolls
up the path into your garden, please realize he is
charitable and wise
please read and analyze his unpublished memoir
Cherkovski, may wish to stay on for some time
as it is his birthday.

Chris Mansel

Symphony In The Cold

2010-09-08T23:05:00.001-07:00

what you see in the smoke
is eating through the light
as if storytelling were to awaken
from beneath its blindfold
to a beautiful river who's breath
is immolation

- Chris Mansel

Relief In Passing

2010-09-08T23:04:00.002-07:00

a testimony from Babel
collapsing constructions of lies
like Dresden, translators fall to ash
cancer in the early drafts
gathered from the classrooms
falling asphalt fragmented into the sky

Chris Mansel

Pamphlet

2010-09-08T23:04:00.001-07:00

ghosts move about on frequencies
illustrating their own private hells
with each movement like a corpse's
raft circling the blast site
where a guerilla lowers his kerchef
to the sun, emptying his weapon
into my face

Chris Mansel

The

2010-09-08T23:03:00.002-07:00

The coyote half-submerged knows the current cannot hold him
The ash from the brush fire is like confetti
The naturalist is watched by the owl until he changes

- Chris Mansel

Nights In The Examination Room

2010-09-08T23:03:00.001-07:00

its indistinguishable, the cruelities
disseminating an experience by pain
where the cartographer listens as the ground moves
and hears nothing

Chris Mansel

Dostoyevsky From The Chinese

2010-09-08T23:02:00.002-07:00

Our guide is familiar with isolation and changes in the light
He shows us an ecosystem unknown to motion and reachable by light.
He draws a glacier on the ground and steps back,
gesturing towards the end of the day

chris mansel

Siberian Folk Tale

2010-09-08T23:02:00.001-07:00

if I bury you in the snow
I will wait till it rains
if I burn you in a car
I will leave your name
if I abandon you in a well
I will not drink

Chris Mansel

seneschal songs

2010-09-08T23:00:00.000-07:00

a monologue continues anonymously
while a body is carried above a sheet
to capture the sorrow and to be burned
spread the ashes over the body the voice explains
it began with Charles Dickensbefore his body was
removed and transported to India

- Chris Mansel

New Iowa ( a work in progress )

2010-07-05T22:52:00.000-07:00

footsteps on the head of a ram
....descent

There is no strength from holiness, the fetus in this weather must learn to fend
for itself. The new Buddha will form a line in the air, never to cross. Without death
the breath of gods are little more than the crunching rocks of an exodus. The precise
tracings of a circle that was first formed around the rim of a crest of fire. Shatter the
cave and your left with the sounds of dust smashing up against animal skin. Orpheus
slain to protect the hour of stillbirth.

trembling before the darker trees, hair spread on the ground. Angels like mucus-covered
crows jumping around in the skies. Younger ones yelling in indirect speech about the
ground rising, sweat becomes the bodies only defense to the odor of fear. Burn like a
direction and separate.

unmask, resin for flesh
cavernous omnivore, gestures
animate animal tones

Terrifying.

Imagined center of a bloody pit, faces in cadaverous cold. Emerging slowly from a crawling movement to dusk, misery running on the ground. Into the darkness where bulging eyes stare back in milky and horrifying expressions. Steps. Submersion. Hermetic
Ancients swinging axes of bone over shoulders scared. Silence. Coming out of the darkness upside crosses appear and stretch for miles in every direction. There is no movement except for the passing of air between scavengers who press their faces together.

Lit from a hundred wells, the meatiest obstruction penetrating the lips of the passerby. The horrid aroma of death consuming signaling the skeleton beneath the skin of intense displeasure.

The inhabitants remaining still, only vegetation, reduced almost to ash as it was, moving at all. Stopping upon the severity of the heat, the sounds becoming intolerable.

Dialect of approbation

Dead and whiten. The ground sunken. When they stopped a small form of animal formed its shadow upon them. It stopped away from them a short distance. The others in the distance still did not move. Still facing away towards the trees of darkness it was eerie. When they looked closely at the ground there were sticks, sharpened, facing out of the ground.

Water began to come up from the ground. Slowly at first and then more. The sunken ground began to fill and they moved to higher ground.

As they attempted to settle the animal spoke and approached.

That’s the reflection of hell. In the water….there. When it ignites, they’ll come.

Then the animal made his way back to where he had been. They looked around and noticed that many had turned to look their way, away from the dark trees. They turned to look at the water that increased its flow up from the ground faster and faster.

The ones who pressed their faces together were moving together as one. All around them there was movement. Suddenly there was a great heat coming up from the water. Their faces froze. Suddenly they heard thunderous movement coming towards them. Men with axes screaming in a language they did not understand. They were coming from every direction. The air grew very cold. Flames began jumping from the water as they dropped to the ground and held on to one another.

The first jumped over them and swung his axe at the flames. His body was engulfed in fire. His axe swung wildly as his body kicked and fought the fire. Others approached immediately. Some were dragged into the fire by the men with axes and were killed.
Ash covered the men as they collapsed onto the ground. Their milky eyes staring into nothing.

The sounds returned.

The horizon was masqued, severed in agony of ash and darkness. The ghastliness a foretelling of travel further on into this land. The men were up now and stood motionless with their axes at their side. Facing into the trees their heads slowly hung from exhaustion one could only surmise. The sounds were unbearable. A constant pounding. Not knowing the language, they offered what food they had at their feet and gathered together and moved on, moving closely together. Keeping sight of the ground and the minority of water they passed great hills of stone that appeared to have been wrecked into the earth.

Their procession was brought to a halt when they were met by a group of men with large hammers swung about in both hands. They gestured towards the children and kicked at the ground. They were confused by this until they looked past the men to see the ground in the valley below corrupt with huge insects. The insects were thrashing about and screeching.

Then a man stepped out from behind the men and spoke, “My name is Bots. These men are known as the Rau. They will help you.” The people spied Bots suspiciously. Finally one who had led the others spoke to Bots.

“We have passed through one land where water burst into flame. Men there came to our aid. This land too is strange to us. We have no destination, only to escape the darker times.”

“There is no more dark and light. Hell has come and all has come to pass. God has come and gone. There are no more revelations, no more second comings. We are all that’s left.” Bots said.

The insects began to approach and the Rau turned and raised their hammers. Their tails swung about and thrashed at the Rau, fangs gnashed and the Rau fought just feet away from Bots and the others. Bots guided them to a cave for sanctuary.

The noise outside the cave grew more intense until Bots spoke again. He bent down at the opening of the cave protecting the others.

“They can smell you. You have put them in danger by coming here. Once you were over the path they went into a frenzy.”

Again the leader spoke, “God has come and gone, you said. What is the chance of survival in a land….” he looked around at the others he had traveled with. “Who are you?”

“I am Bots. I have always been here. In one form or another I have always been here.”

prescience, shoulders dangerous
half-covered and prophetically fearful
outward peaks and inward/hellish image
Ancestral snakes, scorched from a hole in the
sky
Bots explained the origin of the insects. “They came from the riverbeds. Their births mixed with the collapse of vegetation. The vulva of their reproduction was misrecognized as disease, and was taken for weakness. Their incest became violent.”

They could hear the fighting growing ever closer to the entrance of the cave. They huddled together. Bots did not move away from the opening, even when the shadows of the insects towered over him.

Intimacy, incapable of anger/intimacy
Cracking the whiteness. The body/shudensha(last train
I confess,
…moving within.

Gravedigger, moving with his hands
forehead against stone
my impression is shaky

..give me

a photograph of hell.

The stones in the cave began to shake. You could feel the percussion of the insects slamming into the rocks. They gathered in a small group for protection. Bots stood still. They didn’t notice the water coming up from the ground until smoke crowed around their feet. Bots turned and stepped outside the cave.

- Chris Mansel

Goya's Penitentiary

2008-07-25T23:28:00.000-07:00

My shadow is on my face and its a darkness that I inhibit whenever I can. I find it personal and it is something I can't share with you. Not since I burned my clothes so hastily and proclaimed myself free of the mincing fear of myself have I been so confident. It all began in front of a statue of Goya. I turned to find myself a bandit, a driver, a male drawn too late. In a chapelI was Osiris, my clothes wet and by no means an August body. Unable to recuperate my precious breath, my body roaring. Discriminating. I hold no intimacy, I hallucinated an image of my soulin the background. Flung open at once, oil on a brush, tincture of a animal skin. This inevitable dying horse drug across my flesh, the position in my eyes was struggling, burning of my infection. I was in the painting wide awake. Forty three point eight by thirty two point seven.

- Chris Mansel

The Pineal Eye

2008-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

running from the earth
like a diamond in reverse
same as nature its heard
the front seat of a hearse
get the bad weather first

nothing is so divine
as the pineal eye
from a lizard to a king
from Lorenz to Laing

syphilitic through the vein
the ship's sails of intestine
sailing under another name
misguided as Charlton Heston
signal fire spelling out fear

nothing is so divine
as the pineal eye
from a lizard to a king
from Lorenz to Laing

its just a merciless suicide
to touch a child who's died
waters swollen from the tide
screaming till laughter cried
the hearse hits the pole first

nothing is so divine
as the pineal eye
from a lizard to a king
from Lorenz to Laing

- Chris Mansel

Bodhicharyanatara – The Reincarnation of the Peasant Buddha

2008-03-19T00:59:00.000-07:00

Irrational pubic descent, I remember waking with the taste of gasoline in my mouth. I knew I needed a change of clothing and I hadn’t eaten in a few days. Pubic bone severed my spine. A hair fetish overcame my companion and we spent the day at sea, the vagrancy sutra repeating in my head.

Helter skelter on my forehead, helter skelter in my hands. Blood is causing the boat to sink. We’re on the shore and there’s music. Tribal incantations to remove my spinal column, baptisms of urinary fornication. I am brought to a boil in pools of excrement and force fed the pages from my writings.

My companion dead now bobs up and down beside me, she died quickly before they could ask her anything. My vertebrae is removed and used as a drum by the shaman who tells me he can make me well. When I awake it is three years later and I am crawling the shore retching up blood and watching as the drops construct the Sistine Chapel in the sand. I collapse into the crucifixion.

- Chris Mansel

Drawers of the Wheel Watch

2008-03-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

ankles feasting dug their faces away
undergrowth reinforcing contempt
crawled mud-soiled body of one
a whisper that curls briefly – surging

immediately into the moment
Where it seems
To suddenly
Burst into place
Like a murderer loosened from the restraints
First black then white then back to white again
Burned the dead silence
Inebriated unmade bloodied
The dead lay face to face turned on their sides

The dead were exhausted

Reviving their ageless demise

Carrying themselves on their backs down the hell
At dusk to the gates brandishing sunken cheeks and tattered souls

(downpours of excrement)

were undressed and catered to the living
cold water poured under the door
in the darkening dream

siphoning every ounce of pain
that could be swallowed or beaten
the
gray
wash
of narcotics pouring
from
the faucet

the mystery has been thrown to the ground.

- Chris Mansel

Freud In Whiteface

2008-03-16T23:12:00.000-07:00

The psychologist prays into the cloth
his blood he carries in the ear of his dead child
immerses his soul into black coughs
mau-mauing turrets of speech
cupping his hands in the raw meat
drinking from his soul, answering her face
race guerriere
clotting the steam
pregonal
ejaculating lincocin
perspiration beading up on the floor
skin is dead, and forget the orgasm
will shed the phlegm of the conscious

- Chris Mansel

Jon Berry's 23rd Psalm

2008-03-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Creatures, seven stories depth of genetic sand
Fall into prayer and storm across the river alone
Becoming the leaves the laws would later appraise
Ectopistes Migratorius cutting the barrels way
A message for the highway, an arrest for the city lights

Suffering for the paved road, a gathering for the soul
The abandon wheel sought a tree with five limbs
Just then a thunderstorm passed over a hole
A Socratic garden erupted with air wafer thin
An alluvial plantation padlocked without the toil

An underground city where vehicles grow
Germinating light from the rows
Dispassionate about the blackened snow

- Chris Mansel

Photographed In The Distance

2008-03-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

The stars will beckon but not call
Their souls disintegrating
Like the prayers of the wicked
Or the youth of a child

- Chris Mansel

Night of Candles, and Dark Outside

2008-03-12T14:42:00.001-07:00

The muscles have so much left in them
to suspend the poison of the brain with
the animated shrieking of movement.

The head shaking, inside when you
can’t see the motion and the shaking
back and forth when you think I am
disagreeing.

My hands contort in almost the same
motion. Sometimes I think
when I am dead I’ll still be shaking when
the fires of cremation startle the skin and
relax the bones.

- Chris Mansel

Arias For The Midnight Runner

2008-03-11T00:36:00.000-07:00

I remember a body with ribs exposed leaning out of my hands
The heat of the day
And the pain in my head

I was open to the medication but closed to the symptoms
A coiled relief map of extremities
Trees awaiting the river to wash over the grass below

The notes of music that come from tires on the road
Coming from under the window above
Slowing when the wind slows

The phone that doesn’t ring anymore heated to 425 degrees
Receiving the bill by mutual respect
Ash not withstanding the caller

- Chris Mansel

Arias For The Burning Tire Ring

2008-03-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

The uncontrollable lines of the human form
Chained to the canvas, unable to escape
A horrible but convincing argument
For the end of sight

Sound from the open doorway aboard the
Sinking ship trails back to the darkness
Than to the remaining light of the day
Swallowing up the last gleaming, screaming
Shining tears from the reflections lost
Forever to the parental blue waters of the sea

She opens her ears and the holes close
We open the ground and the hole is filled
The body is laid in, the ear ring is hung

The evening she lost her finger
Her eyes dimmed

- Chris Mansel

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

2007-10-23T20:14:00.000-07:00

Photo by the author

This Poison Sun

2007-10-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

a rural baptism, in a war zone
an I.V. of clear liquid will do
quarantining in a Sunni neighborhood
an Iraqi who is HIV positive
hooded and detained, white blood cells
retracting like concertina wire
the Marine charged to watch over the detainees
sits with a pistol in his mouth
repeatedly trying to kick off his boot
under a poison sun

- Chris Mansel

Flashing The Hash At The Watergate Parts 1-6

2007-10-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

Part One:

Television news crews surround the steps of the courthouse as Scooter Libby begins a slow walk to his car after another day of testimony. Down the street looking like a moth eaten turtle in a helmet of burnt hair sits Karl Rove slipping rounds into an eighteen shot clip. Cursing quietly under his breath Rove ponders erratically the choice of taking out the cause of the spotlight on him or empty the clip into his face.

Jack Random and I were strolling by having recently relocated to Virginia to research a book on terror warnings, bank defaults and their ties to the white supremacist movement. I noticed Rove slamming his weapon into the dash of the car and just as I leveled the camera lens Rove hit the accelerator and sped down the street in reverse. The press up the street hardly took notice having heard the sounds of violence in the streets of Washington before.

Scooter Libby made his way out of the courthouse to his car. The press following and asking questions but not expecting any response. Like prison guards watching the monotony of inmates coming and going they hardly notice when a guard is attacked and the alarm doesn’t sound but the alarm will sound for Rove soon enough.

We tracked him to the Watergate Hotel and down the stairs into a conference room. Jack stood by the door with a high-powered microphone to eavesdrop on whatever was going on. I questioned the hotel staff tipping those on the lowest rungs of the pay scale and threatening with expulsion those who never got their hands dirty. Jack captured the goods and came back out to the car to play back the tape and as he hit rewind secret service agents surrounded the car. We showed our hands and they drew their weapons. Exiting the vehicle we were asked for identification. Some time ago we had made two press I.D.’s that showed we worked for the Washington Times that is owned by the Rev. Sun Yung Moon, a name that would open any door in the city of Washington, certainly the beltway. As we were held against the car we noticed Libby driving by in a taxi and exiting into the Watergate.

Part two:

Fear looks like hope in the tall grass and that’s where we were, two inches of steel surrounded by a hard durable casing, the smell of cordite, and the kind of smell you recognize that the weapon has been recently fired. Secret Service agents who when they surround someone begin chattering on their communication devices and slamming themselves in place. They took a few minutes to analyze the fake identifications we showed them and slowly there was a look of recognition in the lead agents face. If I didn’t know better I thought the c*cksucker was going to drop to the street and begin his prostrations. I noticed a scar behind his right ear and Jack saw it too. It was the mark of a true believer, a West Pointer. Somewhere along the line he had been burned by something, he had known the smell of human flesh being singed into an emblem.

A huge crowd had gathered around us, a crowd of civilians. The agents knew he had to save face so he immediately started ordering his agents to make way for us and reducing the citizenry to a mass of insecurities. Their violent wand of intimidation about no cameras or questions led those around us to believe we were important. I could sense the onlookers squinting their eyes and trying to remember what we looked like so as to be able to identify us if we ever showed up on the news.

After the melee Jack retrieved the recorder from the car and we quickly made our way into the Watergate. Slamming into a booth in the bar we began to listen back to the tape.

We knew we had to try and hunt up Libby but first we wanted to hear what we had managed to capture on tape. The following is what we were able to transcribe.

Two or three agents will be enough.
The word is out on the limos and Duke (Cunningham) has f*cked that for us.
Hell we could get some pickup for that matter. If anyone can operate a shifter on the column it’s a hooker.
How much you think it would take to get the old Arab to squat over Durbin and piss?

Part three

In the bar we met up with a photographer who had been staying at the Watergate at the behest of the manager of the hotel in order to photograph the renovation. He was paid a flat fee and given a room at the end of a hallway on the first floor. He explained to us that more than once he had been accosted by the Secret Service for what they describe as “loitering with intent.” He explained that he had overheard some of the recording and with a smile added that maybe we might be interested in some of the photographs he had taken around the hotel. Something in the way he said this made us believe that there was something more to these photos. He opened the satchel in front of him and we joined him in his booth.

The photographs were amazing. Some were of the hospital staff in compromising situations, photos of the restoration included the construction workers smoking pot and generally laying around on the job out of sight of the hotel surveillance system. As we looked Jack asked if he had anything more official, and with that question he lit up and turned towards the back of the collection to reveal covert photos of the Secret Service removing stuff from hotel rooms. In one of the photos a Secret Service agent carries a life-size sex doll made into an exact replica of G. Gordon Liddy. In another, an agent was holding a drunken Scooter Libby against the wall while he awaited the elevator.

Jack leapt to his feet and stormed over to the bar and grabbed at the phone to make a call. The bartender came down the bar and said something to Jack that I didn’t hear and Jack screamed, “If you’re mother was in this kind of situation you’d be on this side of the bar asshole!” The bartender who had seen many crazed looks like the one in Jack’s eyes (many from politicians) sulked back down to his newspaper.

“News desk! Hey. Mike! What would you do for a photograph of Scooter Libby being sodomized by an agent?”

The photographer looked at Jack and back down at the photograph and then to me.

“Well, you know the darkroom can do many things but these days a fraud can be spotted right away.”

I told him that it didn’t matter if the story was true or the photograph genuine. As long as it existed and was leaked in the right way it would show up on the news and get picked up by the wires.

I added, “If bullshit was the ration card of power the entirety of Washington would be bent over backwards digging corn.”

Part four:

As we left the bar we saw a group of Secret Service agents running to the salon located in the Watergate. We followed behind them to see a drunken Scooter Libby rubbing mud on his face and screaming about a free facial. Karl Rove was standing across the room talking into his cell phone. The Secret Service stormed into the room and Libby twirled the chair around at them and grabbing the terrified makeup attendant he started spitting on her neck and rubbing it in and screaming in a voice reminiscent of Truman Capote, “Isn’t it pretty, isn’t it pretty!”

The agents tackled the lady and Libby and began kicking them both. Rove sat down at the front desk and began flipping through the call caddy and copying down the names. One agent turned to secure the area and noticed us photographing the scene. The agent grimaced and started toward us but he slipped in the blood pouring from the woman’s forehead.

We ran down the hallway and were almost out of the hotel when Jack suggested we head for the conference room Rove had just left. We ran across the lobby and through the door. Down the stairs we met by a cleaning crew. We flashed our I.D.’s and took the garbage bag from them for inspection. They could have cared less why we needed it or for our identifications.

Back in the car I eased into traffic as Jack fished through the bag. He began laughing hysterically when he found a list of congressmen who had participated in the Duke Cunningham hooker scandal. Rove had the names circled and beside several of the names were amounts of money and personal phone numbers. One name in particular hit us more than others: Matt Drudge.

Part five:

Any member of the press core will tell you that if you shove the head of a baby into an airsickness bag and pop the bag immediately you will completely unsettle anyone near you. The mother will confess immediately every cock she had ever sucked and whether or not she saw what she had seen and testified what she had testified to in a case against a politician. This has been done in the case against the Bush administration. We saw the tale and we were there to report it.

Jack Random and I armed with cameras, starkly open and brutal honesty, we traveled to the tomb of the unknown soldier where we had been told Karl Rove held private conversations as tourists watched two guys in dress uniform flip around rifles in peace time and during war. Rove would appear we had learned with a hat pulled down over his misshapen ears. So there we sat waiting for Rove to appear when we noticed a representative from the Fox network we had photographed once on the balcony of a hotel in Maryland. He watched as he exposed him self to a group of Catholic priests. The Priests stood motionless in the tourist bus windows.

Waiting for Karl Rove had gotten to be a favorite pastime for Jack and I. We would sometimes pay someone to tip off the Secret Service that he had seen a photograph of one of them transporting illegal aliens into the streets of San Antonio and watch as the agent shoved the tipster against the wall. We didn?t do it too often as it usually cost us a couple thousand dollars and once it took the promise of an introduction to a certain celebrity who enjoyed urine in more than a relieving manner.

As Jack listened again to the tape from the hotel I saw a couple of tourists taking a few steps backwards. I watched closely as two agents opened one of the men’s shirts to reveal a listening device. I grabbed the camera from around Jack’s neck as he cussed me loudly. The agent took notice of Rove arriving in a sedan flanked by two women.

The man with the listening device made an attempt to punch the agent in the face and the agent was beating him senseless immediately. Every tourist eyes went right away to the noise. Rove and the two women made their way past the tomb to section thirteen of Arlington National Cemetery. As they walked we strolled quietly by the violent outburst of several agents now subduing the individual. By the time we were in the wet grass of the cemetery they had the man down to his underwear.

Part six:

Once Karl Rove had hit a stopping point in his mind he shoved the two women into the wet grass and began taking photographs of them. As they writhed in some kind of illicit blessing of Ronald Reagan, Rove began kicking at them in his sock feet. Agents had circled the area and had re-directed tourists away. As we tried to inch closer and closer we noticed a startled Juan Williams, the regular Fox news contributor getting out of a SUV. One thing was unusual however: the SUV had diplomatic plates.

Jack and I at seeing Juan Williams stood up and walked gingerly towards the scene. We had had several conversations in secret with Williams and whenever he saw us around town he would begin trembling, as he had been a bit too honest for his parties good. He had detailed one night how the party had during the 2000 election attempted to impregnate several Gore staffers by force.

We knew that if we could get a photo of Williams alongside Karl Rove kicking two half undressed women in Arlington National Cemetery we could get Williams to open up about the tree house in the White House as he has been long rumored to be the one with the apple in his mouth.

Rove was in ecstasy. He didn't get the warning that Williams was approaching as agents had told him. As the women were beginning to scream now, the agents didn't notice us either. As we got closer we could hear Rove's ranting, "We'll call this HR 666! Yea, take that Bay Buchanan betrayer of the chair!" The harder Rove kicked the women the louder they would chant, "Four more years, four more years."

- Chris Mansel

Jack Random and I in Iraq

2007-10-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally published at Jack Random's blog, jazzmanchronicles.blogspot.com

Part one

Jack Random and I burst into Iraq like a widow at a train station all out of quarters for the condom machine for that last ride to New Jersey for the High school reunion. The White House press office kept offering us our own poppy fields in the hills of Afghanistan if we just wouldn't go to Iraq. After breaking the story of Karl Rove and the Washington sex trade they would do anything to keep us away from the story. We were determined and even thought to go thru the wilds of Pakistan but why muddle in with the retreat of the Taliban, we end up in their clutches soon enough we were wagering.

Anyway, we hit the Iraq oil fields to the sight of an American truck broke down. Roadside bombs it was said weren't going off near the oil fields anymore since it was common knowledge the Americans would be out of the country in force by the end of 2007. The George Baker plan had just hit amazon.com and all of Beirut we had read over the wires had ordered a copy and soon all of Iraq would be reading it through the black market. Once again Ed Meese would be popular among those who killed for pleasure.

The drivers of the two trucks both U.S. military soldiers were cursing at the four Iraqi members of the police who had driven by earlier and had took off quickly and laughed at the two of them stranded. One of the soldiers wanted to go off and shoot the Iraqi police and the other had for weeks left on the most recent one year tour in country. When we asked them about the term "boots on the ground" they responded with as much hate and vigor as they had when we asked about the Iraqi police.

"Boots on the ground, goddamn! I tell you what the boots on the ground think about this f-cking war, there's too much blood, too much Iraqi blood and too much American blood, and not enough old blue blood from any red states!" The soldier kicked the front of the truck violently and looked back at us quickly, "Just why are you here anyway? I don't see no boots on the ground here between you two."

We reassured the two soldiers that we wanted to report an honest portrayal of what was going on in Iraq. The other soldier who had remained quiet for most of the time spoke up, "Let me tell you something. We were on a patrol about a month ago maybe two. A roadside bomb goes off and these Iraqi troops start firing at one another, ripping each other apart and we have to mop it up. How long have we been here and we are getting killed every day. Sometimes I just want to start shooting and I don't honestly give a shit what I hit."

Part two

How many screams did you hear until you knew they were coming from someone you could identify as someone other than yourself? That's a question you need to ask yourself when you have spent any time in a war zone.

Here we were in a war zone and as soon as we arrived we noticed that the poppy had followed here from the shores of America, from the rocky cliffs of Afghanistan. We investigated the cities amidst the sound of automatic gunfire and saw parents in the desert grip of drug addiction dealing with the unthinkable loss of three children in one day. We saw one child get his legs torn apart as visiting dignitaries bid farewell to the high security fences of Halliburton's white table cloths on CNN and its high rise bleachers. The grimace of Donald Rumsfeld quoting the words real or imagined from a wounded soldier at Walter Reed hospital.

In the days of slavery the crowd were treated to question and answer sessions between the seller and the slave. The slave was usually being judged by the crowd as to their build or visual strength so the Q&A were usually for the delight of the crowd and so in Iraq are the questions to Iraqi civilians as weapons are put in their faces by privately hired security, militia anywhere else in the world, or if you like insurgents in Iraq if it were not for the tax form they can produce given six months notice. We ran into these thugs several times and had our lives threatened until we lied and said we were with some government agency we made up on the spot. This never ceased to amazed us as it always pumped them up more in their blood lust and obscene patriotism for the red in the flag.

On American television the obsession is with crime scene investigation and forensics. There are no investigations to speak of in a war zone, especially not in Iraq. For instance, if you wanted to dig a mass grave and hide it with any education it wouldn't be too difficult, after all it is a desert region. This can work to the benefit of both sides in any war. Body counts make for headlines a soldier said once, just draw a line straight to the head, and you'll usually find more than one.

Part three

Dodge City, that's what the Marine's called the area we were in. One marine, so young he shaved once or at least twice a week whether he needed it or not had already killed three people. When I asked whether or not they were insurgents or civilians he just answered, "Well, one was shooting back and the others weren't, but screw'em man. I say arm yourself, shit we're MWA bitch, Marines with attitude!" Raised on MTV this white marine was born in Tennessee and had served a tour in the KKK while still in high school he told me before I even asked where he was from. When I asked him how he liked serving alongside other Marines he laughed and spit at the burning sand.

"You want to know what I think about all these highly esteemed people of color? They're all marines ain't they?" Then he laughed and patted his weapon and slapped it down to his side and saluted me and added, "You think nobody fragged anybody since Vietnam?"

How bad an epidemic racial strife between soldiers serving in Iraq was we might never know. Jack had secured an interview with a Major and was coming back across the camp and looked worried. As he walked he looked around, his head looking this way and that the way someone does before they tell you a secret or avoid someone they do not want to see. In the soundtrack in my head I instantly heard "Peace Frog" by the Doors. I don't know why these things always occur to me but they do. I remember a time in Chicago when I was covering a story on the heated talks betwen labor and management and War's "Spill That Wine" hit me all of a sudden and within minutes violence broke out and I spent the night in a jail cell fighting for my life.

Jack got over to me and his voice was quiet which was unlike him in so many ways. "This Major I went to talk to just got a call about an ambush of civilians. They were targeted by security forces." I looked around now because I wanted to be the first to get there and because the security forces always have friends serving in just about every platoon in Iraq and many after their tour is up will join private security to cash in.

I asked Jack, "How do we get there?"

Jack replied, "That's just it, the guy that called him while I was sitting there is his brother, and his nephew was in charge of the group that opened fire. I just got out of the office before the crazy bastard could call a corporal to detain me."

I looked around and as far as I could see were Marines with weapons at the ready, well trained and loyal to their commanding officer, the chain of command. I stood to scout a method of transportation, a friendly ride to anywhere other than where we were and saw the Marine from Tennessee. I turned to Jack and looked back at the racist marine and I thought I might have a plan. Shit it worked in Hollywood.

-----------------

Author's Note: (Before beginning to write this next installment I see this excerpt from the New York Times, and I am constantly reminded that the ugliest of man often occurs to me and as I see through their eyes it makes me want to close mine. I had no idea of this report before I wrote about the racist Marine but I am not surprised as human nature often tends to lean toward that line from Apocalypse Now that quotes Abraham Lincoln, you know the one, "Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and good does not always triumph." I don't see any good in this, after all where can there be good in starting out to shoot someone because of thier skin color?)

"Lance Corporal Woods is black. He smoked in the darkness and said it has been a topic of conversation in his unit, Mobile Assault Platoon Five. "Valdez and me talked about that," he said. "He's Hispanic. He said, 'Man, I'm going to paint my skin darker, man.' That's what he said. And the next day he got shot."

"I hate this place," he said..."Out here, it really makes you love your country. I love my country, man. I love my country. I didn't hate my country before, man. But I had some problems with it."

"The United States of America," he said. "That sounds like heaven right now."

C.J. Chivers, "Marine Unit and Iraqis Fend Off Attacks and Boredom," NY Times, 7 December 2006.

Part Four

Jack and I came up with a plan. Racists are notoriously patriotic, reference most of America's history, governmental and citizenry for evidence of this, and certianly ignorant, so Jack approached the marine from Tennessee playing the role of a C.I.A. agent.

Jack approached the racist marine who was kicking at the sand and aiming his weapon at the horizon.

"Hey, you hear about that American got shot in Fallujah yesterday?"

The marine looked around and then looked Jack up and down. He didn't take but a second or two to size up Jack. "Yeah, terrible shot that guy, took'em two."

Jack laughed, "Yeah well, what are you gonna do, poor training."

They both laughed and Jack shot me a worried and disgusted look.

Jack went on, "Say, John Russell, C.I.A., in country to take care of some loose ends. Not saying we need some help but always looking for some willing participants, those who can be covert and keep their goddamn mouth shut. It's below the radar of course." Then Jack snatched the weapon from the racist marine's hands so fast he told me later it scared even him, "So, you got the balls to pull the trigger without caring where the rounds land or are you just another weekend faggot here till your wife fucks the whole town back home?"

The racist Marine stood up and drew a knife and said, "I'm an American, ever since 9/11 I wanted to do what was necessary for my country to fight terrorism!"

Jack didn't break a sweat and went back after him, throwing the weapon to the ground, "Since 9/11? What were you doing before that? Working in a conveinence store and cheating on your mother? Real American? Shit!"

The racist Marine was livid now and was ready to open fire on anyone. Jack knew he was ready and in less than five minutes.

Jack said, "Ok,you're what we need. What we need right now is a humvee. Think you can get one here and I mean now Marine?"

The Marine flashed a shit-eating grin, "Before you know it!."

Part five

Driving through the wasteland that has become Iraq you pray you'll run into an arms dealer and you'll also pray he'll have some legs and a few hands, some teeth and eyes. You hope he'll start the bidding with a request for just a drop of water to pour atop the loaves and fishes he has brought to feed the warring tribes as they sit down and start to calmly discuss the atrocity that is unfolding on american television that has been unbelieved so far on Al Jezerra. Maybe you'll cringe when he says offhandly that he was kept out of Rwanda because the prosthetics he had brought along couldn't make it through customs years before the tightened security of 9/11. But then again in Iraq as in many other war zones in modern times the dust will get in your eyes and you'll be able to blame the blurred lines of aggression, of morality, on the weather and the politics of plurality, the obscenity of greater good, on something in your eye. but to the racist marine Jack was dealing with it was something eaten away at his soul a long time ago. Not a speck of dust introduced at the factory but a giant ball of hatred either beaten or lovingly enthralled upon a young boy who before he knew hot to hate was taught that one man was better simply by the color of his skin and it was unfortunate for his fellow Marines and the citizens of Iraq that this individual was not weeded out and was armed and set loose in a war zone. A casualty is a number in any year whether it contains an election or not, and in Iraq as well in America the news was not good.

Then almost as if on cue came the Marine from Tennessee behind the wheel of a Humvee. In the distance came a mortar attack, it's the sound you'll never forget if you ever hear it once. The entire camp reacted at once. The Major that Jack had interviewed came out of his command post and was scanning the desert for the action. Marines were running for their companies and there was hollering all around us. The Marine from Tennessee seemed unfazed. In Jack he saw a direct line to the killing and he was not about to be tied down to waiting for orders and seeing whether or not he would see action that day.

The Humvee came to a sudden stop in front of Jack as he tried not to jump out of his skin. The Marine jumped out and started counting the clips for his M16. "Gotta go get some, just a mortar, maybe just a few of'em!"

Jack was still keeping an eye out for the Major who hadn't discovered us just yet. But we had a problem. Jack was on one side of the camp and I was on the other and in the middle was the Major and a camp in a frenzy stocked full of Marines with posters of Osama Bin Laden with supermodels taking a dump on his face and handdrawn pictures of Bin Laden on diaylsis being tied down to an electric chair repeatedly.

Just as Jack and I were about to lock eyes across the camp and exchange a voiceless means of communication we had managed to develop in some of the world's worst hot spots, an incendiary device went off inside of the camp and the mess tent went up in flames. The explosion was minimal but sent a surge further into the camp as another mortar landed about a hundred yards away from the camp.

Jack grabbed the Marine from Tennessee and screamed, "What are you boy a Dixie Chick or Daniel Boone? Get in there and get some!" Pointing at the spot whers the mortars landed he got the Marine's attention and he raced off to where Jack had pointed. Jack seized the moment and jumped behind the wheel of the Humvee. Dodging troops who were running for the mess hall more from curiousity than anything, Jack skirted the perimeter and made his way to me and I jumped in the open driver's side and we were off. Speeding down the only road out of the camp that wasn't being hit by mortars we were on our way to the site of an ambush knowing all along that a marine Colonel knew who we were and that we knew that he was related in more than one way to the incident.

The words of the racist marine rung in my ears, "You think no one has fragged anybody since Vietnam?"

Part six

Moving around in Iraq you can be reminded of the image of James Cagney's famous line, "Top of the world ma!" But only if you look at it from the ant's point of view. Imagine the ant as an insurgent. Yeah, top of the world but the top has a hole in it and it goes all the way to the bottom. The bottom branches out and comes up to a point and resembles a volcano. But rather than resemble the fiery furnance of the first Gulf War, (the image of the Iraqi oil fields graced all manner of media around the world) but now the volcano is purging blood, oozing limbs and the mangled childhoods of burnt and homeless Iraqi children.

How do you approach a crime scene in a war zone? How do you make your way through a maze of distraught family members who are rushing around helpless to the carnage of their family members having been shot by officially licensed gunmen by the government who has invaded their country. If you are a reporter you make it clear to all those who are around that you are a reporter, a correspondent, and are not armed. If the privately armed security force is still present you make it damn clear that you are american, but you also make it clear that you are someone more important than you are. You impress upon them that it wouldn't be so good to open up on you and you pray like a virgin on her wedding night that their cell phone batteries have gone dead and haven't gotten a call from a particular Marine major.

As we sped away we could see in the distance black smoke billowing out of a building in the distance. Ahead of us in a pickup two Iraqis were shifting around nervously in the seat and as we came alongside them they shot a nervous glance at us until they realized we were not U.S. soldiers but they could not know if we were not private sercurity forces, who in some circles have been called cowboys. There was even a rumor in command circles of a Taliban website that referred to the "cowboys" being displaced in Iran, not unlike the way american forces were moving across the Cambodian border in Vietnam. As we rode alongside the truck for what seemed like two minutes the Iraqi in the passenger seat raised a pistol up to eye level and aimed at my head. I yelled for Jack to speed up and Jack hit the gas and we sped along as four shots bounced off of our Humvee.

I yelled over to Jack, "I hate to ask a stupid question but how much gas do we have?"

Jack answered, "As far as I know we've got enough to get to the site of the ambush but what do you think about ditching this Humvee?"

I thought for a minute and asked, "I don't know, something bothers me about that shit back at the camp. How the hell do you lob mortars at a camp and miss by a hundred yards and manage to hit with a fragmentation grenade? How the fuck do you explain the physics of that one?"

Now Jack looked worried, "You think the frag was a cover to get at me?"

"Well Jack, you did hear the phone call..."

Part seven

As we approached the scene of the ambush the humvee took fire. Families were gathered over the wreckage of what were once bodies. If you have ever seen footage on television of men and women in some third world backwater holding one another and crying uncontrollably and waving their arms at the cameras and pointing at the bodies then you didn't smell the bodies burning. You didn't see the casual way the network cameraman replaced the film in his camera and began taking photos again like the carnage was just another stop on the way to the Pulitzer. He knows that he will be back in another watering hole soon enough.

In Iraq it's not like in Vietnam. You didn't just hop aboard a C-140 and then grab a Huey out to a shithole to scrap about to the shit. In Iraq the shit was the day of Tet, every single day. Thanks to a foreign policy of "Bring 'em on." One thing Jack and I could never figure out was why they called the area where the american troops where located the Green Zone. The only thing we came up with was when we interviewed the civilians in Iraq and they all responded with the same word, "Halliburton."

Halliburton had funded this attack. Private security forces had opened fire on innocent men, women, and children.

We turned around and around, Jack turning the humvee against the shooting and slammed the front across the curb of the highway. Both sliding out of the driver's side, we were still taking fire.

Jack screamed out, "You see where it's coming from?"

I was caught, frozen in the moment. I was watching a woman as she caressed the head of a boy. As she lifted his head up to her lips I could see that half of his head had been shot away. Blood had caked around his nostrils and from there, there was nothing. Somewhere on the bloody street his bloody mouth had been torn violently from him. As rounds exploded all around her she wept uncontrollably. While others ran for cover and Jack and I tried to save our lives she was shot through the heart while mourning the loss of this child.

Jack gripped my shoulder, "You see where it's coming from?"

I was shocked back into consciousness when a shot knicked my wrist and sent blood shooting across my hand. Before I had a chance to cuss or holler I looked up and noticed an Iraqi man wearing a black handkerchief aiming at my head from across the street. I jumped up instantly and grabbed Jack and jumped into the pool of blood in the grass by the front wheel.

The Iraqi man fired just as I jumped and just missed me. Jack cussed as I crushed all of my body weight on top of him, sending him face first into the bloody grass. We rolled and came up for air just as a car bomb exploded up the street.

The news cameraman crawled over to us, "Either one of you journalists?"

Jack and I looked at each other, I responded, "Now just what in the hell does that matter now?"

The cameraman didn't bat an eye, "I thought you might get my film to the network office, my cell is fubar."

I stared at the cameraman a moment and said, "Oh sure, yeah, we'll get it there, no problem."

He answered, "Great, tell'em about ten or twelve dead maybe more, I'm going after the car bomb."

The cameraman made his way crawling on his belly through the bloody grass in the direction of the explosion.

Jack smiled as he watched me open the film canister and expose the yellow film to the flames not three feet away from us. I handed the film to Jack and he tossed it in. We weren't going after the car bomb, we were going after the truth and fame and glory didn't have any role in this tragedy.

Part eight

The only human right you have in Iraq these days outside the idling engine of a military transport plane is just that, you are a human at that moment. But step out of the plane into the dusty air and you are the margin for victory, a landslide on the abacus. Translate that into political capitol and you are the means to an end, the straw on the camel's back that like a dowser's wand leads the way to the oil, damn the body count, this is war. Damn men, stiff upper lip and all, this is economics.

It's hard to keep a global ledger in mind when you are bleeding on an Iraqi street. It's even more difficult when you are in the grass which is much cooler but is covered not only in your blood but the blood of children and the twisted metal of automobiles and weapons. Any weapons in a firefight can be a weapon of mass destruction when paint is tearing and flicking away into your eyes, remember that if you ever find yourself hunted by the military of your own country in a foreign land.

The car bomb exploded again as best we could figure as there was another explosion almost right away. One thing you will never understand if you are ever in Iraq is the term, Improvised Explosive Device. That description alone brings to mind Timothy McVeigh going into a Wal-Mart and buying a few items and coming out with two shopping bags and some d cell batteries. There is nothing improvised about any of these devices, nothing thrown together on a whim. It's not like the Vietcong rushed down from the jungles of North Vietnam with just some nails and fertilizer and had to first find a rental truck or take flying lessons. Read back through the reports from Iraq when Saddam was in power and there weren't any I.E.D.'s being exploded. Create the demand and journalists will recoil only slightly before rushing in and that was where we were, rushing in on our bellies.
I looked up and noticed the Iraqi man with the black handkerchief had taken off his disguise and had exposed his american features. I grabbed my camera and shot a few stills of him reloading. Using the second explosion as cover the famalies who had been caught out in the open ran to cover as shots sprayed the streets like vipers snipping at their heels. I grabbed Jack and pulled his face over to mine, his look of confusion moved to anger as he noticed the american.

Jack whispered to me, "Dirty son of a bitch!"

Looking around us we noticed the famalies had made it to cover and one man was waving us over to the door of a storefront.

I grabbed Jack by the shoulder and notioned to him, "We got to make it, the bastard knows we're here."

As soon as I seriously allowed myself to consider running across a street being riddled with gunfire I instantly thought to myself, "You're a journalist and this asshole is trying to make you a soldier!"

I choked back fear and crippling anxiety and slinging blood from my hand onto the street I darted across the street with Jack alongside me. We made it just as the entire front of the building erupted in flames and smoke as a grenade was shot into the street in front of the wall. Once inside the man and his family motioned for us to follow them. As we made our way through the store the man stooped for a moment and stopped to pick up the body of a woman who had been shot. The bullet had gone clear through her skull and glass had sprayed her face, scarring it horribly. Jack and I each grabbed a leg and with the man we made our way to a vehicle outside.

We searched the roofs for private security forces but saw none, evidently they hadn't planned ahead and this gave us pause. We were at least 45 minutes late to the scene and this was as far as they had gotten. What had stopped them? What had we missed? Somehow we had to find out if they had suffered any casualities and we had to ask our saviors here what had happened but first we had to reach a safe distance.

Part nine

If you took the weight of the ocean that erupts in pain at the slightest breeze from across the world and threw it at a child and then took notes on the impact you'd see before your very eyes what war can do. Those notes would be the propaganda you could use to turn the tide on the floor of the U.S. congress and that propaganda could sustain any rationale of turmoil or loss or life. Sound irrational? In the young year of 2007 the political landscape of the world has become the wall that mankind has been backing up towards since the beginning of time. The spear flies through the eye of the storm, through its splendour and blue skies, through the calm and bereft moment of wreckage only to land as the clouds begin to darken and the rains re-approach from the east.

There is no soundtrack on the ground, "boots on the ground" as they say. No combat photographer in khaki has a camera crew following him or her around making sure they are captured in the right light as they help the wounded child to safety or as they seduce the Catholic missionary in the dimming light of the battlefield. War is ugly, it is obscene and the sounds you hear are the screams and the sounds of gunfire, the recoil. If you listen close enough you can hear the gunman next to you change his field of vision, not because you have spent so much time together in a war zone or in that distinct battle but for the fact that your senses are so heightened that your fears are leaping so far from your skin they erupt like the ocean with the slightest breeze from the gunman's movement from across the room.

Jack and I had been in many situations before where our lives were in danger and we had been in situations where we were so compelled into an idea that as we moved along with the story we ached for adventure or excitement.

On the campaign trail, following presidential candidates we would often sneak away from the subject and do what the industry calls a "human interest" story. You've read that line before and wondered what that means. It's not slice of life or inspirational as you might think. A hardened newspaper or wire service editor will call it a story about a nobody, a worthless sidebar or whatever he can come up with at the moment until it gets picked up or noticed. Then you are gold.

For instance we did a story once on a midnight shooting about a woman who was shot two blocks away from a hotel where a candidate was staying. It was a parallel piece. We mirrored their movements. As the candidate was taking the stage and fluffing out his speech she was being struck by the first shot. As the candidate told the first of many jokes in his speech the cartilage in her leg exploded and severed the nerve in her leg and she began to bleed uncontrollably.

When the story was presented the next day we were attacked from one end of the country to the next for sensationilizing the candidates visit to that dear city. We were told directly not to come back. This was the way we felt as we raced ahead of a grenade in Iraq in the back of a car with a family who's only thought earlier that day was survival.

As we each grabbed a leg and the man cradled her head we hurried as best we could out the back of the house. The noise was unbelievable. We could hear the private security forces shouting in english behind us. I was bleeding and all I could think about was their safety and Jack's and going back out the front of the house and somehow returning fire with whatever I could find. I had been shot at before by americans in my own country but not in Iraq. These were criminals, government sponsored thugs who were sure to get away with murder if we didn't do our job.

As we got outside the man's family was cowering in the front of the car mindful that we had to get the now deceased matron of the family into the backseat. I've never helped to put a dead body into a small car, especially one that I had to ride in also. I looked up and Jack's expression was of hurt and anger. He was quiet which was unlike him in a situation of stress but I was aware that he was focused.

As we got her into the car the man noticed that my hand was bleeding. In poor english he took me by the bicep and said, "Wait, here."

He reached into the backseat and tore a piece from the old woman's dress and wrapped it around my hand and tied it there. I couldn't move I was so struck by what he had done. Tears sudenly and immediately streamed down my face. The man padded me on the arm and shook Jack's hand and motioned us into the backseat of the car.

I looked at Jack and he looked at me. I couldn't do it and neither could he. There was no way we could crawl inside on top of the woman even if it meant that we would be shot at any minute. That was the difference between people like this man and his family, people like Jack and myself and the people who were terrorizing this country from both sides. We were good at heart and could not and would not break the simple and fundamental means of life that make us who we are.

We motioned for him to get in the car and go. He tried and tried to get us to get in but we said no.

Jack stammered, "No, take your family and go! Go! Go!"

As we watched the man drive away his son turned around in the front seat and watched us with no expression. I don't think he had any idea what was taking place but it saddened me to know that this boy would remember it all some day. War is no place for a child.

Part ten

In the final stage of the Gulf War, American troops engaged in a ground assault on Iraq, which like the air war, encountered virtually no resistance. With victory certain and the Iraqi army in full flight, U.S. planes kept bombing the retreating soldiers who clogged the highway out of Kuwait City. A reporter called the scene "a blazing hell...a gruesome testament....To the east and west across the sand lay the bodies of those fleeing."

- Howard Zinn, Introduction to the book, "Target Iraq: What The News Media Didn't Tell You" by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich.

To date almost 35,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq.* You can't stand them end to end as the old saying goes because a good number of them are not all there anymore. Have you seen what these so-called improvised explosive devices do to the legs of a child? You wouldn't see it on American television because it just isn't shown. If you have a sateilite you might catch a glimpse of it on Al Jazeera but that has been dismissed as propaganda so you would just flip away to something else.

As Jack and I watched the man and his family drive away from his home, the dead woman's body in the backseat, we had a pretty good idea what a roadside bomb could do to a body. We had a damn good idea what an american grenade could do to an Iraqi woman of about 70 to 75 years of age. In the front of the house we could hear the radio traffic, it was american military signal. The nearby camp, the one we had just left, was mopping up a recent attack.

It was just a year before that I had seen a reporter from The Sunday Times get decapitated in Jerusalem in an attack that didn't officially happen during an official visit by the British government while he was riding in a car that I was almost riding in. Every time I watched a car drive away without me in it I had horrible feelings, like a waking nightmare where the monster crawls up from under the bed and begins assembling the ropes strand by strand and explaining why he is here to kill me.

My worst fears were soon upon me as Jack and I searched intensely for an escape route out of the situation we had volunteered for. It was a small stretch of houses and there was not a lot of room to hide if the security forces came looking for us which they were sure to do. They had "skin in the game" to quote a terribly inept phrase of the last century. As the car made its dusty way along the cratered field it came under fire. Jack saw a hole under the house two doors down we could escape through and was pulling me in that direction but just like when I watched the lady gripping the body of the boy in the street before I was frozen in horror. Jack slapped me twice and kicked me in the leg, shouting, "They're coming through the house, damn it come on!"

As we shriveled our way under the house and into a pathway that led up and into the next house over (a pathway which must have been created to escape what I don't know but it was convenient to us), the security forces came through to where we had been standing and on their radios directed the fire on the car the man and his family were trying to escape in.

Up and into the next house which had been abandoned due to the shelling and bombing, Jack and I ran to the front window and saw American military racing to the front of the house. It would be a few moments before they would organize and attempt to secure the area. It was now or never.

We bolted out of the door and ran into the street and turning the corner we ran into a pack of Iraqi civilians who were just as shocked to see us as we were to see them. A man who must have owned the house we came out of screamed at us in English for leaving the door open, "They will tear the place apart, asshole!"

We had to reach a vantage point to keep in view of what was going on but not so close as to remain in the line of fire or identification. In the streets of Iraq this is almost as impossible as in the jungles of Thailand or Laos when you are two American journalists sprayed with blood and shaking in fear.

- Chris Mansel

Worms

2007-07-31T04:34:00.000-07:00

god cut the river that made the bank
the devil made the fish that eat the bait
for years they swam around in a tank
but they were destined for a plate

because of the crime rate...
they lost their soul mates...
there was no great debate...

the devil just liked to watch.

- Chris Mansel

Bixby Canyon, On The Wing (for Neeli, Ivan and JLandry)

2007-06-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

from the night I spent standing near the cliff's edge
I saw cancerous cells being carried from the beak
of a mother's beak to the waiting mouths of crying birds
As they were fed and retched and learned to fly
a twisted reflection appeared, like dirt on a windshield
the next step in water would reach hundreds of feet
scattered among the clouds, abrupt to one's memory
the first lines of constellations irreversible to the flutter
wings falling from the sky

- Chris mansel

Anemone

2007-06-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

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Let's Atrophy The Departed

2007-05-29T21:24:00.000-07:00

The barrel of a weapon is pointing at you, in fact its alread beneath your skin and if you were to stop you might actually smell the ammunition a finger pull away from your disconnected brain matter. Just how do you expect the blood and bone surrounding it to stop the blast?
Where did this weapon come from and why is it pointing at you, well it is simple really, just stop and think. No seriously, just stop and think. Come up with it yet?
When you close your eyes do you hear a terrified voice screaming, "Movement in the treeline!" Do you hear, "I.E.D!" Do you hear, "Crash, code blue, sorry sir, you can't come back here!" Or do you hear "The driver was drinking and had a blood alcohol level of..." Maybe you hear, "I want to join the National Guard."
The poison is coming mother and father, sister and son. The wind is going to blow your sand castle into the sea and all the shells along the shore are just gonna give you that thousand yard stare, it's nothing new to them.

- Chris Mansel

After The Turning of The Wheel

2007-05-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Possessing a dream can lend to the eye someone once said and that entails that you are awake in the dream. This defeats the scientific makeup of rapid eye movement and wouldn't that be a ticket to drag down to the market and sell by the ounce. In a dream a man cross himself in the traditional Cathoilc prayer north/south/east/west and assumes the stance of an animal on all fours. He begins to growl and behind him an engine starts up and out of his mouth fires three rounds of ammunition. Upon the eye of the dreamer blood splatters and the chorus of singers erupt on the car radio mounted to the engine block. The man breaks the stance and jumps back and begins tearing apart the engine and eating it. He stops before ingesting the radio and thus the music does not stop. In a dream color can lend to the viewer a better reality, a market shift in the process whereupon he or she will feel they have expierenced something no one else ever have and they will feel the need to share it with everyone else. This begins the dreaded art of advertising and the downfall of conversation after the turning of the wheel.

- Chris Mansel

Butterflies ( for Neeli Cherkovski)

2006-08-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

Transatlantic butterfly
Translucent cocoon, on metal railing

Protected species, your frail design
More precious than ancient Chinese inks

Butterflies in the story of creation
Grace landing on the head of the serpent

Kept in captivity under glass
Adoring eyes do not remove the pins

- Chris Mansel

Bob Dylan

2006-08-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

Dylan says modern recordings "atrocious"Tue Aug 22, 2006 1:30 PM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is "atrocious," and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc.

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, "Modern Times," next Tuesday.

Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."

Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.

"Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."

Down By The Riverside

2006-08-17T00:19:00.000-07:00

Wash me down with alcohol
Leave a little in the bottle
I’ll be sending for it in the spring
Pull me back from the throttle
I’ll be going down the riverbed in flames

A house of detention with sunlit floors
Pushing a mop over the seat where I sit
Send the bottle this winter won’ t you dear
They won’t let you open your veins here
Cause I’ll crawl inside when I done with it

All nightmares have come true
I’m alone in a room with you
Take a picture and throw it in the fire
I’ve endured your final lasting ire
I’ll be going down the riverbed in flames

Chorus:

I have constrained and walled myself in
I’m the opening to hell that invites in
Those who go down by the riverside
Down by the riverside

- Chris Mansel

Apocalypose Now

2006-08-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

Saigon... shit; I'm still only in Saigon... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now... waiting for a mission... getting softer; every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.

- Francis Ford Coppola

God's Times of Death

2006-07-25T00:48:00.000-07:00

The graves of eastern religion are horned
There are no birds in the Holy Land…
Television prints the pages of the Koran
The divine now illuminated.
Martin Heidegger writing,
“Every spoken word is already an answer.’

Confusing language with prayer, with war
A Jewish Star becomes a Muslim emblem for
Sobriety, hell must be approached like the first
Insects to the corpse, the anguished state.

- Chris Mansel

Well for Water

2006-06-30T03:05:00.000-07:00

When the darkness finds you it looks a lot like the light. Many artists and writers are ill informed as to its illumination. Change becomes hunger and anxiety when faced with every new day, each new work, the feelings of adrenaline and despair mirroring the same level of intensity.
There is no logic or specific lecture you can draw on to endure what is happening to you when you discover a talent or desire to create. The synapse clicks and its rotors counter every movement until even acts of sexuality or daily requirements of living become contrary to the process of living.
Shakespeare wrote, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” Medication is what makes an artist an individual.

- Chris Mansel

The Hickory of Oak and Down Crucified Man

2006-06-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

Part one

Brokered from a well of broken spirits, noosed, a rope of blood from the neck before. Wearing church slacks, coat and tie throat slit from the bushes jumped onto the wagon seat. Throat slashed from ear to mole, shrieks of horror and bodies lying in state. Contribute to the drying well before you start home. Won’t be coming back to services tonight. Scalp feathers on the axe hanging on the wall, and a slow fire burning and water on the road. The next day a holiday and horses in the pasture, the smell of gun powder riffing up through the over night pass in the hills.
Later chain gang baking in the hot sun, perspiration beading up like a widow’s cheeks on Christmas morning. Gray faces in a Mississippi graveyard hoeing Alabama dust. The sermon won’t have a wishbone or a plate of beans. Glory is in the stones you pull up along the way. Young boy walks his fingers across the 88’s, the rugged cross-burned down into the coals of hell. Nails holding together the axe head to pine and a copperhead on Waterloo shores where Indians once boarded a ship. Brown skin weighting in the water that turns over itself.
A young lady from Texarkana rubs her dress against the fence. The warden’s niece on her way to church watches the water cup passed from bucket to chin. Years before the depression stretched to the shores of Africa and the coastal lands of Germany. Before the war struck an industry of disposable labor. Before the chain gang became the factory window. The young lady eased her skirt from her bare foot to the snap of the hosiery safety pin device, a sight surely to make Uncle Remus pour out his whiskey to shuck oysters from the side of the road.

- Chris Mansel

Half A Decade

2006-05-08T03:08:00.000-07:00

I’m a moment of quiet clarity
Of indecent integrity
A conceitful exposing light
A frail and open permissive night

I’m a window open to the floor
A bed at night with a whore
A lamp that burns butter for monks to pray
I’m a writer you’ve never read who doesn’t go away

An artist who would carry a tree to a stone
A reverent and lustful tome
An escaping rat from a docked ship
I’m all of these on this list

- Chris Mansel

Brooklyn Visitation

2006-05-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

I’m thinking of you Allen
In what was once the area of the caregiver?
The restless inhibition of a lonesome traveler
Doomed to celebrity and not to sex
This asylum riddled Oedipus wrecked
The diagnosis of cancer
The transgressions of idyllic marriage?
Allen marrying on a May Day street
While Chicano worshippers roast in effigy
The office of the president

Noise would run to your window
Hospital beds turned to puzzle floors of black and white
Coffins carried of migrant workers
Shot while tossing lettuce into baskets and not into salads
The corporate dining room looking over
The hospital parking lot
The grounds dingy with rebellion and water bottles

Allen your gentle heart swarming the sutras for sound
Calming the protestors with a gentle sigh
The Internet now reaping the revenue of your reporting from Chicago
Set it now Murrow would have said

Allen your penis in the sawdust of a master’s degree dissertation
Allen your poetry read at the trail of a lover in Italian magistrates diction
Allen the de-colonized Jew Buddhist Lama resting above the blackboard
At Brooklyn College
Allen your songs of Blake in the hymn books in eastern seaboard schools

Allen what is the phrase of your humanity, where is your soul
I’ve seen you on my bookshelf and wondered
Allen is there no natural condition

- Chris Mansel

Louisiana

2006-04-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

They found the Ark of the Covenant when the waters began to recede
You’ve never seen New Orleans look the world more in the teeth
Not since the Daily Crescent in 1848 set its type into print
The world was always looking for the ink in the fold to indent

Butter lamps and the luxuriant of America pulled to the rivers edge
Slaves from Haiti and Africa moving towards Rampart Street’s ledge
Buffalo meat hanging from the street lamps and sold through the door
Followed by a caravan of murderers, politicians, thieves and whores

Sunsets when the masters hide in the field and the slaves embark
When the hail falls like a lariat and the smells carry it into the dark
The berth of Ship Island covered in the ashes of Marie Leveau
Even today all the cypress know to turn from black to blue

Throw the boat astern even hell burns
Cast off the lines and lean into the turn
Louisiana, Louisiana even heaven can turn

- Chris Mansel

LIstening Post

2006-04-25T02:54:00.000-07:00

A void of apprehension
Orchestras of technique and noise
Reversed upon the learning of speech
Irritating the ventilation of sound escaping

The wing-span of birds considered and measured
the lapping of a brook controlled by movement of stones
to refit the narrative of nature, to reuse the listener
the rights of our brethren in the asylums
who were taught magic and dismissed at their peak
to destroy the tune bound by the white whale

the invocation of a seizure
the choreography of a starless night
the sound of sunken ships jostling about in the dark Atlantic

that is the sound, that is the music, that is the poetry I hear…

in my soul.

- Chris Mansel

The Relief Boat (Oren's Aboard)

2006-04-24T02:43:00.000-07:00

Ten days in the kingdom of evenings falling
A new shepherd lies down by the creek bed
His decisions are like widows speaking in a dream
And all he sees is what rolls around in his head
All he sees is what rolls around in his head

Tree touch the garden floor and the rain never falls
Insects in a sea circus are corpulent in their dismay
Dreams are like shadows of kitchens on narrow walls
The weather ashore is garnered even as it loses its way

Buggered and dirked by a Thessalonians darker side
A fellow traveler with worse rolling around in his head
The custom being to kill his children and sleep with his wives
He travels until he reaches the creek bed and goes inside

- Chris Mansel

Presence (After reading a poem by Hank Lazer)

2006-04-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

12:00 am. the day after Easter, Jesus’ birthday
my brother in law sleeping behind me
recovering from surgery, already suffering from Multiple Sclerosis
cancer and other deformities, his spirits high

the hiding of Easter eggs he watched from
the sliding door in the living room
recalls the wreck we saw yesterday on the way home from Birmingham
out of his head in pain, going in and out of sleep he saw the body
on the stretcher with the sheet pulled over it
hearing on the news 4 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq

delivered the day before we left to go to Birmingham
IMPORVISATIONS by Vernon Frazer 697 pages
Kind words from Frazer in the package
My words seem to matter but only to the point
When they cease

- Chris Mansel

Vice and Vengeance

2006-04-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

The dead burn as well as the living; a man who is afraid of fire would say this. But as he rolls in his squalor the world follows in the steps placed before them. The working class, the laborers, those below the poverty line revel in the hard work of the passing day, they take pride in their ruin, they pass as they are born. If you think you can defeat them your life is as meaningless as the squalor in where you reside.

- Chris Mansel

9th Street InGloria

2006-04-13T03:51:00.000-07:00

3:46 in the morning and the tide has shifted

(gravel burnt by cigarette lighter
collected and hot glued to masonite)

the image is of a hotel window being removed by
force

black paint is applied and human hair from hair cuts
is attached to the corners of the piece

words are inscribed detailing the contents of the room

3:48 in the morning

- Chris Mansel

Who This Time

2006-04-10T23:08:00.000-07:00

Limb resting on the back left tire
and a rain falling stirring up the dust
someone said a killer is worth his hire
here I am with a knife ready to cut
Mississippi Alabama Tennessee line
Sunday morning and the night’s not done
Bodies sewn together with old fence line
Sunday morning and the night’s not done

Head on the savannah road sign
Happens when a killer gets in his wine
Who was it this time
Who was it this time

Trees in the garden touching the ground
Window looks out on a box of shells
Down on the lake you hear the sound
Of a man shooting into his own hell
Horses come and stomp out the fire
You can hear the bodies hit the ground
How much blood to call you back home
You can hear the bodies hit the ground

Head on the savannah road sign
Happens when a killer gets in his wine
Who was it this time
Who was it this time

- Chris Mansel

You Don't Want Her After You

2006-04-10T22:52:00.000-07:00

This is what she said to you
Bust that woman up in her head
Pull out all that shit she said
You don’t want me after you
You don’t want me after you

She come up the road one night
Swinging a hammer in her hand
Said I’m looking for my man
You don’t want me after you
You don’t want me after you

Hell come over the banks today
Everything she owned floating away
She reach her hand up to the lord and say
You don’t want me after you
You don’t want me after you

Chorus:

Fist like iron cold like steel
Hate like a gasket bust its seal
You don’t want her after you
You don’t want her after you

- Chris Mansel

Keep The Devil Back In His Room

2006-04-10T22:51:00.000-07:00

There’s twelve snakes in the hollow
Guess what they’d say
There’s twelve snakes in the hollow
Guess what they’d say
Twelve snakes in the hollow
Getting fat on sin
Twelve snakes in the hollow
Can’t fit no more in

Devil hired a woman
To give me kids
Devil hired a woman
What do you think they did
Devil hired a woman
To give me kids
Devil hired a woman
You know the lord forbid

Judas kept on walking
Till he got into the fire
Judas kept on walking
You’d think he’d retire
Judas kept on walking
Kept this kids in the room
Judas kept on walking
Spread’em with a butcher’s broom

Chorus:
Got to slip the ash back in the tomb
Keep the devil back in his room
Got to keep the devil back in his room

- Chris Mansel

You're A Shooting Star (for Hank WIlliams Sr.)

2006-04-09T01:51:00.000-07:00

I was drinking on the grave of someone I never knew
When the feeling overcame me and I thought of you
No more lonesome in your life you reached out to me
And I wonder if heaven is as cold as where you lie

The flowers don’t grow in this corner of the field
The grass is too poor I think for the rain to hit
I wonder if this bottle will disturb your last grace
And I wonder if hell is as warm as the sun up in the sky

Tears brought me to this abandoned cemetery today
As I drove along I thought of what I would say
You were the only daughter of a man to drunk to stand
And I wonder if the prison I put you in bears my name

Chorus:

Tears fall as thick as tar
I wonder my darling just where you are
I miss you so much you’re never that far
Don’t you know that you’re a shooting star

- Chris Mansel

preserved

2006-04-06T00:43:00.000-07:00

The driveway of J.D. Salinger's house.

That the great men seek silence, that the myth is more than the truth, we should all allow for grace to inhabit our curiousity.

- Chris Mansel

The Cypress Are Touching The Ground

2006-04-05T13:27:00.000-07:00

Lost in the century the dream awoke on a train
There were ribbons flying and there was rain
From the everglades to the pacific stormy winds
The airports were shut down by well-armed men

The Mt. Rushmore cliffs went gray under the light
Middle America stood on the front lawns that night
The waters in New Orleans rose from corkscrew heights
The countries work force is moving like ghosts in plain sight

I’ve seen an Alaskan sunset from Canada’s skies
I’ve been asked what have I done with my life
I’ve tried to do good but some wrong has led my hand
Couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t take a stand

Chorus:

The cypress are touching the ground
If they fall it won’t make a sound
The cypress are touching the ground

- Chris Mansel

Up The Levee Way (for Jake Berry

2006-04-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

Where daddy going mama
Where he been
Going on a killing
He’s going again
Took his shotgun mama
Took his hand ax blade
Going up the levee
To the parson’s shade

Got to see about a woman
Cut her children up
Threw them in the well
Then covered it up
All kind of evil mama
Down the levee way
Daddy been working
All down that way

Here comes daddy mama
His clothes all wet
He been to the river
Up to his chest
Daddy’s cursing at the river
Swinging his hand axe blade round
Daddy said he don’t want us round
Better get to the levee while the water’s down

Chorus:

Here comes evil up the levee way
Trouble comes floating up this way
Mama why daddy acting this way

- Chris Mansel

quote

2006-03-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

“I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.”

- Saul Bellow

Unknown Destination

2006-03-20T21:06:00.000-08:00

Grady took an overdose of pills in the bath
They laid him out at midnight softly on his back
They could swear they heard a whisper from his mouth
Saying get away gentlemen you don’t know what its about

There’s crows in the tree line and flowers in the grove
Landmines exposed where the grass has just been mowed
The likeliness of Grady stamps his feet and slaps his thighs
His suicide note was broadcast and won a Pulitzer Prize

Grady is carried to the Church of England for the inquest
His clothes are cut off and there are wires across his chest
Troops muster along the skyline embedded with victims past
Meanwhile the organs are removed and the mold is cast

- Chris Mansel

All About The Night

2006-03-20T03:20:00.000-08:00

“Once upon a time there was a little boy who went outside, and that boy was me — I went outside in music.”
- Harry Partch

On the floor there’s hunting
The insects scurry at the dog’s decay
On the ceiling they’re running
And it’s never far away

How outspoken are firecrackers
When the worms crawl across the match
You can see the centipede count his fingers
Just like the anthill when the babies hatch

I’m a gypsy at the cave’s entrance to hell
Like the doorman over the sewer grate
It’s nice work if you can stand the smell
One day all of the insects will come to mate

Chorus:

A deer in the headlights,
a dove down a well
It’s all about the night,
like the henchmen in the dell

- Chris Mansel

Hunter S. Thompson

2006-03-18T00:24:00.000-08:00

(Joe) Finnegan’s Wake

2006-03-16T01:07:00.000-08:00

The ghost of John Cassavetes has been embedded with the insurgents his camera circling the small bowl of heroin displayed for the Time magazine photographer. Cassavetes sits motionless behind the lens as the photographer changes his flash. The photographer is silenced before he can speak. His silence is felt through the Pakistani cave.
Posthumous reels captured by civilian contractors are sold to a small news agency and surface at the Sundance film festival. Celebrities their gift bags in tow flock the small fifty seat theater and begin to speak on their cell phones. Air is pumped into the theater as the celebrities breathe in the black ash trucked in special from the graves of Rwanda. Articles show up in Maxim magazine and feature photographs of celebrities vomiting onto the snow caked wood balcony of a local hotel. The ghost of Cassavetes stares blankly at the small rain clouds gathering over the horizon.

- Chris Mansel

Don’t Cha) Bury A Working Man (For the workers and Woody Guthrie)

2006-03-06T03:13:00.000-08:00

Stretching my soul over a conveyor of steel
For every strip of human flesh it rolls
Soot caking on my face and the wheel
Deep into a poverty mansions hole

I heard my footsteps along the gravel
I stopped as the dust from my clothes
Hit the door before me as I unraveled
I sunk into the floor until I didn’t know

Houses line the fences like headstones
The yards are the only thing alive
A palace like this could never be a home
Where the kids have stopped crying

How hot does hell get before you feel the chill
How slow can you melt the steel before its filled
I look at the scars I got at work just today
Where in the hell did hell come from anyway

Chorus:

It’s an insult to bury a working man in his skin
What does the ground know about where it’s been

- Chris Mansel

Lucinda Williams

2006-03-02T22:05:00.000-08:00

N.Y. Library Buys Burroughs Archive

2006-03-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

Wed Mar 1, 9:01 AM ET

The New York Public Library has acquired the personal archive of William S. Burroughs — offering the first public glimpse of many of the Beat Generation writer's unpublished works and correspondence.
Burroughs himself helped compile the archive, which includes draft versions of his most famous work, "Naked Lunch," along with other manuscripts and letters that range from the early 1950s to the early 1970s.
"Of the tens of thousands of pages, only literally a handful have ever been seen, and only a very few quoted from," said curator Isaac Gewirtz, who oversees the library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.
"This archive has really achieved legendary status among people who follow the Beat writers," Gewirtz told The New York Times.
The Berg collection already holds Jack Kerouac's literary and personal archive, and the newly purchased collection includes previously unpublished letters between Burroughs and Kerouac, the Times reported Wednesday.
Scholars said the material could be a major influence.
"My sense is that it will really change the picture of Burroughs that scholars have known," said Oliver C. G. Harris, a professor of American literature at Keele University in Staffordshire, England.
The collection could be available to researchers early next year, the Times said.
Burroughs died in 1997.
The library bought the collection for an undisclosed sum from collectors Robert and Donna Jackson, of Shaker Heights, Ohio.
___

Headless Horseman

2006-02-27T21:43:00.000-08:00

The Headless Horseman Has Left His Tribe
Said a woman at the checkpoint in her eyes
Her son was a suicide bomber and she wasn’t yet
She collected the well wishes and cashed the checks

I focused on her facial expression to get me thru the hills
Chinooks swept me into a caravan of diplomatic stills
Every rock that could have been thrown went under the wheel
I thought about the Shahikat valley as if from here it was real

The militia sat eating during the day’s prayers I took a poll
How many had seen a chest explode and who fired into the hole
The headless horseman carried a copy of the New Yorker
He laughed and kicked the tires and asked how much longer

We’re going to explode a yellow cake of debris
From McArthur’s grave to the homes of you and me
The headless horseman has left his tribe
And there’s no going back to the other side

- Chris Mansel

untitled

2006-02-22T22:36:00.000-08:00

My American flag doesn’t have any white or red
It’s all in blue and flies its rainy days over my head
It’s got a star for me and yes it’s got a star for you
They’re laid out in a graveyard design in gray
It didn’t have to be it just turned out that way

- Chris Mansel

Each Truth, Each Lie

2006-02-17T21:10:00.000-08:00

(The title is a line from Dylan Thomas’s poem, This Side Of The Truth)

This piece is dedicated with love to the Brother’s Grimm Jake Berry and Hank Lazer

The wilderness is like a shallow river, a skin straight from the bark of the tree that acquired its nutrients from the wilderness, the river closing itself off from what made the wilderness a jungle. From the wilderness we have encountered many beings and we have learned from all of them. Cast not out our brothers you could say and our enemies as foes be blessed with our constant attention. A slain enemy is a confidant in the ways in which you stay alive, a slain enemy like a body in an autopsy is a confidant in the ways you stay alive and while on the table the body which is open to the air resembles a ghost that has had skin stretched over it as to defer itself from the one examining it. A coagulated naturalist could find disgrace in silence, an embrace so immodest as to recall the elegance of a tradesman watching the tools of his trade wash away in the river as his limbs hang lifeless.
Joseph Wolf Shenk writes in his book Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, “The perception of reality is called mentally healthy, ‘one textbook declares, “when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there.” The wilderness becomes barren when the ship of discovery runs aground. The earth doesn’t swallow the ship whole but acts as a port of extradition when depression enters the sea like wilderness shore of reason and accountability.
An element of depression is fear of success or something like that; I think I read it somewhere. All I know is that while I have suffered intricately from this disease I have never sat back and wondered if I was successful I would have to blow my brains out. Fear is farther away than courage. Courage like the perspective of our enemies is at best alleged and gaunt, but it must also be kept in mind that a revengeful for can also become a revengeful ally with a shopping list of deal breakers, requirements and stacks of affidavits to the contrary and so it goes with depression.

- Chris Mansel

That Isn't God's Voice

2006-02-08T13:59:00.000-08:00

“A scream that’s all dawn.”

- Ferruccio Brugharo

The tropics of my cancer have never known disease
My heaven’s head is severed in a replica of HIV
A death head’s spiral returning to the ground
Its tightens slowly and unravels without a sound

Sam Peckinpah in California prison facial tattoos
Sunsets and horses running into the ocean blue
Emigrated to death row from the scene of the crime
A sixth century weapon used now for the last time

A sister’s lover and wrenched and slow obscenities
Cold cooking oil and Robert Browning’s plea
Knuckles disappear and the face seems to tighten
The phone doesn’t ring and the night seems to brighten

Chorus:

It’s all short quick breaths downstage
Chemical inserted murder on a page
The quilt is a picture of the Buddha child
Unable to smile he sits under a tree awhile

- Chris Mansel

New Year's 2006

2005-12-31T22:13:00.000-08:00

Just as the ferocity of a hummingbird’s wings could pull a fresh team of horses it is also true that in the beginning of a new year those meant for survival will indeed fall by the wayside as the horses make their way by towards the cliff where the hummingbird will simply fly away unharmed.
- Chris Mansel

Extradition

2005-12-27T23:23:00.000-08:00

“Having dressed the sunlight in bloodied robes I embrace the night as the time to discover the source of the sun.”
- from an unpublished poem by Chris Mansel

It is in the psyche of anyone who creates to want someone to give you their opinion, to look at it or to read it whether they hate it or not. To do so can lead to obstructions that the creator of this media had yet to imagine otherwise he or she wouldn’t have shown it to anyone in the first place. I am one of those creators and I am speaking to others.
Whether consciously or unconsciously we will, as artists tend to rely on the fact that other artists are the same as we are, think the way we do and are the same kind of people and have the same customs or experiences we have. These events of thinking are so regional it seems that half the country could drop into the sea and the other half would have no idea.
I began a few years ago trying to get a larger audience for my work and I committed one of those crimes for which a lack of comprehension or slow deduced, while trusting in the better angels if they so exist I asked the question that is either answered or explained back. From there I begin to give my opinion on the work of others and being open minded and tired of the clichés I have read for years and also tired of seeing what others have gone through I decided to tell the truth on advice given to me by someone I hold dearly as a friend. This was good sound advice and much like the previous situation I found myself betraying someone, or the act perceived in this way, without any action on my part outside of honesty and good intentions. But now looking back I think my opinion and not that of the author was best.
Growing up in the south I have a definite perception of right and wrong and a customary manner in politeness and a sense of doing all I can for others and expecting that of others but alas this in the world of literary matters is sadly, naïve. I have done and will continue to do everything I can for someone whose work I admire and someone who deserves the act or effort who may or may not consider his or herself in this manner. It is not who you know and whose hand you can grease, it is not you blurb me and I’ll blurb you, it cannot be an outsider is prey and we do not feel like chasing the kill just opening another wound to make it easier for others to finish off the kill, no, it is following a certain civility of lack of a more offensive term.

- Chris Mansel

CODA: Where All The Dead End Roads Intersect

2005-12-14T00:11:00.000-08:00

All I know about my writing is that I have tried my best, suffered the most and brought to life what no one wanted to see or cared to observe. I wrote a book that hardly anyone read and it pushed the limits of even the underground much less polite society. If it never gets any attention, if it never gets published then I know at least I wrote it. I may write the second book in the series, I already have some notes but why should I? To bring into focus what exists in all of us? People just don’t want to know.

Chris Mansel

Lao Tzu Aboard A Flight Bound For Everest

2005-12-12T01:10:00.000-08:00

There is no political species other than personal being. Injustices become like sores on the skin and infection, like nonviolence, is the result therein. To see the world in a grain of sand is to close everything off all around you in order to focus and grief in the distance as well as sorrow in forefront give rise to that secular mirror image that cost you your soul.

- Chris Mansel

Be Pro-Life, No Capital Punishment

2005-12-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

Open All The Time

2005-11-28T03:00:00.000-08:00

The river holds a hotel of ghosts
The piano in the kitchen laughs loud
The stairs on old used cars is broke
The beds like a muddy bottom shroud

The bleakness of a funeral inside
The smell of a fisherman’s worm
Running alongside like a pair of eyes
His eyes like stars staring firm

The doorman spins his head and laughs
Catfish in their eveningwear tip their hat
Here comes the mayor stumbling up the path
The front door closes on a scene like that

Chorus:

Gothic southern mystery, undead chateau
Tennessee river hotel open all night
Under the waterline open all the time

- Chris Mansel

untitled

2005-11-22T18:51:00.000-08:00

CRush The Blade, Reap The Rust

2005-11-22T18:43:00.000-08:00

The Fauna of 1999 (for Mark Eitzel)

2005-11-22T03:56:00.000-08:00

I woke up in gasoline
Slightly apart at the seams
Summer flies dark and curious
Exoskeletons and subcutaneous

Cries and moans God is alone
Where the road ends but goes on
Hauling a Cadillac up on the cross
Crying at the labor laughing at the loss

Martin Luther King as a sparrow lands
He picks up the children by the hand
Disappearing into the cascading waterfall
His wings are as wide as they are tall

Chorus:

The fauna of 1999 keeps moving through my dreams
The cadavers of leaves crushing under my teeth
The lacy moths and butterflies keep me coming back

- Chris Mansel

Looking In

2005-11-22T02:13:00.000-08:00

Window Series

2005-11-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

2005-09-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

The Passing of Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown whose home was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, died not fromt he Hurricane but of a broken heart. A little bit of the soul of music passes with him.

The Charnal Origami and The Chemical Make-Up of Glass

2005-08-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

(for Ivan Arguelles)

As part of the window
We are foreign to the glass
The wood, the nail and the latch
Are all an opposition to the view
Neither can see

- Chris Mansel

I Read a Book on SElf-DEmand Amputation

2005-07-29T23:02:00.000-07:00

What do you say when all is said, when speaking brings you to tears, when writing brings you to the point of screaming in anguish, when there is no point? Why do you subject others to your pathetic suffering when you know they have their own?

There are no heavenly bodies just those that are there when you awake or so the dreams you have seem to suggest. Using the word symmetry when describing the contents of your mind is like throwing yourself off a bridge into a ravine knowing full well if you would have walked a few feet more down the bridge you would have hit the water easily.

The epilogue is always sown into the skin and doesn’t distinguish from the beginning to the end unless you take into account, which insects arrive first. The ash of a religious ceremony never shows the blood or whether or not the snake slithered away alive or dead. From the cradle of exposed skin to the hounding of the door nailed shut, the sounds and motions of life are going to get in one way or another.

If you ever hope to lighten your load you’ve got to learn to leave me by the side of the road.

- Chris Mansel

Clonazepam 0.5 MG Tablet, Round Yellow

2005-07-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

Dead in the brine, golden-yellow
A country road is the godhead personified
Leading to a cave where horses give birth out of the reach
Of those sympathetic to the western pantheon
Deserted traveler meeting across the shadow of the steeple
The wandering Albion, cooked meat on the bone
The smell wafting into the cave where newborns
Meet the sacrifice head on

- Chris Mansel

When Hair Remains With The Body

2005-07-09T03:28:00.000-07:00

The right moment illustrates the end. A man is never enough and his faults are what give the courage to fall into his own trap of equilibrium. A prisoner is a great source for protection since his life is dependent upon the controlled atmosphere he is within. A victim is to the attacker what the sun is to the rain, rarely, but sometimes they co-exist to cover what together they have joined together to create; they can give and they can take away.
Fear is never an adversary. A cornered animal in the deep snow owes as much to his mistakes as he does his advantage of his white fur. His wounds bleed into the snow and his scent is carried on each snowflake that drifts by. His death a mix of darkness and words, the attacker whose hunger betrayed by thirst at once discovered the internment of organs felt the need of a heartbeat in withered flesh.
The excess of the key generate the obesity of the door. Trepanning of the human skull reveals what every lover cannot caption, the freedom of the mind set loose under the door. The reflection of the light in a blinding sun like starvation to a pair of teeth forced into a curb of concrete in a traffic accident, belittles the contribution of the skull to its last gasp. The image seen through the blinds, the image that would be hidden by doors is the sensation of light on a open wound. The key, a purveyor of the opening shrouds the lock of the weakened eye blinking wordlessly.

- Chris Mansel

“I love she who hates me more.” - Poe

R.I.P.

2005-06-28T03:47:00.000-07:00

I am still having trouble accepting that he is really gone.

I miss you Hunter.

Vile Therapeutic

2005-06-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

Only death will appear in the long grass
the teeth bared, the movement silent
and as if representing itself it whispers
…mankind is a profanity.

- Chris Mansel

In Flanders Fields

2005-05-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on rowThat mark our place; and in the skyThe larks, still bravely singing, flyScarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:To you from failing hands we throwThe torch; be yours to hold it high.If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies growIn Flanders fields.

John McCrae, 1915

Stable of the Old Medicine Vial

2005-05-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

There’s an old joke told around the forensics community that goes like this, “What is the difference between two completely different bones? The skin that was wrapped around it before I got a hold of it.” While it ma be legal for a forensic scientist to cannibalize the truth of a body in evidence it however illegal for the victim to protest from the grave to the photographs taken in decomposition. If a picture is worth a thousand words then imagine the conversation over your body in the morgue. Poetry is non-conformity when approached by the incestuous lengths the business of medicine will go to utilize the corpse in their own manner.
Another old joke is from a funeral home. The director of the funeral home approaches a grief stricken man and informs him that the burial of his wife will cost about seven thousand dollars or fifty bucks if the staff of the funeral home can have sex with the man’s wife. Salt into the wound take the guise of coins.
Appearing at the end of a barrel is the bullet fired in anger. The body reacts by tearing away. The mind is conditioned to react to the environment of healing. What happens in-between is anybody’s guess.

The Dry Wake of Orchestrated Illuminated Rounds

2005-04-21T02:17:00.000-07:00

The steam of morning is threatened by an insect flying from one branch to another, the ground pauses as a human finger flips the safety off on his weapon. The flick of the safety sounds like waves crashing against a distant shore in the silence. The silence is deafening until the jungle erupts in gunfire and screams. From the trees snake recoils back to a higher branch as bits of human bone is torn from under the skin littering the blood soaked ground. In the distance insects bend a leaf in order to capture the nectar of a flower growing wild. The insects used to the sound of gunfire go about their routine always aware of the movement nearby. Leaves that had an hour ago turned themselves upside down to drink from the light rainfall that fell are now imperceptibly moving ever so slowly unseen by human eye to their original position before being torn to shreds by bullets from a North Vietnamese soldiers weapon as he falls back to the ground after being shot in the neck by a ricochet.

- Chris Mansel

The Iraqi Book of Living and Dying

2005-04-16T03:16:00.001-07:00

O son of noble family
Burnt Iraqi children
Separated bone from skin
The American process of democracy moves slowly
As you move through the bardo
Hold close to your soul
As it may soon depart leaving your skin to endure
The acts of degenerates
And commissioned officers

O son of noble family
If you are re-born and are recruited by your children
To join the assault of the free world
Heed the teachings of the Buddha
And not the passions of your heart

O son of noble family
There is love for you on the soil of the United States
If you look for it

- Chris Mansel

The Political Philosophy of a Vengeful Society

2005-04-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

Spilt an anthill down the middle and the ants will run downhill both ways. Wipe away the anthill completely with one swipe and they run in all directions on a level plain. Now an anthill may be small to you but to an ant it’s his home. It’s a high rise. What can an ant do to you? Lie down by that anthill and every one of those ants will show you. I never saw the whole as a bunch of ants but then again, I understand the mentality to seek revenge, and I don’t run in any direction, I don’t even notice when my world is swept away. Like that ant I’ll be waiting for you to come back or I’ll bring my anthill to you. Either way, destruction is change and change in this life is but a brief glimpse at the next.

- Chris Mansel

Papacy: The Chemical Wedding

2005-04-05T00:49:00.000-07:00

Bearing witness, chronic illness after madness
A voice asking, “What shall you be called..”
Standing vigil, prison fatigues
Blood coursing through a single vein
Inebriants, stimulants, chemically based psychotics
You have become a loose-based orpheum, the voice said
You shall be called polemic, and shall serve on the steps of
The poor and shall disrupt nations with your views

A puff of white smoke followed black
And I began as I ended, a lamb to slaughter
My fur becoming death, my flesh offered as life
Heralding from the windowsill the holy day of Pharmacopoeias

- Chris Mansel

Passing

2005-04-03T21:27:00.000-07:00

An epic of transition is death. The body is a vessel of incarceration. There are horrors in the skies that dissent to us a web of illness we are drawn to even as we attempt escape. The disease on the ground, the emaciation of the air draws us inside and therefore closes and seals the process of death. Somewhere between the skies and the earth, somewhere in the bardo do we appear as we really are, clear thoughts amidst a solution of matter both gray and dark. Death always reminds us of where we are going and then we start to think of where we have been. Georges Bataille wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Either way you look at it death is a continuing process that if captured in a display of DNA would be a round strand that circles endlessly in a poetic path, tragic and ethereal.
- Chris Mansel

From There Outward (for Philip Lamantia and Robert Creeley, liberated)

2005-04-02T04:20:00.000-08:00

There was a time
many years ago,
when I was a young child,
I did not write poetry.

In those days
my imagination lived me –
it overtook my body
and shaped it to every delightful and
mysterious purpose it could create.

I was imagination’s living form.
I had no mind, no self
I was motionless
until imagination stirred
some portion to song
(and every word was singing)
or dance
(and every movement was a dance).

Then I felt compelled
to make words.
So I wrote a poem,
then another and another
and people laughed or made pleasant remarks.
And the girls were pleased
when I wrote for them –
those were kisses worth the poems.

But I recognized that
words failed imagination.
They were so carefully
reigned by books and teachers.
I had become imagination’s loss.

So I destroyed myself
and freed the constricted words.
I liberated them to
imagination’s tongue
and they once again
took their natural form
like a tree, or a sun, or a boy.
And people were confused.
they were afraid and turned away.
and I became serious,
a solid man.

I had to destroy myself
again and again
to liberate the words.

and speech was singing
and movement was dancing.

And today,
I hear the great poet’s death
and I think how lucky he is
to be nothing but
free imagination again,
to become pure poetry,
without a world of fools
that make us work
for what we already are.

- Jake Berry 3.30.05,

Jake Berry graciously allowed me to feature this unpublished work and he alone retains the copyright.

Robert Creeley

2005-03-31T17:18:00.000-08:00

Prominent poet Robert White Creeley dead at 78
The Associated Press

Robert White Creeley, a longtime university professor in Buffalo regarded as one of the great American poets of the last half-century, died Wednesday. He was 78.
Creeley, who was associated with the Beat generation, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Odessa, Texas, where he was a writer-in-residence, a Buffalo newspaper reported Wednesday.
Creeley taught English at the State University of New York at Buffalo for 37 years before leaving in 2003 to take a post at Brown University in Rhode Island.
He wrote more than 60 books of poetry and earned many honors, including the Bollingen Prize, of which past winners include e.e. cummings and Robert Frost. Creeley was named New York state´s poet laureate in 1989.
A native of Arlington, Mass., Creeley lost his left eye in a childhood accident. He later attended Harvard University but struggled academically and dropped out. In 1955, he received his degree from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he was one of the founders of the Black Mountain school of poetry that promoted an anti-academic writing form.
He befriended several of the best-known Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Creeley also became friends with painter Jackson Pollack but not until after the pair nearly came to blows in a New York City tavern.
"His place in American poetry is enormous," said Charles Bernstein, a poet and former University of Buffalo colleague now at the University of Pennsylvania.
He will be laid to rest in the Cambridge, Mass., cemetery where fellow poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are buried.

Hank Lazer Writes About His Friend, Robert Creeley

2005-03-31T12:33:00.000-08:00

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Absolutely exemplary. Certainly these last ten years or so, a quality of sweetness, pleasure, and generosity. A life lived in and of words with absolute integrity. For me, personally, no more important poet, no one better able to show ways in words to make manifest the grace, pleasure, complexity, cadences, and play of mind at work.

I met Bob in the late 1970s, at a Black Mountain College celebration at Warren Wilson College. We spent a couple of days in conversation; I interviewed Bob; I listened to him read. Much of our time together I asked him for information on the three-line stanzas that he developed, and what relationship his writing had to similar modes in Williams. Great fun witnessing a packed auditorium at his reading, only to have Bob tell stories and follow out a range of thoughts for forty-five minutes to an hour before he read the first poem. Many left before he read. They missed a superb reading, one that was absolutely continuous with the talking that preceded it.

Yes, quite simply one of the greatest conversationalists of all time …

At the time of that Black Mountain event, I knew only parts of what Creeley had written – mainly Words and For Love. From then until now, I have grown more and more familiar with the range of his writing – the poetry, yes, but also the essays. In fact, when I got news of Bob’s declining health, I was reading a new essay of his on Whitman’s poetry of old age (in a special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first Leaves of Grass).
In the mid-1990s, I gave a reading at Buffalo. Bob attended, and I had the pleasure of reading new poems (which became the book Days) which were very much based in what I had learned from his work. We spent the next morning, over pastry and coffee, sitting and talking, along with my good friend Yunte Huang. Bob’s generosity to Yunte is another story, but typical of Bob’s kindness to so many younger writers…

Here, at Alabama, I had the pleasure of hosting Bob for a reading a couple of years ago. Again, a packed house. A superb reading, though Bob had to sit for most of the reading, as he did for the conversation/discussion the following day. That particular visit enhanced by the presence of Donald Revell (in residence for the semester), another poet deeply steeped in Bob’s life and writing. And again, Bob made time for a morning of coffee, pastry, and conversation.

Last saw Bob at the Louis Zukofsky Centennial at Columbia this past fall. Some familiar anecdotes, and some unfamiliar.

I’ve been quite moved by the increasingly emotionally open work of Bob’s last couple of books – Life & Death and If I were writing this. He seemed able to circle back, to realize the importance and vitality of late 19th century verse – a family tradition of popular poetry – in his own practice. Or, to make of Keats’ work such a central thing.

We corresponded sporadically via e-mail. I would often send Bob a few poems, and his remarks were always appreciative. He blurbed a book of mine – an extended chapbook called As It Is (published by Mark Scroggins) – and was always supportive of my writing.

What Bob showed was the pleasure and work of making one’s way in a writing life. It is rather amazing to think of how many of us have learned from his example.

Yesterday, the day of Bob’s death, at the end of the day, I went with my son, Alan (16 years old), to Beulah Baptist Church – a black church on a hillside on the way home, a place that I’d often admired but where I’d never stopped. A modest graveyard with a cement angel of Memory leading the way up the dry, red clay hill. At the top of the hill, we walked around for a bit, sun streaming through the clouds. The wisteria now in bloom, we looked at the tombstones, stood beside one for “Pa Pa” Jones, and I read aloud several of Bob’s poems from Life & Death.

Earlier in the day I’d been in touch with several others to whom Bob had been so important – Charles Bernstein, Yunte Huang, Joel Kuszai, Don Revell, Claudia Keelan, Norman Fischer, Tyrone Williams. Even at the time of Bob’s death, it’s hard not to bear in mind his favorite closing in correspondence: “Onward.” Without Bob here to be the figure of Onward, we must take what we have learned from him and be, in our writing and friendship and conversation and correspondence, that no longer singular figure of Onward.

Hank Lazer
March 31, 2005

*

Here’s the e-mail I sent to Bob on Monday, March 28, 2005:

Dear Bob,A gray cold day of spring break, giving way to sunny windy afternoon. I spoke with Joel Kuszai mid-day, and learned some of your health difficulties. And then heard from Charles Bernstein, a more optimistic version. I'm simply writing to let you know I'm thinking of you. And thinking with you. Got in today's mail the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review -- on Whitman, and your superb piece on Whitman's poetry of old age. When I read at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden (several years ago, back when Alicia Askenase was in charge of the reading series), I visited Walt Whitman's house, and recognize it in the last photos. For me, the determining feature of my early years of writing poetry was to have an especially close relationship with my four grandparents -- all Russian Jews, all living close to us. In the way that drugs & zen of the 1960s allowed it, I spent time with them, in their decay mental & physical, with a mixture of love, curiosity, and observation (rather than the disabling frustrations that I saw in my parents' relationship to their aging parents). My poems began with telling their stories, my grandparents, and with learning (or trying to learn) something of the phenomenology of aging. And thus, yes, a reading of Williams' later work and others, including, eventually Oppen.A rambling way, Bob, to say that you are on my mind these days, as your poetry and your essays and correspondence will always be.With much love,Hank
*

And a poem, from several years ago, very much with Creeley in mind, from an ongoing work, Portions.

YOU

so the old
cabin leans “sit
up” i said

as if to
someone i said
it to you

i always do
if there were
no one else

if there were
only you i
would say “sit

up” & think
someone heard such
is my sense

the old cabin
leans what is
never passes away

- Hank Lazer

2 poems

2005-03-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

The Prophetic
How often does scared and sacred touch? When the rays of the sun reach the earth in the form of lightning? Concealed and mythic are the relations between scared and sacred that belief stumbles into the room unaware of its reason for being there. Faith is scared for lack of a better term and finds its way by fear. Trust is never sacred and therefore unrelenting in its frightening role as faiths widow. Perception is the first body to decompose in a mass grave of indignities. A mass grave where the onlookers are to scared to be sacred.

Mirrors in a Drop Of Alcohol

A rare form of slavery is the act of denial and love. Mixed together they can form a bond, a foundation that will crumble under its own weight as worry and lust overcome the more subtle acts of depravity and death. Locust will decimate everything it flies by, rape will scar the victim long after the victim seeks revenge and truth will be denied by every honest man in his dreams. Angels will get caught in the machinery of life here on earth and be swallowed up by the rationing of fear that operates the will of man. Love is an exodus of snakes abandoning their skin by traveling through rough terrain.

Interview with Hank Lazer

2005-03-22T16:44:00.000-08:00

What is the earliest tender moment you experienced, and how did it change you?

The problem, of course, is with what we remember, or, what, to serve present purposes, we claim to remember. I can’t say that I have some particular intense first memory of tenderness. No doubt, like other infants, I must have early moments of tenderness – eating, caressing, fondling, eliminating, sucking, making eye contact, etc. The earliest kinds of tenderness that I experienced that in some way might have been idiosyncratic or somehow personally defining would be associated with my grandparents. I grew up living close – often on the same block, sometimes within a few blocks – to all four of my grandparents. They were not quintessentially “sweet” grandparents – particularly my mother’s parents, who were rather depressed, critical, and moderately paranoid. But they did spend a good bit of time with me; they indulged me; and, most importantly, since English was not their first language, I acquired some of their fascination with language. I learned, somewhat, to see and hear English through them. I remember them telling jokes – often turning on a simple pun. I remember their accents – their first languages were Russian and Yiddish. I remember their delight in humor – a complex quality of language acquisition. Especially from both sides of the family, I felt a deep respect of learning, of thinking, even a love of seemingly esoteric learning (for its own sake). I remember their pride in reading. Eventually, they became the first important subject for my poetry – rather conventional brief or extended narratives telling elements of their history. These early poems can be found in the first half, Book One: Facts and Figures of Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989 (New York: Segue, 1992). Having this desire to tell their stories proved to be very important, since from the outset my poetry was not particularly located in self-expression.

Chogyam Trungpa said, “Buddhism will come to the West as a psychology.” Do you think this is the case or has the true feeling of selflessness actually occurred in our culture?

Perhaps Buddhism will come – or has come – to the West as a psychology, or as a philosophy, or as poetry, or as a meditation discipline, or as a new hybrid sort of religion (as it has entered and met with our cultural conditions). The categories themselves blur. The particularities, the singularities of experience, come and go. That true feeling of selflessness itself comes and goes. As for the feeling of selflessness becoming a key value and revered accomplishment in our culture? Obviously not. The current war (in Iraq) shows how far away we are as a culture from anything like selflessness. It is a war based on arrogance – based on a narrow sense of “our” righteousness. Think how far the war expenditures could have gone toward ameliorating hunger, or poverty, or lousy education – here, in the US, or throughout the world. We have not – as a culture – learned how to give freely. Clearly, though, Buddhism has arrived in the US – particularly in the western US (including Hawaii). Purists may debate whether or not it is a “true” or “rigorous” Buddhism. So, again, the labels may be part of the problem. Something has arrived and developed – some collision and collusion, some generative interaction of Buddhism and elements of western culture. In the area of poetry, of course, there are many examples of the importance of Buddhist thinking in our writing – Gary Snyder, Norman Fischer, Jake Berry, Armand Schwerner, and many others. The writing of poetry itself can become a means – a site, a portal – for accessing and dwelling in (temporarily) that locale of selflessness. Certainly the language and its pre-existing specificities as well as the many traditions of writing are well beyond the doings of an individual “self.” Consider too the wonderful (and at times frustrating) way that the best writing often is not a matter of will but of receptivity, of knowing when and what to listen to, of learning when and how to follow the suggestions of a few words that are given to one…

What do you feel is the anatomy of a poet? What makes some write, and others not?

I don’t think there really is such a thing as “the anatomy of a poet” other than the fairly obvious notion that a poet is someone with a particular fascination with words, someone who has experienced the peculiar depth and mystery of language (and its intimate relationship to human consciousness). As for what makes some write and others not – I think that it must remain a mystery. I tell myself – I try to learn it – that from appearances – say, looking at a line of people in a restaurant or at a sporting event – I know nothing about them. Poets may tend toward a certain seeming casualness (or understated melancholy) of dress, but then there might be a Wallace Stevens, or an Emily Dickinson, or there goes Dr. Williams. Or, there goes John Coltrane, playing amazing sax in his coat and tie. Plenty of people do dabble in poetry – and I think that’s a good thing. Why shouldn’t art-making be an accessible activity? But the more perplexing mystery is trying to determine who might persist at the activity (and why). I remember from the first poetry writing course I took in graduate school (at University of Virginia, taught by a Robert Lowell disciple), we were nearly all students in our early to mid-twenties. One student had, at age 21, published poems in Poetry magazine, and the teacher seemed to worship this student. A few years later, this person was no longer writing poetry. I think back to that class of fifteen students. Who writes today has nothing to do with the quality of writing done then (thirty some years ago). I’m not even sure that the cliché is true: if you enjoy it, you’ll continue. Or that the severe version of the cliché is true: when asked by a young poet, “should I continue to write poetry?” Auden supposedly replied, “if you can quit, do. ”It’s not as simple or clear-cut as either of these extremes suggest. Personally, I am enamored of poets who have some stubborn, self-taught, non-institutional streak. But persistence – especially for those who receive little or no recognition for many years – is a tricky thing. An enemy of persistence: self-pity, a quality that often seizes the poet (as a kind of prolonged adolescent agony for recognition or approval). For me – and I did not publish a first book of poetry until I was 42 years old– the persistence comes from the fact that when I write certain poems, I am able to enter a space (like Robert Duncan’s “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow”) that has a palpable intensification to it, an emotional and intellectual power (simultaneously) that is addictive, that is a supreme pleasure, that feels like a temporary participation in something quite splendid (even if painful). I feel it as a full and best use of my being, so I continue to seek out that place, as a writer, but also most definitely as a reader too.

Could grace ever be achieved through a sudden impulse as opposed to re-writes and revision?

I think that grace can only be achieved through a sudden impulse – being and living within the intensified present of the moment of composition. Yes, a great deal of practice – writing, revising, reading, studying, thinking – may go into the developing of the skills and resources and concentration that maybe of use in that moment of composition, but the achievement (or, perhaps more accurately, the experience) of grace will inevitably occur suddenly. Such a conclusion, though, does not mean that all of our efforts in writing are wonderful. There is, of course, an absolute mode of revision – “yes” or “no” – that allows us to throw out poems that are not especially good. And I have had plenty of experience re-writing and revising poems, sometimes with beneficial results. But for the most part, I find it very difficult to re-enter the space or field of the poem after much time has elapsed. Eventually, the highly specific integrity of that moment – including the peculiar rhythms and sounds that one heard at that moment – gets lost. Perhaps over the span of several days, I am able to tinker with some individual word choices, make some deletions, and occasionally make some substantial changes. But for the most part, the poem itself is an embodiment of a highly specific (usually brief) duration of consciousness – its concentration, its intensification, its specific music (i.e., the music of that specific thinking).I was relieved a couple of months ago to hear Robert Creeley, in an informal discussion, articulating a remarkably similar view. Such a viewpoint aligns poetic composition with jazz improvisation – an informed composition in the present. It does not necessarily mean that “first thought best thought” always turns out to be the case, but it does mean that the present – the specific duration of composition – will be honored to the utmost, the poem, among other things, being a record of attentive dwelling in that specific duration of time.

Should there be a specific role that spirituality should play in art?

Not really. I’d hate to be prescriptive – in regard to spirituality, or in regard to any important element in the making of poetry or art. I suppose that what I have tried to do with my own exploration of poetry (and spirituality) is to be phenomenal. That is, to be truthful to the inconstant, shifting experience of spirituality – as a kind of force, or vector, or pressure, or presence (and disappearance), or immanence, or contiguous relationship. To be truthful to the phenomena of that relationship. It seems to me that if one works at an adequately profound level of awareness of what’s at stake in art-making, spirituality will already be adequately woven into the fabric of the making. Over time, over many years of engaging in a mode of art-making, I think it’s important to embody or represent the elusive and inconstant nature of the spiritual. As I’ve experienced it, it simply isn’t something that’s available on demand. That’s part of why I’m suspicious of any kind of formulaic or axiomatic pronouncement about how spirituality “should” be present in art. Also, the nature and intensity of its location will be ever-changing. And like any other important or intense experience, the rhetoric or vocabulary of the spiritual may harden and become a merely repeated or second-hand, tired, received set of markers (that may actually stand in the way of a renewing experience).

Where do you suppose the self-destructiveness trait comes from that occurs in so many writers?

From frustration, as a consequence of marginalization, and from succumbing toa dangerous set of culturally romanticized stereotypes. First, the frustration and maginalization routes. A writer, particularly a poet, places himself in an odd position in relation to dominant cultural value. A poet decides to value certain kinds of somewhat aimless, impractical, non-money-making activities, and he decides to make room and time in his life for these activities. Furthermore, he’s apt to be pursuing a rather elusive mode of language – not necessarily the direct, communicative, “useful,” commercially manipulative kind of language skill that society readily appreciates and rewards (in advertising, in journalism, and in other modes of persuasive and/or manipulative writing). So, what he’s doing with his time is aberrant – hard to explain. And yet, if he is really engaged in a serious and profound relationship to poetry, he does have certain sporadic validating experiences – a sense of connection to a longstanding human enterprise of considerable wisdom, joy, and pleasure. The self-destructiveness may arise as a gesture of anger and frustration, arising from a sense that one’s primary life activity is not appreciated or understood or respected. The self-destructiveness becomes an act oddly complicit with that ignoring and marginalizing by the society at large, while it is also a somewhat desperate call for attention and significance. Society at large – at least here in the US – establishes an interestingly ambivalent role toward the poet/artist. Most of the time, it’s business as usual: scorn, neglect, derision, lack of value. But then there is the flip-side: a compensatory romantic larger-than-life version (preferably made for the movies) of The Artist. This Artist is one who is – big surprise – too sensitive and volatile for this world. It is, in my opinion, a very dangerous and seductive model, particularly dangerous for the artist/poet who buys into it. This intuitive, somewhat childish artist figure – who can’t help himself, who has to pursue the truth of his art at all costs (including family, personal health, etc.) – is exactly what the society at large needs to comfort itself. That is, some reassurance that being an artist is a big mistake, though a grand enough mistake – entertaining enough – that we can witness the story every couple of years in a big Hollywood production. And then we can return the rest of our days to ignoring such individuals in our midst. For the artist/poet, the self-destructiveness can be conformation to this cultural stereotype of the “crazy” artist. Since it’s already a bit crazy (in practical, capitalist America) to use your intelligence to pursue something like poetry, why not go all the way and become that “odd” figure as in the cinematic cliché? The result is an infantilizing identity: the artist/poet as intuitive creature severed from a penetrating cultural and practical intelligence. Personally, I find it hard enough to work with the nature and complexity of making poetry. No need to pursue additional clichéd personal drama (and self-destructiveness) just to make the story conform to a movie script. The real drama is one that can barely be seen: an internal drama, a drama of consciousness, the drama of wrestling with the issues, questions, and realizations of making the poem. You don’t see those moments dramatized in the movies. You see the scenes of drunken abuse; you don’t see the scenes of someone sitting in a chair, staring out the window, writing down three words.

If it is true that human beings are the only beings that can hate, then why are we the only species that feels a need for spirituality?

Perhaps to atone for our experience of hate? Perhaps, though, spirituality can be thought of as something intrinsic to us – not something “added” that we must seek. In the sense that Hebrew has no word for “religion” – since the experience of “religion” or of being “religious” is so integral to the (Biblical / Jewish) experience of being alive, that a separate word or concept does not occur. We begin by having some sort of consciousness. That consciousness is already a powerful, palpable, but utterly invisible element of our existence. Why wouldn’t we want to extend the realm of the invisible into something called “spirituality”? Why not develop concepts and modes of interaction with the spiritual?

What to you is required reading?

Increasingly, I find myself thinking about this – i.e., what is essential or crucial reading – in a couple of ways: when you go on a trip, and you can only take a few books with you, which ones do you pack? Or, honestly, which books/authors do you really return to again and again over the years? For me, the list includes: George Oppen, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. I also think of listening to music as a kind of reading. Hence: John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. Of course, there are many others – as the need and as circumstances dictate. And over the years, there have been many other writers I’ve learned from and who have been of great value to me. And I would give a different list if I were asked to recommend a basic reading list for someone else – and the list would depend on the person’s needs and circumstances. But for the time I have, and for my current needs, the list above is fine.

Interview With Jake Berry

2005-03-20T12:33:00.000-08:00

How is your health?

Physically, quite good, thank you. I’ve become a believer in exercise. Mentally, it varies; depression is a misnomer for a disease that seems to run in various kinds of cycles. But exercise is helpful there as well.

You told me once that if you thought someone would stage it you would write a play? If this could come about what would your play be about?

Recently Wayne Sides, hearing I was interested in writing a play, said if I’d write it he’d make sure it was performed. So I’ll begin work on that in earnest soon. I think the play will begin as an adaptation of scenes and characters from a piece Jon, my brother, has been writing. I’d like to do something character and dialog driven.

You are a self-proclaimed hermit, how has his affected your creativity?

For some reason unknown to me I have always been inclined toward a solitary existence. I regret this occasionally because it frustrates my friends. Still, one has to do what works best. Of course this means that I don’t do that much collaborating. I’d never make it as a film maker, I have, however, written collaborative poems through the main and e-mail and the Bare Knuckles recordings were very much a collaboration once we got into the studio, but this was in terms of production, the songs were already written. I also think that working alone might make one more inclined to go inward, and in my case the work became more visionary than it otherwise might have been.

At the Charles Olson festival in 1995 Vincent Ferrini stated that Olson lived his body as a poem. Do you think you have done this?

Well, one would like to reach a point where there is no longer any distinction between the poem and the poet. That would be the ultimate state of grace regardless of the emotional and mental complications. I’m not sure if I would say I live my body, perhaps my body lives me or that I am my body in this worlds, or that the word body could be a word that could be used to describe one’s traceable existence in whatever world and whatever form. I’m not surprised that Vincent would say that about Olson, it makes sense given the Olson wrote. It takes many years to get to the point where one vanishes into the work. I seem to be getting closer as I get older.

Speaking of Olson he has played quite a role in your writing, he appeared to you in a dream once. How have your dreams been lately?

Actually it wasn’t a dream. I was not asleep. If you’d been in the room I could have heard anything you’d said though I might not have been able to respond. It’s more one of those hypnogogic states. So Olson was actually there, that is to say, it was not an interior experience. Lately my dreams have been quite vivid and not always very pleasant. Nothing as profound as the Olson vision has happened recently, but poetry, at least in my case, so often proceeds from a condition that can not be said to be normal consciousness, whatever that might be.

When speaking of projective verse Charles Olson said, “ One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception”, do you think this can be said for any type of poetry?

Probably not, but that is the ideal condition. One room opens into another and so on. Poetry is so many things to so many different kinds of poets that it would be impossible to make any kind of blanket statement. I think it is definitely true of projective verse. That one essay covers so much ground it’s staggering. The first time I read it I was astonished that Olson had mapped it so well. I rarely mark in a book. I tend to copy quotes into a notebook, but I’ve got about half that essay highlighted.
Since we’re talking about him, Olson’s essay on Projective Verse, his Maximus and several of his shorter poems. “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” is a tremendous poem. One needs to go as far back as possible. I’ve read several translations of Gilgamesh, that’s a vital work, Homer is fundamental. Also the bible, especially the Old Testament. Of the Roman period Ovid is best, at least I enjoy him more than Virgil. For shorter poems Sappho is always great, and I like Catallus. The great spiritual books are important. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Mesopotamian songs to Inanna, the I Ching, the great Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist works.
Among those I love the Bhagavad-Gita, the Tibetan Books of the Dead and Great Liberation, and noting can take you to the threshold of oblivion better and the Diamond Sutra, Lao-Tzu is essential. There are tons of Chinese and Japanese poets I’ve been reading recently. Shinkichi Takahashi is extraordinary. I still read the Zohar quite often. Among more recent works I like Blake and Baudelaire, Dikinson, Rimbaud, Artaud, Apolinaire. Mallarme is delicious. Stein is in a class by herself. Samuel Beckett is always good. Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats. Of course there are the Beats, I’m especially fond of Kerouac and McClure. There are also people I’d call essential that I am also very fortunate to know. Among them is Jack Foley, Ivan Arguelles, Hank Lazer, yourself, Dan Raphael, and I mentioned the book my brother is working on the takes on continental theory and goes it one better, I also like the novels of Paul Auster and the fiction as well as theory of Blanchot, the philosophy of Levinas, Heraclitus, Heidegger. The ancient writings of the alchemists. Well, it goes on forever obviously.

Do you think a school could be constructed today like Black Mountain College?

Absolutely. Though perhaps with better management. There needs to be schools like that all over the world. Jefferson had the notion that one should attend school until one felt one was educated then leave. Also a kind of master-student apprenticeship form of education, especially in the arts would be much better than most of the art schools we now have.

Sigmund Freud stated that, “A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” Do you think in your case this is true?

I have no idea. Freud seems to vacillate between brilliance and blindness. Of course a dream and a wish can be the same thing. What I’ve read of James Hillman seems to be more on the right track concerning dreams. Hmm, that statement is a conundrum to me.

You wrote in a poem entitled, Essay Empire Poets, “What a pitiful destiny, singing with your tongue cut out.” That’s an interesting line coming from someone who is both a singer and poet.

Yes, well, one comes up against the limitations of language very quickly, especially in poetry. And for that reason poetry is a very pitiful calling. Yet, one must make words do what they are not inclined to do by their own nature, or rather, one must restore words to their original nature which is an embodiment of phenomena or noumena by way of the tongue. And the tongue lives in the written character and makes the characters vital and sacred.

Harry Polkinhorn described you as the “preeminent experimentalist of your generation.” Hank Lazer called you “William Blake in Alabama.” Also, Bob Grumman put is best I think when he called you a “paleo-neurologist.” Are there words to describe your writing or is there any need at all?

These words are quiet accurate to what each of these writers were saying at the time. They make their point. And that is the use of terms like these. The problem arises when people take them too literally, as absolutes, or that these are goals that I have tried to achieve. That is the problem with categories, and Bob Grumman and I have argued about this through the years, that categories are too rigid and too legalistic to have anything other than transitory use, especially when applied to the arts.

The more experimental music you have recorded has its’ roots in many places. Have you been fascinated by some of the places it has taken you? Did you gain the same satisfaction when you performed this music as you did writing it?

Answering the first question: yes, I am fascinated by where it leads, that’s the beauty of it, the reason for it. Which leads to the second question: the music is written on the spot. We usually set a key or a scale but everything else is completely improvised. It’s ironic, performing a fully written piece isn’t very exciting. It’s almost a chore because you have to conform to the song enough to at least resemble the original. Yet, to perform while you compose, though it would seem to add pressure to the situation, I find it completely liberating. At any rate, it’s the creative moment that drives me. There’s not much joy in repeating yourself.

You mentioned that by working in a solitary work ethic you are inclined to work inward, in my own writing I have tried to limit myself to the human body, yet there is no limit there. There isn’t enough room there to move around and never explore it all. Have you ever considered publishing your journal or more personal writings?

You’re right about the human body. And you’re work is the best example I know of that kind of infinity. John M. Bennett does it too, but in a completely different way, so that’s apples and oranges. And the fact that the human body allows such breadth and depth is testimony to it’s richness. But no, I don’t think I’d care to publish my journals because they wouldn’t add anything significant. The work I publish is more personal than my journals and notebooks, and I often take sections from my notebooks and modify it somewhat for publication. If by personal you mean things one might write in a diary, I’ve never been able to do that, though I’ve tried many times. I think there are places in my songs that I touch on those emotions enough to allow them voice. Otherwise my personal life is of little consequence. After all, I am trying to live the poetry. There’s art and there’s love, everything else is just waiting.

One song of yours I especially wanted to ask about is Maggie’s Soldier/Tom Clark. This is in my opinion the most ambitious song you have written. Where did you draw the influence?

Tom Clark was a notorious outlaw in North Alabama and South Central Tennessee during the late Civil War early reconstruction period. When we began to write material for the first Bare Knuckles CD I thought it made sense to have a song about him. I liked around for a while, thinking that surely there was an old folk song about him, but nothing. So, I had to write one. I drew the song from a book called Bugger Saga by Wade Pruitt. The things that happen in the song actually happened. Then I wrote another song, “Maggie’s Soldier”, from the point of view of a young soldier on the battlefield discovering the girl he loved had been killed by outlaws and places it before “Tom Clark” to lend perspective to it.

Do the creative forces that drive you to create ever try and disable you to prevent you from writing something you should or shouldn’t? Is there a filter?

Oh, yes I argue with the muse all the time. Sometimes I don’t want to write something she is telling me, but she insists. Later, I usually discover what she was doing. There is a filter. I mean that the work is a kind of collaboration. Of course the line between muse and poet vanishes as one goes along. I heard Jean Cocteau say something recently in a documentary, that the muse or the god devours the poet. I thin he’s right about that.

Gerard Depardieu was asked why he became an actor and he replied that he had always had a need to communicate. Why did you become a writer, or did the writing become you?

When I first wrote poems, I think I was fourteen, I felt for the first time that I’d found something that I could do. It felt completely natural to me. So the choice was made. Poetry found me and I submitted gladly. I don’t think communication really entered into it because I had no concept at the time about publishing, or that anyone would see it. It was only much later, when I was twenty-one that someone asked me if I’d published and it seemed like something I should do. One wants to give the work away, to make the work available to anyone who might find something in it. One wants to contribute something to the world, something beautiful. Perhaps it is a very strange beauty, but given that mediocrity seems to be the rule, perhaps all genuine beauty is strange.

ACLU Seeks Records on Use of Patriot Act ...

2005-03-17T13:21:00.000-08:00

ACLU Seeks Records on Use of Patriot Act to Deny U.S. Entry to Prominent Foreign Scholars
March 16, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: media@aclu.org

NEW YORK -- Citing a serious and growing threat to academic freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records concerning the government’s practice of excluding scholars and other prominent individuals from the U.S. because of their political views.
"The government should not be barring scholars from the country simply because it disagrees with what they have to say," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "Nor should immigration and State Department officials be in the business of determining which ideas Americans may hear and which they may not."
The FOIA request filed today focuses in particular on Section 411 of the Patriot Act, which permits the government to exclude foreign scholars from the country if in the government’s view they have "used [their] position of prominence to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or to persuade others to support terrorist activity." While the provision ostensibly focuses on those who sanction terrorism, news reports suggest that the government is using the provision more broadly to deny admission to those whose political views it disfavors.
The ACLU’s FOIA request seeks records concerning the use of Section 411 as well as the names, nationalities and professions of those who have been excluded under the law. The request is directed at the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency.
"Unfortunately, the public has very little information about how the Patriot Act is being used," said Jaffer. "At a time when Congress is being ask to further expand the Patriot Act, the government should be more forthcoming about how it is using the powers it already has."
In its FOIA request, the ACLU cited several recent cases in which respected scholars were barred from entering the U.S. Among them:
Tariq Ramadan, a widely respected Muslim scholar who was named a "spiritual leader" in Time Magazine’s Top 100 Innovators of the 21st Century series, was forced to resign his position at the University of Notre Dame after the government revoked his visa. News reports suggest that Prof. Ramadan was excluded under Section 411.
Dora Maria Tellez, a leader in the 1979 movement to overthrow Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza (and later a democratically elected official), was forced to abandon a teaching position at Harvard University after the government refused to grant her a visa.
A group of 61 Cuban scholars was refused permission to enter the United States to participate in the Latin American Studies Association’s international congress in Las Vegas last October. The Bush administration deemed the scholars’ entry "detrimental to the interests of the United States." Those rejected include poets, sociologists, art historians, and economists, many of whom have frequently traveled to the United States to lecture at leading American universities.
The Patriot Act’s ideological exclusion provision, Jaffer noted, echoes laws that were used in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to bar those who were associated with the Communist Party. Those laws were used to bar, among many other prominent individuals, the writers Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dario Fo, and Pablo Neruda, and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Jaffer also noted that the ACLU has successfully used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information concerning other controversial provisions of the Patriot Act. For instance, documents obtained in response to a FOIA request about the government’s use of "National Security Letters" ultimately provided the basis for a court ruling striking down Section 505 of the Patriot Act. Section 505 permitted the FBI unilaterally to order Internet Service Providers to disclose sensitive information about their subscribers.
Today’s FOIA request regarding the exclusion of foreign nationals is online at: http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17740&c=206.
Attorneys on the project include Jaffer, Ann Beeson, and Melissa Goodman of the ACLU's National Legal Department and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.

MASH 4077th - Charles Emerson Winchester

2005-03-16T01:03:00.000-08:00

Dear Dad,

I have recently been thinking of Charles Emerson Winchester III. While in Korea there were several times that the true decency and humanity shown through his rather blue-blooded and pristine exterior. Charles once related to me that the relationship between his father and himself was to a certain extent cold and cordial. Thinking of you Dad I can see with moist eyes and a heart filled with love that I had the best father, giving, understanding, and ever conscious and aware of my needs. Now in my seventies, I have never married. There were many opportunities, I won't lie and say that there were not. But maybe some of us are meant to be alone, like you for instance. Much to my surprise Charles married immediately after returning to Boston retired from the medical profession and spent his remaining years up until this last autumn, engaged in philanthropic activities. I guess the experience that I have struggled with for many years seemed to escape Charles' thick skin and let itself loose into the world. B. J. is still alive and living in Montana where he operates a clinic that is specializing in the treatment of battered women. His wife Peg died of cancer a few years ago. My two bunkmates from the swamp, the two men that I spent the most time with in Korea are always in my heart. They both wrote me constantly, and of course there were visits periodically, but nothing much. We were scared, lonely people thrown together in an insane situation and deposited back into the waters of a battered coast and told we were no longer needed.
Dad, there are just some things about that war I cannot explain. Some things that even now swell with disease and cover my eyes in a dark and dense shroud that Dante would have left out for the milkman to drop to the ground. Bleeding from the shards I am forever your son and merchant to my dreams, your loving son,
Hawkeye

MASH 4077th

2005-03-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Dad,

Hawkeye here, it seems that the complete insanity of the war has followed me home. Now listen before you think your son has lost his marbles I imagined you would want to hear about this. When I was in Korea my friend Dr. Sidney Freedman told me often of writing to Sigmund Freud to relieve the tension and distress he often felt in his work. Well dad, you've only been dead a few years but the little time we had together when I got back home was treasured by me even if I never said it often enough or with enough love. Alas, to the subject at hand. I am having nightmares that I can't seem to shake.In one of the dreams I am in the O.R., a place where even in the horrors of war, meatball surgery, and total and complete exhaustion I am terrified far worse than any shelling we ever had at the 4077th. I am standing over a soldier, a kid barely 18. I look around and I am alone in the room. I look over to the air gauges are working fine and he is under anesthesia safely. I turn to the instrument tray for a scalpel to better expose the wound and all of the instruments are tangled into one. As I try to free them from one another I get a terrible urge for a drink. I think to myself the swamp is just a stone's throw across the camp. But no, I am a surgeon and a damn good one. I don't need a drink that bad. What am I an alcoholic? I've already been down that road once before. As I try and fight against the instruments the kid starts to hemorrhage. Blood begins to ooze from his chest. I tear off my clothes to try and stuff them into the wound to stop the bleeding. When I think I will scream the kid dies. I stand there Dad, for a long time until I know there is no hope for him or me. I walk out of the O.R. and I see Henry Blake sitting on the ground in the compound crying. Then I wake up and try for a half hour at least to figure out where I am. Dad if you can see your way clear put in a good word with the powers to be and see if they can help me with this latest installment of insanity. Kiss mom for me.

Love your tired, tired son,

Hawkeye