Saturday Poetry (on Sunday): Don't Go to Bed With Frank

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:  there was (at this point 20 years on, I'm sure "was" is the correct tense) a Bernie Marinello.  One of those old school Italian-American Brooklyn geniuses.  A poem like this is an elegy for postwar Brooklyn, a world long gone except for men like him.

Bernie Marinello

was discharged from the Air Force

in 1946 and came home to Brooklyn.

Met his two children, both born

before he could remember why

he married their mother.

Leaving, out of the question.

Bernie was a good guy

and did what he could.

And now, white-haired old man

he’s in love.

We work together in the big room that

used to hold enough desks for burly men

who never sat down.

There was much to do back then

but the Shipyard is dying

and now it’s us three:

Bernie, Frank, me.

We work in silence.

Bernie looks up

after Frank leaves for the day.

Honey, Frank’s not very good in bed.

I look up after saving my file.

Don’t worry, Bernie,

I don’t plan to find out.

Ain't That Don Draper?

It's Friday.  It's been raining and raining and raining.  Husband's out of town so the roof leaks ruining for the third time since we bought this house a bathroom wall.  (That the bathroom is the size of an orgone box is probably a blessing, but I so do not want to paint it again).  Test on Monday.  I have been monomaniacal.  Not much to report.  But .....

I have spent some time reading the pre-mortems about the presidential race.  There is, for the writers and me, the reader, a whistling past the graveyard air to all of it.  Better to read it as diversion, not fact.  Then I came across this picture.  I would no more want this man leading the republic than I would want Al Sharpton to do my hair.

That is all.

Black Earth

Longtime colleague and friend, artist Julie Patton, has a piece in About Place Journal 
about Cleveland's very own Salon des Refuse'/Let it Bee Garden.  Also check out the piece by Grace Lee Boggs (with Scott Kurashige).  If you don't know Julie and you don't know Grace Lee Boggs, you should.

Check out what Detroit's urban farmers are doing.  Poetry, too. 

Saturday Poetry: Bait (from East River Soliloquies)

I pulled it out.

By then it scarcely hurt.

I winced just a little as I tore

sickly arteries apart.

I would not use it anymore.

Had no need for this one with

its thrumming dance,

no more space for its pathetic concuss,

that ushered a red serenade

through its chambers.

Why did Venus do this?

I'll feed it to the fish, I thought.

They'll eat it before it hits bottom,

before she finds it.

I can't be bothered with the thing, I said,

flexing my arm, testing until I was satisfied

it could bear the weight.

Sensing the end,

my heart surged unforgivably hot.

It leaped and pounded, gurgled and ran

so badly that I silenced it with my sopping shirt,

hastily dropped it in a plastic bag,

setting out heedless

to the fact that

I could be seen through,

laughed at,

humiliated all over again.

This Is What Being slightly < 60 Look Like

This is what getting older is like: Turns out I have sciatica.  I can pinpoint when it would have started over 20 years ago.  A 3 mile stroll down Flatbush Avenue on a blistering August day with 9 year old chatting me up and a suitcase on my back.  (Another day, another dispatch.)  Undiagnosed, ignored, I'm now certain it is the cause of the burning, rubber-banded, hey-did-I-step-on-a-bottle-cap? feeling I often have in my right leg.  But you know what?  I'm so bored by all the maladies large and small that visit me at this age, I haven't even bothered to google it.  Meh.  I'll see my internist soon enough.  "Doctor, will I ever be able to dance the Running Man again?"  Ha, ha cuz I couldn't dance it before .....  (Snares, please!  Rimshot!)

So, quiz #1 is over.  I barely got half the problems right.  I could have done better were it not for a stupid stupid mistake on a truth table.  Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.  But, what really blows my whistle is that there isn't a person in that class of that thinks I should be there.  Here's what I've learned in 3 semesters:  that the higher you go in mathematics the whiter and more male it gets.

Don't these boys know I grew up in I-O-W-A where underestimating and denigrating negroes is and always has been a sport and a pasttime?  And don't these boys knows that they've wakened the competitiveness in Aunt Jemina?

It's on, ya'll ...

Never Stop

Picture this:  After math class where I raise the mean age of the students to 25, rush hour driving down the heart of black New Haven, Dixwell Ave., in a bigass banged up Nissan truck that gets 1 mile to the gallon while blasting Dylan and Marvin Gaye on my way home before going to my first Rosh Hashanah dinner.  Thinking about my beloved 6 year old niece, who goes to St. Whozit School of the Exculpatory Distraction and tells me 2 weeks into 1st grade that 2 girls said she's weird.

To which I say, never stop.  Stay weird.

Just Me, the Books and the Spiders

Blogging has been sporadic as fall and school descend.  Another September, another mind-boggling math course.  This time, Foundations of Mathematics, which seemed innocuous enough until the professor said that "it is the bridge between lower mathematics, e.g., Calculus (I kid you not) and higher mathematics".  I think I blacked out for a minute.  So, you ask why I'm doing this when my life could be so much more comfortable?

This is why:  a Mother Jones piece, “Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong,” by Kristina Rizga.  As a supplement you can listen to her terrific interview on Bob Edwards Weekend.

That's it for now.  I am temporarily living alone for the first time in 31 years.  Husband No. 1 is with his family, Beloved Niece and her mother moved out and I share the house with dying spiders and wasps.  It's great and I sometimes wonder if I'll croak like a frog when I do use my voice because other than a phone call or a meeting I don't talk much.  (At school I'm so old I'm virtually radioactive so no one engages me.)  This interlude reminds me that I'm an introvert with good social skills; this precious time allows me to be more of myself.  I hope to make the most of it.  Ciao, I'm off to Harlem for a meeting.

Saturday Poetry: Gorgeous Puddin'

In my next life

(if I get one)

I’m coming back as

Gorgeous Puddin’.

I’m coming back

to sing

scatting blue notes

through the pillars

that are my teeth.

They’ll hesitate

blue notes will,

quavering in their need

honeyed on the vulva

that is my mouth.

One note, a whole note

will tumble and slide

across the lounge, catching

(like a bb frenzied)

one the rim

of my next man’s ear

where it will tickle him

and unsettle him and

make his hands to stumble

(his fingers to splay).

They’ll flutter and sigh

and long to send me

one finger.

For me, one haloed digit,

upstage, at my piano.

Here where I lay playing

with tongue heavy

and lips ready

for his love.

Bumper Sticker I'd Like to See

Paul Ryan .... the Lance Amstrong of VP candidates

Mitt Romney, the GOP and Contemporary Political Operations

I follow the American political scene.  I just don't write about it much.  There are others more consistently tuned in and far better.  I leave it to them while I post poems in my dotage.  What follows is a brilliant "exegesis" about Romney, the convention, and his relationship to party mandarins and operatives.  (If I knew how to do a specific permalink I'd do it.  Instead this is a cut and paste from nancynall.com, 8/31/12.):

baldheadeddork said on August 31, 2012 at 5:59 pm

Long weekend, long post. 

This probably won’t be taken seriously by people who don’t already agree with me, but I think there is one serious point to take away from the convention dog-and-pony show. 

As noted by many others, a presidential nominee only has full control over two events in the entire election: Who he chooses as his running mate and his convention. Everything else he believes or wants to do might have to be massaged, ignored or even changed to get votes and money from one group or another. But choosing (and announcing) the nominee and running the convention are all his. 

I think there is a lot of evidence that in these moments a nominee gives a pretty good glimpse into how he’ll govern and lead if he wins. Look back to Obama for just one example. Watching Obama in the late primaries through the convention four years ago was nearly identical to how he’s operated as president for better and worse. (On the better side, a really smart staff with the lowest collective ego quotient I’ve ever seen in a campaign or administration. For worse, despite being really good at politics they hate to dirty their hands with it.) Bush 43 also showed a lot of his biggest strengths and flaws in the way he handled those decisions in 2000, as did Clinton in 1992.

So, with that in mind, it’s time to address something that people haven’t wanted to point out from the beginning of the campaign. Mitt Romney and his team are fucking awful at running for president. They’re barely competent on a good day and they make so many awful unforced errors.

This convention was a disaster. They invited a lot of unnecessary damage to the GOP in this election and beyond by bum rushing the Paul delegates. That’s the closest thing the GOP has to a viable youth movement and the Romney team threw them out because they played the game too well. The nominee always has final approval on the speeches given by the defeated candidates, but Romney’s team asserted no control and allowed everyone to talk about themselves for twenty minutes before mentioning Romney as a literal afterthought. There was no control of messaging at any point, and no control of the behavior of the delegates coming down from the top. What do you think Karl Rove would have done if the peanut incident happened at a convention he was running? It wouldn’t have just been the offenders thrown out. Whoever was responsible for that delegation would have been turned into a greasy stain on the convention floor – and every state leader would have known it before they landed in Tampa.

And then, at ten pm EST last night when the networks picked up the convention and the audience tripled, Mitt Romney began his introduction to the American people with an Oscar-caliber performance of Clint Eastwood impersonating Grandpa Effing Simpson. Then came Marco Rubio to talk about himself for twenty minutes, and finally Romney himself.
Probably only one person in four who was watching Romney’s acceptance speech was watching on the cable news channels or PBS before ten to see Romney’s introduction video. That is political malpractice on par with the Florida freak who injected cement into people’s asses and called it plastic surgery. Every candidate since Reagan in 1984 has used these meticulously crafted videos as the real introduction of the nominee. Know why? It fucking works. People like watching movies more than seeing someone give a speech and the campaign can use all of the soft focus and takes it needs to get the message right. Video, then – maybe – a brief introduction by someone who won’t outshine the candidate, then the acceptance speech. This is so simple and obvious, yet Romney and his team screwed it up beyond all recognition.
It’s not just that the Romney campaign team is in over its head. They are, and so deeply they can’t even see the top of the ocean. But the bigger problem is that despite months of miscues and mistakes no one has lost their job. And even despite a lot of experience people in GOP politics saying they’ve got major problems with the candidate and the people running the campaign, Romney continues to run the same way he ran in February and even in 2008, and with all of the same top people.
There is a strong correlation between how Romney is running his campaign and the way a bad CEO runs a company. You don’t have to follow business very long to find a company that gets into serious trouble because the CEO had bad staff and either didn’t have the vision to see what was really happening or a deep knowledge about the company or business. Draw your own connections between, say, Dan Ackerson’s travails at GM and Romney’s campaign problems.

But there’s a political precedent that deserves more attention. Romney has captured control of the Republican party this year, but he’s always run as an outsider to it. He’s never seriously tried to win over the party bosses and the conservative movement leaders. He’s come in with the conceit that if anyone wants to ride, they need to get on board with him. This isn’t a merger to Romney, it’s a takeover.

And in this way, the candidate of my lifetime that reminds me most of Mitt Romney is…Jimmy Carter. Carter had to run a brutal contest against the Democratic establishment to win the nomination in 1976 and his team was almost entirely composed of people who had not worked on other federal campaigns. Carter also had Romney-esque arrogance towards his party’s leaders after winning the nomination. The rift never healed and worse, Carter went into office really believing that the Democratic-controlled Congress should act like subsidiaries of his White House. It ruined any chance he had at a successful presidency.

The ideology is 180 degrees different, but I see a lot of the same method and personality in Mitt Romney. If he beats Obama the only common thread holding Romney, the GOP and the conservative movement together now will be gone. They will turn on each other and the fight between Romney’s WH, Eric Cantor’s Congress, and Dick Armey’s K-Street operations for who is really in charge will be on.

 

Saturday Poetry: Eight Post Meridiem

It's spring

yet Winter’s resentful of its diminution and

comes back to haunt us today.

We who have them, unearth the

scarves and mittens and caps that

flew into the laundry basket

for washing and putting away.

Finished with homework she consents

to walk to the co-op for food.

I was girded to resort to censure:

I'm not the only one who eats in this house, y'know...

I've work all week and I’m tired.

She soothes me, the gift of her company.

We walk together, minutes into

the bracing cold

gossiping to keep ourselves warm.

She tells me that she is through with her posse.

She is not hanging out

with them any more.

She tells me where they were supposed to meet, how she waited.

Then looked for them at the Burger King.

They weren't there

and she went to the take-out Chinese

where they weren't, either.

In the street was the principal

who gets mad if she sees you eat

outside.

It’s after lunch that she finds them

and she lays down the law:

I'm not waiting for anybody.

Thinking of all

the boys who have broken my heart

all the phone calls that

still don't come

I tell her, it's a good way to live.

Fortified she interrupts:

I'll hang with anybody

I don't have to stay with one group.

She boasts how easily she can make herself welcome.

We are halfway there,

Winter’s been forgotten.

I am proud of my level-headed girl

Grateful for this inadvertent canal

between chores

to learn who she is

and love her even more.

I Have Started School

Which is why I'm using it as an excuse for not posting.  Truth was I was away last weekend, in the City, pretending I was 25 years old.  But, yes, school has begun with an innocuous class called "Foundations of Mathematics".  Sounds simple, right?  How to count?  And multiply (cf. life before effective birth control) and divide (cf. Republican Convention, Tampa, 2012)?  No.  The course is none of the above.

You have to study logic.  And do proofs.  Husband No. 1 is waiting in the wings thinking this will knock some sense into my head.  I am headed to the nearest medical supply store to buy a leather helmet with a chin strap.  I've only had one class and already my head is starting to swell.  Excelsior, my ass ...
 

A Warning to All Those Ladder-Climbing Hot Mamas

Even MILF's get old.  Sigh ....