Poem for the Rooftops of Iran - June 19th, 2009

Tonight the sound of God is Greater can be heard louder and louder than previous nights
Where is this?! Where is this place where everything has been blocked?
Where is this place where people are just shouting the name of God?
Where is this place where the sound of God is Greater can be heard louder and louder?
Everyday Im just waiting to see if there will be more and louder voices at nights?
My body trembles
...and I wonder if God trembles too?
Where is this where weve been imprisoned so innocently?
Where is this where no one gives us a helping hand?!
Where is this place, where we are getting our voices heard worldwide through our silence?
Where is this place where the blood of its young people is shed on the streets..., where people stand and pray on their blood?
Where is this place where its people are named Gangsters & Thugs?!
Where is this?
This is Iran. This is my land and yours!
This is Iran

by an anonymous woman in Tehran


This is your and my homeland.
I am born in this darkness with you.
This is the homeland of you and I.
I shake within your voice
and tears flow to my eyes on your sobs.
The wind at the microphone.
The voices pleading
from the dark sky. The only light,
dots of distant occupants.
This is my homeland and yours.
The threat of tomorrow and its promise.
Iran is where each of us is born.
From here we reach out
to touch a new birthplace only imagined.
Come daylight.
In it raise our head.

by jerry gordon

6.20.09

Concerns

To Whom It May Concern: And just like that, the phone went dead. And something else too. But the new day will ressurrect the dead and call upon dormant hearts,  kiss the mouth of the sleeping, suck out the bitter taste. And all will start again. Now you have a choice. Make it happen now. Don't count on the next new morning, each day weighs a little more on the heart and the bone.

by Nili Roberts


This does concern you. Your choice. Don't go back to sleep. Live a thousand dawns within each taste. The day's lips to yours. Kiss back before there is time to count befores and afters, before one more something else is buried beneath another name for separation.

by Jerry Gordon

Cries

I was born
and when I stopped crying
I was shown my home
I loved it
I went through a wall
and I was taught everyone was an angel
I learned to speak my tongue
I was told,
"With these words you can tell the truth"

I climbed the mountain behind my home
I could see over the walls
and as far as my eyes reached,
everywhere were angels
and there were no ends

But when I came back down
my home was gone
and no one welcomed me as an angel.
My tongue sounded like nonsense.
The mirrors said,
I was a foreigner.
The silences said,
my words were noise.

Not heard
not understood
I cried
without meaning.

I cried, my tongue a stump of sorrow.
I cried, my lungs a bellows of joy.
I cried, my mouth like the open hollow of the sky.
I cried.

I cry
and in it find a home
not of place or flag or time,
but of this lost and momentary
bark of the heart
echoing off from others' lips.

I live
in this ever unnamable emotion
always breaking
open like a seed that can only grow in abandoned soil
and takes each road back to wild.



by jerry gordon
5.13.09

Circus

The circus feels in town.
The town being my mind.
Its three rings my doubt, trust and fear.
The trapeze this emotion
swinging from wires I as yet have no names for.

The clowns dive into a drinking glass.

I jump in
to save them from drowning.



5.9.9

Beside a Glass of Water

It is still possible, I see,
to find a shattering dazzle
in a simple thing; the lazy
looseness of liquids
turning in certain weights of light,
in the trembling layers that shine
inside their reflections of the room.

Did the inventor of glass realize
what he'd given us?

I sit at a corner of a long table
and let my pieces of paper and history
find a random rhythm of place
as though the rituals of Dogen's punctuations
are here as well,
echoing in this momentary arrangement
of my transcient clutter.



by jerry gordon
cafe independant, kyoto

Before Evers

Our marriage is on and in the morning
we will steal into our death.

Never; before the dawn
and the end of our dreams,
I will touch your hair,
as soft as the clouds
that carry these stories of rain.
Believe me. I am getting lost
to find you.
To meet you without all the bodies
I have gathered to just stand
bare against the sun's cleaning light.
Smile to me from the other side
of the road. Then I will cross,
take your hand
and place it to my face.

The sky and ground may fight,
but we can walk between them until dawn.
Let the mountains roll their rivers
into the mouthes of babies.
Sweetly giving in that
blood-milk-nipple-lip-belly-heart
promise.



by jerry gordon

Rolywholyover, A Circus

for shigemi

In a word the years disappear
and we are sitting at that chess board in Mito;
me on this side
you there
playing across the space of John Cage's brain
in a world of only one rule.

As I remember, three hours passed with us
ending in enough concentration to hear
the sounds of our pieces
taking positions amidst the rest of
randomly hung art works.

Here, on this train of an unimaginable future,
the emotion of a moment
nearly old enough for high school
sets a thread of honesty into my voice
as I tell what this person now gets
to imagine.



by jerry gordon
3.28.09

Future Calendar

The sky is seeping in on a voice
that isn't Elvis Costello
but is enough
to ply those emotions of tender brutalities
born 20 years ago.
Your sunken living room
and hi-fi on the floor.
The woman working the expensive black paper
over there has skin that explodes
from her chest like a plentiful shiny mountain,
like a field of infinite shiny grain.
If Elvis mated with the Beatles,
this ceiling's voice would be that spawn.
It's possible, you know,
that I studied literature because I love
the look of women who like books.
It's a theory
I'm entertaining tonight.
Or, perhaps it's women handling paper.
Or, simply, women in their majority,
because there is something so beautiful
about a woman amidst women who are not quite friends.
Women in teams. Women working with women.
This perhaps locates my long realized attraction
to concentration as a behavior that makes me stop and gaze.
Such staring women have economies of beauty
that surpass any glamour.
Busy girls.
Could be a geek calendar: 12 pictures
of un-makeuped women focused on
removing something from a press
or choosing a certain tube of paint
or reading a line of text
or cutting the edge off an expensive photograph.
Women reading Art Week.
Women designing cool chairs or a new system
for cataloging music by sonic intimacy rates.

That's a calendar I'd like to be given.



by jerry gordon
12.19.08
Standard Books Cafe, Osaka