moontriangle

Market Report

2011-04-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

i wonder what i would talk about
if i walked that same path.
your eyes found so much food.
would my eyes find more details of the cracks and stones,
the patterns of water and textures of stains,
the quality of echos against the shade?

your eyes in your head on your body
my eyes in my head on my body

we meet
in these gifts of such
sharing

by jerry gordon
4.12.2011

Exchanging Belongings

2011-03-20T02:07:00.000-07:00

Yangjah and I played last night in front of the moon and Docomo building, thinking of Meri and all others with us in this world right now.

When we finished, a German man came out of the dark and told us his experience of being on the 30th floor of a Tokyo office building during the quake. His voice and eyes only hinted at the moments he witnessed. Speaking to strangers about experiences he can barely fathom he had. Telling of his need to smile and be reassuring to other people near his desk while at the same time he watched the ground rippling beyond his window and thought he would soon die in that building.

We meet and exchange belongings, leaving lighter and heavier in our movements.

3.20.11

A Race Between

2011-03-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

Start your stop
watches, we are getting
going, we are counting
geiger numbers down and up
like it’s a race
between fear and hope.

Isn’t there an iPhone app for this?

Mirra’s in Tokyo
Meri’s in Tokyo
Lance’s in Tokyo
Sammy’s in Tokyo
Yangjah’s going
not
going
not
going
not
going
to Tokyo

Yesterday I called a friend
and asked my first
21st century question:
“Shall we cancel the picnic
because of the nuclear cloud?”

We didn’t.
We played on
on an almost empty
riverside.

jerry gordon
3.16.11
Osaka

Straight from Sky

2011-02-09T07:07:00.000-08:00

I wish I could
lift the sadness
off the rain
so it could fall free
of river, stream and mountain peak,
so it could be ocean
straight from sky,
those two purest blues
facing each other
like depthless mirrors
shining in shining's shine.

by jerry gordon

mouth upside down needle blink wrap aggressive knit time move window

2011-01-14T03:28:00.000-08:00

Within some blink
behind my eyes, I see
a woman knitting a window of time.
Her needles move the circles
of these moments inside of
each other, but the dimensions
of her work remain vague.

Will this warmth wrap us
for now or ever,
for a season or decade?
These questions only inspire a race
between fear and hope.
The fact is she is
continuing her work.

Her window's size makes no difference.
If we come close
we can see wide and far.

Some will aggressively say,
"This time looks upside down;"
I say, "When I kiss your mouth,
I close my eyes."

by jerry gordon
1.14.11

Yodogawa Poem

2011-01-04T03:58:00.000-08:00

Smoke rises
from a mouth
as voices without meaning,
returning the needles of names
back to Time.

by jerry gordon
1.4.11

Behind Beyond

2010-11-23T20:53:00.000-08:00

Behind your eyes is all
I must imagine,
but I feel no hope
to do so, to set my ideas
within you or build some city
of my figuring. I'd rather just look
at the windows
without assuming some landscape
or weather
or crime scene
beyond.

by jerry gordon
11.16.10

Each One

2010-11-23T20:50:00.000-08:00

The wind blows
cold today, but
the sun reaches down
from beyond our heavens
and touches my eye
with its shine,
touches my face
with its warmth.

Like a carpet of gold,
10,000 pages of poetry
spread out at my feet,
each one describing
its own fall
to earth.

by jerry gordon
11.9.10

Loop Line Lyrical

2010-11-18T05:52:00.000-08:00

Exiting the Loop Line
in Kyobashi, I'm held
by the smell of lavender and wax.
My heart scans the platform,
looking for your lips
or throat
or fingers. But,
it's all rushing
salarypeople here.

So, as to not waste
any gift from the sun,
my heart expands
the space the shape of
three loaves of bread
into a small room
decorated with the furniture
of my longing.

by jerry gordon
11.18.10

The Days of Burning Buildings

2010-11-07T06:09:00.000-08:00

In the morning,
I want to burn the city down,
leaving the marrow of rot
to run the streets of man's disasters, but
by lunch time, I see the shine
in an idiot's eye looking
at some item of my hatred
with such sincerity
that a seed of doubt
blossoms in my brain.

By dark
I am smiling within
the insanity of
friends,
love,
kindness
and collaborators in beauty.

I sleep and float through infinite meetings
within that perfect
forgetting,

then. . .

I wake
and feel the need
to search for matches
yet again.

by jerry gordon
11.7.10

New Now

2010-10-26T08:45:00.001-07:00

I walk through this
world of intricate failures,
of 10,000 pages of poetry falling
from these invisible trees.
Climbing up into their boughs,
I want to work
handfuls of mud into my hair
and decorate it with these
fiery stems, my head
a halo of autumn dying of
this most beautiful time.

by jerry gordon
10.26.10

. . .

2010-10-25T17:36:00.000-07:00

let the seeds fall
let the birds consume
let the forests fly

by jerry gordon
10.26.10

Ride in Night

2010-10-19T20:17:00.000-07:00

Riding south to Namba,
the streets are filled with autumn night, thus
why isn't it impossible
to feel the sun's warmth against my back?

My fingers hold
the memories of knitting,
whittling and fingers. My mouth
of onigiri, anise and a flicker of tongue.

How lucky can I fucking get?

I offer this all up
to the altar of intricate failures,
as well.

by jerry gordon
10.20.10

Nili's Poetic Street Corner

2010-10-04T05:39:00.000-07:00

From the overwoven
abstractions of sky,
birds descend to my page,
landing and pecking the paper
like nuggets of meaning.
Waddling, strutting and fanning
their feathers, they arrange
and rearrange themselves
in readings.

by jerry gordon
10.4.10

Dialogic

2010-10-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Beauty of incongruity

Let's breathe in
Deep the narrative
Ruining our lives

Breathe in again
You look at me
I look at you

The ruin we see
Is the art
And the lie

Why do you stress so
When I contradict you?

by mjsalovaara

I contradict
lest I contradict
my nature; "the ruin
we see is
the art and the lie."

With so little time
to breathe in so little of
Time, I hold my breath,
letting more
of the moment's diligent chemicals
to seep into my blood.

It ruins me
in this delightful chaos
I recognize in the mirror;
the 10,000 mes I have memorized
climb the scaffolding of this beast,
tearing the terror from my eyes
as tears.

by jerry gordon

I too tear and tear,
scaffold or desire
we climb nonetheless

alternate universes
in relief or contrast
beloved, beholden
and with the stars
just so ...

despised and taut
this beauty of incongruity,
a hall of mirrors
or 10,000 waves
crashing, lapping, eroding
my King Lear reach

that plank you walk
is but a splinter
when you breath
too deep

by mjsalovaara

Within an echo,
the devil told me the way
to stand atop the tip
of a needle made of wood:

"Be afraid to fall."

Being a bad student,
I forgot the key points
of the lesson and found
my own way:
collecting particles of
smoke, ash and splinters
I build a bridge from ruin,
going nowhere.

by jerry gordon

Rain

2010-09-07T03:53:00.000-07:00

And suddenly,
as though there is
a universal kindness,
the rain sings out
from the blacktops and gutters
that she has come back,
however briefly.

And so i am
out the door and into her,
my shirt still the inside-out of sleep,
getting drenched clean
in her spiky diamonds.

After so long
steeping in my lonesome sweat,
this falling sky smells of
all those incensed gods
that have reached down
and calmed my reckless brain.

by jerry gordon
9.7.10

Baku

2010-08-18T04:45:00.001-07:00

I sense you are arriving,
ready to eat my dreams
and leave me blank and drooling
at tomorrow’s breakfast table.
The clicks of your claws
are not as subtle as your euphoric sister
in how she rides inside
the pores of whisky and wine
to float along the narrowed
capillaries of my brain,
making mush of grey matter.
No, you I can almost hear
climbing the ladders of my soul
on such nights when the moon
stumbles up and down the sky
and dreams offer hope
of escapes, new meetings and secrets worth keeping.
This is typically when you arrive on your tiny toes,
tapping along the Formica hallways of my memory,
past where my spent muses scream
from their paper cages
and into my vast factory of intimations.

I know you need no keys to move
through the doors; you simply chew
them off their hinges, leaving no fantasy
undigested, just this dust
and the splinters of disreality’s sweet visions
piled as traces of what could maybe be
forgotten.

Only this vague unknowing remains
present for my glazed, rewoken stare.
This vacant taste of what I’d thought I’d chewed.

Your sloppiness is your one concession,
the way you depart quick enough to leave
your footprints and turdlets behind. A gift
as I reconstruct the world
against the sun’s speedy particles. I find something
mysterious but not quite monstrous
has torn up my garden, the marks
of your destruction alluding to evidence erased.
And, this at times gives me hints
to reconstruct your crimes, to imagine you
with your snout and tusks and dinky tail
rutting through my multi-winged flights,
epics of mayhem and under-ocean sex:
the sort of stuff that dreams are made of.

by jerry gordon
6.9.6

Spoken at the Window

2010-08-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

At the start of this
most recent eternity,
I looked into the evil
in your eyes
to promise I would not
let your hand fall from mine.

I got close enough
to see each fear
that scars your face
and to see myself
floating in your eye
like in a bath.
Into that depthless window
into the house of your soul,
I spoke these words:

"I cannot hear the distance
from where my words echo back.
They may roll here
returning from some long ago
life before man imagined suicides
and rebirths. They may be
here at my ear from
no farther than my teeth.
But, their words are clear.
Not of any language,
but carrying the meaning I have
always sought and fled. They say
I must resume from go
again building the road
by molding each pebble on the path
from atoms I must collect in dreams.
They say you will not help me,
because your job is merely
to make my work possible
rather than easier. They say,
they are not sorry and will laugh
at my eventual destruction and repetition.
They say they are not angels
because I would not want angels.
They are not devils or princes of wisdom.
They say they are merely
echoes of my fabulous ghosts."

by jerry gordon
3.24.10

Sobs of the Mute

2010-08-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

for James Barrett

Upon such nights
when the soul can climb the spine
and the air's a conductive pulse,
each eye is longing to meet each eye
and the hand carries so much pain to the touch,
the trumpet is here
to guide the sorrow,
to take it from table to table
like a flower of fire
wobbling in the sobs of the mute.

by jerry gordon

Puddle Wonder

2010-08-17T19:25:00.000-07:00

Does the puddle wonder
if the wind is from
a passing train or the season?

Each sweep of breeze
shrinks what
wasn't here this morning.

The reflection ripples.

And, who is here
to see the
sky as a
reflection?

by jerry gordon

7.12.10

2010-07-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

Reality
is such a fucking bitch,
but I love her;
the clouds vanish
and she stands here
bristling and danceable.

They say, "She is muggy
and humid too. Sticky and gross;
she is Ephemera, unsubstantial
when poked; she is the reversed
reflection of what I desire."

But, I say, that's not her.
Those are the lies she tells and believes.
Behind that, she shines
fierce as a nail and its hammer.

by jerry gordon
7.12.10

Learning from Echos

2010-07-11T02:11:00.000-07:00

In a dream, I spoke to echos
and they replied, “Touch
the flexibility of her waist,
the way it leaves a doorway
empty for strangers, friends and ghosts
to exit and enter.
Watch the wind remove
the stick from her hair
so it can find form in that storm.
There is a location in your nostril
to keep the scent of an hour as it is
bent against a quiet river through a quiet city;
that stillness that is within the reach
and beyond a grasp.
Like this, let the diligent rain of chemicals
fall within your brain
as you speak into the bodies
of what remains unnamed.

“At times you can’t imagine
how much this world needs you
to not do much.”

by jerry gordon
7.11.10

A Scratcher

2010-06-29T23:46:00.000-07:00

Beside me on this train bench,
a man calmly tears
his face to pieces
and I imagine
within he is roaring
with itch. The greed
of his fingers
and the needs of 10,000
brief reliefs are eroding
what we recognize
as one of us.
I try to look
away, let him be
placed on that invisible island
of others.

With so much drought,
the boats of compassion no longer float;
should I hope for suffering
to restore some rain of empathy?

by jerry gordon
6.13.10

In and Out of TV Consciousness

2010-06-23T00:50:00.000-07:00

My dad died tomorrow
four years ago,
and so I imagine him
sitting on some sofa
that would make atheists
grumble their circular fundamentalisms.

He's there with his tall glass
of White Horse whiskey
and his colorful game board
of medications, each somehow
connected to his heart trouble.

Before vanishing into Arizona,
he wasn't interested in health.
Talked more about self-death
and animosities, things he would
remember again and again against
the raspy sweeping
of altzheimer's impeccable broom.

So, today, the day before Father's Day
four years ago, I watch
a jittery loop of images
shining just behind my forehead,
of Dad nodding in and out of TV consciousness
as some eternally uncancelled series of JAG episodes
are broadcast by some discount cable channel
in heaven or hell.

by jerry gordon
6.18.10

My Crown of Honor

2010-06-22T23:32:00.000-07:00

As if it is my crown of honor,
I set my hair on fire
each morning.

Rolling out of sleep,
I gather matches and gas
from beneath my mattress
and ignite the nappy mass.
It snaps and cracks as a whisper of flame
speaks its pungent descriptions.
The heat increases, reaching toward my eyebrows.
I watch the flux-form shadows of my thoughts
weave the wall with calm confusion.

Somewhere behind my eyes,
the orange ember of my brain
clicks and ticks and clicks and ticks and clicks and ticks,
distilling my head full of
futures and memories down
into a fragile stack of ash,
a cloud of 10,000 clouds
piled like gravity likes its pages:
still enough to fathom
the frenzy in any movement.

30ish minutes later, I rise,
make my bed
and start the day.

I put my head beneath
the bathroom spigot
and smell the fire's fragrance
stain the water.
Flowing down the drain,
it's already found its ocean.
My hair grows back almost
immediately, or at least before
I get on the 9AM train and need
to plot my angles to an empty seat
or dual for dominance
at the ticket wicket.

But, even come afternoon,
when my hair gets wild and fucked up again,
there remains some trace
of the morning's combustion
to insulate myself
from too much me.

by jerry gordon
1.14.10

A Review of YOU

2010-06-16T07:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a very nice review of my 2007 chapbook YOU, done by Niluferplum over at http://niluferplum.blogspot.com/ . Check her stuff out.

How is it I'm
content with this
perfection?

Reading YOU, Poems by Jerry Gordon, Three Cornered Moon Press, 2007

(A poem of sorts about a collection of poems)

Like a diamond miner, YOU extracts the beauty in all the places - the celestial and, more delectably, the mundane. A probe is lowered into "a room beneath the street," an exceptional ear is exposed to "a sutra sung for every train car and every crack in the concrete," and a "mind breathing close."

I plugged myself into the delicate machinery of the photocopied pages, I let it inject into my poetic vein what is outside of myself. The stuff, in a flash, travelled through the intimate vessel and spoke to the parts that do not know language but know all. I bathed in beauty, I was happy, enveloped in a poetic daze, with a spark in lieu of a heart, born out of the meeting on a torn page of an author with his reader. Beauty was floating all around me and pushed the ecstatic rose to bloom inside. I was linked by a golden thread to YOU, to all. I knew I was safe in this quantum writer's laboratory where minute details are observed with no other bias than the benevolence that should always accompany the extraction of truth and beauty. I knew I was saved.

The room, the street, the crack, the breath, perhaps indeed they were outer trivial occurrences, but it is his fortunate eye and it is his ear - it is the shape of his soul - that sculpted the folds and the secret corners into reality. I contemplated the contemplation and his arrangement of the external elements. I witnessed "a torn piece of gold paper from a cigarette box" turn into a monument. I marvelled at scraps of the hidden inner material, which so freely seem to offer themselves to the filigree worker's attention, to be woven into such miraculous moments.

How beautifully you are "talking about architecture." Perhaps because the architecture is breathtaking and there is no other way to talk about it.

niluferplum, a reader's poetic orgasms, 10th June 2010

But, I'm dishonest

2010-06-11T05:26:00.001-07:00

If I were honest,
I’d write you and say I called
to just hear your voice, to feel
the chemicals that fall
like a diligent mist within my brain
when I think or write
the bodies of your name.

But, I’m dishonest, so I’ll tell you
that to my right, a woman
just dropped a can of apricots
and it rolled down the train car
to where a man leaned out
to return it to her hand.

by jerry gordon
6.11.10

Beyond the Other Tracks

2010-06-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

An object only comes to rest
when it finds some spot of solitude.

Coming back from Kyoto
after improvising and talking long
about Being, tuning the self,
suicide and death,
my train slows, stops and then creeps
past a train stopped on the other tracks.

I watch from my window,
staring in at the various little cultures
happening in the other train's cars:
a middle aged man sprawled out
and sleeping on a long bench;
a group of high school boys
leaning far out their windows
to see where they just came from;
slouching passengers sitting with
the drained-faced looks of forced patience.

My train slides on, leaving the other
and comes to a humming industrial light
pouring its brightness down on a blue tarp
shaping a woman's body.

The body has been made soft enough to fold
over the right angles of a concrete drainage ditch,
a body that perhaps 20 minutes before
could climb the fence beside the sidewalk
and time its leap in front of that now stopped
local train towards Kyoto.

This thought makes me
wonder about that leap and its actual details.
For example, did she land
on the ground between the rails
already ringing with the train's approach?
And thus, did she land standing
or just come down already falling?
And, if she landed on her feet,
did she feel any sense of accomplishment--
some twinge of successful physicality--
or was it just one more pulse
of irony or futility to drive her
into the train's embrace?
Did she turn towards or away from
the train's light and its unobstructable momentum?

It was obvious in my glance and recognition
of the body half-poured into the gutter,
it was knocked back off the tracks.
But who knows after how much
interaction with the train?
The emergency trucks didn't gather
where she climbed the fence.
She was transported by the energies
and logics of physics, but I wonder about
her final immeasurable moments of thought
and perception. Did she hear the beauty of
the Dopler effect or her name spoken
in one of the tongues of her mind? Did she
sense a release or the approach of punishment?
Did she build one final memory before becoming
lost to herself and wholly gone?

by jerry gordon
suicide on the Hankyu Kyoto line
5.6.09

Break

2010-05-26T01:37:00.000-07:00

for Nili

In Japan, a crack is healed
with sumac sap and gold,
making the scar
a shining mark of a moment
and alluding to the miracles
that make Time less
than the sum of its times.

broken?

by jerry gordon

5.26.10

Becoming / Lost

2010-05-16T18:02:00.000-07:00

My friends become landscapes
and in them I wander
climb search their faces for mirrors
becoming
ecstatically lost to briefly find
myself--
that ghost in the ephemeral wink.

Amidst these mountains and rivers,
these forests and valleys,
we lay our words next to our words
as a fuse of chemical speech
that ignites Time--
reactive synthetic metamorphic.

And in those fires
I find my maps and hopes
and self-portraits and tongues
already tossed in as fuel
by that enviable who
I've never met long enough to thank.

"We can't even imagine what we must sacrifice."

Traces vanish,
but when I peer in
at the mirrors walling my heart,
I find them patterned
with prints of your fingertips
and feet and minds and lips--
building me once again
as the visible surface
I reach to touch.

A butterfly's wings beat
the delicacy of hurricanes, leaving
my maps obsolete
in this new,
this rewrought land.

Nowhere is Now/Here

by jerry gordon
May 2003

No Beyond

2010-05-04T19:08:00.000-07:00

I pass by worlds
and don't need to bother
abandoning them to periphery;
they simply don't exist, their sole residents--
the withered, the bird smeller, the squatting
masturbator, the slow-motion vomitress
extruding a lake and its rivulets of enzyme--
are unable to reflect enough light
through the window-wall I filter with intentions
to enter my eye.

I pass.

Beyond the rows of words,
are empty margins.
Beyond the page--
invisibility.

by jerry gordon
5.5.10

A Forgotten Poem I Found I Wrote Inside the Back Cover of an Oliver Sacks Book

2010-04-27T19:42:00.000-07:00

These disembodied
voices of judgement feed
on me like
tapeworms of memory.
Hidden within, does my skin
ripple and bend of muscle
or them
raising my hand or eyebrow
against me?

by jerry gordon

Departure

2010-03-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

for Mirra

When you left
I felt something
like a small rubber mallet
whack
against my heart
a little more than lightly
but less than violent,
like a physician's efficient
tap to test my reflexes.

The impact rippled
across my thumping heart
like a delicate tsunami
rolls around the world,
disturbing no land masses
but reshuffling all the fish.

by jerry gordon
3.28.10

Feeding Time

2010-02-11T20:33:00.000-08:00

for msj

We each eat our shit--
He and me and thee--
so, they say, "Choose well
what food you first ingest."
Does it digest?
Is it worth
dining on
again?

I eat a nail
and then
its hammer.

by jerry gordon

2.12.10

Empty Body

2009-12-15T23:06:00.000-08:00

for Yangjah

In so many places,
we have seen you dissappear.
It's happened in rooms for plants
and middle floors,
in white dresses and near boat motors.
We've seen you vanish to biwa and be-bop
and a rattling can.

It starts
as less a look and more a distance
arrives in your eyes,
and then a mask as neutral
as the sky rises into your face
from some cabinet of the heart
that isn't measurable
in dimension, depth or moments.

At this point, we know
you have become somewhere
else, leaving your body
available for ghosts or localized gods
that may be
passing in need of form.

And then your motions get real,
hinting at some fragile narrative of echos
and secrets that don't belong to this world.
Your body churns through the space
of some parking lot, stairwell
or other ephemeral spasm of ambition
and leaves a twisted intestine of emptiness
shimmering and suspended in the air.

Like the beat of a sparrow's heart
sews a slender thread of warmth
into a wind,
into the world
your body draws out a blank enough for being
and a private history of strangers
with strangers finds form in our brains,
letting the ancient blood and milk within us
flow again of pulse and urge.

by jerry gordon
12.16.09

God's Flamable Dandruff

2009-07-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

I take
what I get
of you and the rest
of beauty,
these scrapings
off your heart
and God's
flamable dandruff.

Collectable sparks
to start forest fires
in my hair.

And like the fragments of some
rumored completion,
I hold them to my eye
and ear and lips.
Sense them.
Not to build a shape of
the Big Deal
from their pieces.
Instead, to read
in them their intimation:
that bits and bits
of disparate beauties
predict these patterns of
perfections
repeat.

by jerry gordon
7.29.09

Skeleton Day

2009-07-27T04:29:00.000-07:00

Today is the kind of day

where I walk just behind my skin,

my skeleton's rattling clatter

echoing off the buildings and car windows.

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

2009-06-20T02:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-31T20:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-31T19:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-24T20:55:00.000-08:00

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

First Poem

2009-01-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

Beauty crowds us towards
believing beyond dreams
and to press the chest of reality
while giving it
all our breath.

jerry gordon
1.2.09

Vague Legacy

2008-12-23T23:27:00.000-08:00

for Nick King

As is the way with history,
I have heard about you from someone else
and have since surely augmented those words
with my imagining. So, forgive me
if you don't recognize yourself
in this poem. Your son
Steve placed these seeds of you in my mind
in a past before we were friends,
but the scene remains unfaded.

As I recall the story, Alex had come for a holiday dinner
and you told him he must first play
a song on the piano,
as though this was a challenge you used
for entering the space of hospitality,
regardless of the fact that Alex couldn't play piano.
The implication being
that any being that could feed itself
could deal with enough of the 88 keys
to win entry to the feast. In my imagining,
you sat in a comfortable chair
well dressed but casual
working the rhythm of a martini
as you studied the guest absorb your request--
watching Alex hear, comprehend, puzzle, weigh
and then accept.

And this, perhaps, was the Song of Self-Examination
you genuinely desired to witness: the dramatic event
of an individual meeting something unexpected
and deciding to play it.

While I hate golf, I love this aspect of the game.

And, Alex did accept,
and proceeded to play
using a pair of oranges he plucked from a bowl of holiday fruit.
And in my mind,
it was a marvelous piece of percussive angularity
in a Thelonious Monk mode.
Building from a toying game
into a genuine vehicle of emotion,
Alex and the room listened as intently as Glenn Gould
at each incoming sound,
at each unexpected turn of form,
at each question of legitimacy and contempt.
He hunched over the black and white buttons
as the oranges bounced from tone to tone
just off the ends of his charcoal tweed sleeves.

And, when Steve told me this story--
probably to prove some point regarding ontology--
I dreamed myself into it as a future, halfway
hoping to one day be given the same challenge.
And, here, some decade-and-a-half after,
I must say that what's become my love for improvised music
began with that spark. Honestly. Looking back, I recall
beginning to play in earnest
(if such a thing is even possible)
because there seemed to be some need
to nurture a skill in embracing possibilities,
to be ready for a welcome that could require
an improvised offering of sound.

And, thus, in tribute in a future in a house I imagine,
there will always be a bowl of oranges atop the piano.

by jerry gordon
december, 2008

Each Hinge is So Delicate

2008-12-09T22:14:00.000-08:00

The train is not early
and so I am not crying.

I sit here and want
to sit at the edge of our famous river,
dropping the petal of each word
into its currents
as the promises I am yet to fulfill
and thus yet to break.

Each hinge is so delicate.

Do I confuse flexibility for fragility?

This, too, I may not know
until beyond never,
or simply never
know.

A black bug walks out from between my feet
and as is possible when I am this
fluent in listing
to sense all elements at play,
I imagine it is you
appearing and departing
my care and quarantine, risking
the journey accross the width
of the train car
to vanish behind some stranger's belongings.
And at such moments of ease,
I nod into existence.

Ontology needs this and that
in its indexes.

by jerry gordon

Before a Show

2008-12-09T19:23:00.000-08:00

My hands are very cold.
Like clocks, they count my patience
with concrete and rectilineal shadow.
They place me inside my skin
looking in, seeing that
I put so much hope into this dark room,
that from the lands beyond its darkness
dreams and terrors will appear.

I fold and unfold my imaginings
to find what I have surely hidden,
to let them leap up from the page
and pull my hair down over my eyes
like all the other lies I breath my life from.

Come, sweet crazinesses.
Come from someone else's minds and lead me off
inside of your evaporations,
lure me beyond these paper cages I crowd with my howling muses.
Give me a single match that I can play with back at home.
Give me something to steal or something to break,
something to commit another crime of beauty for.
Come, and leave your fragrance on my skin
like a tattoo tapped of inspiration's vague ink.

by jerry gordon
dance box: B1 Art Space
12.6.08

Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T07:13:00.000-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving,
so, tonight I’m drinking Wild Turkey
in the minutes before I hope the world explodes
like a pheonix of sound
born from the ashes in this air.

All this smoke’s been filtered
through humanity’s lungs and desires for clarity. All this
smoke’s been waiting since the start of time
to ride the currents of this cafe’s breathing.
All this smoke’s becoming more than the invisible
patterns of turbulence churning away
from Kawasaki’s tenor.

I am the sort of monster that imagines
a single particle of this smoke
through its formless and formed and formless play,
all the ways it finds for being. I imagine
its undying float through infinite lies
and the other words I love to call towards it,
as though the shapes of my lips
might make me love it more than absolutely.
I am the sort of pleased beast that pictures
a crystal of smoke tearing off from an embering leaf
grown in some sun-soaked landscape
and watches that molecule of exhaustion rise
through light and contrast into arabesques of visible language.

We must know the desert Arabs loved to light fires
and contemplate the cursive. The Sanskrit calligraphers
had rites for inching their lips close enough to flames
to burn their quick kisses into acrid flashes of peeling chap,
watching how briefly they would ignite
and become evident as line against ceilings of carpet.

Yes, I am the sort that is willing to concentrate
deeply enough to follow, fathom and chart
a single bit of smoke’s progression through to its rest
as residue in my hair.

Pungent spike of tobacco, here is where you have become.
You rode the riot of sound tonight and have sewn yourself
into my intimacy. This is not your end, nor mine.
This is merely our bubble-burst of meeting.
Next time it may be me who drifts past your eyes
while you stir a rock of ice floating in Thanksgiving.
And it may be you who fills a stolen page with scrawl.

by jerry gordon
11.27.08
common cafe, nakazaki-cho, osaka

Fall

2008-11-25T04:56:00.001-08:00

The permanent
willingness to fall
apart, to become
undiscovered and
through that loss
of what isn't and is,
to be at hand
in all
available
here.

by jerry gordon
11.25.08

Wind

2008-11-25T04:50:00.000-08:00

Ever abundant,
ever fulfilled,
this wind I feel
at the nape of my
throat, tapping as
present as my
pulse, making me
within its temporal
gusts and
subsiding.
Leaving what
to remain?

by jerry gordon
11.25.08

On the Nankai Train to Tannowa

2008-11-18T22:43:00.000-08:00

My subtle fantasy of lasting
beyond the bubble-burst of this thought
flash.

My straw hat of these last
three years is woven
of a certain number of stalks
that grew from a certain green landscape.
Their history is now part of keeping these
particles from the sun from
hitting my face. Their distant
seeds contribute to me--
today--
looking like a dork.

Toward the middle of this train car,
a man in pink socks beats his chest
and maintains an angry soliloquy.
The rip-rapping rhythm
of his babbling chant reminds me
of my urgent drumming this morning,
of the cymbal riding the crossing stamps
the snare and bass put on the moments.

jerry gordon
8.18.08

Beach Party

2008-11-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

for Mare

Pleasures give the gift of dopamine.
Pains exchange something she has no name for.

A step in sand away from the fire.
Then, another. The path
appears in my effort towards nowhere.
To follow me you must connect
the dents in the earth
before the wind returns everything
to its nothing. To find you
in this dark, I look into your shining eyes
and follow the shapes your lips behave
as you explain how the brain knows
what it isn't.

A touch reaches
beyond the immediate.

Who are you becoming before I know you?
Your smile's echo; the speed of this light
enters my eyes from the fire
and on it rides these arriving angles
of your mouth and brow.

You touch my hand to demonstrate neurology
and more information runs the pathways of my mind
than an object's awareness of an object.

Memory remains and pours the senses.
Your index finger at the skin
beside my knuckle.

by jerry gordon
3.1.08

The Mouth

2008-11-12T06:28:00.000-08:00

How many words
and spoons heavy with curry
pass through?
How many screams of joy,
surprise and pain?
How many shapes
do lips discover to express
the textured nuances of life lived
through grimace, grit, sneer and laugh,
of mouth wide in holler across a distance,
of the pleading call toward those gone lost,
of the micro-sonic windscrape of whispered secrets,
of the kiss,
of the pout,
of the babbling
confusion we learn in doubt,
of the ease Self feels as it flows and finds form
amidst the words, sobs, giggles and grunts we invent
with those we love and trust?

jerry gordon
11.10.08

image by Amy Farkas

For Now

2008-11-12T03:17:00.000-08:00

With more than exhaustion in your voice,
I read your eyes for signs of limits on eternity.
From across the ocean
of our bed, I watch a wing of sparks
fanning off from some purpose your mind is grinding.
Falling as soft as gravity welcomes ash,
each sliver of light glows
bright enough to illuminate
the clutter of curses and caresses
that have piled below our history.
We have given each other all
the details needed to deceive, despise,
demean and deliver.

We don't know the future,
but for now we trust
each other.

by jerry gordon
2008

Beautiful Bird

2008-10-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

I've got a beautiful bird in my eye.
It won't take away the sun.
It won't save me from
infinite confessions or the distances
between one world and another's.
But, it is beautiful,
and this counts for much.

I look up from the shadows in my hands,
and this insanity gives me a glance
at its dappled feathers, lets me hear
its foggy screech. Wings clap
and bird feet spike the sky.
This won't speed the clouds further east
or get me a seat on the train.
But it is dangerous,
and this counts for enough.

I want to remember this,
not to make it more
important. Merely to make it
valuable. I will surely forget
this moment of having this
beautiful bird in my eye;
I have forgotten it
so many times already. But, it is
beautiful and counts for this
much.

Thus,
regardless of the truth of futility,
I will steal a piece of paper
and get this memory started
towards its eventual
and almost fragrant aphasia.

by jerry gordon
2008

Self-Portrait

2008-05-06T23:10:00.000-07:00

Should I at some point acquire the right
to decide my self-portrait,
it would look like this:

A color photograph
with the edges and folds of everything
saturated by shade. Blurry, enough
to imply the impossibility of determining the Now.

I'd be standing
with feet just more than shoulders-width apart,
as though I just witnessed a start of some cataclysm
or angel of honesty disrupt the logic of the firmament
with a bomb of thought. Ready, to either flee
the final two breaths of my existence or blankly observe
the process of my vaporization.

Clothed, in a navy blue
dark enough to almost be midnight
but with the rainbow sheen of oil slicks
and crow feathers floating its surfaces.
Thick fabric.
Boxy in cut and shape.

Barefoot.

Hands empty.

The tips of my fingers, toes
and the edges of my feet all darkened
with a soot or grime or tone of burnt earth,
as though a shadow is sneaking in
from the ends of me.
Although not visible,
my penis would be likewise tinged,
and with a single pearl of semen
clinging against gravity.

I'd be wearing no glasses, wedding ring or watch.

A heavy-gauge copper wire encircling my right wrist,
symbolizing that while we're chained to the world
we can't not pull.

Our choice is how.

Face shaved.

Eyes closed calmly,
to imply my regard for this shared dream
versus my own.

Pockets bulging slightly
in the shapes of belongings I have taken
and been given by others.

My ego would be pictured in the foreground,
characterized as a balding puppet.
Its lid-less eyes darting
from unseen object to unseen object.
Squatting in a puddle of piss,
it would be picking out fragrant petals--
as a nod to my ambition.

Finally, I would have one hand lifted.
An index finger extended
as if it were a perch for a bird
that at some moment in the past or future
descends from a birdless sky.

by jerry gordon
1.31.08

3.9.08 Yamatogawa

2008-04-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

9/10ths closed,
an eyelid hangs in the sky.
Beneath this, I find my tower of
improvisation. Rising up
from mounded earthwork
and girded concrete, the steel diamonds
and crosses of inspiration.

Carry power. Carry voices.

Kaoru Abe's screaming
whispers of suicidal exhalations,
as though to live
in search of living
against so many edges
injects an ethic
of aesthetic self slaughter.

How much water runs by me:
so silent, a flutter of a fish fin
makes the city faint;
so long, the river reaches back
10,000 years.

Beyond names and symbols.
Beyond beyonds beyond.
I lie on this filthy levee and stare
at a blue so vast it fills my eyes.

by Jerry Gordon
3.9.08 Yamatogawa
Kaoru Abe

Musics

2008-04-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe I’m here,
watching a man--a friend--
beat a music out of
an inflated vinyl insect.

The body rings and plings,
singing its swollen plastic tensions,
its zoological engineering,
its pillow-puffy carapice
as though the logic of emptiness
is sensitive to petro-chemical history
and the complex economy of souvenirs.

Walking there
against this street,
I lean away from the course of cars
and they give me my way as well.

Opposites need not be
in opposition.

My strongest ambition of the moment
is to not forget this
poly-falling-boxes-down-an-Osaka-back-street beat
emitted by a broken bicycle.

Riding in and out of my periphery and memory,
a man pedals a rattle-patter of percussive rhythm
that my ear follows into dark corners,
reaching beyond the nonsense I fathom
towards this momentary matrix of emotions
I desire to breathe with
through twisted metal
and realize as
the air.

by Jerry Gordon
1.12.08
Banco Cafe, Osaka

This is the initial inspiration by Charles-Eric Billard:
http://charlou2006.blogspot.com/

Midosuji subway

2008-04-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

Every form roils in reform;
a woman wrapped in browns sits down
on the subway’s orange bench.

How many names has the dirt
from here to the surface above me
had? Daikokucho; burrowing,
insects churn the earth
through their bowels.

The tiny hidden hole amidst my teeth
fills with mysterious pastes of chew;
holding a thin red box of history in her left hand,
a woman closes her eyes
slow enough to be the envy of sleep.

Two women, enough alike to be each other,
stare at the window into darkness
to tug and touch their hair;
watching them, I watch these words
appear in my mind and then
so different on this page.

by Jerry Gordon
2.17.08
Midosuji subway

Playing with God in the Backyard

2008-04-01T07:21:00.001-07:00

Looking up, I find my sky
in your eyes, deeper than any heaven
I can imagine.
Reaching for the edge
of your pocket, you move your ass
in a skillful intuition of
avoiding my ecstatic touch.
The romantic retreat just beyond
grasp. But, you can’t
escape completely and I catch hold
of your pant leg, by which
you drag me across the lawn
in giggling jerks, staining
my already stained knees.

by Jerry Gordon
11.1.07

A Stick

2008-04-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

My favorite machine must be
a stick
fixed with gravity and perhaps
two or three strings. Used for
whatever purpose could invent it--
to fly a penent or dry a hat
or simply point towards heaven--
its economy is its fragility,
making it even more
perfect than my fingers--as
saturated as they are with symbols,
signals and habit.

Anchored upright, a stick is
its eventuality of leaning
too far inside a wind and becoming
the meat for beetles
and other lovers of infinity.

by Jerry Gordon
2.15.08

Smouldering Door at PocoPen, March 2007

2007-10-19T08:33:00.001-07:00

Wire Skull

2007-10-17T05:19:00.001-07:00

morning stillness

2007-10-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

the first train
is the quietest train
and the women still dressed
in last evening's clothes
have a special patina to their make-up--
that certain sharper contrast
of sensations still floating on their skin,
of memories still more now
than then.

by jerry gordon
10.15.07

Smouldering Door, Sept 30 at PILE

2007-10-04T16:45:00.000-07:00

song title: RoboBros

song title: Romance Etc.

song title: Seven Steps to God

song title: Sun Cream Mandala

song title: Cloneliness

The I

2007-09-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

I heard it was once said,
a tree is 10,000 slivers;
beyond separation, we reach out
to share this touch inside the fire.

Self flashes forth, born as
brief as every star we name;
removing our collected titles
is as simple as cutting clothes off
inside the grave.

Who learns to handle such a knife?

I imagine reassembling
ashes, sparks and smoke
to put the tree back on the mountain.

I am such
a dumbshit.

by jerry gordon
9.15.07

Random 9

2007-09-12T09:11:00.001-07:00

Fake Stairwell

2007-09-07T21:56:00.001-07:00

As

2007-09-06T00:24:00.001-07:00

by Jerry Gordon

Water, Dirt and Stone

2007-09-05T03:53:00.000-07:00

A turtle is a rock
is a dragonfly in the moment
becoming all as
time unties all our
tender threads.

A rock is a dragonfly
is a turtle as the motion of
your breath fills
my lungs of somber crescents.

A dragonfly is a turtle
is a rock in this care-filled pause
of the sky waiting for each
cloud to drift
into invisibility.

. . .

Each cloud is
lost in the roar of
its becoming here and with
each tale we tell we are
new and dead
for this beauty we know
and embrace as
our ghost.

. . .

I became
the answer to my question about
how the dragonfly hovers
in its blue carapace
of witness.

I became
the question to the courage of
the moth in its cocoon of
living after the end
of imagination.

I became
the self of wonder in
the storm that each cloud echoes:
When we live for
nothing, we live
for others.

by jerry gordon
poems improvised while writing
on water, dirt and stone
9.2.07

Including this

2007-08-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

A turtle is eating a dragonfly,
its jaw working
its life into its life
and into this working of
being
including this,
its jaw working
and its heart beating
deep inside the hardness
of its shell.

The insect,
so iridescently blue
in its carapace of hovering,
has all
but vanished inside the span of
the turtle's throat
and life.

I could take
this rock and crush this
turtle's brain and brittle body
beneath its lasting hardness.
Like this,
it would and wouldn't do
everything and nothing.

by Jerry Gordon
8.27.07

Invisible Monastery

2007-04-28T05:12:00.000-07:00

Here I am again
facing this wall flowering
with all these voices
in the heart of perfect wisdom as
a woman in a green cap
packs a painting of a famous
smile. I still don't see
what to do with these
new layers of confidence and doubt,
these nods and smiles
and ignorance not yet unhidden
and thus retaining their infinity.

There is no way to ignore
the garden pouring in
from each seed
planted, even if beside the air conditioner vent.

A flourishing is such
a flourishing.

Now, the song seeping through the
thatch and scratches
is the mumbling tenderness
of less than sure
conversation; my invisible monastery
with its ever-liquid walls,
each stain a flower
of petals born of
tongues and glances.

by Jerry Gordon
4.28.07
Salon de Amanto

Particle Dregs

2007-01-11T04:24:00.000-08:00

Your old hermitage of irregular-placed stone
stands crooked against the tallest pine.
--Chia Tao ending couplet

At the bottom of my cup,
the coffee dregs
that slipped through the filter.
I drink them down,
imagining the bowl you built
from dust swept off the workshop floor.

Each particle a blasted star.

Do Ethiopian grounds
make strong bones
or hard arteries?

The bitternesses of last year
still claw at my tongue;
my New Year's resolution
is to say "fuck" less.

My hermitage of irregular-piled stones
doesn't lean against the tallest pine.
It rides the train.

by jerry gordon
1.11.07

The Door Locks Open Behind Me

2007-01-07T20:24:00.000-08:00

It’s just like that picture of Virgil
I drew in the dust on the mirror:
I find myself in a coffee shop.
And just as I’m about to tire of waiting,
the funeral starts next door
and I hear your voice whispering
across the heart of perfect wisdom.
The pluralled syllables punctuated
by touches to the chime.

You seep through the mud and straw between
and 10,000 tiny petals appear, decorating
this wall of thatch and scratches.

A garden of fragments of
the fragrant flower.

And, so, I know
all that’s needed is at hand,
here. Now,
with only two sips left in my cup,
I check that no one’s not safe
beyond the gate of calm
and repromise to never leave
a single being behind.

Thus,
the door locks open behind me
and new friends wave goodbye
without making the slightest
effort.

by jerry gordon
12.21.06 cafe amanto

Subtle Shades of Cave

2006-12-19T19:13:00.000-08:00

Draped in a blue-green-gray
and the other subtle shades of cave
I paint my urban-hermit utopia--
this palace of petals arrising
where my foot falls,
this monastery of conversations
and arriving--I'm not sure
if my prayers are just beginning
or being answered.

What's the difference?

I find signs of being
between. Two states saturating each's other.
Neither complete. Neither a stranger.
One leg up and one leg down.
A waiting sandal.

Am I
leaving seclusion or the world?
My hands are going to or from my lips.
Is this in thanks or entreaty?
Is realization lost or found?

What's the difference?

My face appears
exploding with some hard-won undeniability.
Perhaps it's that
my altar is empty. Its open sides becoming
the walls of all this I am searching through:
this bodhidharmabubble of form.

by jerry gordon

2006-10-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

Amidst the droplets of infinity,
I follow my shadow, wondering
what sun throws its light
enough to lead me
in this emptiness?

The risk, of fading
inside a sky gone grey
with haze, of going
alone and unknowing
whether I follow or lead.

a world amidst worlds
a world amidst particles
a particle amidst worlds
a particle amidst particles

Pulsing in the freedom of such
invisibility,
I forget
where it is
my heart doesn't beat.

by jerry gordon
10.18.06

Intermission at Loop 139

2006-09-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

After leaving, your bag lays down
with all the grace of a dying flower;
time elapses before our eyes
have the time to recognize.

The swoop of cognizance
into a scene builds it as sure
as any building; leaving, our eyes
meet beneath the train's rhythmic rumble.

I don't recognize you, but I will
when the rain creates reason
to extend my hand
from my world into your's
with what remains of my umbrella.

I'm imagining a memory of you;
a seed kicked from place to place
inside the last car of the Loop Line.

Patience puts each particle in place.

by jerry gordon
9.17.06
intermission at Loop 139

What’s this?

2006-08-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

"There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than is dreamt of in your philosophy."
--Hamlet

I name people pedestrians for walking,
and lazy for sitting, and you
beautiful for your rigor in organizing yourself
in black and white.
And the boy, he’s rude
for stinking up the train
with McDonalds’ smell and noisy wrappers.

But this is only helping me
to see what is merely human.
This is not bringing birdsong to my ear
with all its secrets on silence.

From the air
I pick a part and say, “Skylark.”
“Crow” or “Jay.”

Limiting things to what I think they are,
I comb my hair
like the picture in the mirror.

by jerry gordon
8.30.06

Bon Voyage

2006-08-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

for makimaki

Life is, in deed, so interesting.
Changing within each wind, clouds meet,
become and depart clouds.
We leave belongings
in each other’s pockets.
Today you planted the seed--
“Funky Anarchist”--
inside the garden of my heart.
I know it will one day bloom,
but not how I’ll recognize the flower.
It will be good;
it’s my life.

by jerry gordon
8.16.06

Hi Steve, I’m Here

2006-08-14T20:38:00.000-07:00

for Steve in Hawaii

I’m here,
where the blue begins
and the clouds end.
I’m not waiting,
and so you'll find me.
I’m here
holding enough of nothing
to keep my hands open.

There are others here,
but their shining bodies and mine are of
different perfections.
My cell phone has remained stolen,
and so there’s no reception here.
I have no shoes
when I’m not walking.
Here, the rustic lush is swarming
just beneath the concrete.
The grass is wild.
I don’t know the names of
these flowers yet to bloom.
I’m sitting in only one spot
and my eyes are closed
half the time.

I’ll see you soon and we will talk.

8.15.06

Just Dust

2006-07-21T06:36:00.000-07:00

To hate, I place my heart up to the mirror
and press it against its depthless double--
flattening one and flattering the other.
The pain is self-inflicted.
The only trace,
some bloody echo of the instant
and all the reasons requiring such violence.

You, I imagine, feel nothing
more than the weight of a forgetful year
as you let ash become a landscape.

I hoped to start a seed
from some 40 years of mud.

But now it is up to me to trust
yet again. So, walking
by a flooded rice field,
I sink my hands into its rich, black thickness,
layered of seasons and frog crap
and 10,000 insect corpses.
Squeezing, the earth sucks,
as though things hidden underground
are gasping for breath.
I can feel my fathers
slipping through my fingers,
unwilling to release me
from a grasping more than gravity.

Standing, the mud starts
to dry on my hands like gloves of earth.
Inside, I feel my pulse
throbbing at my finger tips and palms,
more evident as everything gets a bit constricting.

But, before all the rain evaporates,
I pull out my heart--no different
than a yellow mustard seed-- and plant it
in the garden of my hands.
Between my thumbs, I whisper:
“I vow to abandon you
to the moments.”

by jerry gordon
7.21.06

Dad’s Dance

2006-07-18T21:07:00.000-07:00

I start the drum and you appear
standing to my left, dressed
in a grey plaid suit--like all those years
at Sears I have memorized--
black horn-rimmed glasses
and your noble Cherokee nose.
You stand, just listening to the drum
like you have never listened to anything:
with your flesh alive in the blood-loved pulse of rhythm.

And then, slowly, you raise your arms,
stretched out with elbows up.
Your back bends and across your sleeves
a subtle color flashes, a tint of blue
that every set of wings requires.
A scrap of sky so slight it could
put a concrete wall in flight.

And, before a thought can weave a logic,
you dream and your coat of strings
begins its slow transform to feathers.

I keep the beat and build belief with speed
and you ride my release into each finger's tap
and thumping thumb, trusting
mistakes to come from the desert
like the clouds that build behind my eyes
arise of rain-wrought condensation.

You tilt and turn, each pitch and angle
pointed with each touch to skin. Your suit and self
melt inside this choreography of flight.
The 10,000 blue feathers hang,
draping as the lightest gravity.

Turn. Turn bird, man. Turn within your
chalky blues and patterned stripes of black.

I play on, my hands becoming a stronger song.
You dance, becoming bird enough to make me worry
I must somehow sustain you;
worry what I'll fail when I must stop.

Because it's almost time for me to leave.
And, in this glance I take to think that
there's still so far to go, I slow at a mistake.

Looking back to my left, I find you've left.

Needing no time, you've entered the western clouds.
No longer in the feathered blue suit used for dancing.
No longer turning to cues shared with the drum.
You've become a speck on the sky,
moving amidst the outlines of light that ride the clouds.

Now,
each quieting touch merely marks your distances
into the setting sun.

by jerry gordon
7.15.06

***I recently got a new little drum--a little djembe. And, yesterday I was playing it just before I had to leave the house. As I started playing, my dad appeared over to my left. He was dressed in a grey plaid suit and horn-rimmed glasses. Black hair. The image I always picture of him when I was young and he worked at Sears. Also, he actually was 1/8 Cherrokee and had that noble indian nose. That was evident when I saw him yesterday, too. Anyway, I played and he appeared, at first just standing there listening in a way that he never listened to anything. Listening with his blood. And, then he spread his arms out and bent over a slight bit, his elbows pointing up and the sleeves of his suit coat hanging down. A slight bluish tint flashed across the jacket, like some kind of a shark-skin suit lighting effect. Subtle and beautiful. I continued to play and slowly he began to dance and the suit very slowly began to transform into feathers. Chalky dry blue feathers slowly appeared, hanging down in beautiful rows from the arc of his spread arms, his shoulders, his head. He danced in a an indian style, tilting and turning his body at each pulse of the drum's bass. His form dipping and pulsing up and down as he changed from angle to angle and he slowly lost the Sears suit and became a man on a desert stone slab drapped in a costume of feathers. We both released into the event. I could feel it. And, then I started to get a little worried that I was sustaining him and if I stopped playing it would somehow halt him, and in that moment of thought, I made a mistake in the playing and the beat was altered, to which I adjusted. But, when I looked back, he was no longer dancing. He had transformed behind my watching and turned into an actual bird and was off in the distance of the sky, flying farther and farther, visible only as a black speck against the clouds. The setting sun drawing him. The quieting drum now simply marking each stage of his greater and greater distances into the west.

Through the Vellum

2006-07-16T00:08:00.000-07:00

We meet again,
this time on opposite sides of a drum skin,
communicating through the vellum
in the languages of dance and rhythm;
you talk in the ancient tongue
of man moving and becoming bird--
the tradition of transforming
feathers and flight from a business suit--
and I speak in beats,
touching the tensions of flesh
just enough to call you out
of limbo.

by jerry gordon
7.16.06

Your Funeral on the Platform

2006-06-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

A wild old woman chants some violent magic
at the edge of the platform in Osaka,
her urban hermit hand ticking off invisible boxes
as she shouts into her folded paper--
some racing form or schedule of times
or other tiny-columned text.

I imagine she is conducting a funeral
for you and other ghosts that ride the Loop Line.
She's plucking the pains and hatreds from your flesh
like so many bee-stings in a soul,
extracting the poisons you're to leave here
with us. The stuff we'll grind our teeth to nubs on.
The stuff we'll mix with your ashes
to mold you as our mud-man and prance around
like you are worthy of such dumb reverence.

But you are no longer you.

And, so, in Tennoji, this visitation
by a white-striped moth flapping and flopping
its way to the heel of my left shoe, makes me
love you all anew. To meet you
in these million frazzled edges worth protecting.
I lift my heel off the floor and give you
the chance to climb beneath, giving me the chance
to grind your fragile thorax back to ash
and dusty wings. If I so choose.

I don't.

And all of us here on the train smile
as you flash and crash off towards the light bulb
but lose your way
back out onto the platform.

by jerry gordon
6.21.06

Strangers in the Sky

2006-06-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

But for the length of now,
we are strangers.

Riding aluminum clouds,
from the sky we have fallen
into these canyons
of stone and steel and 10,000 right angles.

Up above,
the sky still glows
and here between what's far and near
we meet and glance the chance
of friendship within strangers' eyes.

And somehow, something opens
wide enough for the sky
to descend amidst us
and fill the space that once seemed empty.

We fall from and to and through the sky.

And when I see your face within a crowd,
what is it that now flashes recognition?
How do I now know you?
It is as though you have something
for or from me--
some invisible possession that's been exchanged.
Some buried treasure, which together
we complete the map to.

Arriving and departing,
we pass
on opposite sides of buildings,
leaving our belongings
in each other's pockets.

We are strangers,
but for the length of now.

by jerry gordon
6.4.06
From Dog to Dog

Barbie's Been Arrested

2006-05-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

Well, finally, Barbie's been arrested
on charges of terrorism
and as a threat to Homeland Security.

I could see it coming years ago, like
when she let me undress her
and rub my body against her tiny nudity.

The bait of passivity.

So human in her hardness
and the excessive concentration of big hair
restricted to her scalp.

She said she didn't shave,
but come on!

And so, I cheered when they led her away
in shackles and the orange jumpsuit of guilt,
as ill-fitting as all her clothes always were.

It's nice to know
one more agent of subversion
is off the streets of the suburbs.
Nice to know
that one more thing I fear
is hidden away.

jerry gordon

Self-ish

2006-05-21T07:41:00.000-07:00

surf culture
on my life
--a woman's t-shirt

I've said
the surface of self stares us
into surrender. We see it in all
we fail to forget,
and in that
leash the languid beast
that breathes us inside being.

We do not bay or howl or grunt
but when we do we call it
singing: to create, to express,
to shape the freedom we contain.

Constrained,
we play as many stops
as we have fingers. A human song
to/too long for what's
beyond the world
all
that is untouchable
inside the surface of our lies.

jerry gordon
5.21.6

Between Dream and Concrete

2006-05-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Things hint this is
the way I will end up,
surrounded by beasts
of fur and feather and iridescent carapace.

Friends

A single bowl.
A single scroll of alphabets
to follow
lost
back and forth between dream and concrete.

Amidst the thistle of memories
and a life-time of wrinkles in my clothes,
my beard will become
as wild as any bamboo broom.
It'll sweep the air,
cleaning it before and after
I speak the words for
nothing and silence.

Things hint this is
the way I will disappear,
becoming invisible
enough
to go nowhere.

jerry gordon
5.21.6

Woman beneath the Map

2006-05-07T06:07:00.000-07:00

A woman at the end of the room laughs,
her face flashing through a sequence of masks
like a pantheon of gods
whittled into wood by knives
and man's other fingers of inspiration.

But this isn't sculpture.
And this isn't dance.
It can only be called, emotion.

Beneath the rusting map
of mountains I followed to arrive, here
underground within this decaying sky of sound,
she sits and becomes the crisp completion
of all the world's appearances.

She laughs
and at times like this,
there is enough pause surrounding each moment
to see the stillnesses
building an afternoon.

by jerry gordon
cafe independants
5.4.6

[unfinished]

2006-04-25T22:13:00.000-07:00

A fifty year-old cherry tree
in the middle of a living room.
Strange,
this doesn't seem strange here.
It's petals build the sky between us,
filling the room
to its paper-door horizons.

On the far side, a woman sits.
Her face drifts in this cloud of
the faintest pink. Her eye-brow appears.
Her lips vanish. Her fingers are
wound into a spiky heart.

This Road

2006-04-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

I've traveled this road
from where the hills
talked of torture
and the misbehavior
of rivers. The rise
of sound in an underground.
A voice in an undeterminable
tongue, like all thoughts
worth conceiving whisper
of rooms behind Mexican doors:
dreams.

It's been lit with candles
floating in milagro tears
and saxophone shine.
Its walls contain all
the memories of music
interrupted. Their color is not
of smoke. It is of vowels
voiced as song,
stretched until visible
on the expansive walkways
of the inner ear.

How else to explain
my dizziness?

I speak and watch the road
flash red. I dig the ground
with my teeth
and leave it as a map back
scratched in sand.

by jerry gordon

Mirror

2006-04-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

Each time I face this dusty pane
it feels like I must
take up the tools of memory
and carve my portrait
from this rectangular ocean of chrome.

The duty to make a me
along some semblance of self
and in that cut and file the world
to make sense as what I see.

I imagine the ease of one day
freeing the dust of form,
of simply meeting the beast
without name, arriving unrecognizable
amidst the evaporating droplets
of chromium rain.

by jerry gordon

April 20, 2006

2006-04-20T06:17:00.000-07:00

Fifteen years ago
I saw you for the first time
and heard your voice.

You could fit in my two hands
and I could not understand
what you were saying.

So much has changed.
So many memories are between
the baby, then,
and the young man, now.

You are not any of them.
You are more than all of them.

Everyday
you become you,
larger than my hands can hold
or my eyes can see.

by jerry gordon
for Mirra

Blue Spot

2006-04-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

You're always becoming
new, now
with this blue-black drop of night
spilled across your eyelid.

A tear's weight of ink
is enough for a four-word poem
or can spread down your cheek
into the shape of Kyoto.

You look out through the darkness.

No taint of disease stains your eye.
Each glance contains all
the sky's confidence.

Like some distant sun
burning across the time of night,
your sight shines clear,
with nowhere
for a fog to form.

by jerry gordon

Ghost Story

2006-04-18T22:56:00.000-07:00

You, the ghost
and me, the sheet.
Chatting in this flapping
wind of winter,
can you guess why I make
all the noise
and you look less like smoke
each moment?

It's the danger of becoming
as we are
along with everything
else.

Lost.

Your eyes have always been
louder than your voice. They echo
through the night
like the candles you fed
with clumps of your hair--
offerings the wind wouldn't take
until we sat
inside that pungent cloud of your hatred
and made small talk
serve as prayer.

by jerry gordon

Safe House

2006-04-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

Meet me there
upon the projected wall
beyond
the shadows of our reflections
riding the whirling
horses of this carosel.
Time is our revolution
like a picture of the ocean
nailed up on a theater door.

The magic of a film
is in its flashing:
the betrayal of
how the light dies
before the eye
forgets.

I didn't touch your face
that morning in the bamboo;
what would be impossible
if that were possible?

I have seen our house
within an earthen pot;
everything we need to be
safe, from TV, books and coffee
to news, a bed and jazz.

by jerry gordon
inspired by Fred Wilson's Safe House II, 2003

Andre Breton's Apartment

2006-04-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

Oh, Andre,
as always this is
your day;
the peoples in the peach
and all their lovely furniture;
when we have this time
it's nice to climb the walls
and to sit there
in two-dimensions beyond gravity
like all your native masks
with their Kachina hair-dos.

Oh, Breton, I long
to sit down and disturb
your dinner, where every guest
will get
an apple,
and to stare into the blacks of all
the poured paint hung
up on your walls.

by jerry gordon

Kawaii

2006-04-18T22:05:00.001-07:00

The girl with the purplest tongue
yawns
and takes us all
into that world of pearly shine,
where we stroll between the castles
of teeth but huddle
inside her single cavity.

For there is danger
in the thrash of her chit-chat
and out-bursts of cute.

There is no way to measure
the sonic terror of the "KAWAII"
scream. It's impossible,
and thus we must live in fear.
We must risk all's destruction
with every penguin and puppy
and candy-eyed mascot
that flashes from the TV screen.

by jerry gordon