obey beyond yonder barriers go i notice my own smile

morning

Life (No 13 In Musical Humors)

Tobias Hume, 1569 - April 16, 1645; composed during the Renaissance period

Captain Tobias Hume was a remarkably unsuccessful composer in his lifetime, but the qualities that put off his contemporaries attract today's admirers of viol music. Hume's music was nearly as eccentric as the man himself; it exploited the viol's wide dynamics and ability to sustain a melodic line, in contrast to the more contrapuntally oriented lute, which the viol was slowly supplanting in popularity during Hume's lifetime. Hume filched brief musical phrases from other men's compositions and incorporated them into new pieces of widely varying moods, often with odd titles (My Mistresse hath a Pritty Thing, Twickledum Twickledum). / Hume himself was every bit as colorful as his music, perhaps more so. Despite his serious musical efforts -- he published two extensive collections of pieces -- he thought of himself primarily as a soldier. Nothing is known of his early life; he seems to have spent many years traipsing across Europe as a mercenary, serving as an officer in the Swedish and Russian armies (it was in the former that he achieved the rank of captain; late in life, he claimed to be a colonel). The end of the war between Sweden and Poland in 1629 probably sent Hume back home to England for good. He did not enjoy financial success; that year he entered London's Charterhouse, a former priory redesigned as a home for "distressed" gentlemen, and died there in 1645, after several years of issuing periodic, unanswered missives offering his services to the English king to, among other things, crush the Catholic rebellion in Ireland that began in 1642. / Even while soldiering, Hume aspired to be a recognized composer promoting the virtues of the viol against those of the lute. He published two big books of music; the first, in 1605, is full of fanciful instrumental dances and meditations and stands as the largest collection of music for solo lyra viol by a single composer in the early seventeenth century. The second, from 1607, titled Captaine Humes Poeticall Musicke, is more stylistically circumspect, intended as it was to gain the patronage of Queen Anne. In general, Hume's pieces make few technical demands on their players (suggesting that Hume himself was no virtuoso), relying instead on interesting sonorities and musical invention.   [--commentary by] James Reel, Rovi (source from Pandora | One internet radio)

Captain Tobias Hume, Passion of Musick; Life (No 13 In Musical Humors)

Cheap Trick

Double-quick 
       D
       R
       O
       P
       kick! 

    WHOP kick! CHOPstick! 

    Frank SINATRIC! 

    Caustic Gnostic!
                

     MOON


in                the                
     
    ROOM




        & saw


from my board
            ```````````````IN THE OCEAN`````````````
p
u

d
e
k
o
o
l

I

Room and Board

tenword plex

Riffing on the tenword prompt from last week,

calling on the

POETS OF THE UNIVERSE

weave the mesh of creation with the

tenwordplex

go horizontal, defy linearity, show how words weave creation
how the very fabric of all that is is constituted by poetry

in the tenwordplex form.

have tenwords intersect - correspond - relate - symbiotically conjoin - proliferate
(connect them to each other - interlineate with others created via a shared word - write ones that interlace - a kind of crossword puzzle of poemlines, weaving beauty)


labels: tenwordplex, yourname, poem

Park Rangers Talking, Death Valley

"Found one boot

up there 

with a foot.

That's it."

happy birthday, Janice :)

Playing my Hand

Mordechai 

of 

Turbulence

Momentum 

diffusion

Point 

of Stillness

Sincerity viscosity

delight of discovery

somɹǝsault

this 
ןǝǝɥʍ

t
u
r
n
u ɹ n ʇ
s
n
r
u
t

We

a
r
e
u o
t
i

gether
-oʇ


(oʍʇ ǝʞɐʇ)


t
h
i
s
ןǝǝɥʍ

n
r
u
t
 t u r n
ʇ
n
ɹ
u
s

ɹǝgethoʇ
er
ɥ
ʇ
ǝ
ƃoʇ
t
o
ƃǝʇɥ
       ǝ
        ɹ

ǝʍ
ǝ
ɹ
ɐ

Watching

My mountain is gathering
clouds today
shadows proceed
under cover.

ten times

Train whistle sounding
through the night
not once, not twice...

le dernier mot

She dreams in colors
not of this planet,
my Kate

...

glowworld

wow what else is possible that i hardly imagine
because the glow from the nightscreen doesn't stretch that far (yet) and so my 2am
glowworld is a foot wide and a foot high?

wheel of the sky, open me
may the velvet that holds stars cup my eyes in rest

may i see the halo of hale and whole
within each thing, a deep and yawing beacon

in the mystery-becoming birthing this moment

tenword repeat: wind carries me home

wholeness washes me, even in the nightwind. clatter me home
along with the window skritching yew boughs, wind carries me
home


wholeness washes me, even in the nightwind. clatter me home
along with the window skritching yew boughs, wind carries me
home


wholeness washes me, even in the nightwind. clatter me home
along with the window skritching yew boughs, wind carries me
home...

star trek lullabye: insomnia voyages rock the cradle good night (40 words)

poetry in the middle of the night is a kind of hand cranked can opener
carving space between the worlds, a star gazer's delight
floating here between star bright wind brief
the stellar wind rocks the cradle of me good night

two together 22

I dreamt that I found
my blindfold yesterday
as the day was yesterday
not last night or now
or another time and
there were no eyes except
the ones I was seeing through
then as is now as the eyes
are closed while dreaming
and the body electric is

awake its awake in a different

state its most free state as


The eyes are simply one

opening into another world
That is not really ours.

Cant to Ten

Tenable tenterhooks tenacity

Tenderhearted tendencies
tendentiously tending tenements

Tennantite tenpins

IMUNURI Prompt: 10 words

1. My
2. dog's
3. pointed
4. ears
5. flick
6. a 
7. bit
8. toward
9. every
10. click.

***

 Taste the sun that these
 green ears reached to drink!
 
***

This week, describe something or someone you love in exactly ten words.

You may wish to post more than once this week.


keywords: poem, yourname, tenwords

after your friend dies, do the dishes.

deep in the lair of all-knowing this one majestic sweep of hair, this final

brushing out of bristling, this final repast, this final peace. we strive

to make things perfect when most ugly, make the brutal a kind of placid

lake. where was her staying hand when it was needed? what will it take

to nestle the boundariless? we fall

prey to small motions and forget how to dazzle with earth-bold wholeness.

small notions of the daily wheel distract. if i can make it through

five minutes, a twelfth of an hour, i can make it through this day, two times

twelve more of these, and the wheel of earth spins thirty times thirty

times thirty (perhaps) of these with us goggled up to space and time.

learn the rhyme. suck the rind. peal the chime. start the climb.

fool the find. strut the kind. sharp the mind. crack the grind.

grace the line. trust the thyme. fly the sign. suck the lime.

grin the dime. close the blind. brew the brine. berm the mime.

stop the crime. try to shine. praise the shrine. words align.

craze the clime. scour the grime. halve the prime. nag the nine.

gaze behind. raze the whine. erase what’s signed. primp what’s pined.

bury the mined. slurp the slime.

these are the many armed rhymes in the spider wheel of time that realign
my mind to mind the clime and climb the mine. and the wheel of the earth
spins thirty times thirty time thirty (perhaps) of these. may we bless the rind 
and find our thyme. may our dance be sweet.

IMUNURI prompt: sightless

What's visible when nothing is visible to the eyeballs...


when it's completely dark or when your vision is blurred or obscured?

What do you sense when your senses are dulled or unavailable?

What happens to you when you take off your glasses or put on a blindfold...

put in earplugs or enter a sensory deprivation chamber...

get lost in a snowstorm or wake up during a blackout on a starless night? 

How does a mole or an axolotl experience existence? Close your eyes...



keywords: sightless, poem, your name

The Spider

At El Cortez where most players are soused,

I finally dared to join a poker game.

One guy looked around the ring of us. "Does

anybody here know...the spider's name...

that's most poisonous?" Small talk. It douses

the hand. And his grammar sucked. Just the same

I caught the question, if not what he meant

by it. I tried to guess how it pertained.

The flop cards flopped, and someone raised the bet.

"Black widow?” asked a man who seemed so used

up, I wondered where he'd found momentum

to speak. "Nope," answered the arachnophile.

"Brown recluse," I said. "Nope. It's the venom

of daddy longlegs. Most deadly of all."

“That can’t be right,” I thought. The river came.

A silent man was moving my chip pile

over toward his. He didn’t crack a smile.

in/spider/time/out

       I.

morning
brushing time
in the sink bowl
black spider
take a piece of toilet paper
to the spider to crawl onto
transport outside
not drowned

        II.

paint dangled off earth scape
black
rough ridged
swinging free
inviting
translucent museum spider
to climb up
enter
cross terrain
hike interior domains
drawn in

Rainbow Bridge

for Carrie Jo

i notice

as the color trellis grows

sprouts to cosmic depths

to the star nursery where your new self

is bursting out

how the rainbow bridge

from your bones, your luminous

skin, the chemo skin from childhood

an alabaster peace

how the smile that came

after we bathed you in gardenias and roses

spread all the way across your face

has become a rainbow to the stars

imagine the twinklepower

to plunge back down to us here

in this snowlit quiet grove

rose petals scatter and Aphrodite’s dove

which sat on the branch throughout

is winging now, through darkness

back to glistening starlight

your body wrapped in grandma’s quilt

has become a sacred site

may huckleberry blossom every year

from this sacred ground

at night, i feel the incandescent, luminescent

strength of final light beaconing out to your new star

from your bones, your voice, your movement through space:

you have birthed a permanent portalway of peace

IMUNURI prompt: spider poem

‘The Crouching Spider,’ by Louise Bourgeois.   Photo by Bill Wison

This week, write a spider poem.

Keywords: poem, spider, your name

untitled

Woke up a few inches above the sheets.
My bones were poking out of every pore.
The blankets hovered on my sharpest points.
I warned my waking wife, "Don't roll over.
I'm pokey again." "You'll be all right. It's

going to be all right." She rose fast to pour
lotion into my hands. This I patted
on, leaving globs suspended from the hair-
thin needles covering me. She chattered
to make it all seem normal. "I think that's

a good reason to call in sick," she said.
"Would you do it?" I asked. "Okay. You go
to the garden. I'll call Guy." The sky bled
pinks and golds as I stopped and let my toes,
their tender skin, greet the cold soil. My core

felt warm though frost stood in the garden rows,
and I was naked as a winter rose.

Haiku One

frosty roofs gleam sun
Blue sky moon milkiness wanes
passengers shiver

Deeper Then (with thanks to Janice)

“deeper than begin “
began to watch
earth tears drip
from wear & tear
apart the greys
from the blues
“unflyable kites”
dip nots
knots dip deep
inner tube time
floats paint chips
downstream up
strokes across paper
oils piled
Jay de Feo high
quarter time 2
layers of us
passengers only
past this point
“maybe or not we start”

Skin Deeper

You've lost your watch
and nearly lost your mind
you can see and feel yet

You passed out of time
and now you reach for
but out there there are

No references any more
real than one thing from
another or all things real

In their own way just as
you real within this skin
consciousness skin deeper

The blinking cursor tells
nothing like it once may
have now only intervals

With some precision and
without measure so help
you time where what when

Something helps you pace
yourself find your bearings
we've given those numbers

Strange fruit such magic
unfolding again and again
before our eyes oh yes

How will you know to
arrive to depart to fall in
to be yourself all in all

Such fraternity the avenue
of time cannot turn against
all things unto themselves

Out(side) of time we rest
markers makers listening
as long as stars hold yet

Even then or were that
may be or not we start
again deeper than begin

IMUNURI Prompt: Whangdangdoodle!

Happy 2013!

To kick off the new year, let's pitch ourselves a whang-dang doodle!

Here are a handful of sparks from writing gatherings. 

Write something using as many of these as you wish, from zero to all fifteen. Or take the patchwork itself as a prompt — something about collaboration, association by proximity, the colors of inking things, torn paper.

keywords: whangdang, poem, your name