Direct URL: Meridians of Culture
(I have added experimental avanteguard music in the background: 'Lambkins Black,' by Alphacore, which carries a Creative Commons License. It may be found at Jamendo.)
It's my daughter's favourite of all my recordings, and I think it is mine too. More like a Joycean inner dramatic monologue. I am hoping it moves in the direction of a deeper, richer writing that hints at vast underlying energies the way stream-of-consciousness, surrealist and dream-time writing does...
Hope you enjoy this recording! I am hoping, somehow, to add video to it, though the thought is daunting, just daunting. Any ideas or suggestions for video would be muchly appreciated.
xo
Wrote this poem in the intensity of the afternoon on that day and I wouldn’t describe it only as stream-of-consciousness or surreal or dream-time but as an inter-splicing, like synapses crossing the brain to create strange formations and patterns, of different meridians from the world in which I am embedded. From the sonic to metaphors of natural substances, processes and systems that express thoughts about life and death and consciousness to cultural events, such as the recent tragic death of Michael Jackson and the paradoxes he represents, or personal ones, like my 86 year old mother’s recently broken hip, to historical revolution. The way it is in the deeper speaking, behind which. Life enters. Renovation going on outside my window, which you may be able to hear, became the renovation in the poem. The poem spans many meridians. I’ve decided to call it,
Meridians of Culture
I
In the deepest speaking. Clone the element. Tarry the fishnet. Slice swordfish swording slices. Cut the knuckles. Chuck the jade. Be verbs to your object. Sledge hammer the screwdriver through the wood grain fibres until the wood splits into columbines. Spin with the wind machine. Pan is wandering the forest like a komodo dragon. Whiteness of the clouds pushes in on vision. Tinsley sound, boot scratches soil. Dirt, rocks. Fecund upper being outflowing volcanic rubble. Don’t laugh. You’re next.
Line up; fall out of place. Jump off turning ferris wheels. Neverland never was. Don’t turn a black-eyed cheek on me.
Roth your socks. Mildew doesn’t grow between our toes.
They floated by the Great Wall of China, and then fell. Mao had thick fat lips and I never trusted him. He killed millions in the name of revolution, a tyrant like any other.
Go green. Like everyone. Green, keep greening. I don’t mind my status. Neither should you. Hips are beautiful; why do they crack & crumble? We will all have metal hips in the new utopia. Where we clone with steel. Pins. Motherboards. Chips. Design element.
I don’t want to make this easy for you but it should be fun. Today I’m a bit of vibrating anti-matter; tomorrow I could be a gold statue by the pond of orange fish. Fish float freely through Freon.
Rainbow my world.
The world is sweet. Layers of sweetness. I get caught in the honeyed loving of it all. Birds sing my heart. Happiness.
‘Let me in,’ the man renovating says to his bud. Clatter of sheet metal.
It’s a cool summer of bliss.
But there I go. Not undercutting myself enough. People live different realities.
When you’ve been tortured, wounded and set free every day is a gift.
II
In this speaking, no I don’t. You do wind, wood, fire; I, metal, bone, water. If you can sustain the listening. Where the flames roar.
Punctuated sentences. Punctured.
Eyes of meridians cool the water you pull the sword out of.
Acupuncture of the soul, which can’t be pinned.
Our souls are wind, fire wind.
Burning through life.
The birds in the trees never tire of their singing. Speaking to sing.
Hush rush of cars sleekly sliding by.
Clouds of gold
fall on me.
III
The ear is a nautilus shell out which the ocean pours. Roar of seawater. My spine is brine. Mollusk, exoskeletal dancing on the flashing rock-star studded stage. Sliding into Motown. Ho-town. Show town.
In-earbuds. Listen.
The deep speaking is song. The burning bush sings of nautilus souls sweeping the burning deserts of ruin.
Ozymandias, crumbling.
Dust is the most creative substance on the planet. Ground rock. Galvanized gallantry. Silica strands. Igneous dreams. Encrusted crystals. Embedded dreams. We are miners of the ore.
We come from what we go to. Everything that takes form dissolves.
What is the intuition of the cloud-bank? It’s so white it brights my vision.
Most days I am dissolved and barely resolved.
Hailing baby cries. Rush of thunderbird. Ignition. Trains rocking. Laughter. Baby glee. Sun. Wind. Tree. Out of the dust storm of life. How can a life be fragmented? It can’t unless it cuts into death from life, like a zipper. Maybe we do, death-teeth, life-teeth, hailing our baby screams. Flesh cuts both ways.
It’s irresolvable. Nothing to hold onto.
This ragged bone-edge of the world.
IV
I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be scattered. I want to be collected.
V
Frosted tip of emeralds shining in the raw rock that slips like soapstone.
Green, greening.
He is black, with green cat eyes. Fur over bone.
Hiding in the rocks. Under your toes. Ground bits of the ground world. Greening its grounding. A planet greening its grounding. Magma slips. Seawater steams.
I don’t think I’m living in a forest fire but I could be.
Forest fire of flaming souls.
How can the liquid light of being be honey glossing the fires? Sweetness, beauty.
Sustaining.
something so ethereal in those work sounds behind you, musical musical. in a poem for michael jackson, we would want a lot of music and you achieve that with these sounds, your lilting voice and the odd siren language in which you speak, a sign language to deciper!
ReplyDeletei like very much how you tried to get at his unique vision, at least as i saw your mark, to all the things spoken and unspoken, in that great love of life of which his friends have spoken, and how he perceived everything not with eyes or language, but with his heart. and then again, this is brenda's vision when she thinks about michael.
please see my poem for michael jackson here, a swap-out of perceptions between us, each so unique:
http://moineauenfrance.blogspot.com/2009/07/for-michael-jackson.html
xoxoxooxox ~lt
verif word: sprecr, as in sprecr ze langue de brenda? :>>))
thank you, Laura, for your perceptive comments, and I am pleased that somehow Michael Jackson has informed the vision of this prosepoem in the ways that you indicate...
ReplyDelete...when I wrote it I wasn't thinking of him at all, but he kept entering the imagery, and even the child-like qualities in it seemed to be of him and it was only after I thought to dedicate it to him, not sure if there was 'enough' Michael Jackson in Meridians of Culture to warrant the inclusion, and yet unable to say he didn't affect the vision, its imagery either...
so I'm glad you've looked at it as a poem written for and seen that it works as thus
and I look forward to reading your Michael Jackson poem, which I am sure was written in memory of, and for
xoxoxo thank you so much sweetie - sprecr ze langue indeed! :)
you know, honestly i thought that there was a lot more going on than michael jackson in this poem... but the overlay of the dedication worked for me personally, and as i said, it's a brenda vision in brenda language; and the childlike embrace of life and all that love that was in his heart overflowing, that is so much in you too, brenda. thanks for the explanation, though. it does help! btw, i adore the title "meridians of culture"! it's so... "prewave"! xoxoxooxoxoxox
ReplyDeleteYou read this with such mesmerizing grace, Brenda, and I love to listen and then steal a glance back at the words, realizing that I didn't understand them the first time. Somehow the swiftness of death poles through your poem like the ferryman and the timbre of your voice makes waves. Michael would have found it instigating and perhaps run to the piano to fiddle out a song.
ReplyDeleteStirling, I know we're going back a waze, and I have kept your comment highlighted all this time, and thanks... I am honoured and touched by your comment. xo
ReplyDelete[from ning site]
ReplyDeleteComment by John F Walter on August 9, 2009 at 12:17pm
The final parts of the work are equally interesting, viewing the place of the unbound self--deferred from continuous presence, identity, moorings--in a series of vertiginous landscapes bound together by the metaphor of dust, covering over death.
Comment by John F Walter on August 9, 2009 at 12:15pm
I like the expansiveness of this opening of this piece, its anti-ego project reminiscent of Deleuze´s rhizomes, at the outset, that moves through machine violence to nature to body to the logic of dream bodies replicating in an envisioned metaverse, then back to personal introspection to metamorphose through elements, language, and myth.