A Short Film I Made Earlier this Year in Response to Chris Marker's La Jetée

A meditation on time.

I did the music, soi-disant, too. I think of it more as "bodily organic ambience" than music. bio-soundtrack.

I love how Chris Marker's later super-short films fit in so beautifully with YouTube's and other social media's re-shaping of consciousness and attention span. Let's call it neo-span.

Stopping an Argument Going Nowhere

As a boy, I stood in drowned sneakers

and held up to the sun a crayfish

between my thumb and forefinger,

just plucked from the creek,

its pincers gyrating and pinching air,

trying to reach back far enough

to scissor skin and win release

from pain by pain. Win release

from pain by pain. Even in the dark places

under stones in creeks, whatever stones,

whatever other kingdoms, this immutable

is known. The dark imbricated plates

of her body were soft bronze. She knew me

enough. She’d treat any animal the same

and be blameless, not dwell as we do

after we use our natural defenses

to return to where we can breathe.

I’d call a friend over to see tiny dark eggs

she strummed under her body’s shields,

then drop her for the pleasure of seeing

that tiny splash, the dark zing backwards

into her watermind. She’d flex her entire body

and her big scoop tail would shoot water

through water as she flew to the safe

underplace. Each language, its dark, protective stones.

I am not a boy. I no longer lift

the roofs of stones from creatures.

Let dwell, let dwell.

Time is water and we must breathe under it.

Each in the darkness it calls home.

I Have a Poem in the Current Visual Voice

I love seeing what people come up with each month.

The whole ekphrasis thing. No ideas but in translation.

It

It is never finished.
I wake and walk barefoot
to the backyard,
past the spider universe
of the abandoned nook garden,
branches of everything-all-at-once
strangling or loving, who knows;
should I have said roses
in a poem, pedigree, pedigree
I have no use for.
Something wilder than roses
grows there and through me,
the birds getting excited
at my approach, summer
through us, they flee
in terror but will circle back
as soon as I’m gone,

as soon as I’m gone.

FDA Approves Ebola Vaccine with 100% Success Rate

Merck has developed an Ebola vaccine with a 100% success rate which has been approved by the FDA.

This is really wonderful news for the planet, especially when you look at the 2014-15 outbreak in West Africa where the death toll exceeded 28,000 people. Viruses with an ability to spread through casual contact in an age of global air travel are nothing to shrug off.

Technically, Ebola is not spread though "casual contact." If we use a CDC definition of the term. But if we use a civilian definition of the term, one might want to argue the point.  It's spread through bodily fluids. But then: "If a person sick with Ebola coughs or sneezes, and saliva or mucus touches another person's eyes, nose, mouth, or an open cut or wound, these fluids may spread Ebola." That's pretty darn casual. And it can acquired by touching such fluids on door knobs or other surfaces if one then transfers that inoculant to a mucus membrane such as one's mouth, nose, eyes, etc. That's a pretty common occurrence. Again, sounds pretty casual. Few people on the street or in their office in Kinshasa or anywhere else are going to be wearing gloves and goggles the way scientists going into Ebola zones wisely do. A co-worker's sneeze might mean Ebola transmission. So the word “casual” in “casual contact” when used in relation to Ebola might just be a misleading term used in a sedative phrase intended to quell public panic.

The different strains of Ebola have varied wildly in terms of mortality, with some variants having a mortality rate as high as 90% .

So a vaccine is really great news. It’s a cause for celebration. At least until the next plague says “Surprise!” It’s a never-ending war. Probably long after humans finally stop going to war with other humans, there will still be that microbial war and its many active fronts. The enemy is within. It has been a vital part of our evolution and the evolution of everything else alive.

I've recommended a book on this topic before and I will again today. If you want to read a well-written account of the first time scientists went to war against Ebola, check out Laurie Garrett's nonpareil The Coming Plague (1994). The long chapter "Yambuku" in the book gives a harrowing account of the first Ebola outbreaks, which occurred virtually simultaneously in Zaire and South Sudan (1976) and the international scientific response to them. This book was eerily prescient and forecast much of what was to come with the new millennium. And it's some of the best nonfiction writing you will ever encounter. 

Time Leaks

"Mysterious blocks of flotsam, about the size of a chopping-board, bearing the name 'Tjipetir' (a plantation in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—operating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), have been washing up on the beaches of northern Europe for some time through 2013 and 2014. They are believed to be blocks of gutta-percha from the Japanese liner Miyazaki Maru, which was sunk 150 miles (240 km) west of the Isles of Scilly in 1917."

"No, Wittgenstein did not invent the emoji"

Did you realize this was almost a thing?

A Grim and Funny Whitmanian Experiment

I thought this article trying to suss out the cause of Walt Whitman's death was darkly funny, especially when the guys started mixing up the bacteria-orgy which Whitman considered a beverage to try it for themselves.

Sort of a new genre there and potential for a new show, poetry Jackass. 

Up next week: the guys try to out-drink Dylan Thomas and avoid acute hepatitis on an historically accurate reading tour.

And I would have guessed long-entrenched syphilis had something to do with Walt's death. Pneumonia and tuberculosis can be associated with syphilis.

Here's another interesting article about poets and suicide which should surprise absolutely no one. Poets who use the first person pronouns more in their poems (narcissistic poets?) are more likely to kill themselves. So too much self-absorption can lead to the ultimate self-absorption?

I'm Still Wondering about the Indiana Dunes Mystery

Well, it's not the only mystery centered in the Indiana Dunes, but the disappearance of three young women from the beach when thousands of people were present remains one of the most enduring and perplexing cases.

What happened to Patrica Blough, Renee Bruhl and Ann Miller on July 2, 1966?

Unless I'm mistaken, there's never been a book dedicated solely to this case (a few compendia have included brief rundowns of the case). I'm discounting one book predicated on what I consider a completely outlandish theory not based in any real evidence.

I'm still wondering what happened. Silas Jayne? Certainly evil enough to have been behind it. Richard Speck? Ditto and nearby that day. An innocent accident in a park known for dangerous waters and dangerous terrain as well? Something else?

This isn't the only disappearance of three women in one fell swoop. Those other cases of multiple disappearances are equally disturbing. For example, the Springfield Three or the Fort Worth Missing Trio.

I'm surprised no one has made a movie about the Indian Dunes mystery. It would require a director with subtlety, someone attuned to the unanswerable side of things. Probably someone like Sofia Coppola. 

Here is a Short Story

I wrote about phrogging.

8 Poems (Air Poems)

      BEHIND CVS

I wake and my little cat gives me my spirit.
No cat, no spirit.

The sun is tender
with looking at the earth.

It is hard to look at earth

Truly to see
the people's hope

Oh, look at
The things that end in a dirty creek



        CHILD

The child touches lightning bugs
on the summer air

So many lovers
she will have

So many doorways

None nailed shut




           CURSE IN A CVS

The pot you gave me is no good

I will float on lightning

and return later




                 TWO BOYS

Two punks
walking over a bridge
stone bridge
snickering
throw stones
into a world below
anger
zings and zips
through the Underworld
their faces
wood in the snow
crack like a rifle
shot
into a world below
their living





               NIGHT

What the roses dream at night
let me dream

The spiderwebs all through me

let me dream

The stars sending light
without postage

Yes

An old woman the color of night
breaking up

In the river now

More of my excuses die



      EXPLANATION

the cat
sits in
winter's window
slant rain
turns snow
means more
means less
than naming
to me

I am a cat



     SEDUCTION

I hear
this neighbor's
coyote voice
a woman
is a blue bird
rousing coyote
into the open
where he releases
his voice
in spring
the blue berries
release her
birds know
poison from food
fly away
into fire
of more sky





      LOVERS

the rain
comes down
bending their necks
the lovers
who run now
into shelter
of a garden
inside the mall
rain on the glass ceiling
of the shopping mall
continues
they look up
where birds flee
we are
seeming
to be many pieces
of one person

My Copy of the U.S. Constitution

Something calls oblivion

Where milk glass is heading

It won’t return

like icicles every year

White cherubs for stems

You notice people buy it

not because they want it

but to preserve it

Fruit that aspires to be alabaster

What words give

What words take away

Not beauty but what it’s cut out of

So jaggedy

as you out of me

You note more circles every year

Less rectangles

It must be a national diet of shapes

Men lose their beards and women find them

Food can be a sexual proxy adventure

The bears in the backyard

Seem more like your dead parents

every year

You lock the door earlier

You start to swoon into the curtains

And watch the bears that way

Dear

Raindrops on the window

please stop impersonating me

with your stillness and your going

you are too much like modern punctuation

trying to evaporate so quietly

nobody notices you have died

because of cell phones

and escaped into that reservoir

of nostalgia around which I pretend to jog

but mostly mosey,  the way

mushrooms do and other spongy

things that prefer spongy dreams

on moist lawns faking wine

each morning home

to the disconcerting rest

Thank You For Talking to Me

I say to the rain.
I say to the ingredients of a person
which just erupted in a random conversation
they insisted I taste.

I say to the past,
then lock the door behind it.
I say to the crows
in the cemetery

that act like cashiers,
pretending to make conversation,
but not really.
I say to sleep's

white noise pretending
to be a person pretending
to be me.
Then I nap

and dream of the world
before conversations existed.
How like a glass paperweight
everything was!