Skulls and Ice Cream - New Thirteen Myna Birds - July 2013

NEW Thirteen Myna Birds with offerings by Bethany W Pope, Alessandra Bava, Tim Queen, Lyndon Seitz, Robert Cole, Jeremiah Walton, Sheila Murphy, Phillip Larrea, and Ricky Garni at http://13myna.blogspot.com/

"the bowl of my skull - bones-sparking - flawed but alive - unfed appetite for love - smuggled out in the slit lining - from friction they glow - sweet like lanyards and rope - in smoldering masks - a rubber chicken in melted plastic - a silver platter - imitative of a pyramid viewed from the inside - coconut on the ground - chills hard"

Why I don’t always like the phrase ‘lucky to be alive’

Because yes everyone is lucky to be alive, but repeatedly hearing that phrase directed at me in particular makes me feel as if I‘m supposed to focus on feeling lucky to be alive more than focusing on actually living. 

Because I don’t want to over-focus on the fact that certain life experiences might be a little more risky to me than to the average person.  After all, I’ve always been a bit of a risk taker in certain degrees – and for the most part, I don’t regret that – and I don’t want to feel as though I shouldn’t take any little risks anymore, because I’m so lucky to be alive I should just sit around feeling lucky instead of having a new life experience that might include small risk factors.

Don’t tons of things include small risk factors?  Is NEVER TAKING A RISK really good advice?  Some people might say yes.  I say no.  I’m not saying I’m going out of my way to take silly risks without even thinking, but if I think about trying something different that is not wildly unsafe and I decide to go for it,  then I’d like to be encouraged rather than discouraged.

If I had written this a few days ago, it would have been much more negative, bummed, and upset feeling  - but now I’ve thought about it more, reasonably considered whether it was over-risky or not and decided it wasn’t – and I’m going to do it.

Why should I not partake of a one-on-one new life experience and see what happens?

Insect Mounds and Tales

Yesterday I saw a cicada lying sideways on the ground in front of my garage door, unmoving.  I picked up the seemingly dead creature and carried it into my house, thinking I would appreciate it in some sort of artistic capacity later (a painting, collage art, or maybe just interesting photo positioning).  I set it on the side of my kitchen counter and then got to working on other things.

A little later, I didn’t see it where I had placed it, but found it fairly quickly, a tiny bit farther along the counter, moving its wings – so clearly it WASN’T dead.  I carefully gathered it via paper towel, carried it back outside, set it on the ground and took some photos of it - then I carried it to a tree and placed it atop a small branch where it seemed fairly comfortable, and took some photos of it there.

Shortly after placing it on that tree, a man who lives in my neighborhood, who does a lot of walking (and since we were often encountering each other when I was walking my dog, we finally introduced each other some months ago and got to taking little talking breaks when we see each other in the midst of a walk) was walking past my front yard – and I felt compelled to walk over to him and show & tell him about the cicada.

I also told him about how many years ago, when I was a little girl and there was a cicada influx, my sisters and I would pick up small tons of dead cicada bodies off the ground, form them all into a circular mound, and then position our pet cat in front of the mound and watch it eat the cicadas.(Golly, after what happened yesterday, with me thinking a cicada was dead, but it was still alive, I hope we weren’t feeding that cat a bunch of cicadas that were still alive and turning our cat into some sort of small white casper the friendly ghost cannibal  or something. That was our cats name. Well, not casper the friendly ghost cannibal.  Just casper.)

Then the man told me an amusing tale about how years ago, his yard had a lot of hornets and his little boy and little girl were scared of being stung by a hornet, so they became uncomfortable playing outside.  One day they were outside with him and one of his buddies and were about to head right back in as soon as they saw a hornet.  He asked them why they were so afraid of hornets and they said because if a hornet stung them, it would hurt really bad.  He told them so what if it stung them; it wouldn’t hurt that bad at all – and then he grabbed the flying hornet with his hand and flung it down to the ground.  See it stung me and that didn’t hurt, he told his kids – and then they stayed outside.  As soon as the kids moved away from the dad, his friend said, are you kidding?  Getting stung by a hornet didn’t hurt you that bad?  He said, hell yes it did, but now the kids are going to be comfortable playing outside.

***

I immediately wanted to tell him another story after that, but I could tell that my brain was going to have a lot of word issues if I quickly launched into that tale – and I didn’t feel like getting into the whole ‘why I sometimes have word issues’ talk with a guy I don’t know all that well, so that sort of bummed me out (but not nearly as bad as what bummed me out about my ‘health issues’ later last night, but I’ll get into that later, in a different blog post, maybe).

A little while after talking with that guy, I took my dog for another walk – and while walking him, I concentrated on trying to think of the easy words that wouldn’t quickly pop out of my head re: the next tale I’d wanted to share with him.  The main two were ‘bee’ and ‘lemonade’ – but also ‘pheromones’ and ‘insecticide’. It took me a while to get all those words.  They definitely wouldn’t have emerged in a sudden conversation, unfortunately.

However, now that I’ve finally managed to gather those words, I’ll tell the story to myself and whoever reads this blog. The tale was about how many years ago, when I was in high school, during some summers, I worked at the state fair, in some food booths.  Once I was working in the homemade lemonade booth with another girl – and about five bees entered the booth and were buzzing around a window, so we quickly killed them.

What we hadn’t known but soon found out was that dead bees release pheromones that attract other bees. Within about half an hour our booth was infiltrated with hundreds upon hundreds of bees – and at some point we realized that killing them kept attracting more and more and more, so we stopped killing them.  Since it was a fair booth serving a beverage we couldn’t spray insecticide in there and still stay open – and since the fair only lasted about a week, the owner did not want to close down the booth and lose all sales for a day – so we had to keep it open and be surrounded by bees.

I remember feeling very uncomfortable at first - remembering the discomfort of being stung by bees in the past and worried that now I was bound to be stung multiple times.  Guess what though?  I wasn’t stung a single time that day, even though I had times were a bee landed on me or was crawling on my hand.  After a while, I stopped feeling uncomfortable and realized every time I’d been stung by a bee in the past was because I had been wearing no shoes outside and accidentally stepped on it.  Why would a bee want to release its stinger and die unless that was a defense mechanism or a reaction to being stomped to death?

Hundreds of bees were flying around my head, crawling around the walls, crawling on the table near me, occasionally crawling on my hand and not a single one stung me.  After that experience and what it lead me to realize, never again did I swipe my hand at a bee flying near my face or a bee accidentally landing on me and then crawling on my clothing – because it now seems obvious to me that if you swipe at a bee that would make it much more likely to sting, because it would feel threatened - whereas if you just let it crawl on you for a minute, it will soon realize you’re not a plant brimming with nectars and it will fly away.  I still see lots of people swiping at bees though.

The only time I was ever stung by a bee in my adult life was when I was wearing flip flops, exited a car door and accidentally stepped on one. 

***

Back to hornets though, those creatures are a different ball game. They’re mean, more aggressive, and more prone to sudden random stings. I guess my neighbor is lucky that one of his kids didn’t get stung by a hornet the next day and then lose their father trusting feathers at a young age. 

The Tao of Badass is a Big Gross Money Making Trail of Shit

Why in the hell is this online site related to a book called 'The Tao of Badass' appearing as the main source that's viewing my blog lately? Out of curiosity, I clicked the link and listened to part of the video about the book and the guy is going on & on about how to get lots of HOT YOUNG women to sleep with you every month, even if you're short, fat, bald, don't have any muscle, don't have any money etc...

According to him, women don't really care about any of those things (it's just the media trying to convince men that they do) - and men mostly just want HOT YOUNG WOMEN sex partners.

And women can quickly be triggered to be extremely attracted to ANY man if he does things like look at her lips while speaking to her and give her the impression that lots of other women want him.

According to this video, every woman is basically the same (except that some are hotter than others - and those are the ones that ALL MEN WANT AND DESERVE) - and every man primarily just wants to get tons of HOT YOUNG WOMEN to desire his cock - and to get that, men can trigger all the women they want by learning and following these easy steps (that they need to pay money to receive).

According to this video, 97% of women like men with no hair.  So apparently any bald men staring at my lips is well on his way towards leading me into his bedroom, even if all he really cares about is hot pussy and will pull whatever maneuvers he can to get it.

ALL MEN want tons of HOT YOUNG WOMEN for sexual purposes.

ALL WOMEN can easily be triggered by ANY MAN who follows these easy steps.

Who cares about a man's or woman's true personality or interests or passion or genuineness, as long as they can trigger and be triggered?

I was working on a poem. Why did I take a break and listen to that shit heel crap?  Now I feel like a time wasting barf bag.

Don't bother looking up 'The Tao of Badass' (even if you are an insecure man who wants lots of women and can't figure out how to attract them) - because there's not any one easy set answer that works for all men and women in the world.

This book seems to me like a scam-oriented, money-making piece of shit, suggesting that all women and all men are basically the same and human beings have nothing to do with truth, genuineness, honesty, or unique individuality.

Gross.

 I'm the little witch on the left side of the page, next to Margaret Bashaar and Crystal Hoffman.

they couldn't hear me unless I screamed

Awoke last morning after ongoing odd dreams and even though I wasn’t sure exactly how/why/if this derived from my dreams, I immediately felt the need to write down a note about how I dislike and get really stressed out by some of my family dynamics – not just my immediate family so much as extended family issues that strike me as less love-based and more judgment based, along the lines of telling other people what they should or shouldn’t do (and what they’re doing wrong and how they need to do this or else…).

It’s  probably because I’ve felt such impressions throughout much of my life that I don’t usually like ANYONE (not even a good friend) phrasing things to me as if this is what I need to do unless I want something bad to happen. How does another individual know what I need to do? They don’t live inside my brain, do they? So how can they be experts on what does live in there?  Shouldn’t they focus on what they need to do?  They can offer me their thoughts/feelings/opinions (indeed I like that kind of in depth exchange), but I don’t think they should state their point of view as though if I don’t follow it, something bad or unhealthy is bound to befall me.

*

The dream recollections involve a seen in which I was driving with a group of family members and suddenly I knew that my dog was about to jump out the window on the other side.  In the dream, my dog looked like a white cat.  I kept saying stop the car, stop the car, stop the car, but nobody stopped. It wasn’t because they were purposely ignoring me, but they couldn’t hear me. They could only hear themselves. Until I screamed. 

I screamed, “WE NEED TO STOP!’, which finally got them  to stop, but by then my dog had jumped out the window.  I told them where to drive back to, but couldn’t remember exactly, and we couldn’t find him. He was gone.  I made myself wake up before I saw him dead on the road.

*

I often feel like I don’t matter much to anyone - and sometimes that makes it hard hanging out with people who feel like/act like they matter a great deal. People who even say things about themselves like, “I’m awesome”. I don’t relate to friends thinking/acting like they’re awesome, popular, very attractive, and so many people are attracted to them.

Aside from poetry readings and planned events, I’m not a fan when people think a space full of unknown other people (such as a restaurant or a bus ride) should hear their loud conversation, like it or not.  What if someone is trying to think their own thoughts and you suddenly jump into the space and start forcing yours upon them? I don’t think that’s particularly creatively enlightening or positive or caring towards others; in fact I think it can be invasive and stress inducing.  At least it is for me. 

Why should I want my brain forced to hear someone else’s conversation rather than being able to focus on my own or hear/speak with the person I’m sitting next to, who I’m having trouble hearing/concentrating on because I’m being loudly intersected by someone else’s expression and I don’t want to talk that loud or have a performance style conversation?

I could be wrong; I’m no expert; but I don’t think being stressed to the point of a bad headache by that sort of thing is a result of my brain’s negativity. I think it’s more like that is not my style – and when surrounded by it in excess for an extended time period, it stresses me out.  I don’t want to scream to be heard.

But then I have a dream where if I don’t scream, nobody can hear me.

*

“(I was never a cheerleader in real life.  I was never popular in real life.

What is real?  Why am I sinking down under these misshapen rafters?)”

from my poem, “Vintage Pom Pom Underwater”, which you can read in its entirety here –

http://www.counterexamplepoetics.com/2009/02/giggle-or-gurgle-her-voice-sounds-like.html

It’s one of 11 poems I read this past Saturday, during a poetry reading at the East End Book Exchange in Pittsburgh, PA. The weekend included time with very creative friends (poetry reading time, interesting conversation time, and more), bands, The Oakmont Bakery, and the Polish Hill Arts Festival.

small scales can still sail in their own way

do you ever feel small scale compared to what other people are doing/how other people are thinking/what other people are working on and experiencing? i do. i sometimes feel like i don't do enough compared to others; don't have enough new experiences compared to others; but some of those experiences there's no way i could even handle

for example, i could never be a doctor who performes surgery (but that's okay, because I never desired to be that - although I certainly appreciate the people who are great at that or i and lots of others wouldn't be alive)

for another example, i could never travel all over the united sates or travel other countries outside of the united states by myself for months (but that's something several friends of mine have done/are doing - and that's something part of me wishes i COULD do, but there's no way i could - and i'm not talking monetarily here; I'm talking about my mentality couldn't handle it on many different levels)

maybe some people might feel like they don't do enough compared to me

but then there's the fact that life should not be a comparison; it should be focused on everyone doing what's right/important/meaningful/significant for them; everyone choosing to arrange their lifetime and priorities as they choose

some people are primarily focused on kids/family, some people are primarily focused on art/reading/writing/publishing, some people are primarily focused on spirituality and growing in that realm...

some people are more physically active (including experiencing a lot of different locations), some people are more mentally active (there brain focusing on all sorts of things, even if they're mostly staying in one place physically), some people are neither, some people are both...

i'm definitely one of the more mentally active/brain focused persons (in both bad and good ways) - thoughts, feeling, words words words, writing writing writing my thoughts and feelings - and often that feels very important and significant to me - but on a larger scale, is that personal expression relatively meaningless and insignificant?

even if so; even if i am really small scale, is that a bad thing? 

lots of people are small scale in their own way right?

*

small scale or not, i've had lots of different life experiences, even if they feel like an ongoing circle shape with ups & downs then another circle...

but sometimes i feel as if I'm darkly frothing rather than evolving..

but are dark froths a bad thing?

NEW POETRY NEWS!

This coming Saturday, July 20, 7:00 PM at East End Book Exchange (in Pittsburgh, PA), I will be part of a Hyacinth Girl Press poetry reading – also featuring readings by Sally Rosen Kindred, Daniel M. Shapiro, and one or two others TBA.

*

Speaking of Hyacinth Girl Press (which published my poetry chapbook, Thirteen Designer Vaginas in 2011 – and yes I will be reading two or three Designer V’s during the poetry reading this weekend, noted above), it is now official (in a darkly delicious sort of way) that press has accepted another chapbook of mine for publication in their 4^th year – MUTANT NEURON CODEX SWARM, a collection of collaboration by me and Robert Cole, coming your way in 2014!

I am very excited and delighted to be a part of this group of five women and three men, in Hyacinth Girl Press’s 4^th year of publication:

Lisa Marie Basile - war/lock
Dan Nowak - the hows and whys of my failures
Caitlin Elizabeth Jans - Incident Reports 
Amorak Huey - The Insomniac Circus 
Risa Denenberg - blinded by clouds 
Juliet Cook and Robert Cole - Mutant Neuron Codex Swarm 
Laura Madeline Wiseman - His Late Wives

You can find out more about all of us at the Hyacinth Girl Press website here:

http://hyacinthgirlpress.com/news.html

*

Speaking of 2014 excitement, I don't usually like to focus on feeling overly excited about things way in advance, because then my excitement tends to lead towards unfocused freaked out nerve blobs, making it harder to concentrate on the here and now - BUT having said that, I will make a little exception for a few minutes here. 

I'm pretty darn excited that 2014 will MY FIRST TIME EVER ATTENDING AWP AND HAVING A TABLE THERE - and sharing table space and poetry love with a number of other extra-special poetry women. My Blood Pudding Press with The Rooster Moans splitting table T3 – Hyacinth Girl Press with Menacing Hedge splitting table T4 – Dancing Girl Press with Misty Publications splitting table T5! YAY!

*

In other exciting news, my hair got dyed red today (an “INTENSE MEDIUM AUBURN” called “CHERRY CRUSH” – thanks Mom!).

(and i might like an alcoholic beverage called cherry crush)

(and I will save my one little sad spurt for the comments section)

My uncertainty will last forever

Other than the fact that I like poetry and art and expression, I can never seem to figure out/decide/stick with where my focus should be, even in those realms I like i.e. what should I do more of, what should I do less of, and why?

Often I think I should read and write more - and socialize less, but I’ll admit I sometimes feel jealous of writers who seem to have tons of writer/artist friends and lots of time to spend with them.  How do they connect with so many people? How do they find enough time to write?

Despite having a decent amount of time to focus on whatever I choose to focus on by myself, I sometimes feel lonely, un-liked, un-likable.

Often I think that I should spend less time promoting my creative work – and maybe even less time submitting it.  Then I think if I don’t submit it, get it published, and promote it, then hardly anybody is going to know about it and be able to read it.  Then I think even if I do promote it, hardly anyone reads it.  Maybe if I’m promoting myself a lot, people have a hard time focusing on what it is I’m promoting and thus pay less attention.

I don’t know.  Maybe I should just sort of continue on with the way I tend to fluctuate between focusing on this more, that more, this more in mutant circles – but sometimes my head hurts and I’m not sure if I’m doing anything right, anything important, anything that matters to anyone – and I don’t know who to ask, except for myself, but even my own opinions fluctuate in those warped semi-circle shapes. 

Maybe I need a doppelganger to talk to, share thoughts/feelings/opinions with, hang out with, do certain things for me, and do certain things with me.  Unless that doppelganger was even more mutated than the current twisting me.

SCRATCH - An old poem/a new old story

(Started writing this blog post a handful of days ago; then my time/brain space got invaded by a wedding, a baby shower and other what not – including other oodles of reading/writing/poetry goodness. Finally getting around to finishing it, in one way or another – about how so-called vintage children’s books got me thinking, when does contemporary poetry suddenly turn into vintage!?!  AAH.).

The hour is late, I should get to bed, but instead I am feeling compelled to express a few thoughts/feelings about how tonight my poetry made me feel old!  Not because of its content or style (thank goodness), but because of the fast passage of time.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, I am 40 years old and I started writing a lot of poetry back when I was a teenager – and I started submitting it/having it accepted for publication when I was in college (getting my BFA in creative writing) – and I started writing/submitting/being published considerably more AND feeling more strongly and favorably about my writing style in my late 20s to mid 30s – so…this shouldn’t surprise me or make me feel weirdly old, but…

Last night, I was adding a few vintage children’s books to my Blood Pudding Press shop – more specifically, children’s fairy tale books published in 1978. That process got me thinking about fairy tales fused with poems.  I was adding additions of "Beauty and the Beast" and "Cinderella" to my shop, thinking about how personally I’m more of a fan of gruesome and macabre fairy tale language (a la Grimm's), rather than how more traditional kid's books really tone down the words.

(Despite the toned down words, I’m still keeping a copy of Hansel and Gretel - because no matter how a children's book tries to tone that content down, it's still going to be delightfully creepy, on a variety of levels - PLUS the fact that when I was a little girl, my mom used to style my hair based on a Gretel illustration). 

I got to thinking about how in recent years, I don't write poems inspired by fairy tales.  I’ve written a few fairy tale themed poems in the far off past – but many years ago, I thought fairy tale inspired poem themes were becoming overdone – and for the most part, I’d rather work with my own themes, rather than creating variations on others’ themes.

I understand how parts of fairy tales can be creatively inspiring, though (for me, especially the violent bursts).  In the far off past, pieces of my poems where semi-inspired by rumplestiltskin, rapunzel, and black birds in a pie.  Thinking more about it, I realized that I HAVE used some fairy tale snippets recently – not any overall fairy tale theme, but fusion mix snips of georgy porgy pudding pie inserting himself plus my ongoing spurts of ashes to ashes (to ashes to ashes to ashes) in various amalgams.

Then I got to thinking about how an older poem of mine, possibly the first poem of mine that I continued to feel really strongly about many years later, SCRATCH, was inspired by various childhood issues, including burning my hand on an electric grill while walking around in circles reading 'Sleeping Beauty'.

I recently read SCRATCH (for the first time in years) at a poetry reading event this past March 2013 – and while thinking about it again, I decided to locate its print version, to take a peek at more details. Yes, I have my poems on my computer, but for many years now, whenever I finish a poem, I also print out a copy – and I have all these printed out copies of poems (hundreds upon hundreds open hundreds) stored in big envelope sections, where I handwrite notes as to where they’re submitted, rejected, accepted etc…

When I finally managed to locate the printed out copy of SCRATCH and then look at its handwritten notes, I found out that it was written in 1999!

I don’t remember all the details about how and when I revised the piece (how many times and how significantly etc…), but according to some of my handwritten notes jotted down on the printed out copy… An earlier version of the piece was read at Clintonville Community Co-Up and was read twice at Victorian’s Midnight Café (those notes made me remember my Open Mic reading phase in my mid 20s).  It was submitted to and rejected by Spinning Jenny, Brownstone Review, Sonora Review, and Crab Creek Review (I’m not even sure if all those sources still exist anymore).Then it was revised. Then it was rejected by Indiana Review, Green Hills Lit, and Arsenic Lobster (a source I’ve now been published by several times).  It was entered into a few contests/poetry prizes in 2000 (I had forgotten that I used to submit my poems to contests too).

Furthermore, I have quite a few submission sources written down and crossed off – and I’m not sure if that means I never heard back from those sources one way or the other or what (because if I had heard back with a rejection, then I think I would have written that in the rejection section). I have all this stuff crossed off – Sylvia (Dec.), Bathtub Gin (Jan. 2000), Great Midwestern Quarterly (June 2000), West Branch (May), Interbang (July)…  There are a few other notes too that I don’t quite understand and I don’t want to spend too much time trying to analyze the details of notes I jotted years ago.

The overall detail that made me feel weirdly old was that it appears I initially finished writing and stared submitting the poem in December 1999 (and had it accepted by SKIDROW PENTHOUSE in which it was published in 2003, 10 years ago) - and so when I read it for the first time in years at a poetry reading event this past March, I knew it was an older poem, but I didn’t realize it was thirteen years old! 

I’m sure I could go on (and on & on), but that’s enough of this semi-random rambling for now.

In other news, the vintage Cinderella book already sold from the Blood Pudding Press shop – but as of right now, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is still available there (https://www.etsy.com/listing/155869933/vintage-childrens-fairy-tale-book-beauty?) – and I’m hoping to find time to add more vintage kid’s books and other stuff soon.

My first darkly delicious poetry publication of July - Menacing Hedge!

The new summer 2013 issue of Menacing Hedge offers surrealist poetry and fiction and interviews and more by oodles of interesting writers, including five collaborative poems by me and Robert Cole!  

Oh how I adore being a part of the Menacing Hedge, where you can read the poetry and fiction while LISTENING TO THE WRITERS read them.  

Read read read, listen listen listen - and then create some of your own poetry and art. 

Here - http://menacinghedge.com/summer2013/index.php

(These five poems by Robert Cole and me are from our forthcoming collaborative poetry chapbook, MUTANT NEURON CODEX SWARM, to be published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2014).