1. A SHADOW OF DOUBT

from Touching the Dead

A moment looms large

but everyone

says to keep it small—

a pinpoint of light,

not a pretentious

epiphany.

 

Perhaps they are right,

these advisers, when

they counsel me to

keep my words down on

the floor with the dust

and debris swept up

 

by eager eyes on a

voyeuristic cruise

of the low domain.

There was, after all,

just a little fluid

smeared on the tiles. So

 

what if my pants were

wet at the knees from

his puke or piss that

escaped as the guard

slammed the riot stick

into him again

 

and again? The cloth

dried before he died.

I no longer held

him down when he stopped

breathing—between floors

I ran and ran, out

 

of breath myself,

a waist restraint use-

less in my left hand.

Counselors continue

to advise: deflate

dark recognition.

 

2. SALVATION

from Touching the Dead

But voices said: Too easy, too easy

from where you stand.

You have not touched our dead

or kissed the salty blood wounds.

Or buried your child every night,

buried your child deep in your fear,

deep in the mire below your basement

floor, to keep out the rats and brutes with guns

who crash through the door, who rape

as they cut apart the ruined remains.

 

You have not created a just order

in your world, the voices accuse.

Do not come to us for salvation.

 

No, I tell these voices. No,

my child is quite safe, it’s true.

How to say this? This, my guilt,

how to say this to you:

The knife wielders and club swingers,

room smashers and wrist cutters,

face hitters and rock throwers,

I guessed those were the ones

I could lock away. But

 

he fought against these—against the room,

against the leather restraints,

against the uniforms,

against the lock on the door,against the psychiatric intrusion,

Against feeding the machine,

the machine with the faceless How Many.

 

Tossed down by the guards,

the shouting at his head,

Listen, do you hear?

His grunts and gasps for air.

I thought it was justice.

Just bubbles in the red froth

from his mouth.

I turned away,

my slacks now wet

from kneeling.

 

You have not touched our dead

or buried your child, they said.

Do not come to us for salvation,

Too easy,

You have not touched

our dead or kissed and

buried your child every night,

buried your child

deep in the mire

below your basement floor,

brutes with guns

tear open

as they cut apart

this world.

 

Do not come to us for salvation.

We will not give you to it.

 

3. WHAT I DON’T KNOW

Dreams into words, but silence between

notes makes music—blue skies, red flowers.

A rhyme with something to do with love.

The contrast at the edge of meeting highlights

orange better than red: an opposite complement

to define. Marks form letters, white space shapes

words, words fill lines, lines stretch two dimensions

into infinity. Sound, air, breeze, fan the light

tickling behind my neck. Light, shadow, contrast

in shape and time and again, what? The chemical

exchange, electric spark in living tissue rises up,

a note heard, space recalled—falls back to spark,

exchanged, sung forth. The cerebellum, cortex,

amygdala, corpus callosum—parts create more

than can understand. The whole generates only part

of the meaning.

 

4. UPTOWN

What time and where your parking meters expire

really determines nothing in the scope of walking

down the streets where gunmen rob late night stragglers

staggering, star gazing along their Uptown nights

as the news bureau crates fear mongering and sells it

to advertisers for suburban life-styles and desperate

housewives watch themselves on tv, wishing they

could fulfill their own fantasies as well as the men

who control their lives fulfill nothing, nothing full,

nothing filled in the hyper tension drive of electronic

disguise, true crimes that keep us behind our locked

doors; I mean, who cares about parking tickets

at a time like this, the end time of end times,

millennium of millennia, Armageddon dawning

dark, dreary, disgusted amid soldiers falling

from skies without parachutes like chickens

exploding on impact, grounded at last; our

patrimony patriotic patter sputters away

to nothing more or less than your parking meters

expiring where and at what time, really

determining nothing, no scope, no walking,

no street, no gunmen, no staggering stragglers,

no gazing stars, no night, no news, no fear, no sale.

 

Michael Dickel’s prize-winning poetry, stories, & photographs have appeared in journals, books, & online—including: Sketchbook, Zeek, Poetry Midwest, Neon Beam, why vandalism?, & Poetica Magazine. He lives and works in Jerusalem at the moment. His latest book of poems is Midwest / Mid-East: March 2012 Poetry Tour ( http://www.amazon.com/Midwest-Mid-East-March-2012-Poetry/dp/1105569136).

In the opening of his book The Republican Brain, author Chris Mooney describes the tragic tale of the Marquis De Condorcet, a 16th century scholar and philosopher who played an instrumental role in the early stages of the foundation of the new Democratic government following the French Revolution. Condorcet was an eloquent, impassioned idealist of the Enlightenment, a man who fervently believed that the widespread dissemination of facts and reasoned arguments to the populace at large populace would stamp out the spread of politicized disinformation and divisive rhetoric that plagues the advancement of a free society. His vision was as naïve as it was noble, failing to account for the actual workings of the human mind and the ferocity with which the establishment resisted the spread of his idea, and his relentless pursuit of it, while incredibly heroic, ultimately led to exile, a life on the lam, and an untimely death at the hands of his inevitable captors. Great tragedy lies in Condorcet’s legacy, as legions of activists, scientists, and free thinkers have strived to advance this ultimately foolish ideal to the world. John J. Berger is the latest member of the climate science rank-and-file to tout Condorcet’s philosophy, and I’m sure he won’t be the last.

Climate Myths lays out in exquisite detail the history, methods, and guilty parties of the campaign against global climate change reform, indicting dozens of corporations, lobby groups, and think-tanks. This book is as insightful as it is exhausting; you wouldn’t believe the level of conspiracy in support of the fossil fuel industry, and the billions of dollars that have been spent keeping climate change reform off the table both here and abroad. After reading a seemingly endless string of facts and figures concerning the impending doom of the climate apocalypse and those responsible for it, a feeling of numb helplessness starts to creep in, coupled with an urgent desire to distract yourself with all due haste, in order to wipe the horrific images from your mind. The climate change debate has moved into an arena where rhetoric and ideology have all but supplanted reason and civil discourse, and while books like this are an invaluable asset to those who have already been swayed by the cause and are ready to fight, they offer little other than a bitter tale of woe to those on the sidelines who aren’t sure whom to believe, and are certainly not going to change the minds of any entrenched climate skeptics.

Those who believe climate change reform is worth fighting for need to learn from the failings of Condorcet’s legacy, and find new and innovative ways with which to bring the vital urgency of this issue to the widespread attention of our nation. More important than the facts themselves is the way in which they are presented, and climate change advocacy is in dire need of drastic rebranding if it is ever going to have any hope of being successful at anything other than preaching to the choir in the limited time table humanity has left.

 

Note: More information about Dr. Berger and his work can be found at his website, www.johnjberger.com. 

A recent Google search under the topic “anti-choice legislation” (the collective umbrella under which restrictive abortion and birth control lie) reveals that America’s “War On Women” has certainly not ended so much as it has become unfashionable to speak on in the mainstream media once again. Michigan, Nebraska, Texas, Oklahoma…in these states and more, the debate rages on, reason and hysteria clashing again and again over exactly how much control a woman should have over her body. While I know most of you, especially the ladies, are tired of hearing one more (mostly) straight white guy tell you why this is either a good or bad idea, consider for a moment exactly what actual stake us menfolk have in this debate as well, and why it’s important.

All of the anti-choice legislation that is being flouted by the GOP today is designed not only to serve as a punishment to women, but also as a warning to men. For either gender, the message is clear: do NOT fuck under ANY circumstances other than that which is necessary: making babies. If you do it for any other reason, punishment will be swift and severe, and penance will be everlasting. Not only will women be forced to carry that child to term against their will no matter where it came from, but the idea of safe, non-committal sex is officially thrown under the bus, due to things like increased risk of exposure to STDs and astronomically higher odds of unwanted pregnancy. Let’s face it: most men, being the horny bastards that they are, are scared to death of both of these things, as monogamy is certainly NOT something that is well codified into our genetics.

So why would the GOP want to control men’s libidos as well, you ask? Because by controlling both, they have a direct handle on the sexual instinct itself. The people that push this legislation don’t want you to fuck, PERIOD. And there’s nothing moral about this, either. The truth of the matter is that energy is much better directed, in their eyes, towards the sort of myopic, hysteric, flag-sucking nationalism so critical to making the GOP’s larger platform the status quo.

“It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship…There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.”
-George Orwell, “1984”

Being one of mankind’s most base and powerful instincts, the amount of energy devoted, whether consciously or otherwise, to the act of reproduction is tremendous. By instilling heaping amounts of fear and guilt upon the sexual act, usually through some sort of religiously dogmatic pulpit-pounding in both church AND state, you can cut people (especially the lesser-educated ones) away from the desire for sexual expression, which is one of the cornerstones of freedom itself. When you start to imagine the immense power that can be harnessed there to garner support greater and perhaps more insidious goals – such as perpetuating endless war-for-profit or the furthered concentration of wealth through monopoly and oligarchy – it becomes abundantly clear why legislation like this is so overwhelmingly favored by the Right: because it works. You can see it in the way your average fundie’s eyes glaze over and he or she assumes almost reverent tones when spouting talking points regarding issues like our supposed “War On Terror”, the protection of America’s “job creators”, and things like entitlement reform. The overwhelming majority of these same people also stand firmly behind anti-choice legislation, while in the same breath claiming to champion “freedom” and “liberty’ without the slightest trace of irony in a stunning example of collective doublethink. America’s Anti-Sex League has done its job well, supplanting sexytime with standing for the Pledge throughout vast swaths of our nation. Nineteen-Eighty-Four was written as a cautionary tale, not as a primer for empire-building. It’s clear that the Right long ago discovered the former; when will the proletariat discover the latter?

The Holding

A  door like a sun is in front of you
and the screams have begun. It seems
all things ruminate themselves to ruin.

Remember how even your own fire poisoned you
the oxygen thin and cluttered,
your voice sputtered to a consonant.

In the glorious beginning, snow sang
in the darling anatomies of trees,
knowing them in the deep of day.

Birds swooped in and around
the bare-branch mazes,
needle and threading with their trills.

This interior door swaddles you –
what you always wanted, they accused:
you who loped up grassy slopes

and careened on cardboard flats,
who avoided the witch in the woods
with freaked out glee:

who sat on dappled rocks dolloped
in ice cream and sweat –
you did everything right.

Why then the glass-paneled door?
Again, this night, unfurl the velvet dark:
Blind the eyes of the door.

Yes, the dreams will come back,
blue, and black. The door too dreams
of being wall.

Yet it holds.

 

Deep Night Wings

By night and day I write you,
partner of thirty turns about the sun.
You’ve demanded the rest in silence.

I type yes.

Writing is quiet pursuit,
a lone cow corralled,
grazing on alluvial grain.

I’ll be a hush like deep night wings
humble as the moon
with her referred light.

Already, I was in flight
already a stone divined,
its music near-dismissed.

The sky and spheres
seem quite complete
in their apparent arrest

but fold me into their vast black nest.

 

Why Assume 

there is nothing to be learned
from the one shivering bird
in the anorexic tree as dawn
lends its coral collar to the
coming paste-faced day?
The violated instinct
is a most worthy instructor,
yet we fold frigidly away
to protect our many mansions,
crying ourselves to sleep like
hollow-bellied babies
bursting our battings
with excess of goodness.

 

The Android Speaks: Winter Trilogy

I.

There is only so much time
to start what is already started
and forgotten
unseeing the start from the end
that, ending, began it –

be certain never
to answer the door to a dream –
it is a trick, that knock.
Sleep like oasis among oases
desert among mirages of gold.

Ponder the time between times
spent thinking about places
on rims of places,
how minor tragedies
are major in mode

life to the spirit, which,
dreaming or awake
are no molten things
when the light of dark
drifts…..drifts in.

II.

I need pencil or pen
and there are none
and it is – did I say it?
it is cold.  Again.

The worm sits thick
in its bricklayer belowness
the bird follows
its other eye
leaves dream their bones
to dust
skeleton trees sing
their raspy airs.

What does not succumb
to ice, fire or flood
and how to go without writing
with a madness in the blood?

III.

This tall wide piece of plywood
in front of me as I sit
with a small lamp,
reading –

is ugly, old, discolored,
one tiny dead leaf stuck to it.
I study this throwaway from
some throwaway project.

Many shades of brown
white moldy circles at the top
striations, rutted black lines
pits, blots, pocks.

And now … ? I see beauty, as though
seized in a near-death experience
as though they’re not all that
and should not be.

 

[Note: “The Holding” was previously printed in the anthology Finding Our Voices, and “Why Assume” was previously printed in Julie’s collection Of Mortality A Music.]

 

Julianza (Julie) Shavin is a composer, poet, and visual artist. Most recently, she was awarded second prize and two honorable mentions in Telluride Arts Organization’s Mark Fischer contest, and in November had three poems published in “Messages From the Hidden Lake,” Alamosa, CO.  A recipient of three Pikes Peak Arts Council grants, she was named 2011 Performance Poet of the Year; in September, Pikes Peak Page Poet.  Shavin has two chapbooks and a collection, Of Mortality a Music.  Her poems are published regularly in literary journals, which sometimes feature her artwork inside or as cover. She currently has four recent compositions/improvs on YouTube and is in process of recording her earlier works. Shavin is past-President of Poetry West (www.poetrywest.org), currently serving as Vice-President.  She is an animal welfare advocate/activist, working with Pikes Peak Animal Rights Team, National Mill Dog Rescue, Denver Animal Protection League, and many others. 

Julianza (Julie) Shavin is a composer, poet, and visual artist. Most recently, she was awarded second prize and two honorable mentions in Telluride Arts Organization’s Mark Fischer contest, and in November had three poems published in “Messages From the Hidden Lake,” Alamosa, CO.  A recipient of three Pikes Peak Arts Council grants, she was named 2011 Performance Poet of the Year; in September, Pikes Peak Page Poet.  Shavin has two chapbooks and a collection, Of Mortality a Music.  Her poems are published regularly in literary journals, which sometimes feature her artwork inside or as cover. She currently has four recent compositions/improvs on YouTube and is in process of recording her earlier works. Shavin is past-President of Poetry West (www.poetrywest.org), currently serving as Vice-President.  She is an animal welfare advocate/activist, working with Pikes Peak Animal Rights Team, National Mill Dog Rescue, Denver Animal Protection League, and many others. 

 

 

David Broza at Masada

Josephine Baker in France

Last Night’s Storm

Michael Dickel’s prize-winning poetry, stories, & photographs have appeared in journals, books, & online—including: Sketchbook, Zeek, Poetry Midwest, Neon Beam, why vandalism?, & Poetica Magazine. He lives and works in Jerusalem at the moment. His latest book of poems is Midwest / Mid-East: March 2012 Poetry Tour ( http://www.amazon.com/Midwest-Mid-East-March-2012-Poetry/dp/1105569136).