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February 1st, 2008

09:35 pm - A Whole Bunch of Stuff Here are the first four drawings from a series of six: And now, some poems... Love Hurts How can I write a love letter to you when that love was lost a long time ago? I wear that love, which you once declared a true love, around my neck like a putrid, rotting carcass. Tears were never cried for that love. In fact, 'tears' and 'cried' are not strong enough words. Howling tempests of grief never swamped and battered my body for that love. The loss of that love never burned me, never consumed me in a great conflagration, never reduced me to a pile of cinders. This is a love poem of mourning. How can I say what you once meant to me without regurgitating every painful literary cliche of the last five hundred years? I will not compare you to a flower or the sun, moon, or stars. But goddamn, you were beautiful! And you trusted me to carry you under my wing like the wounded gosling that you were. I think that's what I loved about you the most; that even though you'd been abused, raped, mistreated, beaten, neglected, abandoned and betrayed, you still had the ability to trust. And you trusted me. I remember entire afternoons spent lying with you in a warm, fleshy pile, like a litter of pups, our only language that of skin on skin. I never grieved over the loss of that. Never grieved over the nourishment that our touching gave me; the pure mother's milk of it, the safety and utter relief after years of living disconnected, like a man under glass, my body starving for fingers and arms and legs and lips. Shall I grieve now? How do I do that? By writing a poem? How do you let something go when so much time has passed that it's turned into a scab, a crusted booger? Do I rip off the scab and let fresh blood flow? And I never mourned the loss of our passion. How being together was like a cure for cancer. How you were the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning, and the only reason I got out of bed some days. And how spending a day with you was better than winning the lottery, better than anything I could possibly think of. The way our hands and eyes hungered for each other like junkies needing a fix. How do I mourn the loss of that passion, now that twenty years have passed, and the anesthesia is starting to wear off? How do I grieve for the intertwining that was severed, the raw flesh left behind when our hearts were brutally disengaged, like siamese twins ripped apart by horses running in opposite directions? What about the time you told me that you couldn't live without me; not like some cheesy lyric from a country-western song, but with the truth of your bones and blood. And I realized that we had both jumped into the deep end of the pool together. How do I say goodbye to that moment? Am I still walking around with scar tissue and bits of dried-up, dangling heart-cords, like forgotten umbilica? How do you begin to repair a delicate piece of machinery that's been neglected for half a lifetime? You once wrote a poem about me entitled "An Evening With My Beautiful Lover." What do I do with that? Do I burn it? Do I tear it up? Do I put it in a drawer and try to forget about it? Those words were never given a proper burial. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Our love is dead, and it's corpse has finally surfaced, like a soldier missing in action. And it's time for me to dress in black, and weep. David Aronson March 2007 Monkey-Boy for my son Josh Do you remember when I sang you the first forest songs, and showed you how to arrange the bones? You climbed up and over everything that was climbable: sofa-mountains, table-caves, coatrack-trees and waterfall-chairs. My little monkey-boy, mercurial, bouncy, ready for your stripes. Never a blank slate, you were born with your personality fully tanked and priced to move. And you must have had the justice dial turned up extra high when you were crafted. Do you remember how you were outraged when Bart Simpson got bullied on TV? No one had to teach you that it was wrong. My wild little monkey-boy, where did you learn to speak so eruditely? Did a traveling consortium of missionary english teachers find you in the jungle and take pity on you, thinking you Tarzan's primitive boy, and leave you with a scholar's vocabulary? Your controls must have been set to bypass stranger anxiety as well. Do you remember when you dove head first into a room full of unknown people as if they were a huge vat of candy? I think you forgot I was even there as you charmed grownup and toddler alike with your swaying flute and fearless turban. My darling monkey-boy, your Gepetto must have placed the philosopher's stone behind your eyes. Like a reincarnated Neitszche, you wanted to know the nature of good and evil as soon as you were pushed out of the nest. You swung from vine to vine looking for God while the other little monkeys were looking for grubs. Sweet little monkey-boy, you're an imp and a mazik, and you fall into mischief through sheer curiosity, but you've also got a piece of Florence Nightingale's heart, because you can't stand to see anybody suffer. You played patty-cake with death almost as soon as your life had begun. Did you discuss esoteric mysteries with the cherubim and seraphim while your body lay motionless in that hospital bed? Is that where your old-man-of-the-forest wisdom comes from? My brave little monkey-boy, I'll always be there to applaud you as you conquer the world, and to pick you up when you fall out of your tree. And no matter what, I'll always be on your side. David Aronson April 2007 High Colonic of Love You remember the past through shit-colored glasses; a watery brown-out, a slaughter-yard wallow that stains your eyes. No chocolate bunnies, no baby chicks or peppermint candy. The rainbows got sucked into a black hole, gold coins, leprechauns and all. Lucky for you that I kept a record, scribbling notes and plucking the jewels from the turds before they disappeared forever down the drain. Here's an item: A declaration, a promise made, a gift to be hung around your neck or strapped to your forehead like a prayer box --but all you remember is the breaking of the promise. You really should keep this gift in your mojo bag-- it will bring you more good luck than a rabbit's foot blessed by the Pope himself. The giver was a woman, and not just any woman, but a woman who slid down your throat like sweet cream and warmed your belly like hot buttered toast. Remember when she spoke to you, earnest and naked in your bed, and revealed to you the hidden wonders of the dark continent of you, and announced her position as first lady of the united states of you, and her eyes and her voice led you through that tangled forest to the place where all your lost radiance sat waiting for you to find? And what about that other woman? The one who touched you like a butterfly landing on your summer-warmed, grass-stained vagabond face. She took all your innards that were spilled out on the ground and stuffed them back into you and stitched you up like a much-loved childhood doll, and thawed you with her easy-bake-oven smile. You've wiped your ass with her gift and tossed it on the dung heap as carelessly as all the rest. I think it's time to schedule you for a high colonic of love; to purge yourself of the slamming doors, the harpy screeches, the castrating hysteria, and make room for the good flora and fauna: the smiles that pardon all your secret sins, the rolling on the floor like giggling pups, the salty sweetness of ardor-swollen lips, the warmth of flesh that curves into yours at night and acknowledges your spark when it's at it's most tenuous, protecting it the way cupped hands keep a burning match from the wind. David Aronson January 2008

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April 16th, 2007

05:30 pm - Poems from the Eye of the Hurricane I've been going through an intense healing crisis since December. Here are some poems that have come out of it: Ruach (The Holy Breath of Spirit) Okay--I give up. I surrender. Powerful currents are capsizing me. I dip my toe in the water and the riptide pulls me under. I'm not going to struggle--I'll become a merman. Tidal waves wash over the blinking lights of Disneyland and I'm surfing the crest. The spell is broken-- my Mickey Mouse ears are blown into the gutter. These puny windshield wipers can't hold back the downpour any longer. What is expected of me? Nothing that requires any more effort than allowing a seed to become a flowering tree. Remember the spark? The original plan? The holy letter scratched into your forehead long before you were born? You are a catalyst, an enzyme, the sand in the oyster, the bee that pollinates the flower, the man who sweeps up the ashes of the Phoenix and from them builds a new nest. You're the fire that turns the water into the steam that drives the engine that takes you to another country, and you can no longer indulge in the illusion of insignificance. You can no longer ignore the fact that your existence makes an impact. You speak, you touch, you love, and the entire web starts to quiver. It's time to acknowledge your sticky-sweet immersion in the cluster-fuck of humanity. Here's your top hat and your wand; people are waiting for the lightning bolt that knocks the lids off their towers. They squawk and squeal, but their hearts secretly hunger for the moist dark alchemy of the cocoon, and it's merely frippery that they relinquish. Donald Duck is drowning along with his indignation and his victimization--let him go. The ocean of you has tributaries that encircle the globe. Alright--I acquiesce-- there is freedom in surrender. I've had my face to the wall for way too long, like a punished child sitting in the corner, forgotten, and left to split the seams of his clothing as he grows. I won't be a bird on his death bed despairing for never having flown. I'll be the goldfish that leaps from his imaginary bowl, the vine that grows through cracking stone. What is asked of me requires no sacrifice; I desire it the way a salmon yearns to swim upstream. The only thing I need to renounce is the inevitable accumulation of crust and debris, the fallout from living in the material world. The tide rolls in, scrubbing and rinsing with it's foamy suds, and the afterbirth falls from my eyes which water and blink as they let in the morning light, momentarily blinding me, the same as on the day that I was born. David Aronson December 2006 Jubilee An ancient stone hospital was winding down. The wards were full of the dead. Soon the last breath would expire with a barely audible sigh, like a candle flame softly extinguished by a breeze through the curtains. The only survivors were myself and a strangely androgynous nurse. She was surely a woman, but her face looked like my son and my father when I glanced at her sideways. We strolled from bed to bed, surveying the deceased. Some of the patients had been there for centuries. We saw an old man with an archaic nightcap from the time of the plagues, children with limbs missing and mangled in factory explosions, elegant young men with wasting, coughing diseases, sad, pale, addicted women, overdosed and drowned. We saw creatures that had been sick and dying for so long, they had lost part of their humanity, and lay motionless in truncated lumps under neglected bed sheets. We saw patients with their hearts eaten away and their throats plugged up. We saw emaciated bodies with hair and nails grown into wild tangled brambles to rival Sleeping Beauty's castle. Soon the nurse and I would also die. What to do? "I have a potion," she said. "It brings the dead back to life just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb." Being a Jew, I was skeptical. But as we pressed liquid to lips, eyelids began to flutter. Wasted centenarians leapt from their beds. People without legs turned cartwheels. We raced from sickroom to sickroom, giddy with our godlike task, the hospital filling with human voices after years of silence. Crutches were smashed against walls. Iron lungs were abandoned. The potion ran dry, and with more corpses to revive, the nurse whisked me to the kitchen, handed me a mortar and pestle and a jar full of something and said, "Here--grind!" We whipped up a frothy, buttery batch of death-be-gone and resumed our rounds, flinging gobs of it into shriveled, blackened mouths, like paperboys tossing the morning edition onto the porch. The newly resurrected danced and sang in croaking voices and garbled dialects. They laughed and shrieked and sobbed and stared at their functioning bodies in wonder and amazement. We came to a room with two humanoid creatures strapped to a bed. They were like hunch-backed men with the heads of alligators. According to their charts, they had committed crimes-- eaten people, like the Big Bad Wolf. "What about these two?" I asked, hesitant to reward such evil. "Give them back their lives," replied the nurse in a firm, clear voice. "All are to be redeemed!" David Aronson March 2007 Letter to myself at age 11 I know it hurts. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to arrive. First my armor didn't fit properly, and the dwarf had to bend it and bang it and re-solder it I don't know how many times. And then my first horse died, and my second horse got pregnant-- I didn't even know it was a girl-- and my third horse was stubborn and willful and was always galloping off on it's own personal adventures. And then, I could barely hear your crying in that closet you got lost in, buried under pillows with the door locked behind you. But something kept startling me awake, like a mother who hears her child's faint cry even though she's a thousand miles away. And I went looking for you and found you in the photo album. Your face was supposed to be smiling for the benefit of the school and the PTA, but your eyes and your mouth were wavering on the verge of tears. And so I held you to me and felt your sadness. Long afternoons that drained you with their crushing heaviness; sunny afternoons spent indoors fearful that if you went outside you'd be hunted down like a Jew fleeing Nazi Germany. The Gestapo teachers that shaved your beard and tattooed your arm. The American ambassador that turned his head and washed his hands like Pilate. The experiments they performed on you, like a rat in a cage with no escape from trauma and stress, no bars to push to bring relief, waiting to see how long it would take to break your spirit. I saw the light in your eyes that flickered and burnt out, and I felt the lump of petrified meat in your chest that you hauled out of bed every morning like an iron ball chained to your leg. And I know it hurts. And I'm sorry it's taken me so long to find you. But I'm here now. So rest your head and hush. Hush and go to sleep. I love you, little boy. David Aronson March 2007 Current Mood: depressed

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November 5th, 2006

11:55 pm - New essay and illustration Ars Gloria Dr. Hoffman's Folly      Bill stood on the kitchen table, his arms raised in a grand, sweeping gesture, shouting "I am Jesus Bill! I am Jesus Bill! Hallelujah!" in the bombastic oratorical tones of a holy-rolling tv evangelist. He leaped about on the flimsy table like a demented, drug-addled Peter Pan, and I was afraid it would collapse under his weight, but I was unable to do anything except stare at him with a big dumb grin on my face, because the acid was kicking in big-time and turning the clockwork gears of my thought processes into a water-slide filled with raspberry jello.      There were four of us scrambling our brains that evening with what was supposed to be lsd, but could have contained just about anything that was poured into the kitchen sink where it was most likely concocted; drain-o, rat poison, douche vinegar, who knew?      Our blinkered band of blind pied pipers consisted of my friend Dave, his friend Bill, my first wife Terri and myself. We were all young, none of us over the age of twenty, and we were gathered in the small apartment where Terri and I had lived since our untimely teenage marriage, precipitated by the unplanned birth of our daughter Diana the year before.      Diana had been put to bed an hour earlier and we had sprawled on the living room carpet waiting for the drug to take effect. And as we sat hovering in that twilight zone between everyday consciousness and righteously fucked up, I glanced through Bill's journal which he carried with him everywhere he went, a key prop in his emerging literary persona. I read through some of his latest poems, expecting Bill's usual mix of zen philosophy, dada nihilism, and absurdist theatre, and was shocked and taken aback by the extremely violent anti-christian sentiments I found expressed in them. There was stuff about Jesus sucking diseased cocks, having the cross shoved up his ass, and lots of nasty scatological references.      Dave, Bill and I were all Jewish by birth, but gravitated towards eastern theologies; zen buddhism, hinduism, taoism. We practiced yoga, and had disdain for pretty much all western organized religions, and certainly no love for christianity, but this was really over the top! There was some serious rage in that notebook, and wherever it was coming from, christianity was the target. It was a side of Bill I hadn't seen before. He had always played the part of the mystic, serene and wise beyond his years, or else the clown, the witty court jester who amused everyone with his surrealist wordplay and eccentricity. Now I was seeing one of Bill's darker characters, one filled with volcanic repressed anger, and it scared me; not so much for myself, but for Terri, who, although seriously strayed from the flock, had been raised a catholic, and I was nervous about how she would react if she should read the products of Bill's poison pen.      I knew that Terri was volatile and prone to extreme bouts of irrational over-reaction, but what neither of us knew at the time, and wouldn't know until years after our divorce, was that Terri was suffering from a serious dissociative disorder; the result of a highly abusive and traumatic childhood in an extremely dysfunctional family filled with alcoholism, addiction, incest, physical abuse and mental illness.      I think it would be safe to say that taking acid was not a good idea for any of us, but what the hell did we know.      So now Bill was dancing on the table, gesticulating wildly and shouting "I am Jesus Bill! Praise Jesus Bill!" at the top of his lungs, and Terri stared at him with a googly-eyed expression of uncomprehending confusion; she looked like she didn't know whether to laugh, cry, take offense, or wind her watch.      My stomach knotted; this was not going to be a pleasant trip. Truthfully, though, I didn't really know what kind of a trip I had wanted it to be. I don't think any of us really knew what we were after. Enlightenment? Revelation? Kicks? Transcendence? Escape? Wonder? We had failed to heed Dr. Timothy Leary's advice to honestly examine one's true expectations and motivations before taking lsd.      Terri laughed hysterically at Bill's antics; the kind of bone-chilling laugh that one rarely hears outside of the locked ward of an asylum, the kind of laugh that makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck, and your scrotum, should you possess one, shrivel up like a raisin. Dave and I looked at each other wide-eyed. The first note of bad trip paranoia had been sounded. Once again, Tim Leary's words came to us too late: set and setting, set and setting--we were fucked.      Terri continued to laugh like Woody Woodpecker's evil twin. We thought she was going to have a fit. Even the normally implacable Bill was alarmed now and had climbed down off the table.      "What's wrong with her?" he said.      "I don't know," I said nervously, "maybe she shouldn't have taken any acid."      We stood in a circle around Terri and arranged our faces in ways that we hoped would seem kind and soothing.      "It's okay, Terri," I said, "everything's going to be alright."      "Yes, everything's groovy," said Bill, "think about butterflies and bunny rabbits and shiny daffodils..."      "You've done acid before, haven't you?" Dave asked Terri. Terri looked at me.      "Not really," she said, "when we did that sugar cube--that was my first time."      "Oh shit!" I said.      Terri was referring to an afternoon, shortly after we had first met, when I had shown up at her house with some sugar cube acid while her parents were out, and we tripped and had sex in her bedroom while side two of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band played over and over on the turntable--we must have heard it thirty times--and Terri was menstruating and her blood got all over the sheets, and she was flipping out and getting hysterical and I kept telling her "No... it's beautiful... it comes out of your body... it's natural..." like some drugged-out flower child at a Manson family orgy.      So Terri hadn't had as much experience with acid as I thought she had. Not that we ever got good acid anyway. The days of Owsley and orange sunshine were long gone. All of our late 70s suburban acid was heavily cut with speed and god knows what other kinds of garbage, and our trips were usually psychologically akin to the act of peeling off one's own skin with a pair of tweezers. I honestly don't know why we continued to take the shit.      "I think I'm freaking out," said Terri, her voice quavering.      "You're not freaking out," I said, trying to be the voice of reason while my brains were sliding out of my ear like runny eggs. "We only took one hit. It's not that much. You're going to be okay." I tried to sound confident and upbeat but Terri wasn't buying it.      "I... I need to be alone," said Terri.      "Are you sure that's a good idea?" I said.      "Yes... no... I mean... I don't know... maybe..."      And she removed herself to the bedroom, shutting the door behind her. Dave, Bill and I looked at each other uncomfortably. A pall settled over us, replacing the earlier hilarity of Jesus Bill.      "What do you think she's going to do?" said Bill, "She's not going to hurt herself, is she?"      "I don't know," I said, as I watched the carpet and the walls breathing in and out. "I think you freaked her out with that Jesus Bill stuff. She is catholic, you know."      Bill just stared at me blankly.      "And whatever you do, don't let her look at your god damned notebook."      Just then, Terri came rushing out of the bedroom in a panic.      "I... I'm going to get in the car and drive... I have to get away..." she said in a shaky voice.      "That's not a good idea," I said slowly, trying to maintain my composure.      "No... not a good idea," my friends echoed, with barely concealed alarm. We got up and once again surrounded Terri, fencing her in with our bodies. With soothing baby-talk and paternal cooing we gradually herded her away from the door, moving slowly so as not to frighten her.      All of us were tripping pretty heavily at this point, and it was getting hard to keep track of what was happening when. Right now, yesterday afternoon, and five minutes ago were getting jumbled up and re-arranged like chips on a scrabble board in a scrabble match played by monkeys. All kinds of Lucy-in-the-Sky visual effects were pre-empting my usual neural-retinal schedule: colored silly-string motion trails, shifting kaleidoscopic patterns plastered over every surface, chairs and tables shooting up to the ceiling on rubbery legs like in an episode of Little Nemo in Slumberland. And in the middle of this phosphene brain-gasm, a part of me was trying to figure out how to keep Terri from snapping her tab and slipping her wig, and that part of me was a little man in a little boat in a toilet bowl getting sucked down into a fluorescent day-glo whirlpool.      So Terri and I decided to take a bath together thinking it would chill us out, but when we shut the door to the bathroom, the walls began to close in on us. The water running in the tub sounded like a deafening waterfall with eerie voices murmuring underneath the roar, and the flowers on the wallpaper seemed to be staring at us with accusing eyes as we got undressed. I felt as if I was slipping down a dark tunnel. I was paranoid; the toilet hated me. Whatever nasty things the acid was doing to Terri's head were now infecting me as well.      "Don't look in the mirror!" I said in a panicky voice, expecting to see a vision of our flesh melting off our heads, leaving Mexican Day of the Dead sugar skulls blinking back at us. We got in the tub and sat facing each other, and as I watched her, Terri's skin took on a greenish glow, and her eyebrows curled up into a sinister pointiness, and her teeth became fangs, and the freckles around her nose turned into rough, bumpy scales. She had transformed into a dangerous, frightening lizard-woman, and I could tell by her look of trepidation that my face was doing bizarre and unpleasant things for her benefit as well.      "Is my face scaring you?" I asked. Terri nodded.      The trip was taking us from a colorful Peter Max black light poster into a medieval Heironymous Bosch demonic nightmare.      "Okay--let's get out of the tub then," I said, my voice small and tremulous. "Don't look at me and don't look in the mirror."      We quickly got dressed and rejoined our friends in the living room. They were watching tv, but the screen was broadcasting nothing but static, since all the stations had signed off for the night.      "We're watching the snow," said Bill.      "It's really cool," said Dave.      "Look--it's thousands of people waving flags..."      "Oh yeah," I said, "I see it too... people waving flags..."      "Look--now it's millions of Chinese people with conical hats..."      The novelty of the tv game did much to take the edge off of our fear and paranoia, and soon we had forgotten all about the bad trip bathtub. The four of us sat huddled around the tv for what seemed like hours, ooh-ing and ah-ing over the imaginary scenes and hallucinatory characters that our lsd-feuled sense organs were projecting onto the tv's visual white noise. The distraction seemed to calm Terri down, which in turn calmed me down, and everyone was able to relax. Eventually, the drug began to wear off, and the tv static lost it's animated funhouse appeal and reverted back to plain old boring static.      "Come into the other room with me," Terri whispered in my ear. We excused ourselves and shuffled off into the bedroom. Terri shut the door and flopped herself down on the bed.      "I'm horny. Come here and fuck me!" she demanded.      "Now? What about Dave and Bill?" I asked, somewhat anxiously.      "What about them?" Terri said, as she stripped off her clothes.      "Well, they... they'll hear us..."      "So what?"      I was rather uncomfortable with this idea. I knew that both Bill and Dave hadn't gotten laid in quite a while, and I also knew that it would be pretty unpleasant for me to have to listen to my friend having sex in the next room when I was feeling horny and frustrated.      "Come on," Terri demanded, "put that thing in me!"      I did the deed as quickly as possible, all the while worrying about Dave and Bill overhearing Terri's squeals and moans of pleasure. It was very hard for me to enjoy myself and I felt rather like a concubine in a male harem, or a stud animal corralled into a breeding arrangement.      When the servicing was over, I quickly returned to the living room to check on Dave and Bill. The vibe I got from them felt kind of strange and I could tell that the quickie had been clearly broadcast through the apartment's thin walls. Dave had an ambiguously crooked smile on his face, half amused and half embarrassed, and Bill was standing on his head in a yoga posture. Our two-year-old daughter Diana had awakened and wandered into the living room and was staring saucer-eyed at Dave and Bill as if they were gooey green martians with antennas and six eyes and drippy slobbering fangs. I picked her up and tucked her back into her crib, and by the time I got her back to sleep, Terri was snoring in the bedroom and Dave and Bill were feeling sober enough to drive, so we said our goodbyes.      I sat on the couch and reviewed the night's adventures. It was clear to me that Terri and I should definitely not do any more acid together. Lsd is not a recreational drug. It is a powerful substance that needs to be approached with caution and reverence. It can be a gateway to expanded levels of consciousness, or a pandora's box loosing all the screeching demons from the dungeons of the subconscious. Luckily, we got through the evening without anyone burning their hands on the stove or jumping out of a window. We were on the ground floor anyway, so a jump would not have been fatal. And besides, those once-familiar tales of acid trips gone awry are most likely urban legends. But the experience underscored the wisdom of the unfairly maligned Dr. Leary who warned people not to take lsd unless it was in a highly controlled environment with an experienced guide. And one should definitely not feed acid to people indiscriminately without knowing anything about their state of mental health.      It's no surprise to me that the 1960s magical mystery tour through the summer of love ended up on the side of the road with a blowout and smoke pouring out of the hood, and a lot of misguided, psychedelicized basket weavers sitting on the grass, gibbering and babbling and twiddling their thumbs and toes. David Aronson November 2006 Current Mood: amused

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October 27th, 2006

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September 7th, 2006

11:20 pm - Erotic Art These images are from a series of erotic drawings created to illustrate a friend's chapbook. The others can not be posted on LJ, but you can see them here:http://www.alchemicalwedding.com/drawings/erotic.htm Sometimes A Broom Is Not A Cigar I have many things to return to you. I've been taking care of them for a long time without really attending to them, like an absentee landlord, like an invalid gardener who lets the weeds take over, or maybe, possibly, like a widow who discovers that the contents of her safe deposit box have tripled in value. These things were installed in me at an early age, and like asbestos in the walls, they've been poisoning me ever since. I've discovered the probe, the implant behind my ear, and I'm having it surgically removed. Now that I've written the eulogy for my first life, and before I mail the birth announcements for my second, I need to take inventory of your gifts, your plagues and pestilence that have taught me so much, so that I can return every last one of them to you. You see, they were never mine to accept in the first place. You assumed a parental duty to feed me with bits of your own flesh, and I, likewise, felt obliged to lick the wounds, like an animal trapped with it's brood on an empty ice floe. I thought it was my business to transform your feces and your nightmare abortions into gold, but now, your emotional landfill with it's hundred-year halflife is staining everything a cancerous brown, so I'm giving it all back. I'm giving back the pussy cat you said I tortured --that was a lie. You were the one with the leash, the whip and the glove. I'm giving back the Playboy magazines you appropriated, hiding your flaccid anxiety behind bathroom bravado. I'm giving back the Punch and Judy nightsticks and hammers with which you clubbed each other half to death. I'm giving back the duplicitous phone calls at 12:00 AM and the blind-eyed amnesiac trips to New York. I'm giving back your floppy three-cornered cuckold's hat and the accompanying ribald libretto. I'm giving back your contractual fluids squirted through holes in solemn bedroom sheets. I'm giving back Dr. Freud's triangle, where boats and planes and symbolic submarines are never heard from again. I'm giving back your passive-aggressive nipple-biting and your eunuch's mirror that hides genitalia, like a fat man's belly obscuring his penis. I'm giving back your lurking father-fear and the castrating knife behind your back. I'm giving back your insect mouth that severs members during fellatio. I'm giving back your half-acknowledged seductions and your intellectual incest. I'm giving back the box-row seat at the foot of your marital love-bed, and the playbill for the impotent king and his wretched child bride. I'm giving back your cheating heart and your d-i-v-o-r-c-e. I'm giving you back all those stories, those blueprints I once thought were mine; those dark burlesque narratives, cheap smutty novels written by psychotics and cretins, horrible made-for-tv softcore porn movies, with all the sickening shame and embarrassment of a catholic school sex-ed filmstrip, rerun and rerun over and over again on a channel that can't ever be changed. Your enmeshment was more cruel slapstick than sadism, the Three Stooges with a dildo in the eye, but still enough to cripple and dislocate a green and unshelled young child. I'm noticing an empty space where your dysfunctional library used to sit; a stretch of wall once occupied by your infernal diseased volumes reeking like a noxious pussy-fart, with titles like How To Ruin A Marriage, and How To Repeat The Same Mistakes Ad Nauseum Without Ever Learning A Goddamned Thing. That space is clear now, and the sunlight through the open window reveals nothing but spotless white, and I'm wondering what sacred lovers, what coiling angels of light, will soon be blown in on the virgin wind. David Aronson August 2006 Current Mood: accomplished

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August 4th, 2006

10:09 pm - Art & Poetry One of Us from Shadows in Heaven A Poem About God It's time to let God out of the books. He's been standing in those books with his face to the wall for too long. He's tired of jumping through your hoops, afflicting people with boils and whatnot. The burning bush is so--I don't know--last millennium. I think God has paid his dues by now, don't you? But how could a benevolent god allow so much suffering in the world? This God is a bad egg. Let's lock his ass up in a book! Where's God? He used to be in this mountain, in this ocean, in this thundercloud, in this sheaf of wheat. Sorry, he's over there in the book. And he's so much more...engaging. We've got a top notch team of writers for him. Our ratings are through the roof! It's time to let God out of his contract. The statute of limitations is up. He's tired of smoting and smiting in your infomercials. He doesn't want to be Big Brother anymore. Leave the job of omniscient censorship to Santa Claus. But where will we find God if he's not in the book? In your asshole. That's right. God will be in your asshole. And in your penis and testicles, and your vagina and your breasts, and in your piss and spit and cum. There's a lot of places he hasn't been to in a long time. Oh, you let him do some cameos and guest appearances in poems about flowers and sunshine, but God hasn't slopped around in a big pile of shit for ages. Sure--a lot of people are going to be upset, and there will be lawsuits, but think how nice it will be to have God smiling up at you every morning as you brush your teeth. Let him out, I say. He's tired of being the heavy-handed shtarker. And he wants to shave, already. You'd be amazed at how much food gets caught in that beard. God is tired of being cooped up in church pews and shoved into hotel drawers. And he's tired of being unable to screen the people who read his lines. Some of these creepazoids would not be getting a second call-back, let me tell you. God, bubbulah, stay with me on this one. It's going to be sweet. Millions of people bowing down and praising your name. We'll split the take 50/50. Maybe God is tired of being a he. Maybe he'd like to be a she for a while, or an it. Mommy, God is under my bed and he's keeping me awake. You'd better share God with your little brother right now! And what a boring domain you've given God to live in. Fluffy white clouds and round-the-clock harp music. Like waiting in the dentist's chair with a head full of novocain for all eternity. It's no wonder people are always breaking those commandments. Maybe God would like to live in a tree, or at the bottom of the ocean, or inside a bubbling volcano. God has done his time in your books; he's up for parole. He's played all your make-believe games with you and participated in your puppet shows like a bemused, cheerful, over-indulgent parent. He deserves some time off for good behavior, don't you think? David Aronson April 2006

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May 11th, 2006

07:04 pm - New art and poem "Summertime" from Shadows in Heaven. A new poem from the "Reports From the Secret Heart" series: The Queen Of Wands Crossed By The Moon Her valentine-crimson hair danced and wriggled on her head like snakes of flame from a fiery Medusa. She claimed to be a rock'n'roll love-child, and I believed her. She moved about her suburban island like the throbbing hum of bass strings, bewitching passing sailors with heavy riffing from her electric guitar. Her husband, the Prince of Cups, knew her as a wildfire mare that could not be saddled, and he was highly aroused by her midnight-ride romps with strange virile cowboys, as he spied on her through her own crystal ball. Or so she told me as we rocked and rolled in my bed, slipping and sliding on a sea of backbone slip, squeezing lemons and juice running down our legs. The Queen of Wands was jaguar-sleek and so hot your fingers blistered when you touched her. And maybe it was just this sensual sizzle-pop and griddle-hiss that exiled her to the barren surface of the moon. Maybe her mother couldn't take the heat; maybe mom's panties got wet every time she picked up her little queenlet, and, horrified by the child's brazen built-in sex-broil, banished her to the bleak lunar wastelands where she now dwelled, her fire damped down by cold clay and harsh, paper-dry winds. The Queen occasionally escaped from her cratered prison by disguising herself with the help of potions brewed up in her cauldron, and the subterfuge of her sailor-slaves, long since enchanted into braying pig-dog-men. Our bonfire boff was only to have lasted a single night, but the Queen saw something of herself in me I suppose, and I became her favorite, and our simmering dalliance lit up into a sexual conflagration. She had once sat at the right hand of Beelzebub as a sorceress-in-training, and men offered up their souls to her at midnight blues-guitar crossroads. And so I couldn't very well refuse her invitation to join her in her marital bed. After a sumptuous aphrodisiac feast and a deadly nightshade cocktail, her husband and I filled her at both ends like a stuffed sweet pepper, and powered by an itching copulatory spell, we explored every possible configuration of three bodies, two male organs, and two female orifices. "Hey, I think I've seen this porn movie before," said the Prince of Cups. "I think I'll keep you both," said the Queen of Wands, grinning like a mouse killed by a cat and waking up to an eternity in the land of cheese. The Queen and I fucked in the shower like horny otters, bent over and hanging onto the soap rack. Her labia was a perfect pink tropical flower in the full flush of bloom, carnivorous and inviting and waiting to pounce. A nibble of breath on her neck was all it took to melt her into a puddle like an erotic witch from an x-rated Wizard of Oz. We feasted for weeks on end in her lunar mansion, the moon beaming down on us ripe and full, like a fat milk-engorged breast. But when the nighttime sky started taking bites out of that dairy-moon-platter, her mood began to turn and churn like the washing machines at Bedlam, and her silver mirror no longer told her she was the fairest of them all. The Queen wigged out, flipped her bell, book and candle, drank hemlock, danced in red-hot shoes with spikes inside them, spun her head around like a gyroscope, snap, crackle, pop, humped her broomstick, puked upside down crucifixes across the room. The tides discombobulated her inner ear, and she staggered and reeled from room to room, frothing at the mouth, and cursing me and my family all the way back to Abraham. And so I was banished from the house of the moon, where orb-addled lobsters crawl from murky pools, raise their claws to the heavens and spin about crying hallelujah. I dispatched impassioned letters to her by messenger which were returned ragged and torn, scratched out and stained with ink. I bided my time, hoping the Queen would return to her summertime brilliance with the first sickle-sliver of the waxing moon, but her inferno of lust for me had been totally washed away by the men-in-white-coats fire brigade. The moon dripped it's smelly green cheese all over her passion and snuffed it out like a sputtering candle. And I received an embossed and filigreed royal missive thanking me for my service to Her Majesty, which I kept as a memento of our wild, wing-melting, bronco-fuck ride to the heart of the sun, where, for one glorious hour, it danced, jitterbug and pirouette, in perfect balance and harmony with the volatile, punch-drunk moon. David Aronson April 2006

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April 8th, 2006

06:28 pm - Batgirl My contribution to the Batgirl meme, doubling as a Shadows in Heaven image

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April 7th, 2006

07:46 pm - New art and poetry Cover image for "Shadows In Heaven" The next two poems in my series about past sexual and romantic relationships: The Mating of Mutables She was scared of me at first. But I knew she was attracted too, because she kept peeking at me from across the table, between the sheltering bodies of her flannel-shirted friends, like a rabbit sniffing the air to see if the hounds are gone. Clearly, I was the one with the magic wand. And like a rabbit, she was nervous and small and adorably cuddly-cute. She came to my room and we talked about how people change and why they don't. We sat huddled on the floor; she, desperately wanting me to take her face in my fervent hands and overwhelm her with a kiss, and I, afraid of frightening the skittery creature that she was. And so began a courtship worthy of Pepe Le Pew. Every time I reached for her, She looked at me with round, red, froze-in-the-spotlight eyes. She stiffened like a corpse under my touch, but the moistness of her mouth invited me to join her in a juicy, skin-bursting feast. Eventually, the pull of her tides overcame her timidity and I found myself naked in bed with her, blanketed in her delightful downy skin. She was an anxious lover, frenetically pistoning on top of me like a squirrel stuck to a jackhammer. I had to use kind words and gentle tones like a kindergarten teacher to calm her. And then, take her by her tiny hands, through true and false and multiple choice into slow-rolling, savory, deliciously long-stroking lovemaking, like honey dripping languorously down the inside of a love-misted thigh. And so, through the miracle of mucous membrane sensitivity, she was transformed, from a shrinking chipmunk to a tasmanian devil of brazen, slobbering, wanton lustfulness. She burst through my door and threw me to the bed like a stuffed bean-bag love-toy. "I've wanted you all day!" she moaned as she tore my pants off like a little kid impatiently opening a present. "It feels so good to be naked with you," she gasped, as she rode me tantalizingly slow like a snake-charmer cowgirl tantrika, and performed tricks and feats with her vaginal muscles worthy of the number one star courtesan in the emperor's harem. Breathless and satisfied and wrapped in a ball of caresses under the covers, we talked about all the different ways to change who you are inside. And then we decided to invoke the coiled serpent energy of evolution into the crucible of our bodies. And so, at the appointed hour, we lit the altar candles and removed our clothes. We stood inside the quartered circle and petitioned the transforming currrent of divine electricity with our hands, eyes and lips. Our bodies were blessed and anointed with reverent erotic attention, and soon, the queen mama snake was roused from her slumber and began her slow, coiling slide up the multicolored maypole-in-the-middle. Voices from distant stars spoke from my throat and opened wide our eyes like the lens of a camera letting in more light, bringing us into focus as tiny jubilant drops in a vast celestial ocean. And our bodies moved together like waves on that ocean, the tactile intensity of every cell turned up full blast. And then, there was nothing but sensation; we had become that slowly dancing wave, orgasmically pushed and pulled by God's eternal gravity. Surely, this was the closest one could come to touching the heart of existence. The next day, I felt strange, as if my soul wanted to fly out the top of my head, like the ghost of a bird slipping through the bars of it's cage. The trees were glowing with a gentle translucent light, and I could hear their green whisperings bubbling through my inner ear. We had opened the portals but neglected to shut them again, and now the seawater was madly rushing in. We flung ourselves to the ground and let solid mommy earth siphon our spirits back into their three-dimensional containers and replace our cranial corks. Later, we sat and we talked about impediments to change and how people can change for the worse. I returned from a week spent away from her to yet another metamorphosis. She had become a tragic heroine in a shakespearian drama with a vendetta to fulfill. And I was cast in the role of the selfish, controlling paramour, which was not a part I played well. To my dismay and bewilderment, she forced me into a halloween mask then spoke to it like the mirror in Snow White. I was a sinister satanic clown, cuckolded by myself; the victim of some evil reverse-glamour spell. I tried to negate the charm and dispel the illusion, but my magic wand had become a limp piece of wood. The wascally wabbit trickster god was fucking with our heads, showing us cracked funhouse reflections of each other; she, with her hysterical woolly-brained accusations, and I, with my castrated anxiety and atavistic fears. It was a volatile cup of soup indeed. And of course, the inevitable kitchen accident took place; the pot boiled over and the stove exploded, flinging us in opposite directions. And she scampered away like the frightened rabbit she was, pursued by the bugaboos cooked up in her own brain. And I was like the angel Lucifer, cast down from the spiraling heights of heaven to the dark, sulpherous bowels of the underworld. I fell into a fetal slump and after months of thumb-sucking and bed-wetting, I received a letter from her, apologizing for having drawn that bad-guy Dick Dastardly moustache on me so heedlessly. She came over and we lay on my bed talking about how people can mistake the contents of their own heads for reality. Her soft, scrumptious, lickable body brushed up against mine and I yearned for her, but she already had her thumb out and her skirt hiked up to take her down an existential highway that didn't go anywhere near my neighborhood. The magic wand had been passed on to her and she was not about to give it away. David Aronson March 2006 Girlfriend, Deconstructed Certain things need to be cut out, rearranged, pasted down. Long, straight, shiny black hair like a Chinese doll, and big, black Bambi-doe eyes. An upside-down-heart-shaped ass squeezed into straining tight jeans, crouched before an art school locker. But what about these clippings here that show her as nothing but a hairy Italian dwarf with a bad case of acne? What the author fails to acknowledge is his emotional ambivalence towards women. His lovers are either idealized or denigrated to the point where his actual physical perception of them is affected, airbrushing away any flaws or magnifying them into grotesquerie. The poem continues with another metaphor equating his memories of the relationship with notes for a manuscript. Certain things, once written in longhand, are now word-processed and edited. The concert I don't remember because it was spent frantically snogging; devouring lips and tongues and falling out of our seats. Her dark eyes flaring red when her mother praised my artwork over hers, and how I neglected to defend her. The dirty, smelly bus ride home from the party where she rejected me, driving me into a love-shorn isolation, like a sacrificial scapegoat cast out into the desert. The images chosen for the last three stanzas paint a picture of a passionate relationship, and fire was certainly present between us. We were often akin to dry tinder smoldering under a magnifying glass, waiting to spring into blaze, but other less glamorous emotions also had their brushfire sparks to ignite. What my poetic friend is trying to say with his flowery language is that he desperately wanted to fuck this girl, but she never let him, probably because she didn't trust him, due to the fact that he was never genuine with her. Having had little sexual experience, he wanted her to see him as a stud to mask his insecurity, but she saw right through his false bravado and posturing. He asked her out in a very businesslike manner rather than honestly expressing his feelings of attraction, and then tried to pressure her into sleeping with him, rather than seducing her like the Don Juan he wanted to be. The author here has cleverly, if opportunistically, appropriated the critical voice, using it first as his own, admitting to embellishment and selective memory, and then as a plain-talking third person alter ego, confessionally "spilling the beans," Like a fish unaware of the water he swims in, the author fails to note the subtext of guilt and narcissism running through the poem, and refuses to take responsibility for solipsistically recounting the details of the relationship as if his thoughts and feelings defined it, as if without his musings it would cease to have been. He continues with another metaphor. Scores of soundbites need to be sifted through and sorted for inclusion in the documentation. "I don't want to have to put on a smile every time I see you." "I'm not going to sit here and hold your hand all night." "What you really need is a wife. You should find someone and get married." It's interesting how the dialogue that I remember most clearly from her is angry, harsh and critical. Was I really guilty of behaving in a smothering and manipulative manner? Okay—now we're slipping into psychoanalysis. This is not poetry, just adolescent whining. What Mr. Sensitive Poet doesn't see is that she was a cold, immature, fucked-up bitch, and that all he wanted from her was warmth and intimacy; but he's such a masochist that he takes any accusation from this little cunt, no matter how ill-founded, as gospel truth. She wouldn't even sleep with him, for fuck's sake! Once again, the author has used the device of speaking in multiple voices, this time to illustrate his internal conflict over the interpretation of his memories. It seems as if he is now consciously aware of his previously hidden feelings of shame and anger towards the subject of the poem, and the tone has changed to one of introspection. He continues: Certain bits of data are now seen through a microscope or telescope, adjusting their size and distance. The thrill that ran up my spine when I kissed her, my hands encircling her tiny convex waist. The photograph of her ex-boyfriend, who broke her heart and left her like her runaway father, and who looked just like me. The party where she abandoned me and I sat alone and untouched, a miserable leprous pariah at a college make-out orgy. You know, I think I was really traumatized by that party. Everyone was paired off and sucking face except me, because my girlfriend had a bug up her ass, and I just sat there watching and feeling like a total reject. It's still painful to write about. I'm sorry, but this sounds like overblown angst from a teenager's diary. What's really painful are the earlier traumatic experiences of abandonment and withdrawal that this memory stimulates, first with his parents neglect and then with the private elementary school he was kicked out of. The poem ends with the author's secondary voices taking on the roles of patient and analyst; a rather unoriginal and un-poetic attempt at closure which ultimately fails, as the ambivalence and conflict remain unresolved. The poem as a whole is meant to point out the arbitrary and dishonest act of making art from autobiography, but in the long run, the author's choice of tonal variety and fragmentary structure does nothing more than reveal his insecurities and deep-seated complexes. Then, when the files are completely catalogued and the collage finally takes shape, a single picture emerges: The two of us sitting on the art museum steps on a cheerful spring day, the sun kneading the knots from our shoulders with a warm, gentle massage, and feeling a bit dejected because the museum was closed when we thought it would be open. She puts her child-smooth hand in mine and this small feminine gesture intoxicates me with unbridled delight. A man walks by and says, "Smile! It's a lovely day and you're with a beautiful young woman." My eyes drift up to a bird on a tree branch. A bird whose sparkling feathers are the most radiant, breathtaking, sapphire-brilliant blue I have ever seen. David Aronson March 2006

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February 27th, 2006

10:37 am - Even more art and poetry "Matriarch" from Shadows in Heaven The following is the first in a series of poems about past sexual relationships. This one is about the summer I lost my virginity. Thou Art That At a time when my sap still flowed upward, and each new day was a downhill boulder gathering mass and momentum like a runaway train, I stood with warm, sugary crumbs of sand between my toes and watched the shimmering blue earth curve brazenly away from me, as gulls flew above my head proclaiming me King of Wild Things with their cries. I was seventeen in a place where nobody knew my face or name: where no one expected me to be a puppy cringing under a rolled-up newspaper; where no one saw the pitting and erosion of a thousand hurled stones; where no cruel suburban high school burdens were attached to me. And I lounged about the boardwalk as cock-sure as any stoned-soul rocker. It was a liminal summer, plum-ripe for reveling, and I was a pristine three-story house with all the decrepit old furniture pushed to the curb, and sure enough, in order to redecorate, the hoochie coochie gods soon came knocking at my back door. And so it came to pass that Dionysus, lord of divine intoxication, took frenzied possession of me. My head crowned with laurels of seaweed, I soon had my own gaggle of ecstatic followers trailing behind me. And oh how we celebrated! And whirled like drunken, god-mad dervishes! Our bodies cast off their last remaining two percent of solid matter, and we slooshed through samadhi floom rides and spluttered and sploomed at the tops of spouting olympian fountains. It was an immaculately stoned orgy of dissolving egos, and we were bhodisattva geeks biting the heads off the chickens of illusion. And it also came to pass that one night I found myself entangled in the sensual bedclothes at the back of a come-a-knocking van with one particular water-sister, an experienced woman of nineteen. We pounced on each other like kitties on catnip, and she kissed me like an electric eel sliding down my throat. We staggered along the boardwalk, stuck together with our hormonal glue, reeling under the approving eye of an infatuated moon, and blessed by the stars that chased each other lustfully through the silky black sky. In the blissful bake of afternoon, the simmering ocean nibbled and licked our thighs as we kissed underwater, her legs wrapped around my waist. Fingers stroked and poked into slippery sink-holes, slithering around each other like two squids in heat. And as my little brother built rainbow bridges at the beach, the gods attended us in our summer cottage bedroom, and I entered her, torches ablaze, with the sacred liquid fire of Dionysus. And we melted and dripped into one another like poppets in a boiling cauldron. Her tasty, tawny-brown, animal-healthy body was animated by Aphrodite, undulating in the sticky seawater sheets. The priestess had parted her silver satin curtains and booted me, head-over-bum across the threshold and there was no turning back. But the orange godhead sunshine of our union was painted black when it was time to part. We came tumbling down into a thorazine autumn, like when your favorite childhood pet dies or the circus big top burns down. We tasted the dark side of the Dionysian cookie; felt the sting of the wrathful buddha's birch switch on our backsides. A gray bummer schleprock cloud wrapped itself around my face as she got in the car and drove miles away to her home on the other side of a very wide state. And I returned to dispensing donuts and coffee in the dead of night to vampires in dirty shades, anorexic chalk-faced junkies, and people who looked as if they had just awakened from napping in a puddle of stale urine. My dandelion-wish days of wiggly tadpole-happiness were gone forever. My soul had grown another head, like a love-struck hydra. I had become a twin and was achingly half-empty without my mermaid anima lover. And so, without a word, I walked out of the grease and flour graveyard and got on a bus which took me straight to her little town of smokestacks and crumbling tin rooftops. She met me at the station and you could actually see the little cartoon hearts fluttering about our heads as we gazed mutually moon-eyed and cow-pied. Her cool hand on my forehead was like a benediction from the Madonna herself, and I felt like a reunited child after a department store abandonment. At midnight, she tip-toed into my guest room expecting to re-enter the temple, but alas, the gods had forsaken us, and we found ourselves two mere teenagers with all the accompanying vulnerabilities and insecurities, fumbling about awkwardly with elderly parents snoozing behind the wall. The font of holy water had run dry. But still she came dutifully every evening, and one night fell asleep in my bed where her father found us the next morning. I didn't understand when he asked me if I wanted a big breakfast. That night, I lay alone listening to the heartless wind throttling the trees and whipping their branches against my window. I imagined myself a character in a book: a man standing at the end of a lonely railway platform in the middle of the night, a single, feeble streetlamp the only thing keeping him from being devoured by darkness, waiting in vain and despair for a train that will never arrive to take him home. David Aronson February 2006

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February 12th, 2006

11:37 am - More art and poetry "The Deep" from the Shadows in heaven project. Motherless Children I first tasted her lips at the bottom of the garden. Slippery, apple-red lips, and a thirsty, famished kiss, like a swallow of water after a week in the desert. A swollen, bee-sting of a kiss, sprinkling pollen on the flowers, birds and bunnies. A kiss that gave my pocket watch a seizure and pointed it's hands at the moon. And we rolled on the ground, as naked and innocent as the first glimmer of the rising sun. The known world was our sandbox and we built castles of stones, moss and mud. Our gnarled, brown grandmothers watched over us, their leafy fingers cooling us with their shade, and our father, the sky, clothed us in woolly jumpers of blue and teased us with beards of clouds. like soap-suds in the bathtub. Do you remember when your dewy head was first peppered with love's golden crumbles? You never doubted the morning— the nourishment of sunlight fed to your bones and blood. The perfect adoration of your mother was your birthright. Your mother of the ten thousand things; her hair of comets and constellations, her cavernous belly full of diamonds and coal, her rivers and oceans that kissed away your scrapes and cuts. And you were fearless with your gifts of love then. Your heart was a bouncing birthday cake and you showered jelly beans of affection on all who crossed your path. But whispered stories creeped about your ears— promises of a better world, and the clear stream of your joyful bounty grew cloudy and stagnant. Your mother's nurturing body became a bleak prison and you wantonly pissed on her. Thinking yourself bound for the glory train, you smeared shit all over your lovely home like a neurotic monkey, only to wake up the next morning hung over and face down in feces. How easily we turn away from love and become entangled in our own gibberish. Like when those sharp, slavering fangs sprouted from her sugar-fairy lips, tearing my mouth from my face, ripping out my throat, and grinding my flesh to goulash. And I in turn became the man who chewed up her head, spitting out some fragments of bone and half an ear. And there we sat, two senseless torsos topped with raw hamburger meat, lonesome, unspeaking, isolation tank Helen Kellers, not knowing enough to pinch ourselves, pull back the covers, and sit straight up in bed. I know you think that love has left you just a sad bit of gristle, a used wad of gum stuck to the underside of the table. But the sun is always hiding just 'round the horizon, sniffing and snuffling his way into your home town every day. The skeletons of trees get new guts and skin each and every spring. The lake dries up over here and the rain falls down over there. And your mother is always forgiving and awaiting your bruised and bloody-nosed return with her celestial chicken soup. So please don't spurn her because you've forgotten that you were cooked up in her womb. Please don't poison her body with your noxious excretions. And please don't piss in her mouth. She's the only mother you've got. David Aronson February, 2006

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February 1st, 2006

08:18 pm - More art and poetry "Benefactor" from Shadows in Heaven project Letter to Dylan (My first wife and I had a child born with trisomy-13, a very rare and very severe genetic birth defect.) I don't know where my tears have disappeared to. They've run away like the dish and the spoon. Maybe the faucet was never turned on in the first place. Maybe it's rusted dry, and my grief, black, foul and sticky, is festering like a landfill and gumming up the works. My first clues that you were not the rosy bundle I expected were the delivery room looks of startled dismay. "It's cosmetic—it can be fixed" they said, hiding you from view. When the nurse presented you through gritted teeth, I did not know what I was looking at. Was it a cabbage patch kid survivor of some horrible industrial accident? Where your mouth should have been I saw a series of gaping, alien holes and obscenely mangled flesh, as if the creator, instead of lovingly crafting the lips and teeth that would have proclaimed your glory to the world, had wantonly punched into your face with an ice pick in a blind, drunken rage. When your mother said "Where's his ear?" the room began to spin like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I think it was at that moment that a valve was turned inside of me and the tender flow waiting to enfold you was stilled to an arid drip. I stood as coldly stoic as Mr. Spock and as numb as novocaine while the so-called expert stood in his pissed-off night-slippers, icily reciting the accusatory litany of your defects and deformities, to the soundtrack of your mother wailing banshee torrents from the depths of her desecrated womb. That night, your grandfather slept in my bed with his arms around me as if I was the newborn in need of comforting. The next day, kinder doctors with warmer eyes revealed your agonized world to us. Your poor, tiny brain, like a sea-sponge washed up on shore and picked at by wild birds; a never-ending electrical storm in a shook-up glass paperweight. We took you home and fed you through a tube like some abomination locked in a Victorian closet, while the sunny world went by with eyes averted. Your mother and I became weak and sick, puking up the broken eggshells, twigs and branches of a violated nest. Finally, we had to put you in the hospital, your bodily needs attended to along with all the other sad-eyed aberrations. Four months later, your mother held you swaddling-tight as you took your last anxious breath in this world, and I'm glad I was able to love you and see you, just once, as something more than a cruel and vicious joke or a hideous mistake. So now I'm wondering what might have been had that spanner not been thrown into the chromosomal works. Would you be a poet like your namesakes Bobby Z. or that famous Welshman? You were a swan without it's trumpet, and now I think I carry your innocent, untried voice next to mine, snuggled cozily in my throat like a bear in a blanket, asking me, as if for a bedtime story, to always always speak the truth. David Aronson December 2005

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10:31 am - art and poetry Image from Shadows in Heaven Dead Languages I heard a man speak hard, shrivelled words from out the left side of his mouth. They had been pounded flat by the pages of heavy books, and fell to the floor with a lifeless thump; a droning, laundry-list poetry punctuated with random, sterile ironies. Then I heard a woman speak words straight from the heart of her womb. They tumbled out of her, brazen and lusting for life, like a litter of yelping, squalling animals. Her words were nourishing like mother's milk; rich and exhilerating like chocolate ice cream on the hottest day of summer. And as I basked in the delicious tingling, puppy-lick warmth of her language, the man stepped in front of me with his sun-blotting shadow, and implored me with the power of his high-school-style peer-pressure to follow the intellectual line laid down by his lineage of venerated sages in pasteboard caps. I told him I preferred the voices of those whose need to speak and be heard was a life or death proposition, of those who need to berate, acuse, curse, shriek, bitterly weep, shamelessly expose, seduce and sing hallelujah with their words just to be seen and acknowledged. Brothers and sisters, I have been to the mountain top and I have seen a vision of a time when the forests and beaches will be our classrooms, and our textbooks the sand and soil. The fruit of the tree of knowledge will be ripe for plucking and one sweet swallow will connect you directly to the heavenly database. We'll learn the secret knowledge of all things from the movements of the stars, the chattering of squirrels, the decay of a leaf, the faces in the clouds, the meanderings of insects, and the density of bones and rocks. Poems will burn like the sun through a lens; will cut through stone like the wildest river. Our words will be divine messengers once again, and every poem will be a pregnant seed containing an entirely new world. David Aronson January 2006

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January 29th, 2006

11:26 pm - For Your Own Good Image for a collaborative work-in-progress book project with Leslie Powell entitled Shadows in Heaven.

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