Saturday, September 30, 2017

Lecturer Livelihood


So, there you were in that meeting, the one with all your nemeses, real and imagined. It was time. You stood up to say your piece. Your voice quavered but you persevered. Your words had not been rehearsed and they were not the best ones for what you had to express. You couldn't remember whether to say "non-traditional," "adjunct," "non-tenure eligible," or "career track" to describe your job title to the ones who were entitled, but you spoke anyway. You told them about the years given, the service done, the programs directed, the courses designed, the publications, the utter absence of hope that you would ever be promoted, have job protection, or have secure voting rights. You did not tell them about the insults delivered over the years, the belittling at the hands of the ones who blocked your path at every turn. Later, when it was over, you wouldn't remember what it was you had said, exactly. And you were not sure if anyone had really heard what you said, but you did what you had to do. You couldn't really think after that, much less grade papers. You walked the Friday hallway alone. Your thoughts wouldn't come because your heart was broken, again. Why has this been so hard, this getting and making a life?

Friday, September 29, 2017

The Next Thing


While you were gone, things changed. You walked into what you thought was familiar to find the whole place re-done, turned upside out, the furniture moved, your paintings taken down and replaced with posters of video games. Where people used to face you you now see backs turned. You get cut off and people giggle when you talk. Nobody cares any more what you think, what you want, what you believe to be true. It's a new world they say. Buck up. There's the door if you don't like it. You are supposed to stare at your laptop in meetings and laugh at inside jokes that you don't think are funny, don't see why others think they are funny. The road ended and you are still moving forward, off the pavement now, heading off into the desert. You missed a turn somewhere and have to go back, or find your way into what comes next. You don't know what that is exactly, so you just throttle back, take stock, and remember that what you do is breathe. You breathe in and out. It is compassion you inhale. You remember that. It's the next thing, the way you will go.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Under the Half Moon


Between here and there, betwixt and between, in the limbo of the interstice, you make your way toward that part of you that is the beloved. She has delivered the news that things will not be what you hoped and you have been freed to resume the real work of becoming without the comfort of arriving. So be it. The work is to deepen, to find the compassion hiding in the space between the notes, the white between the words. It is there, beloved,  that you find the answer, the one that you will never possess because she is not form, but energy. She is love, beloved, and it is your work to infuse that into your actions, your thoughts, and your words. Only then will you find the peace that comes from searching with the commitment of every cell of you, nothing held in reserve, nothing held in reluctance, all served up and added to the burning furnace of now or never. 

Thursday, September 21, 2017

There But For


He had been gone a long time. He looked different -- deep tan, much thinner. The eyes, though. The eyes. They looked everywhere but at you: the floor, ceiling, speck of dust in some neglected corner. He was angry too, a short fuse with us kids, or at least with me. I was his oldest son, the son of an officer, the one that was supposed to carry on, become a soldier. Only thing was I didn't want to do what you had to do if you put on a uniform. Then if you met the enemy in a thick jungle it was kill or be killed. It wasn't about being afraid, but not wanting to pull the trigger with a man in the sights. Now that meant a hard road for me. I had to learn the paradox that comes with caring for others while not looking to them for answers. I had to break from the set path and venture off into an indifferent land where all I had was a bike and a brain. The bike was a good one. The brain... well it worked for a while. Pickins were slim out there, but at least bullets weren't flying over my head. The way I had to go, though, was obscure, so obscure. I had to learn to embrace the darkness that lay beyond the comfort of the family code, to feel my way forward, alone now, in blindness, fueled in equal parts by necessity and love. 

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Sleight of Hand


The top tenth of one percent of our wealthiest citizens have as much as the bottom forty percent, and the gap continues to widen. The last time inequity was this bad was right before the Great Depression. No wonder misery defines the lives of Americans left out of the investment class. No wonder that schools are out of control. No wonder that prisons overflow. No wonder that the threat of war, the worship of celebrities, and opiates of media rain down in a curtain of distraction. The powerful and wealthy like it this way and want more. They are reaching into your pockets as you stare at the screen and ladle the sweet slop that they serve up. It's a show, for sure, all this hype, titillation, volume, action, and anxiety. If you stop for a second and pull the curtain back you'll see the little man at the controls, shooting fire and fear into the night sky. No one will believe you if you try to explain, nor will they listen. Reality is just a tad too sharp for the soft mind of obedient consumers, always hopeful that somehow, things will turn out if only they play by the rules, buy the illusions. Too bad the magic ain't magic at all. Just another cheap trick.

Saturday, September 16, 2017

People


Dealing with people (not individuals) has always been an issue for me. I just don't like them very much, find them tedious and self-absorbed. Well, that little defect has gotten worse with the brain malady. My head hurts, literally, when I try to listen to people saying things in which I have no interest. This physical ache has begun to make polite company toxic. Given that I want to write for others, this poses a bit of a problem. Not only am I a failure at marketing, I can't bring myself to "reach out" and touch anyone. Not the best situation for someone who works as a teacher at a large state university. Oddly, the inmates in the prison workshops don't affect me. That may be due to the type of conversations we have. Those interactions usually mean something, are trying to make art of impossible dilemmas. I don't know how all this is going to play, and others are soon to catch on to my affliction. The wave of that realization may roll me onto the rocks, may toss me into the big wave wipe-out. I'll just keep nodding and faking it for now, retreating into my own little quiet place while the world yammers on.

Friday, September 15, 2017

Summer Passes -- Sometimes Too Soon, Other Times Not Soon Enough


September is half done. Still the days swelter well over a hundred degrees and my nights are sweaty, tossing, fitful episodes that find me more exhausted in the morning than when I went to bed. The swamp cooler chugs along pumping hot, steamy breath into a house already pulsing with radiant heat from a long day of sun. Tonight, for the first time in a long summer, the temperature will drop below seventy degrees. I am hoping that the shortened days of lower light arrive soon. As it is, I can barely lift this heavy body off the bed. Maybe a cool night will help. I hope so, but know that more than heat keeps me mired here in the grip of a body running out of chi. We'll see. The cools a comin'.

The Woods and the Words


For years he carried weapons. There was the shotgun for ducks, the deer rifle, the .22 for squirrels, the razor-tipped arrows for whatever he met on his walks into the autumn forest. Then, something happened. He was cleaning a kill and noticed how similar the muscle, tendons, and puzzle-pieces of the gut were to what he knew of his own. He saw in that moment that he shared the transience of a body with these creatures that he hunted for fun. He buried the body and gave away all of his guns. There was no regret, no second thoughts, not a sliver of doubt. He was done. One chapter ended and another began. The new one was far more baffling than the one he left behind, and he sometimes wondered where this confusing search into the words would lead. He hunted stories now, and he was not the best at what he did. While he could track in the rotten leaf litter of Wisconsin, the trail into the words was harder to read. He grew old too soon to find what he sought, and he lost the tools he needed to capture and deliver the words he wanted to the page, his trigger finger waiting over the keypad for the next command from a mind gone dark.

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Can't Blame the Thug for Doing His Job


Another one comes down the pipe with all the kindness of a runaway semi. It is a day, that is. One of those things that takes hold of my collar and slams me against the wall of having to make a living. I am in arrears, in that I just don't have the mental chops to keep up anymore. So it's survival now, just survival. I have to scrape together change from the couch cushions, bust open the kids' piggy banks, dip into the rainy day pittance. The costs of keeping this body under a roof, in clothes, and fed have way outpaced my ability to bring in the dough. So here I am being clobbered by hard questions for which I have no answers, responsibilities I don't know how to cover. Can't blame the day for doing his job, for making me cough up what I agreed to pay for another flop and three hots.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Good For Nothing


He gets up too early, to brood about the day and what he will do in it, to ruminate on how he will spend this gold that is time, time that has suddenly become dear and limited. The sharp edges of the world press against his skin insisting that this is serious business, this being alive in a body, having what many only dream of: a home, some tools, a voice, a slice of liberty, a fat cat. He has been given enough that he can turn around and give something back, extend a hand to those climbing up out of despair. The business of perpetual getting and taking becomes obscene, pornographic, in the face of so much trauma. Too many have been cut out of the game, locked behind concertina wire, bled of hope. His peers eat well, travel, count their coins in comfort-controlled climates. He wishes he could keep on wanting more, sometimes, just to join the parade of blind me-me and more-more. The diversions of having and getting ring hollow, and the only option is to step forward into the blazing field who knows what. That future has yet to be born, the humming potential, the great nothing that calls, desiring only to be created by what he knows to be true.

Disrobing


You say you want to know the beloved but you don't lift the filters that keep you from seeing. How can you know what another sees, feels, thinks, desires without dropping, for a moment, the screens and lenses through which you define the world? You see what your pain has made to be real and true, not what is actually there. You must learn to listen to the story the other tells, to crawl into it, embrace it as dearly as you embrace your own, sleep with it, touch its cheek in the deepest night. You must stand naked in her gaze. You must imagine to the point that you feel what the beloved feels, taste the sweet or bitter truth that she carries. Then you might begin to know, to take to heart an alien land you have never before visited. If you can do this, your boundaries may begin to crack open, like an egg, and you will flow into a yet larger horizon, having lost what you thought was the end, entering the pain of beginning again.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Night Bloom -- Despair and Possibility in a Prison Writing Workshop


Turnout was even slower than usual, so I, a visitor to the workshops, and one inmate had the Programs Room to ourselves. The visitor was a young woman, a poet, and UA student who wanted to help with the workshops. The inmate was Champ, a thoughtful but hardened guy with the tattoos that go with gang affiliation. Likely because no other inmates had yet arrived, along with the novelty of a female visitor, he spoke openly about his offense, his time spent incarcerated, and his view of the future.

"One of the rules is that you don't rat. I'm in here because I didn't rat, but you know what? Nobody has stuck with me. I don't get letters from the woman who said she'd love me forever or the homies that said they'd stick, but still you can't cut from them."

He pauses to think, to consider whether or not he should say what he is about to say.

"Once you go down that road, the gang thing, it's hard to get out," he said. "So even after my sixteen years served for murder in here, I'll probably be back."

He said it with a flat, matter-of-fact certainty.

I asked him what he wanted to do if he weren't caught in the cycle of gang violence and politics.

"Something to keep kids from doing what I did. You know, someone who has been there can say it right, in a way that they'll understand."

"Nobody knows what the future brings," I said. "We could be hit by a meteor in the next second. You just don't know. That's all."

He thought about that. I had a book by Shaka Senghor, Writing my Wrongs, and asked him to read some of the forward. It spoke to the possibility of shaping a future that worked for more people, had more opportunity, more justice. He read the passage aloud.

"That's tight," he said.

Now I don't know the shackles that come with gang membership. And the talk about a future that might break from a past that seems all but certain to repeat itself must seem quaint to someone with a history like Champ's.

Other men arrive, and we get to work; our visitor reads a poem. In it she has a line about a gun being held to her head. It's a good poem about the perils of love. Her work is sharp, fearless. The men listen and then respond.

"Did you really have a gun held to your head? Do you know what that's like?" one of them asks.

It's a credibility thing.

"Yes," she says.

The man gives her a hard look that lingers, but then softens.

"That makes a difference," he said.

I try to divert the discussion to the features of the poem, lines that stand out, but the group lingers on the subject of coercion, threat, and the leg-trap hold of prison politics.

"You know a guy was murdered on the rec yard this week," one of them says. "He wanted out of a gang. He was stabbed over thirty times. That's why we were late. The cops were doing a drill to speed up response time."

That hangs in the air.

"How long have you been writing?" Champ asks the visitor.

"Since I was twelve. I wrote to figure out my place in the family. Writing was the only place I could see some way through an impossible situation."

Champ says "Yeah, I started writing in prison, about thirteen years ago. I was eighteen."

Then, he looks at me. "But I still haven't been published in that magazine."

He says it as a challenge, like it's my fault. I get that. I am a stand-in for all the obstacles that he and others face in moving forward into a life coming hard and fast and fearful down the pipe. The past is roaring toward them like a freight train. They want to tell it, and have someone hear it, before the train wreck.

The room feels charged, nervous, uncomfortable.

"I like the honesty, the self-awareness, and images of the poem," I say, just to say something.

You have to start where you are I think.

Champ doesn't waver, and asks to read a piece he has written about betrayal. It's succinct and dark and literal. I ask him where he wants to take it.

"To the magazine," he says. "I want this in the magazine."

I ask for responses, suggestions from the group. I ask how to take it from a list of events, a history, to something else, something artful. I talk about what others have done: Othello, for one.

One of the guys knows the work. We talk about betrayal and ways to live through it, to write about it, to give it fresh life and venom on the page.

Champ passes the baton of reading off to Handpoet who has written a piece about the power of music to trigger memories. When he hears songs on the radio, he hears, not the singer, but his father's voice. He means this literally. He hears the voice of his father.

The poem is good. It disrupts time. It renders memory as free from time, free from space; it makes a case that prison walls are no match for the power of the mind to remember, to imagine.

He says he keeps his music alive by singing on the yard sometimes, away from the clusters on men scattered around the field.

Champ asks him to sing, right there, in the Programs Room. Handpoet declines and shakes his head, but others join in. He agrees.

I don't know how this happened exactly, but Handpoet stands and begins to snap his fingers to some beat he hears. The room otherwise is silent.

He begins to sing, softly at first, then stronger. It's doo-wop song I don't recognize, but his voice is clear, on key, resonant.

When he is done, the men applaud.

Some of the tension in the room eases. Time is up. I have to pack up the tubs and get over to the next workshop. It's in a different unit and we have to catch a bus. My arms are heavy, clumsy, don't feel like my own.

The moment has cut me to the bone. I ask myself what one does when a gun is held to the head. The answer, impossible as it is, comes. You sing. You sing.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Settling


You know you are not supposed to do it -- according to all the motivational speakers, the career counselors, your job description -- but you have to settle sometimes for what you get. You can't afford that fancy Subaru Cross Trek, so you buy a little Versa. No power or sporty cachet, and the women are not impressed. In fact the guy next to you buys the Suby and gets the woman, the job, the promotion, the publication; he passes you on every bike ride, eats more green, leafy vegetables, and is a high-flying success story because he is more daring. He rides a rigid single speed instead of a cushy, old-man bike full-suspension. He cuts in line in front of you because you are so spacey, so incoherent. Yours is a life of scattered, half-finished projects and mediocre achievements. You have failed to focus, to sustain, follow through, go deep, produce noticeable results. You are a vague facsimile of what you might have been had you lived up to your potential. And it's about over. Your body and brain are breaking down. Time's up. Game's toast. You are going to finish at the end of the pack. You need to cut your losses. Bid adieu. Time to end wanting what you can't have, throwing pearls into a bottomless pit. You got what you got. It wasn't so bad; and it's time to do something else, re-invent what's possible, given your brain, body, and empty cup of offering.  

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Fishing


You never know what you will catch when you get up in the dark and go out into the surprise waiting for you outside the safety of your front door. There might be a lunker hunkered down in an eddy of your sleepy psyche. You have to toss out an invitation, a tasty possibility, a pending opportunity, and then settle in for a wait. Soon enough you may see a swirl on the surface as the critter rises for the bait. It's a thing you know but may not be aware of as it takes shape in cluster of sound and idea. It is your destiny calling, waiting for you jump in, take a step into the fearful unknown. You see the line go taught, see the bobber submerge. It has taken the question you chant as an incantation. Feel the tug as you sink the hook into a passing messenger. The other side of the veil has awakened. It's up to you reel it in. 

Monday, September 4, 2017

Dragon in the Chicken Wire


My five-year-old neighbor, Geo, was staring intently at something in the front yard. Now that's not so unusual. A Cooper's hawk likes to bathe in the fountain, and javelina or bobcats come by for a drink or to snag a trader rat. It's a lively place. Blocked from my view was the subject of Geo's fascination. It was a writhing diamondback rattlesnake caught up in the chicken wire around the xeriscape island. It was braided but good with one pass through a chicken wire hole followed by a second. Now what did he/she have to do that for I thought. A small group of bystanders had gathered by now as the white belly of the snake twisted in the early morning light. To cut him loose, the head would have to be restrained. I'd cut, but someone had to hold that business end in check. A bite might mean months or years of recovery. Been there. Stuff that. Those present retreated when asked. A guest with no previous rattlesnake experience volunteered. He held the head and neck of the snake while I did the surgery on the wire. Now, having my hand six inches from the fangs of an angry diamondback had my little heart fluttering, no... hammering. In my mind, bat wings opened and closed while streams of fire shot from the hissing mouth. Eyes were red with rage and vitriol. The tail was going hot and fast. No matter. Ignore it. Cut him loose. Snip. Snip. Reach around to the back. Hope the tongs hold. One more. Done. Once free, I caught him with the tongs, told him to never come back and carried his puffed up, fire-breathing, rattling, sinuous body to the wash. He retreated with a hiss, a quick look back to make sure I wasn't following. That way he could travel quicker into the misty world of my dreams. 

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Maybe the Fool


They are gathered there, as volatile a mix as any in the years of the workshops: Sonny, the self-described rage-a-holic, Handpoet, the on-fire Aztec teacher, Cercedes, the braided tough guy who likes to get in my face, Ortega, who wants the first draft to be the one that gets published, and Bell, the quiet giant to name a few. The only inmate race missing here is white. We are reading an inmate poem about poverty. One of the COs is sitting in, but that doesn't keep them from saying what they want to say about the poem. "I love it," Ortega jumps in. "I wouldn't change a thing." He is sitting next to me, and his gaze is both a challenge and an opening. I have to be diplomatic. There is some face to be lost here if I go too hard. "Let's look at the lines that work best," I offer up as an entry into the discussion. I ask the men to identify and read the line that stands out. We go around. "So, what do you think?" Cercedes interjects, looking right at me. "You got some answer there and you're holding back." I wish I had the magic comment, question, or incantation that would prompt the writer to send his poem from where it is into the realms of the sublime but I don't. I can only point in the direction of where others have gone. I read a published poem, similar in form and subject, but that has more sensuality, more metaphor, has greater complexity of ideas, intensifies feeling as it progresses, and ends with a zapper of a turn. "Sensory detail, images, examples, structure, and sharpening ideas" I say. "That's the work we as writers all have to contend with when revising." A mutiny of sorts erupts, but the writer of the poem in question, nods, and says "I think I get what you're saying," and that settles the rebellion just a bit. Sonny backs off, but Ortega and Cercedes are not done. They demand more explanation, and make it clear that they, as inmates, have just as much to say as I do. What am I doing here? That "I" is more of a "he," some alter ego that has fallen into a slot on a roulette wheel and is going along for the ride. Is that he the fool in the cross-hairs on a Saturday in a dark room with men hungry for expression, for insight, for direction, for something to hang on to? Maybe. Whoever this is is not the hero of the show. Rather, he is the one who meets the gaze of his own shadow. 

Saturday, September 2, 2017

It Steepens


They came from very off, through a fog of distance. I closed my eyes to better focus. My mind kept wandering, did not want to listen for the beeps coming through the ear phones of a hearing test. I caught only the dimmest of tones and voices. The sounds that did come were garbled. I couldn't sort them out. Was the prompt "peat bog" or "beef dog?" I couldn't tell. But I kept honing my attention. It just wouldn't settle on the listening. I wanted out, felt like I was going to panic. The rest of the world just kept on doing its business, calm and cool as the plastic wrapped cukes they carried in the Costco shopping carts. The shoppers outside the window looked so at home in the world, so comfortable in the knowledge that they had time, luxurious stretches of love and life and time. I, by contrast, feel an urgency, see each moment in this abundance as a diamond, am watching it all slip away. I no longer care if the book gets published, if I get in shape for El Tour, and am aware that I may never again have someone unbutton my shirt, playfully push me onto a bed. I am a dying man walking, but nobody knows. The audiologist looked surprised. "I didn't think you had it, but you do. You seem so... functional. It's not profound, but is getting there.... " She held back a bit and re-calibrated her delivery of the results. "Let's just look at this as a baseline. If you feel that you're missing too much in your teaching or other areas, you really should come back." She meant get a hearing aid. "Check with your primary doc first to rule out anything else that might be contributing to this." And that was that. I took the print-out of my results, another datum in the long line of evidence that things are progressing a bit quicker than I would like. The delights of this world are receding; the pitch steepens even as it fades.