Sabbath the News & Do the JB Manifesto Dirt Boogie Waltz

 

JB Bryan & his Drum Kit

This morning I avoided the news. I'm letting the long reptile of history slither along without me for a few hours. So instead of the news, I re-read a manifesto from my buddy J.B. Bryan--cantankerous poet & painter & book designer / publisher & zenster & now odd-ball musician. J.B. is good with the manifestos. He's always hammering them out. They never seem to work quite right, the world doesn't listen, his friends don't listen but that's okay. He'll discover another in the weeds or the pumkin patch. He'll send out into the ether free of charge. Of course he'd accept in trade something from your garden or a polka dot shirt or perhaps a good bottle of wine (red).
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NEED TO BE

I worship the sun.
I don’t worship a Sun God or the Son of God.
I don’t worship the works of mankind.
I live happily as part of the earth.
Where else are there lilac bushes?
Apricot blossoms may or may not bring apricots.
Everything gets to know earthworms.
Let us, at least, honor the miracles we live as.
Human beings have been drawing pictures
as long as they have been singing,
or whistling.
I worship the present moment.
The best language is sign language
or wildly beautiful clothes.
I do like the photovoltaic cell,
something powerful enough
to power a small vehicle for free.
The human race may or may not be smart.
We should go back to horse power.
Saddles and wagons, even go bareback.
We need to eat off cups & plates
made out of clay dug from our own backyards.
We should be living in one horse towns.
Horses should be fed from our gardens.
Theories don’t help.
The actual use of plants matters most.
We need chlorophyll as much as any other hunk of biology.
Horses love grass,
their shit makes flowers bloom.
I worship watermelon sugar.
This planet is known as Water Ball.
We live briefly upon it as we circle the sun.
I worship hydrogen & oxygen.
I worhsip every galaxy.
This planet doesn’t need saving,
it’s just our own home we’ve screwed up royally.
Even Kings & Queens of Industry shall perish.
For God’s sake, don’t use the word “Lord.”
Even frogs will have their revenge.
I worship common sense & kindness.
“Hoka Hey! It is a good day to die.”
I need to be as lovely as a pumpkin or else.

JUAREZ, JUAREZ: The March of Februay 13

Juárez, Juárez, no es cuartel
Fuera ejercito de el

Juárez, Juárez, no es cuartel
Fuera ejercito de el

This is video I took last Saturday in Juárez during the march protesting the nightmare of narco-violence and the army's occupation of the city. Ben Sáenz and I had walked over the bridge to be a part of that. There's not much else we can do. It’s a deadly waltz, these two dancers--the narco traficantes and the Mexican Army. The music is courtesy of the federal governments on both sides of the river. The Mexican government plays the guitar and the trumpet, and the U.S. strums on the bajo sexto, keeping the beat. Everyday citizens, like Gabriel who works for Lee and me, will tell you they don’t know what’s worse--the traficantes who are murdering each other and innocent bystanders, or the soldiers who are abusing the citizens and the society that are supposed to be protecting. The citzens are deathly afraid of both. Ben and I were happy we went. It was invigorating. Mostly young people (1500 by one count, "hundreds" by other count and I guessed it as 1,000 at least), lots of enthusiasm and vitality and joy, lots of anger, lots of solidarity and friendship. The marchers walked from the Parque de Benito Juárez to Avenida Diez y Seis de Septiembre to Avenida Juárez and then north to the Santa Fe Bridge where the pink cross stands commemorating the deaths of women in the city over the last two decades.

The events that triggered the rally and protest march are complicated--simply said, the people are angry and scared and fed up--but several recent incidents are the immediate cause:

The very highly publicized Massacre of January 31 which stunned Mexico and the world and the ensuing confrontation between Luz Maria Dávila (mother of  two teenage boys who were killed) and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. On th night of the massacre hired assassins working for one cartel or another carried out a premeditated attack on a high school celebration and murdered 15 people, mostly teenagers. The Mexican government, stunned by the national and international outcry, quickly arrested two individuals who supposedly participated in the attack. If you like irony, try this--the continuing violence between cartels has accounted for the death of over 4,500 people in Juárez since January 1, 2008, and well over 90% of those murders have gone unsolved and unpunished.

And the much less publicized assassination of Josefina Reyes on January 3. Josefina was a political activist, known for her work in protesting the femicides in Juárez as well as her fight to protest installation of a nuclear dump in Sierra Blanca, TX. In recent months she had denounced the Mexican army’s human rights abuses in Juárez and condemned the military presence in the city, calling it unconstitutional. Josefina had been harrassed and received numerous threats from the army and others.

 

The poster reads: "For condemning the abuses of the military, the government killed me.--Josefina Reyes"

POETRY MACHINE

Rumor is that all the 7/11s in El Paso will soon be putting in Poetry Machines near the candy bars. To learn how to get your own poetry machine, check out MOLOSSUS, an online broadside of world literature. Good stuff. Viva for everybody who makes poetry machines.

SUSAN KLAHR, ARTIST

"I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on."

--Susan Klahr

Artist Susan Klahr died before dawn New Year’s morning. For the last several years, she had been struggling with cancer, and finally the disease asked her to cross to the other side. She is survived by her husband David and her two sons Sito and Arlo.

Susan has long been an important force within the intellectual and artistic community that makes El Paso/Juárez unique along the U.S./Mexico Border and in the United States. Her art spoke of the world she witnessed before her, especially the people that populated her imagination, people who in her paintings radiate a spiritual presence through Susan's imagination. A few years ago Lee and I asked Susan, because of her own Jewish immigrant heritage, to paint the cover image for the YA novel Double-Crossing by Eve Tal that Cinco Puntos was publishing. (Last year, during her illness, she painted the cover for its sequel, Cursing Columbus.) During our conversations about the novel, we expressed our admiration for the two paintings I’ve pasted above, Celia and Rose. [Excuse the poor snapshot quality of the images. I took the photographs this morning inside the office with my little Nikon.] One day she showed up with the paintings and asked us to hang them in our office. She wanted people to see them, she didn’t want to roll them up and put them in storage. They’ve been on loan to us ever since.

The paintings are really one piece--Celia is Susan’s grandmother, who died shortly before Susan was born, and Rose is her mother. Rose died when Susan was 14. Susan painted black and white death masks of her grandmother and mother from old snapshots, she then dressed herself in their clothes and was photographed holding the masks in front of her face. Then she painted portraits of herself as her grandmother Celia and her mother Rose. We’ve been lucky here in the offices at Cinco Puntos to see these paintings everyday and to tell admiring visitors about them. Her illness made these paintings even more poignant and powerful, revealing how our presence continues to live in our families and in the work that we do.

Below, beneath the close-ups of Celia and Rose, are the inscriptions that Susan wrapped in the blue border around each of the paintings. And below those is the story of her grandfather Max and grandmother Celia and mother Rose that Susan wrote for the display of the paintings.

●

CELIA

I never saw her.

The one of five sisters.

The one that Max picked.

The mother of Rose.

ROSE

It's a painting of my mother.

How I never saw her.

She's in my body

and I was in her body.

●

THE STORY OF MAX MY GRANDFATHER

AND CELIA AND ROSE

Whenever I think about telling a story, I think about Max. Max was my grandfather and he had one of the two bedrooms in our apartment and he had a big steamer trunk in there. When he opened the trunk for me it was like magic. It was like this… Once upon a time there was a strong young man named Max and he lived in Chernobyl, near Kiev, in the Ukraine. He called it Russia and he had brothers and sisters, and the youngest sister, in the photo he always showed me, so many years later, looked out at me across time, across the ocean with eyes so large, so luminous (like my son Arlo’s) and hair so black, I wished I could have known her but Max came by himself with his trunk; he braved the unknown alone. He was young, 17 or 18. He made his way across Europe to England or Scotland, speaking not a word but Yiddish, and got on a freighter or a steamer or something and his cousin Joe met him in Philadelphia and gave him a banana and he started eating it with the skin on and what a joke! You greenhorn! Laughed his cousin and Max loved to tell it over and over. He went all the way back a year or so after and came back to America and that was the very last he ever saw any of his family again.

In Chernobyl, Max’s father was the town butcher. I would see them in my mind wandering over hill and green fields, going to neighboring towns to do business. Back there was green and wintry snow and the old life and here (he loved America) was opportunity and no pogroms. Everything was Yiddish, he didn’t need English to make good--leave that to his children. And he was strong and handsome and tall. His shoes were size thirteen and he worked hard. He was young and he worked in a butcher store in New York and upstairs from the store lived a mother with five daughters and this mother came from the old country by herself with her five daughters and she was tough and she was strong and nobody seemed to know how many husbands she had and what happened to them. Her daughters all looked different and she lived to at least one hundred years old and she was my mother’s grandma and she was bubbe to me.

But Max was handsome and he visited upstairs and they would giggle and talk and there were five girls: Celia, Clara, Fanny, Esther and Becky. Clara was the oldest. When I knew her she was a big, square woman with legs that looked like tree stumps to me. Fanny I never knew. In the pictures, she looked thoughtful, exotic. Becky never married. She was fussy and critical, the corners of her mouth turned down. Esther looked like a shiksa. We thought she was pretty. Not dark and mysterious and beautiful like Celia but she was pretty and she put rouge on her cheeks and she was always smiling and kind and generous.

One day the Mother looked at robust Max and put her hands on her hips and said “enough! Which one do you mean?” And Max picked Celia, the most beautiful of her sisters. And she had deep eyes and dark hair and a delicate face and he courted her. So he married Celia and he worked hard and he opened his own butcher shop in the Bronx and he had his picture taken behind the counter and he’s big and strong and proud. In America. And Max and Celia had a daughter and they named her Rose. Rose, an American name for an American girl. Rochel was her Jewish name.

Rose was my mother and this story goes on and on and on. Celia died shortly before I was born and Rose died when I was fourteen years old. I lived with three men, my father, my brother, and my grandfather. It was amazing for me to put on the faces of Celia and Rose: to feel them in my very being. I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on.

--Susan Klahr

Happy New Year Cooking Beans

It’s 2010, a New Year, a new decade. In Memphis where I grew up Tula (Darthula Baldwin, the black woman who worked for my mother and who helped raise me) would cook up black-eyed peas and turnip greens to celebrate the New Year and bring good luck for our family and all of our loved ones. Usually she served the feast with pan-fried cornbread. Good and cheap delicious stuff (1). Now that we’ve lived in El Paso these 30-something years we’ve traded in the black-eyed peas for beans .

A while back I wrote a poem about my beans and folks have asked me how I cook my beans. So this is the way I make beans. Pinto beans, that is. I live in the El Paso and so if I say I’m going to make beans then I’m going to make pinto beans. Refried beans or ranchero beans or gringo vegetarian beans. Beans are pinto beans. If I’m going to cook black beans or navy beans, then I say I’m going to cook up some black beans or some navy beans(1). Now, be forewarned, I cook gringo vegetarian beans. And I make a big pot of them, three or four cups of dried beans at least. No sense of having beans on one day only. We like them for a main course the first night and then from then on we eat them however we want them. We garnish them with chopped onions, tomatoes, Monterrey Jack cheese and salsa, and I chop up a clove or two of fresh garlic and drop them on top of my beans. That way I’ll live forever.

So before I go to bed I rinse the beans, cover them in a pot with lots of water and then soak them overnight to soften them up. In the morning after breakfast and coffee I drain those beans. And then I pour in a box of Pacific Organic Mushroom Broth. Good stuff. It was worth a shot. After cooking beans for at least 30 years, I discovered mushroom broth a couple of years ago. Brilliant idea that really happened by accident. We had a box lost in the pantry for some reason and I'm always experimenting with my beans, so why not? The broth adds a dark and earthy taste to the beans. I put the beans sitting in the mushroom broth on the stove and get them started toward a boil. I also set the oven at 250 degrees. And I start throwing in stuff. I find the biggest onion we have, chop it up and throw it in. At least four large garlic cloves chopped up. 1½ teaspoons of ground cumin. 1 teaspoon of curry powder. Maybe more. 2 or 3 teaspoons of salt. Same with pepper. Just how I feel. I never keep count. 4 tablespoons of Extra Virgin olive oil. Maybe I shake in some Italian Seasoning. Whatever. When it all comes to a boil then I stir it up and open another box of broth and add another inch or so of liquid. Sometimes I just add water if I’m tired of wasting money on my beans. I need to make sure that there’s enough liquid in the pot so I can forget about my beans. I get distracted. I like to cook things that don’t need me to pay too much attention. Before I finish I might add a can of organic tomato sauce or chopped tomatoes or even tomato paste. Cooked tomatoes are supposed to be good healthy stuff for being a man. I think about things like that. It makes cooking more interesting. I put the pot in the oven and go away. The beans cook for five hours or so at 250 degrees.

Like I said in my poem, people like my gringo vegetarian beans, but I’m not averse to meat in my beans. You can’t eat beans in a Mexican restaurant in El Paso without getting some meat in your beans some way or another. If you’re eating refried beans, then those are usually are flavored with some lard. That’s okay. There’s no better place in the world to eat beans than in El Paso. Still, if I cook vegetarian beans, more folks can enjoy them. Lots of vegetarians running around these days. Son Johnny Byrd's novia Ailbhe is a vegetarian. Joe Hayes is a vegetarian (well, he eats fish). I used to be a vegetarian. Still, I will use meat under one condition--Somebody gives me a hambone. Especially a Honey-Baked hambone with flakes of ham still hanging from the bone. Those bones make delicious beans.

So that’s how I make beans. With my first pot of beans in this New Year, I wish for good luck, peace and justice for our friends and neighbors—our brothers and sisters—in La Ciudad Juárez across the river from where we live. My first pot of greens will be for our children and grandchildren, for all of our friends—may we all be blessed with good health and spiritual well-being.

Happy New Year.

Notes:

(1) I still cook the turnip greens, and I cook them mostly the way Tula taught me--lots of greens, onions, garlic, spices but I do them vegetarian style, olive oil instead of a hamhock, sometime I use vegetarian broths of some kind or another. I simmer them all day long on the stove top so that the smell and the humidity from those greens saturate the house and make me want to weep with all those memories. Lee, by the way, is in charge of the cornbread. It’s juicy with butter. It’s the grandkids’ favorite. 

(2) I’m sorry, JB, but that’s the way it is. That’s life, the way we live it here.

ESTHER CHAVEZ CANO (1933-2009)

Esther Chávez Cano died in Juárez on Christmas Day. She was 76 years old. She was a hero, a fronteriza woman who in the early 1990s in Juárez saw the continuing tragedy of women being killed and decided to do something about it. With much help she started Casa Amiga near downtown Juárez. At the time it was one of only six rape crisis centers in Mexico and the only one on the U.S./Mexico Border. She brought international attention the continuing murders of women in Juárez and the uncaring and apathetic response by the Mexican government on all levels--city, state and federal--to these murders. Indeed, as we now know, law enforcement was more concerned with supporting the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. than it was with investigating and prosecuting the murders of women. If anything, the authorities wanted to keep activists like Esther quiet because she brought attention to the vacuum of justice in Juárez. She has received many awards for her work, as the number of obituaries state, but she never veered from the task at hand--helping the women of Juárez.

In 2002, when Cinco Puntos Press was putting together the anthology PURO BORDER: DISPATCHES, GRAFFITI AND SNAPSHOTS FROM THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER, three of us--novelist Jessica Powers, who worked for us at the time, Lee and I—walked over the bridge and went to visit Esther at Casa Amiga. She was a diminutive and very hospitable woman with a quiet way about her but she had a presence that commanded respect. Her work at Casa Amiga was self-evident--women and children were coming and going, and some were staying, being protected inside the walls of the center from husbands or boyfriends who would harm them if they had the chance. Indeed, in December 2001 her receptionist, who had come to the center as a client, was killed by her husband in front of Casa Amiga. When we asked her why she started Casa Amiga, she replied quietly--

“Because I am a woman, because I felt helpless and because I have a conscience.”

Below I am pasting the mostly unedited notes that Lee took during that visit that I found in our archives (Lee also took the photograph above), and below that I am pasting an article by Tessie Borden that originally appeared in the Arizona Republic and that we republished in PURO BORDER. But first, Casa Amiga as always needs financial help. Those who wish to help may do so by making a donation to their account:

**BANCO SANTANDER**
No. Cuenta: 65-50227820-0
CLABE 014164655022782007
Titular CASA AMIGA CENTRO DE CRISIS AC
1427 Suc. Plaza las Torres
Cd. Juárez, Chih. C.P. 32575

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Notes from Esther Chávez Cano Interview, June 24, 2002

There is terrible violence against women right now in Juarez. She will give us her list of the names of murdered women with pleasure. She gathered the list from reading the newspapers. She only includes the names of murdered women, not of children, or of people who have disappeared. We asked if she thought the authorities had a bigger list and she said it will do no good to check with the authorities. The authorities will not give us access to names. Everyone who has a list has gathered their information from the newspapers. But what of the women who never get mentioned in the newspapers?

She said, Here is an example of a girl who has disappeared and of what has happened with the mother.  She shows us a photo of a girl, Brenda Esther Afrara Luna, who disappeared two years ago when she was 15. Several months ago (time is uncertain), the mother was told by the authorities that her daughter has been found. But the mother went and looked and it wasn’t her daughter. Then they told her again they had found her. It was not the body of her daughter, but the body was wearing her daughter’s dress. It was very confusing. Esther said there are many cases like this.  The mother in this case has endured a lot of domestic violence herself.

Casa de Amiga was started on February 9, 1999, about three and a half years ago. Esther is the founder. We asked her why she started it. She said because she’s a woman, because she felt helpless, and because she has a conscience. It was funded initially with $31,000 from FEMAP. Last week they received $25,000 from the U.S. embassy [see article below]. It is earmarked for a project to provide therapy for women who suffered incest, rape or violence as children.

Casa de Amiga is the only center of its kind all along the border, the only one in Juarez. There is nothing for battered women.

She mentioned that there have been two deaths in Chihuahua that have similar M.O.s. Why is it different here, we asked. Why is there more violence? This is the border, she said, with its traffic of drugs, its maquiladoras. Poor people come here to seek opportunities, they want to cross the river to live the American dream. In this city there are 500 gangs. There are no opportunities here, conditions are very poor. Have you been to Anapora? It’s a terrible place.

The police hate her. They don’t ignore her. “I would like it if they would ignore me,” she said. They campaign against her. One year and seven months ago, they began their campaign. Governor Patricio doesn’t like her: according to him, she doesn’t do anything right—she’s a terrible director, she steals the money, she herself is a violent woman. And so the stories go. When Esther began talking about the women, Patricio tried to silence her.

In this building, last December 21, 2001, her own receptionist was killed by her husband. This receptionist had four kids, eight years on down, and she was a wonderful worker, good, hard-working, prudent. The husband came to Casa de Amigo to kill her here. From jail, the husband has called for custody of the kids.

When we expressed dismay over this, she said that last week, she had to go rescue a woman who was impregnated by her father. She was 19 and had been raped by him for the last 8 years. She’d had two children. One, a little boy, died of malnourishment. The other, a little girl of 3.5 years, was asked by Esther what had name was. The girl said she had no name. When Esther took the 19 year old woman away, the father went to the Human Rights Agency and demanded that his daughter come back and they agreed to his demands.

There is another girl now who is 11 years old and in the fifth grade. She’s 7 months pregnant. Some woman, a neighbor maybe, took her to a man and he raped her. The father and mother of this girl are separated and she is treated like a puppet.

●

JUAREZ CENTER FIGHTS FOR FORGOTTEN WOMEN

By Tessie Borden
Arizona Republic Mexico City Bureau
Feb. 26, 2002 12:00:00

JUAREZ, Mexico -- It’s 9:30 a.m., and Esther Chavez Cano’s daily personal war with the unwanted problems of this largest of the border cities has begun.

She rushes into her office at Casa Amiga, the rape crisis center that grew out of the violence that has claimed the lives of more than 200 young women here in the past nine years. Close behind is a staff member describing this morning’s emergency: a neighbor found two girls, 8 and 10, wandering in the city’s El Chamizal park the previous night. They told the woman they were running away from their father’s beatings.

Chavez Cano immediately calls the local district attorney’s office, and one gets the feeling she has done this hundreds of times. In a firm but friendly tone, she calls on the attorneys there to take charge of the children and investigate what they say.

“The authorities just don’t do anything,” she whispers while on hold.

Chavez Cano’s Casa Amiga is the only center of its kind on the Mexican side of the 1,950-mile line that separates the country from the United States. Established in February 1999, it receives funding from both U.S. and Mexican organizations.

Chavez Cano, 66, a diminutive, retired accountant whose mild manner causes listeners to lean in just to hear her, is perhaps the most outspoken and militant voice here on violence against women.

In 1993, she noticed a trend among crimes committed in Juarez: dozens of young women were turning up slain in the surrounding desert. The bodies showed evidence of beatings, rape and strangulation. Many of the women fit a distinct profile: tall and thin, with long, dark hair and medium skin, between ages 11 and 25. Often, they came from the ranks of workers who yearly swell Juarez’s population from other parts of rural Mexico to work at border assembly plants, or maquiladoras.

Prodding the police

“They try to pretend these are not serial crimes,” Chavez Cano said of the local authorities. “It just brings your rage out. It makes you boil.”

Chavez Cano and others formed the Liga 8 de Marzo, an awareness group that collected data about the slayings and prodded police to give the murder investigations high priority - often by picketing the police station, holding crosses bearing names of victims.

No one agrees on the exact number of killings that are related.
Chavez Cano says about 230 women have been found in the past nine years, the most recent in November when eight bodies were discovered in a shallow pit. Some slayings have been traced to jealous husbands or drug traffickers. But a large number share characteristics that make investigators believe a serial killer and perhaps copycats are at work.

After raising awareness of the problem to a national level, Chavez Cano decided someone should work to prevent the deaths, rather than just clean up after the murderers.

Help from elsewhere

With start-up money from the Maryland-based International Trauma Resource Center, the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Mexican Federation of Private Health and Community Development Associations, Chavez Cano opened Casa Amiga near the city center. A paid staff of four and an army of volunteers served 318 clients in Casa Amiga’s first year, providing a 24-hour hotline, counseling and group therapy.

Last year, the center added three staff members and served 5,803 clients, of which 1,172 were new cases.

Chavez Cano now worries about a troubling side issue: child sexual abuse and incest. Fifty-seven of her clients in the first year were raped children. So among her most successful programs is a puppet show that teaches children about “bad” touching and instructs them, in a gentle way, to respect their bodies.
The center takes most of her attention, but Chavez Cano does not let the police off easy when it comes to the slayings of women in the desert. They, in turn, have lashed out at her.

An attitude of disdain

Arturo Chavez Rascón, Chihuahua state’s former attorney general, came in for some of her sharpest barbs because of his comments implying the victims contributed to their own deaths through their dress or lifestyle. It’s an attitude shared by police officers on the beat, who Chavez Cano says discourage families from associating with Casa Amiga.

The center used to receive about $3,000 a month from Juarez for rent and salaries, but that stipend has been cut, Cano said. Now, the center relies on money it gets from donations and showings around Mexico of the hit play The Vagina Monologues.

Tragedy close to home

Recently, the center suffered a blow of a different kind.

In December, Maria Luisa Carsoli Berumen, an abused mother who had become a client and then a staff member at the center, was killed in front of Casa Amiga, witnesses say, by her husband, Ricardo Medina Acosta. The two had had a long and violent history that led to Carsoli Berumen leaving him. A court granted custody of their four children to Medina Acosta. She stayed in town, planning to wait until after the Christmas holidays to resume the custody fight.

On the morning of Dec. 21, the pair argued and struggled outside the center, and she was stabbed twice in the chest as she tried to flee. A black bow at the door expresses the staff’s grief. No one has been in arrested in Carsoli Berumen’s death.

Fighting for respect

“The death of Maria Luisa forces us to work more intensely to instill respect in children, men and women, and to sensitize the authorities to the grave risk for families and all of society that domestic violence represents,” Chavez Cano wrote in a column in the local newspaper.

“Rest in peace, Maria Luisa, and watch over your children so they remain united and sheltered by your loved ones who lament your absence.”

Joe Somoza at El Bar Palacios

I want to catch up now on some things that have been on the back burner for a while.

In October I drove up to the Palacio's Bar in Old Mesilla a few minutes outside Las Cruces. For years now a group of poets have been hosting an open mic poetry series the 3rd Tuesday of every month. Joe Somoza was one of its founding members. Joe has long been a fan of open mic series. He likes the democratic ambiente. I don't go to many but when I do I enjoy myself. Anyway the night I was there Joe read two poems he had written that week. He said he was still fiddling with the poems and reading them aloud to an audience gives him a way to listen to the words different. I enjoyed his reading and the poems very much--playful and pensive and, if I may say, lonely in that way that happens along when we get older. I know the feeling. I drove home (50 miles) with enough energy to write in my journal and take some notes on some poems  I've been working on. And I wrote to ask Joe if I could paste the poems in my blog. Here they are.

●

Late Quartet

Beethoven must’ve been deaf

by then. But not blind—though

what does that mean?

That two “buts”

don’t make an “and”?

Outside the window, sun and leaves

don’t concern

themselves with my phrasing.

They’re making love this morning,

turning sunlight to

maple trees

for later generations to sit under

the boughs,

or look out their windows

at them while smoking

pensively, as we did,

when cigarettes, cheap then,

made you feel cool, not

contaminated,

though everything you do

kills you

eventually. Is this why Beethoven sounds

so sad, so richly

melancholic, so continually

expressive

in the darker tones—that he saw

when he could no longer

hear?

______

The Private Lives Of Words

I don’t want to sound

“public.”

I don’t want, even, to pretend

to some importance.

So why set the words

down—preserving them.

For others?

Clarifying them

for myself?

Already, you see patterns

start to form.

The words, once

written down, call

to other words.

It’s so lonely

on the long, blank page,

so isolated living in your head,

behind eyes that are

forever looking

at the surfaces of things

from their secure

outpost, wondering

how it would be

inside—

inside a locust tree, for instance,

or a hummingbird.

Even inside that old rocking chair

sitting in the living room

since Mary, the ex-neighbor, sold it

at a yard sale.

And it’s stayed

against that wall, overshadowed

by the piano, hardly noticed

beside the shelves of multi-colored novels

that probably

commune

with each other nights—

Hemingway continuing his belligerence

with Fitzgerald. De Maupassant

chatting with Flaubert.

You get some words together, and you

never hear the end of it.

Will U.S. Government, World respond to Border S.O.S.

Will Government, World Respond to Border SOS? This is a good article. For those of you who don't live on the border, I recommend highly keeping up with Frontera Norte Sur, a non-commercial news service located at NMSU in Las Cruces, NM, just up the road from El Paso. It has long been one of the true sources of border-rooted journalism in the area north of the wall. They their eyes and ears on both sides of the wall, and they keep their shoes and hearts on the ground and among the people who live and so often suffer in our region.

A friend sent me these photographs from the December 6 "Marcha para Solucion" en Juarez. Writing this I hesitate to use his name or the name of the photographer which he sent me. So I won't. But I will if he writes me to do so. The march included organizations and people from all political persuasions--juarenses are exhausted, they want and need help. A note about the young boy holding the "NI UNA MAS" sign. He's 12. Six years ago, when he was 6, he carried the same sign in solidarity with the women who were being killed, their murders ignored by the judicial systems at all levels. He told his dad that he wanted to sell hot-dogs to raise money and donate, so that the murder of women in Juárez would stop. Now there's this other thing, this monstrosity of violence as two cartels war on one another for control of the Juárez plaza (the franchise for using the region to transport illegal drugs). The psychological toll on his generation of young people is enormous. These memories don't go away.

Marching for Peace & Justice in Juárez: December 6, 2009

Antonio Briones turned towards the City Hall of Juarez and demanded that something be done to stop the violence. (Vanessa Monsisvais from the El Paso Times. Read more at the EPT website and also the Diario de Juarez [and here] website. Problem with the EPT website is that they don't keep their work online after two weeks but it can be purchased. I don't know about the Diario.)

Sunday on December 6 between 4,000 and 5,000 juarenses mixed with some folks from El Paso marched yesterday asking for peace and justice for their beleaguered city. The drug war between La Linea (the Juárez cartel) and Chapo Guzman's Sinaloa cartel continues. It's merciless, fed by the three poisons of greed, hatred and delusion--maxed out and insane. Nearly 4,000 people have been killed since January 1, 2008. Presidente Calderon sent in federal troops, but they've not been trained in the niceties of urban policing and citizen rights so they've caused more problems. The U.S. leadership, of course, cannot understand our own collusion in the bloody chaos. We think our hands are clean, yet our jails and prisons are full of citizens using the drugs or out to make a shadowy living by selling the stuff. The video link below and the photo above are from the El Paso Times. I hope they will continue to keep this video on-line and not archive it. It's inspiring. May the New Year bring peace and justice for the people of Juárez and may the New Year bring sane and just drug laws for the United States. Our drug laws are directly responsible for this madness.

The December 6th March for Peace and Justice in Juarez

John Daido Loori Roshi, a little something for his grave

Half of a Sonnet

1. He wants to feed the whole congregation all at once.

2. What is wrong with them? I’m afraid they’ve all fallen into the same pit.

3. Hoping for a sign of life he stirs the pot again.

4. A live one has appeared. Not all is lost after all.

5. The entire teaching of countless generations is right in his face.

6. Too bad. After all, the teacher can’t do it alone.

7. Although you bump into it everywhere, it’s still hard to talk about it.


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This is a found poem in memory and celebration of John Daido Loori Roshi. After I heard about his death on October 10th or so (he died on the 9th), I spent an afternoon reading stuff about him and written by him. These seven lines are the footnotes to his Teisho on Juifeng’s Rice Cake. I liked how they sounded all alone like this, they make some kind of odd sense and so they became my little homage to his life's work. Seven lines for his grave. A half of sonnet. Of course, I never sat with him or met him. My connection was purely through his two books--The Heart of Being: Moral and Ethical Teachings of Zen Buddhism and The Eight Gates of Zen: A Program of Zen Training. They're strong books, stern books, good books. They were important to me. They gave me the energy to sit and stare at the wall. Loori called himself a "radical conservative" in regards to keeping the traditions of Zen. If you read his books, you'll understand why. He was also a photographer. The photograph of the rocks in water is his.

JIM CARROLL, R.I.P.

[Note: Both poet Tom Clark and poet Ron Silliman have much more intimate knowledge and understanding of Jim Carroll and his work. If you want to know more about Jim Carroll, please visit their blogs and do a search for Jim Carroll. I promise you--it's worth the journey. My thing here, for what it's worth, is a dreamy meditation on a man and a poet I did not know. bb]

Jim Carroll (and here) died a few weeks ago. “The Basketball Diaries” Jim Carroll--the playground b-baller who became a poet rock star celebrity. Pure New Yorker type of guy. 16 years old and he was running with the New York City poets I loved. The St. Mark’s poets. 2nd generation. Tom Clark was publishing him in the Paris Review. Jim was going to be the next Rimbaud. That's what "they" all said. Then he was a rock star and Keith Richards of the Stones was playing behind him. Jesus. It must have been a rush. I never knew Jim Carroll. I don't think I wanted to. And I really didn’t pay much attention to the Diaries or his poetry. Maybe I avoided them. I didn't want to step inside. Yet there he was in my psyche living the life. The rep and the rumors and the talk. Yeah, I guess I can say all that scared me. I always figured if I went off to NYC to be a poet that I would get lost in the jingle jangle. I could have walked into Jim Carroll’s song “People Who Died” and live right there in the ether. I loved that song. I didn’t want to die but I could die. I could go that way. The first time I heard it a local hero rocker here in El Paso was covering it. I wanted to scream and shout and weep and laugh.

"People Who Died" by Jim Carroll
(lyrics lifted from St Lyrics website here)

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys' Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
"Hey," Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But Tony couldn't fly, Tony died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers
He said, "Hey, I know it's dangerous, but it sure beats Riker's"
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Jim Carroll was like my friend Jimmy Walker. Carroll (b1949) started doing cocaine on the streets in NYC at the age of 13. Me (b1942) and my friend Jimmy Walker (b1941) started drinking together when we were 13. Different places, different times. Another difference, it seems, was that Jim Carroll had a father, a bartender in a conservative Irish neighborhood. Both of Walker and I were fatherless, me literally, Jimmy figuratively. Harvey Goldner, another founding member of our drinking club (aka "gang" or "pandilla"), had a figuratively dead father who was happy enough to come home from work and get drunk. And a little bit later Jimmy Douglas, who like me had a father they had put into the ground. All of us fatherless one way or another. We drank hard and often all the way through high school. I’m not proud of that. It’s what happened. We were lost and shy and foolish. Booze was our shield. We battled against the world with our booze. It could have been cocaine very easily but cocaine wasn’t an option in 1954 East Memphis. After high school Jimmy Walker--who like Jim Carroll was easiest the craziest of us all--quit school and went off with the carnival. Then he joined the Army and before long he had jumped off some tower in Germany (the Army said he fell, Jimmy Walker would never fall / he loved climbing the tall trees in his Friday night drunkeness) and he came home packaged in his uniform lying inside a box. But Michael Clemmons was first into that void. I know because Jimmy was with him. Another of the fatherless. They were floating on a log in the Mississippi--Mike and Jimmy, my little sister Patsy and Harvey and somebody else. (I was elsewhere, saying goodbye to a girlfriend). The river swallowed Mike whole. We were 18 then. Mike was a sweet-faced boy who wanted to be a poet. Surely he was gay but it was before that time when he could say, "Sure, I’m gay. What of it?" I hope we would have understood. They found his water bloated body the next day snagged into some eddy on the banks of the river. The undertaker fixed him up fine for his mother. Next in line was Bert Ringold. He put his father’s shotgun in his mouth and pushed the trigger with his toe. And there were others--Horace and Kemp and red-headed Bobby. In the 70s tall David Telder bought himself a gun at an El Paso pawnshop and went into the desert. He was a good friend. I never guessed at his sorrow. It’s happening more often now. Dead people. Jimmy Gardner from AIDS. My little sister Patsy from viral pneumonia and obesity and struggles with depression and addiction. My big brother Bill from alcoholism and a heart attack and depression. Steve Sprague from meningitis. Harvey Goldner from cancer.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if I had gone to New York. The thing is, I didn't. But I did leave Memphis and all the baggage of my growing up. I wanted to be a poet. I needed to be away from my family. From some daydream I wanted to be in the desert. I went west and not east. Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico and now El Paso. I think the work of Snyder and Kerouac pushed me in that direction. I was interested in Zen, whatever that was. I didn't know anything about myself. Whatever would happened, happened. I’m glad I found El Paso. Like they say now, it is what it is. A cliche that makes sense. It wasn’t planned. Jim Carroll’s life was probably like that. Not planned, I mean. Just one day after the next, following our noses. Now Jim Carroll is dead. Why his death leaves a hole in my psyche, I don't know. I plan to buy his books and find out. Meanwhile here Lee and I are on Louisville Avenue in the old Five Points neighborhood of El Paso. We've been in this house 30 years.



If you're reading this on Facebook, go here to watch the video.

I miss Jim Carroll. I miss not knowing him.

May he rest in peace.

Pilgrimage to Cristo Rey Mountain

Woman at the top, kneeling at the statue of Jesus on the Cross, weeping into her cellphone--"Hi, mom. I'm up here on the top. I up here with Jesus. I love you, mom, I love you."

Tattooed man on a cellphone--"Okay, sweet baby, I'm going to hang up. We're going to pray now."

Woman to her mother, hugging her and crying--"He called me a super bitch, he said I don't know what I'm doing."

In the midst of life, we are in death.

They said in the paper that the best guess was that 30,000 people climbed Cristo Rey Mountain last Sunday. I’ve been in El Paso 30 years now and most of those years I’ve said to myself, I need to make that climb with everybody else. Finally I did. The trail is 2½ to 3 miles to the top, depending on where you start; somewhere between 800 to 1000 feet in altitude. The mountain sits at the intersection of three states--Texas, Chihuahua and New Mexico. It was a beautiful day, a cloudy sky to shade us from the sun, just a little bit of a breeze. I started walking about 945am. The trail is only 8 feet across in most places, thick with dust and gravel and stone. I got lost in all the people, just one more pilgrim in the midst of the horde, most of us going up, but others already coming back down--a sea of brown faces, some gringos like myself, the faces of El Paso--kids and babies and parents and abuelitos, cholos and pretty girls, high school kids, tourists, reporters, a barefooted monk from Guatemala in his white robe and purple sash, many other barefooted pilgrims saying their prayers and their Hail Marys, giving thanks and asking for forgiveness. It’s a hard walk. The sore muscles, the bleeding feet, the beating heart, the shortness of breath, the chatter of people, the thirst, the laughter, the worry about death, the drumbeat of the Matachines atop the mountain pulling us along. It was the Feast Day for Christ the King, the last Sunday of October. My friend novelist and poet Ben Saenz once told me the closer you get to the border, the closer you get to Mexico, the more religious the language becomes. And he’s right. The language becomes charged with God-words. blessing-words, prayers. In the midst of the sacred though, people don't forget the profane--they go about their business selling burritos and water bottles, they talk on cell phones, they laugh and hold hands and make promises of love, they trade secrets and they gossip. I got to the top before noon. The Matachines were dancing, the Church bazaar vendors were selling water and pelotas and soda and pan dulce. At the very top loomed Christ on the Cross. We circled the huge statue. Some were kneeling and praying, weeping, lighting candles. A woman slowly sang “Amazing Grace.” Others, like me, took photos and looked down into the valley. A crowd had taken their place, waiting for the Bishops--one from Las Cruces, the other from El Paso. I saw them on the way back down. One was walking, the other (a pudgy guy with big lips) in a white jeep. The jeep was lost in an entourage of banners and people. The trail was only a few feet wider than the vehicle, so we had to climb up on rocks to let them pass. The two bishops blessed us as their entourage crawled higher up the mountain. They were doing their job. I was on the way back home. The downhill journey can be a struggle too. My leg bones ached, my knee twisted when I slipped on some rocks, my feet felt hot and tender. But I was happy and at peace. At the bottom church ladies were making food. I bought a plate of three fresh gorditas for $4 and I wandered back to my car hungry and thirsty and exhausted. I’ll do it again next year.

More photos of the journey on my Picasa account here.

PLAYBOY does El Paso

Luis Alberto Urrea's article about El Paso is in the November issue of Playboy and it’s now on the newsstands. From what we hear, the issue is destined to be one of Playboy's most read issues because Marge Simpson is the cover girl. It's good PR for El Paso. Nationally, El Paso is usually dissed by the media. People wonder why we live here. How come Cinco Puntos is here? In the 1970s when Lee and I first moved from Albuquerque south in search of a job, we asked friends where we should live, El Paso or Las Cruces. “Oh,” they said, wrinkling up their noses like they caught the whiff of something spoiled, “Las Cruces. You don’t want to live in El Paso.” (Why that is / is a whole other subject.) Anyway, Luis’ piece will help people begin to think differently about El Paso. And people (yeah, yeah, 90% are men) do READ Playboy. There are things to do, places to go, people to see. Yes, Juárez is a few minutes away across the river, its suffering remains in our thoughts and prayers, we worry about friends and families, the narco-wars in the recesses of our dreams, but here in El Paso is great music, a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. It's the paradox that Luis was commissioned to write about.

Luis stayed with Lee and me during his visit. I drove him around some during the day, historian David Romo did the same and daughter Susie Byrd took him out for some nite-time excursions around downtown and the Central Side (as opposed to the East Side and the West Side and the North East--El Paso enjoys its multiplicities). I wrote two blognotes here and here about his visit.

Odd thing is that the piece has created a little political controversy in the parochial parts of the El Paso psyche. The reason: Susie is District 2 Representative on the City Council, and her good friend County Commissioner Veronica Escobar made a cameo appearance in the article because she joined Susie on a night-time excursion. Of course they had fun. Susie and Vero, both known for their progressive straightforward politics, are fun to be around. They joke and riff and laugh loudly and they dance. Their faces light up with happiness. Luis fit right in. No wonder, like the rest of us, he loves the fronterizo sounds of the band Radio La Chusma. He gave La Chusma big kudos in his piece. Indeed, he gave kudos to the vibrant rasquache energy of El Paso. In a letter to me he said the Playboy editors wanted him to make the piece meaner, they wanted him to put some diss into his language. But no, he wanted his writing to churn up some love for El Paso. [He was disappointed when the editors chopped his paean to Papa Burgers on Piedras Street.] So he was dumbfounded when a few of the city’s radiomouths started squabbling and bloviating and throwing mud at him and Susie and even Vero. Luckily for me I escaped the onslaught, probably because I’m only a poet and publisher, two occupations that are considered inconsequential among the blabbering class.

Oh, well. Playboy is making some El Paso bucks. I went to the Westside Barnes & Noble and bought three copies for our archives. The clerk told me he was selling them like hot cakes.

MAKE TACOS NOT WAR
Self-portrait with Luis at the Smeltertown Cemetary