Fisherman In The Dead Sea

Tea-Spilling, Navel-Gazing. Queens 2 the World.

[deadseafishing]

'Carpentry'

Dreaming is     that un/conscious act of resistance That emboldens our reality. When I was still     my father's baby I never had     the privilege to dream, Because so much of our imaginative spirit        was spent                           trying                                       to fix our family. It isn't by chance that a carpentry metaphor is the well-worn cliche by which we understand good families and good homes. Love is the foundation,  And respect is the glue. (We drip flourishes all around us Where honesty would do.) And as men— We tried to mould the contours,   to smooth edges  And bend beams to our will, but: The dream-maker is free from physics In a way the carpenter isn't. With cracks in your foundation, It's only a matter of time. This is true of dreaming too,   and in many ways The carpenter is our most honest dreamer: He measures before he cuts—twice— Rather than cutting first and measuring only after you've awoken. But though he dreams as he builds, even he... Runs up against that curious tendency of reality's tools— They too have dreams, They too have desires, And not every home is right for every taijitu. (Absence is worse than loss because you never develop a frame of reference for understanding the beauty of that which eludes you.)

Love is a necessary thing,

And I am still my father's son;

Searching.

--DM, 4/10/12

[warpoetry]

'Running Orders' by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

They call us now. Before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.” And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?” They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. Your house is next. They think of it as some kind of war time courtesy. It doesn’t matter that there is nowhere to run to. It means nothing that the borders are closed and your papers are worthless and mark you only for a life sentence in this prison by the sea and the alleyways are narrow and there are more human lives packed one against the other more than any other place on earth Just run. We aren’t trying to kill you. It doesn’t matter that you can’t call us back to tell us the people we claim to want aren’t in your house that there’s no one here except you and your children who were cheering for Argentina sharing the last loaf of bread for this week counting candles left in case the power goes out. It doesn’t matter that you have children. You live in the wrong place and now is your chance to run to nowhere. It doesn’t matter that 58 seconds isn’t long enough to find your wedding album or your son’s favorite blanket or your daughter’s almost completed college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter what you had planned. It doesn’t matter who you are Prove you’re human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.

[deadseafishing]

Beckoning

I spend So much time   running Away from myself. Treadmill, closed loop, infinite jest.

  My ex-Soviet uncle tells me I Should leave America (as if I ever arrived?)— He doesn't know I carry us  With me whenever I do.

  Undress until I feel Translucent, Except for the excess I spot in Every mirror.

  And the solitude of every interview, And the solipsist who floats Through every interlude;

  Cast high & buoyed on swimming pools, Too awake to drown in similitude But scared to break the silouette— The Mobius seal of approval— But some sense    of liminality still Beckons. -DM, 1/2011

[deadseafishing]

Well, 'Lonely Planet' Says...

                   The lonesome wanderer sits                                                               smoking long cigarettes                                 that fill his lonely lungs with lulls. These lulls interrupt longer days                                 that fill these skulls with ideas and                                                                    mold the contours of the world.

Ironically: his gaze catches hold the frame of a                                   gentler chase --- round the circles are                                                            drawn in the sand as feet patter and

We play.                                          The lonely traveler dances                                          With his lovely planet, this way.

--DM, 12/2009                      

[deadseafishing]

[Ultimately:]

Ultimately:

People’s faces matter more than generic places, The aesthetic laces— That linger— In loquacious (sub-)liminations— We speak a language many have forgotten how to understand. I crumble… Like grains of sand Under unbearable lightness, Seeking. See-King (Sea King?) Poseidon of the visual sphere. And the residual glare of war-born flashes That tore across a velvet sky

                                                   —illuminating nothing—

That cratered this skin, and left tree-bark in decay. In remembrance that Hell— Is a spiritual place, Which the mind mistakes for comfort, And makes home.

--DM, 2012

The context is never clear to me---I never "sit down" to write.  Never.  It always comes to me when I'm busy doing something else, mundane or vital, and all of a sudden my head is flooded with opening lines, and I take it from there.  Sometimes I continue to write it in my head, and sometimes I carry on in the 'Notes' section of my (grandfatherly, 3-year-old) iPhone, and usually it's just dumb raps, but sometimes it's cooler than that. WE are the poets, the awake, the ones who dare to think differently.  The 'flashes', you're right, do sound Shakespeare-esque, I guess I'm semi-consciously inspired. Hell is a spiritual place for the mind---the idea of an afterlife not withstanding, heaven & hell, I believe, are places on earth, and they are often mental states.  And sometimes, when the mind of the sufferer turns against her, when our thoughts become our own kryptonite, and nothing seems hopeful or fruitful, that is when we must pause--and make sure we are not indulging in the false comfort of pessimism.  --DM, 2012

[deadseafishing]

The Hourglass

There is a me                that insists on getting                                                stuck.  Or rather, there are   Many me's Buzzing like fireflies   in a dance,

Lighting up night skies   for a chance 

To participate in beauty.                      Because so much and so little of life is missing it.

So each I lingers, then malingers,    by now expertly attuned to that exact                                                                       moment Which is just before my welcome is worn    in any given       state State bed bar car club class space place              depressive pace                         hustle

And mentality. I'm a tourist in every home & poem,     and hold home in every step, But each new fresh footprint contains within it

   the hourglass of the fast        fading imprint of the last          And I can't help but find this                   Unbearable…          So I slow my movements down in the superficial       hope that doing so could stretch these moments until their    metabolic instincts disintegrate & my nostalgia evaporates And I could finally see that movement forward is movement toward

Not away. 

  That each new flutter & flight can only     Spring from the same past pollinations 

      in which I finally 

         un-stuck 

      myself long enough

   to see the progress I made, Even when all I did was move myself From here, to there.  --DM, 10/2014

[deadseafishing]

The Letter I'll Never Stop Writing

Dear XX, It snowed again today.  Even the weathermen were shocked: They were expecting brief flurries—not 14 inches, not 14 degrees, not 14 hours. This is what happens when you leave. Even the gods grieve. I stayed home again today, mostly.  I walked in this frozen hell to visit the doctor, but even he didn’t have a pill for the pain. (Whoever invents that, my God--billions.) You know we spoke the Language of Delusions to each other that night, that morning, but really: nobody speaks it like us.  We accent each hopeful thought like immigrants, we croon our hopeless urgency like cantors, our poetry swirls like S’s in the mouths of Spaniards, our fantastical verses still linger at each stop before we land them on one another’s cheeks. They should pay us to teach. 

But I can’t say I know why this chest erupted so quickly, dormant this long—finally realizing, maybe, its close distance to the lies of logic, broadcasting every last, arrogant idea, is not so difficult to traverse, after all.  Or maybe you were just that lovely.  But this, what seized me this time was not the fantasy nor the concept—what I saw in you then watered me, peeled my eyes back like pears & pierced me open, like flesh.  I was falling in love but without the vertigo, gliding like paper, losing of my self nothing, like mitosis.  It was easy.  Why was it so easy? But that wasn’t your responsibility to answer, so finally—I kissed you, and you kissed back and Yes, it broke me. Out of respect for you & the choices you’ve made, I didn’t insist. I didn’t violate the vows.  I let you get on that plane.  I drove you there.  I wished you luck.  And then the storm came. And really, I was never trying to put you in that position. I love you such that if you love him—well shit—I love him too.  And we’ll always be friends.  But will he spend those mornings speaking our Native Tongue with you?  Will he put the expensive honey in your tea—raw—not that processed, sugary stuff?  Will he give you not just stability but instability, punctuate your comfort with exhilaration?  Will he sing to you? Does he even make you laugh? I just needed you to know that in this moment, just before the storm—It felt possible.  We felt possible.  A life together, really—not just the ghostly whispers that steam off my tongue like so many empty vapors. I looked into your olive eyes, and I saw a tree: a family, little curly-haired babies dancing to R&B in our living room and us, reading them short stories by some experimental lunatic.  It was the most beautiful window I’d ever looked through—and that’s coming from someone who’s stared out of windows in a thousand planes across the sky.  I just want you to know that then, now, finally: I was there, where you’d been.  You may have been alone then, but you aren’t now.  Now you've got us both.   I guess I’ll be the window-dressing. But man, what a sight.

Always, XY --DM, 1/2014

[deadseafishing]

"To-Do List: April"

1. It seems like any time the weather does anything unTropical, like dip below 35 degrees or snow in April, some yahoo, some dipshit with a degree in shooting spitballs at the ceiling, apparently, will huff smugly, contort his fingers into self-satisfied little air-quotes, and quip  2. “GLOBAL WARMING,” to everyone or no one in particular, his eyes scanning the faces of his audience for the reaction that'll most complement his  3. AM I RIGHT YOU GUYS?! disposition, as if the only way he could *really* tell that whole ecosystems were being destroyed,  4. bee colonies everywhere collapsing,  5. and the future existence of entire things like  6. AVOCADOS and  7. BLUEBERRIES were 8. completely uncertain were if he—I don't know—were sweating like,  9. RIGHT NOW? Or if he noticed that instead of alcohol the strangest expense eating away at his grocery budget were sunscreen. But I mean, I'm (8 again). still pretty obsessed with butts & curves myself (#insidejoke!) 11. even as I've stopped purely appraising my sexual attraction based on these features alone, 11.5. I think. 12. Time wasted feels no where near as good as Cheating, less in that commitment-betrayal sense & more in that man-I-scored-a-sweet-deal sense or that my-oh-my-how-clever-am-I-using-semantic-skullduggery-to-out-wit-these-imaginary-rules-like- 13. -THE-LAW-or-rules-of-propriety-or-even-the-Word-of-God sort of way. 14. That last one made me feel some type of way. 15. But Time is it is all is everything as far as I know & so to waste it I mean really waste it & not in that riding a bullet train in Japan type of way but more like that feeling sorry for myself in bed eating chocolate type of way that doesn't even lead to catharsis or good or bad poetry type of way or not spending time with my baby cousin who'll soon be a baby no more type of way or that not having asked my grandfather to tell me one last dark story of a concentration camp before he passes away type of way or never telling Her I loved Her before She got married type of way or hesitating and then losing type of way or forgetting to remember that sometimes I don't need to punctuate my existence with the same sort of accessible little dots & commas as everybody else type of way because my story is foremost mine to live & then one day tell on a rocking chair type of way to babies anew in a future assuming the Planet remains "healthy" enough FOR a future with me in it type of way where all I'll need are 16. Breaths

17. to intersperse my verse & the Acceptance of myself once I UNDERSTAND myself as the temporary prism through which the entire Universe passes & experiences Itself in THIS form only long enough to express but a fraction of the Love from whence it first erupted & to which it ultimately returns DOT DOT DOT 18. ...to not taste THAT of Life would be a waste of Time so egregious that even, finally, a True Comprehension of  19. SCIENCE and the Delicate Chemical Balance Of It All for my finger-contorting-friend could never begin to  20. Undo. 21. So, you know: Don't.  __. And then definitely: DO. --DM, 4/15/14

[deadseafishing]

“Lil’ Red Wudn't Ridin Like She Should”

“Yuh gotta dig the way it really happened, yuh understand? Cuz they made me out to be a savage, Joe. And the thing about it is – I was duped, I was manipulated. I’d been had – red-hoodwinked!

“I mean, I’d been livin in this forest my whole life, yuh understand me? You think she was the first little girl I’d ever seen strollin ‘round these parts – a-skippin and a- jumpin so nonchalantly, as if there werent muhthafuckin’ bears and wolves and shit out here? It’s insultin, yuh dig what I’m sayin? It’s exhibitionism. And we starving out here! I mean what you expected when they built them fancy villages on either side of uh wild forest? And it’s like, we trapped – shiiit, half the time they see us they start shootin, no questions! And we the animals?

“I mean, as hungry as a wolf was that day, the thought aint never cross my mind to take those butta-biscuits from her. I was leanin up on this tree right here, mindin my own bidness, when she came ridin down my way. What was she thinkin, anyway? Wit that red hood on? I’m tellin yuh, I aint even look twice on her, when she waltzed right up to me, talkin bout ‘Are you hungry?’ I’m like, ‘-itch, is you crazy? Of course I’m hungry, what kinda cot-damned question is that??’ She giggled. She liked it! – talkin bout ‘You’re so cute!’ Then she starts tellin me all about her life story – how she was bringin biscuits and butter to her grandmamma’s house, how her granddaddy was always gittin on her back bout bein careful and shit, how she wudnt ever allowed to go nowhere, how she aint never met a real live wolf before, -blah -blah like I even gave a damn, right? Then this broad straight up invited me to her grandmamma’s place!

“Now, yuh gotta undastand, a wolf aint stupid. But I aint never found myself in uh situation like this before. Brutha, this girl was – she was somethin else alright. I gave in. I decided to follow her. I mean, ‘how bad could it be’ I thought, right? Shit, she said her grandmamma was half-blind and half-deaf anyway. And I hadnt eaten in this dry-ass forest in over three days.

“Anyway, we get tuh her grandmamma’s place, right? Old lady was real cool, real cool. She was like, ‘Would you like some warm milk? Have some of these buttery biscuits. Take a sweater.’ Ol’ lady even offered me a lick’a whiskey! It was real peaceable man, I was surprised. After a lil’ while though, ol’lady retires for a nap, talkin bout her husband’a be home from the general store soon. I aint think nothin of it.

“Anyways, I’m sittin in the den wit Lil’ Red, right? I’m enjoyin this whiskey real hard. Red gittin kinda loose on the low too, right? She loungin, playin ol’ records like she knows anything bout ‘em. All of a sudden, she turns the lights down real low, I mean – low. She slinks on over to the couch right next to me, gazin’ at me all foolish. I’m like, ‘What’s really goin through this young broad’s mind right now?’ Outta nowhere, she goes, ‘You never did answer me.’ I’m like, ‘Answer what?’ She’s like, ‘Are you hungry?’ I’m like, ‘I mean, we did just have some biscuits but...’

“‘No’ she cuts me off. ‘I don’t think you understood me... Are you – hungry?’ I’m thinkin, ‘Damn! What type’a predicament is she tryna put me in out here, anyway? Right in her grandmamma’s house too!’ I’m like, ‘Shoot! I dont even eat red meat no more, All Praises Due!’

“All of a sudden I hear the front door slam. Two licks and a split later, ol’ man barges into the den, rifle drawn. He looks me down real long and real hard. ‘What in the Lord’s name is going on here?’ he asks, real stern and solemn. I was just about tuh explain myself when this actress bursts out into tears and runs on over tuh him like “Oh grandpa! I’m so glad you came in when you did! This wolf was about to eat me!” I just freeze up on that couch, three words a-runnin through my head – ‘Aint. This’a. Bitch.’

“Man, you already know what happened then, Joe. Fool chased me out the house and halfway into the woods, gun’nin. Managed to shoot my left paw clean off with those hollow tips. Well, I guess thats what I get for bein so ign'ant – trustin uh broad like that. Now I know how you heard the story through the grapevine, but that aint the way it went down. ‘Course they’d say anything to make that little girl out to be a victim. Whole world is crazy. But she was far from it, Joe, far from it. Let that be a lesson: Never trust uh big butt and uh smile.” --DM, 2/2008

[deadseafishing]

How to Hallucinate

Writers are fond of saying that they write out of necessity. That’s probably true, and often for one of two reasons: 1) You find your own thoughts so increasingly panic-inducing that you need to give them form and expunge them on the page, or 2) You find your own thoughts so exceedingly beautiful that you feel like other people should really be sharing these moments with you (and maybe even paying you for them). 

  So, you know, “Anxiety or Narcissism: A Succinct History of Literature.”

  I’m of course guilty of belonging to both of these camps, at some point or another. But there’s a larger, more crucial reason why I write as well: I love to hallucinate. 

  Writing changes the way my brain functions. When I'm working on something, over the course of hours, days, or weeks, I begin to observe the world around me like I’ve just dropped acid. Everything becomes luminous, every waking detail potentially worthy of a poem, every person's story radiating from their coolly demeanors on the subway like a light quantum that won’t be contained. I begin to interact with my world like I’m recording it; I start talking to people like I’m interviewing them for their biography.

Suddenly, everything feels important. I jot notes everywhere: on napkins, in the margins of books, on my phone. I recite phrases & couplets in my head while I'm walking. I'm in the shower humming one tune and then seized by another—“No, not 'liberate'” I’ll realize. “The word there should be 'unshackle,' paragraph 4, 8th line.” The page is a chessboard; these acts of heightened perception are the strategy, and my task as a player is to move the pieces into a precise mosaic of metaphysical purpose.

  I have to explain it. I have to make you feel it. It should make you trip as hard as I did.

  And the goal should be to write something important, something that will stir you and maybe even stay with you. Writing should be a deeply personal act, whether you’re synthesizing your history, writing a novel, or delivering the news. You should be present. You should be manic. Your writing should grab me by the shoulders & scream “Holy shit! Isn’t this thing [important/ beautiful/ fucked]?” (Which is, actually, not so different from doing drugs with & screaming at me, either.)

  When I write, I become more of myself than at any other moment. I'm Jackson Pollack at the keyboard, this glowing screen my canvass. The reader is like a canvass too--if I don’t leave an impression, then I’ve failed. 

  You might say that there are two types of writing: That which lies, and that which tries to expose the lies. A decent writer’s job is to do the latter. That’s what I try to do when I write. And that notion probably situates me primarily in the narcissism column.

  At least, until the other shoe drops. --DM, 9/2014

[deadseafishing]

Kaleidoscope

I

Wish I

Knew how to always channel

The kind of inspiration that just

Up and hits randomly out of nowhere

On a Tuesday afternoon;

Makes me believe

The idea that

We are not who we think we are,

Merely receptors

In an

Interconnected

Universal

Spectrum of

Frequencies

Infinitely colliding,

Kaleidoscopically. --DM, 1/2012

[deadseafishing]

Osmosis

Every time I tell you    I love you, I give you       a little piece of myself.        I replenish eventually,    but I’m never quite

just whole again. In this way, we blend,     and even if you don’t tell me       you love me back,

                      You are forever more than just your self as well.

                                                                                                So, I expand.

         The     more   I           love,               the

                           more               I           disperse         of         my                             

             self      

                                           around          

                                                               our world, our selves.

I wonder how many lives I’ve reached, then,

                                                                      when the people I have loved   

finally give of them selves, 

                                                                                                                 too.

–DM 1/2014

[deadseafishing]

One Less Tear For _________

My grandfather would be ashamed of us.

I mean the Us that look at hundreds—at a thousand, at a thousand plus a hundred, at a thousand plus hundreds more, (at thousands more?)—of dead bodies, at civilians, noncombatants; at families, at fathers and grandfathers, at infant boys and at their sisters and their cousins, and at their cousins’ cousins, and at their aunts, and at their dogs—and say:

                                                So what?                                                 So, fucking, what.

They deserved it. They must have deserved it. They probably deserved it. Didn’t they deserve it? They picked the wrong __________. But what about the ____________? He’d be ashamed, that is, if he weren’t already stiff—shed a tear, that is, if he weren’t already frozen inside of a concrete room, underneath the city of ___________; if he weren’t already numb from a left- or right-ward thumb-shift from Some Soldier, flippant, indicating: labor, or gas chamber, for the lines of

                                                                                                   Millions

Who’d picked wrong too. Who’d picked the wrong bodies to be born into.            Well,

                       . . .well.            

                                       So did they.  

                                                              Didn’t they?                          

                                                                                       “They.”

Them. Terrorists. The ones who hate Us. The Ones from whom We protect Ourselves. The Bad Ones.

                               They kill

                                                         indiscriminately,

                               don’t They?

They send their children to die, don’t They?                                                                        They love death, don’t They? They inflict death.                                They normalize death.                                                                      They must                                                                                           Love death.

Sure

                                                              we do.  Sure, Them do.  Don’t Us?

Maybe some Us        

                       would be ashamed

                                                       of It,

                                                                   If Death, to Us, were stranger. If we could locate Ourselves in the bodies of These Others,

              which

                               once,

                                                  We were, and

                                                                                   Almost: not even.

Almost without, inside a concrete tunnel, underneath the city of _______.

If Some Soldier had not pointed right. If Some Leader had __________.

                                                                                                                             ...maybe.                               If We weren’t already

                                                                            This                                                                                                           Numb. --DM, 8/2014

[deadseafishing]

‘Pussy Riot’ Sounded a Clarion Call in Russia—Were We Listening?

                                                       When the annals of history have been written, edited furiously, and then reedited—after the confrontations, then collusions, of vainglorious victors—three things will be remembered about feminist Russian punk-rock band ‘Pussy Riot’: 1) They had what was easily one of the best band names ever concocted, 2) They weren’t so much “a band” as they were a collective of some dozen-and-a-half performance artists who melded punk music with ski-mask costumes & guerilla performances to broadcast political convictions, and 3) They helped raise the slow-bubbling anger over the neo-czar-like rule of Vladimir Putin into something closer to a slow-boil, galvanizing the former Soviet-empire’s disparate youth movements to rally as one body—for the right of people to love whom they pleased, for the voice of womyn in a society that often treats them as an afterthought to male concerns, and for the values of democratic due process over the increasingly paternal-fascist Putin/Russian Orthodox Church alliance—at least for the duration of the fallout from their most notorious stunt, which landed 3 of them in jail & butterflied Pussy Riot into an internationally-lauded symbol of feminist-flavored political resistance. On February 12th, 2012, just a year-and-a-half after their formation—though their political predecessor & brain-trust ‘Voina’ (translation: ‘War’), a Russian performance group of street-artists (think Banksy but in motion), which included members who would later form P.R., had been active since around 2007—Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and two other womyn entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, where church services were not being held, changed into colorful balaclavas, and began to deliver what they called a “punk-rock prayer”—imploring “Mother of God, Drive Putin Away” (also the title of the accompanying song)—to an establishment otherwise utilized for keeping submissive peoples in check (& womyn in non-threatening roles).  They were protesting the upcoming “re-election” of Vladimir Putin, almost certain to win due to his political strong-arming & over a decade of carefully-curated image-mongering of himself as a semi-God (a page straight out of Joe Stalin’s old playbook), corroborated & exacerbated by the Orthodox Church itself, especially when Patriarch Kirill called Putin a “miracle from God” earlier that same day in comments made openly supporting the Czarsky’s re-election.  The sight of a band of bold young womyn, wearing bright war-like masks & flailing their bodies as well as projecting their voices, must have bordered on the cathartic for observersespecially when viewed in the illumination of the long light of womyn who gave their lives trying to democratize Russia, like the politician Galina Starovoitova and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya (both murdered under mysterious circumstances by forces associated with Russian intelligence officers—Vladimir’s old job).

                           Five days later, the “criminal investigation” papers were filled, and less than a week after that, the womyn of P.R. who participated in the protest began to get arrested, charged with the ludicrously-labeled “crime” of “hooliganism driven by religious hatred.”  After months of a highly-publicized trial, about which even a dastardly-smirking one Vladimir Putin himself quipped to a “Russia Today” news camera that “although there was nothing good about what Pussy Riot did, still we should not judge them too harshly.”  Wink, wink, bro.  Three P.R. womyn were eventually sentenced to 2 years in prison, despite (or especially because of?) the full-throated support of British & American icons like Sting & The Red-Hot Chili Peppers.

  One can read more about the history, the incident, & the subsequent trial on the Internet, but the take-away here is tremendous & two-fold: 1) In Soviet Russia—I’m sorry, I meant some shit called “The Russian Federation”—President chooses YOU! (to go to jail for hurting his feelings, that is), and 2) We in the United States take our freedoms of speech & assembly not only for granted, we squander them on talking a lot but often saying little.  The U.S. is not Russia, but here too the forces of religious traditionalism hover over our rights, corporatist money endangers the power of our votes, and vituperative Supreme Court Justices have taken to toying with absolutely essential legislation like some off-kilter sentence in a personal novel.  It’s inspiring that artists like Pussy Riot (and Banksy, and countless others with less fame) are willing to put their freedoms & lives in jeopardy to fight bellicose patriarchies & dictators or blood-loving corporations & military industrial complexes, and certainly big stunts like performance-bombing a symbolic landmark are responsible for shifting the social consciousness in ways that can begin to chip away at the paradigm.  But when we allow the dissent to end at the symbolic act itself, the familiar first-as-tragedy-then-as-farce trajectory will curve again.  True, Pussy Riot may have been speaking to Russians more than anyone, but there are lessons to be extrapolated for all of us.  An injustice in one part of the world is an injustice everywhere; it is this mantra that will allow us to breach the next final frontier: our unnecessarily limiting conception of the national border.  We here can’t assume the responsibility of changing Russia (nor should we), but we can certainly resolve to cull from a global imagination, and we can remember—an act that has the power to save a whole people, and to give birth to a new one as well.

Let us remember then that we in the place where punk-rock & hip-hop & graffiti were born should never get so spoiled by our comforts that we forget to stand more vociferously with freedom fighters the world over (not just in oil-rich countries with dinky militaries) who sing protest songs with lyrics inspired by our own poets—nor should we forget to sharpen the tenor & tone of our own from time to time.

Because the threats of stagnation, complacency, & repression demand it.  Because the tugs of regression howl like dying twisters.  Because if we don’t, who will?  (And what would I even write about then?)

--DM, 3/14/13

[deadseafishing]

'Sweltering'

It's 2010, the world needs more compassion. A lot more love, a lot less reaction. A style that's free-thinkin' and untouched by sanctions--not meaningless gestures, I'm talking 'bout action. I'm talkin' revolution, but deaf ears turn to factions, they can't see that absolutists are the real blasphemes. I try to shine lights, but night-eyes can't stand 'em, I'm in the middle of this road and that path lies in fractions. I try to move wisely but can't avoid all these scratches, my heart is too big to be burst by detraction. Yeah I meditate but succumb to distractions, I wish my vision & foresight were as clear as my passions. --DM, 5/26/10

[deadseafishing]

‘On Chris Brown & Rihanna’

Rihanna—world-renowned pop star & recent jet enthusiast/journalist-kidnapper—has a song on her 7th studio album entitled  “Nobody’s Business,” featuring the 21st century's Ike Turner: Chris Brown.

And you know what? She’s right.

It isn’t any of our business. Following the infamous 2009 assault that left “Robyn F.” with a battered face and Chris Brown in a sea of trouble/bad tattoos—and left gossip rags in a 24-hour "news" cycle of endless speculation—media outlets & journalists took it upon themselves to turn the two young musicians into a parable of relationships gone awry. 

University students, activists, celebutantes, and any blogger worth half her weight in salt followed suit, mutating an awfully sad but basically private incident into the poster discussion for domestic violence at large. The PR machines behind both singers were collusive—trying first to whitewash the situation, before realizing that leaving it on constant spin was probably more profitable. The amount of literature that exists on the subject online alone is enough to fill a graduate program’s entire workload—and that’s excluding the unfathomable amount of user bloviating and bickering. Brown was quickly demonized & dismissed (howls for his head emanated from both the shallows & depths of the Internet alike); Rihanna was turned into a superficial portrayal of a victim and pitied (never acknowledged for those aspects of her that were strong and not victim-like); and never was a genuine dialogue about the sorts of conditions that lead people to act & react violently—or what such violence can do to either person psychologically—seriously engaged.

As for Rihanna & Brown themselves, the media decided their thoughts & feelings on their own story did not really matter. There were interviews, sure, but with each passing article, op-ed, and year, the two were systematically deprived of the agency to own their own narratives. Yes, they tweeted suggestively & made allusive songs, but any school counselor will tell you that such passive-aggressiveness a cohesive catharsis does not make. 

It wasn't until Rihanna sat down for a one-on-one interview with Oprah, more than 3 years after the fact, that we really bothered to ask her how SHE felt about the incident, about her (then-former) partner—who, she told Oprah, really “needed help”, whose own abusive childhood & personal demons led him to actions that overnight morphed the public’s perception of him from sex symbol to monster, without ever acknowledging what trauma or wounds may lie beyond the camera’s glare. I’m not saying we should feel sorry for Brown, per se, but I do think it would be more useful to interrogate critically his psychological & emotional condition at the time, rather than simply to castrate him.

Nor did we bother, really, to ask Rihanna how she felt about the whole world using her personal hurt as a cheap-ish prop for a litany of discussions about what’s wrong with relationships between men and women, all of which betrays one very real and glaring irony—that this same act of indulgence and disregard for privacy/people's dignity is not so different from the same sort of evils this self-righteous media gluttony was attempting to disavow. I agree: It’s important for us to have honest, open dialogues with one another about the kinds of wickedness that usually get buried in hushed tones and behind closed doors—like domestic abuse—especially with teenagers & young people. It’s equally important that, in allowing our public figures their right to heal in private, we begin to heal our own malicious tendency to drag the most well-known amongst us through the mud for the sake of our insatiable, schadenfreude-laden thirst for entertainment.  

By turning Brown & Rihanna into easily digestible tropes for our own over-consumption, rather than recognizing them as complex individuals deserving of our compassion, we robbed ourselves of an opportunity to have a dignified discussion of the nature of abuse, conflicts between partners, the hard work of relationships, the pressures that come with success, and the mixed fortune of being a young person living under the ever-watchful eye of public scrutiny.

And now, the media is reporting that Chris Brown & Rihanna are back together. Endless ‘twit-pics’ & public appearances corroborate this, and the album itself might well be called one long love letter to Brown. Of course, opinion-peddlers and graduate students writing dissertations are angry. And maybe this IS the sad saga—ripe with didactic parable—of a troubled woman wrongly identifying with and forgiving her abusive lover, despite pleas from the chattering masses (and maybe even their managers).

Or maybe it’s just another turn in the lives of two twenty-somethings, and maybe it really isn’t any of our business at all. --DM, 12/4/12

[deadseafishing]

'Тоска'

  “Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness."

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels, it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” ― Vladimir Nabokov

***

  'Тоска*'

"On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given." ―Gary Shteyngart, 'Absurdistan' (2006) We don't make the tools that  make us But we make sure we buy them. I've bought into more fallacies  than I can count; Though even that act of  enumeration would  essentially be  exploitation. I can't even separate my yearning from my conditioning anymore. But still,  I Do-- Yearn, that is. For-- Short bursts of  inspiration, And-- Big spurts of  perspicacity, Plus-- Reciprocal, reverential  rapture, But-- Roots  have a way of  pulling at the polymers  of progress. I just wish they understood  that settling... Actually dissolves  a compound, Rather than makes it whole. But even if I were  to twirl eternally,  like some centrifugal dervish, I could never relinquish  the difficult work  of locating myself... Between the twin beats  of a heart Divided against  itself. For this, we need our tools. But we don't need to sell  ourselves... To chase what shiny coins  can never Replace. --DM, 1/10/2013

*Written in thumb on an iPhone, at the AT&T store on E. 86th & 3rd Avenue, waiting for a charge.