Now, to just stirring up some of those almost half a century old memories so that if you have anything specifically to ask about what I recall from those days I c'n maybe talk usefully about what I perceived going on at the conference, bein' one of the people around the outside and, then, being in that reading which wasn't much on the inside, but was on the program. You said something about profiling me as one of those readers, too, so I've got to try to pull up what profile I had then, and why it was relevant. Why Gary (Snyder) asked me to read. I don't recall, yet, his actual asking or where it was or a why, though I can guess. Hilary Ayer, who I was with from 63 until 70 and I were back in Berkeley, or maybe north Oakland, because don't recall which of our places, at the time of the conference. Hanging out around the campus wasn't difficult. Weather was good and a lot of activity was on lawns (and in the Med, of course). But, earlier, when Gary said I could sit in on a writing workshop he was doing at UCB, we were still in the city. Most of what profile I had has to be from our time in the city and mainly in the year when I started and, for maybe a year, did Wednesday night readings for Bob Stubbs in his Blue Unicorn coffee house on Hayes. After all, 1965 was the year of my first book. Len Fulton, Bob Fay, Andy Curry and three other people had put together the cost of a magazine, so that's pretty low profile. Did not put in Vivisection or Shaman Songs (which was my second dustBOOK in 67), but I'd read them at the Unicorn . . . . One night I read Vivisection and a guy came up afterward and said he'd been about ready to hang up his parole, but just maybe he'd pass on that. Which profile stuff c'n spread from

Domino players on the yard
Lined on the tables: wooden faces
With white and black eyes — players
And pieces alike without expression.

Rain comes; it is whipped around
The tables and under:

                                     an angry wind
A dervish mystically dancing pain.

Domino players on the yard
Don't see the rain; their ritual
Belongs to a God of the servo mechanism.

My coat is thin, tugged about blue
Ears. Click. Click. Click.
Domino players on the yard
Lined on the tables. Such

Furies as we know shall
be set upon thee.

I've been scratching my head to get the blood flowing, but I can't recall how I met Gary, but at some point he invited me to sit in on a writing seminar he was doing at UCB and I said (I must have), sure. He was living on Green Street and riding across the bay on a new Honda (later stolen off the street). After the session, we'd sit on the terrace over a coffee or whatever and talk, then bike back over the bridge. I'd been on bikes even drove a small one briefly, but up in that wind . . . .

305 HONDA

for Gary Snyder

Leaving a forest of bikes,
leaving the university, headed for San Francisco.
        [After watching the wistful look
        at a different set of handlebars, a wider grip,
        a deeper control.]
Leaning into the curve, sliding along the arm
of inertia,
settling into the traffic, edging around it,
headed for San Francisco.

Move forward, hold onto me, not the bike.
Find the center
of gravity,         the Buddhist
oneness & uniqueness.
Leaning against the arm of the curve.
Two poets, personal perceptions
one rider, multi-armed, -legged.
Point of intimacy:
from the first tools, crafts,
metals & men laboring, hot, sweat
wetted, laboring with flesh & minds.
Fires & dreams, fires & gradually the machines.
The long sight.
The whole technology, a series
of carefully timed openings, man with his fire
manipulating the frozen rhythms
of road surfaces,
the intricate network of wind-rivers, the falls,
lurches, sudden eddies.
A line of intended movement.
Be loose & heavy
against the movement's changes.
The changes -
we throw our movements out, read them
& prophesy.

Along a bay shore highway,
wind falling loose, snapping tight with a whipped
crack at my ear, past drift-wood sculptures
on mud-flats - a sailing ship, a
locomotive, a huge & angry Indian -
movie sets, but with a looser texture, allowing
the different movements of sea & sky to show thru.
Past - leaning to the curve, headed for the tollgate
& the rise of the bridge.

A quarter given, a brief touch of a stranger's
hand, shoulders moving in front of me
& the bike jumping up over the bay, drawing
the winds into the center -
the bay, like any sea, the lands rushing into the center,
the carefully timed movements of man & his fire.

The other poet calling
back
over his shoulder,
the voice cut loose, drawn thin,
wavering, snapping past my ear.
Gone. Missed.
A strange wind-eel, wavering, curious, vanished.
The silent wind-eels crawling like ropes
over my forehead, thru my hair, down my neck.
Vanishing.
Wind-eels edging around my glasses, pulling
at them. Testing my vision.
Crawling into my eye-sockets, changing the shape
of things seen -
the shape-changers, the wind-flowing
& sounds of rice-paddy girls
& distances.

The bridge supports reach up,
drop back, & the wind rushes down, pushes at us,
keeps up its peculiar chants & animal cries, comes
out of the void & sings of the invisible planets,
suns, distances; & the changed landscape sits
in its new perspectives, indifferent
to the wind-rivers, silver & muted violets, the poems

at the edges of the bay
large shapes at the edges of the bay, chiseled
out of light
                 the rough sketches, reaching out of
sight, nature's poems & the clumsy rectangles
& silent windows of man's,
the edges of the grounds carefully surveyed, the hours
of construction computed, paid for.

The cathedral chants of the wind; we lean to the curve,
falling into the shadow
of the city. Our sound louder, now, than the wind-rivers'.
Words coming back,
& a heaviness, & the old geometries carrying us over
subdued hills;
falling into the shadow & headed
for a vodka martini

. . . I'm trying to get a forty-seven year old swirl to rouse up and then settle down.... I don't yet have any idea what I read, who else read, though I remember one reader because he and I were recycling names other's 'd used. that's Jim Thurber. I c'n sort of see the auditorium we had or maybe it was a lecture hall or something. I don't remember walking into it. Not many people. Readers, a few friends. Olson showed up and with at least one person because he was wasted and talked through the whole thing — which echoed pretty well in an empty auditorium. But it as okay . . . . It was his conference and no talent scouts had shown up.

I'm pretty sure I'd already written "Credo" in those first years, though I couldn't read it at the Unicorn or any place else, which you'll see. A few years later Al Winans published it in my Felon's Journal. I was playing with composition by field (which I think was Duncan's, but Olson made a big thing of it in his projective verse stuff). Here's a link that'll get it on my site. It's a book page. http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/FJCredo.htm

I sure didn't try to read that and I doubt I read 305 Honda. I might have read some of my shaman songs, with a nod to Gary, though not like his shaman songs in Myths & Texts nor, as most like to think, "Indian" knock-offs . . . . Not the whole of them, as that's take nearly half an hour . . . . Here's a view of 'em. http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/SS_TOC

You know, you're getting off light what with my habit of going back and roping in context. I was writing versions of this letter while dancing in and out of sleep last night and the night before went clear back to getting out of San Quentin, in late 59, and taking up residence in June & Herman's hotel across from the Oakland police station on 14th street with other new ex-cons (I'd served four-nine of a five to life for armed robbery and had three-three on parole going. Anyway, I got a job in the basement of Kaiser Hospital on MacArthur and Broadway. The main building had been the old Fabiola building and I'd been born in it, October 5, 1931. I met a young guy named Lu Garcia and we got to walking around, talking and I stumbled onto, or, I guess, into, Berkeley . . . . See how all the trails interweave . . . .?

Now, (speaking to Richard) I'm going to go enjoy that walk you and Lu are taking. http://www.physikgarden.com/berkeley_walk.html

and, from your sketch of Berkeley street life you don't need me for the redundancies I c'n add, which leaves me free to meander . . . .

For now, before I leave for your walk with Lu, here's a Telegraph Ave. poem though the coffeehouse isn't the Med, probably Hardcastles', but, as usual, I'm hazy on dates. Anyway, it's a long night's journey into day...

OBSIDIAN

A pilgrim's processional

"your poems carved from obsidian"
A way of telling me
I have the Evil Eye.

Cut away from poet scenes. Di...vision
Nobody is left to talk to. Slumping in Hardcastle's coffee house. Die . . . .vision.
Can't get it out.
Not the landscape wasted, Mr. E.
Me wasted, image chained in the center of my head.
My monastery: place of singled star.
"Man" s p e l l e d backward is "name".

Unhoused and living on sidewalks.
Walking all night; watching for the sun.
Hello Helios!
Food over Berkeley hills, an eating of pure light.
On sight: loosing belly snakes
held tight lest space winds suck the last crawling
        into their black draft,
the sun coming yellow obsidian.

No winter in Berkeley
according to the sleepers behind steamed windows.
Blood running silver
in my 3:00 a.m. veins.
6:30 a.m. yellow-brown iodine stain
turn my head inside out
a flower opening.

Midnight coffee house closure
ejecting mumbling freaks into the night,
Venus long gone earlier a diamond tip
on the moon's horn. Mars hot.
Walked night sidewalks
Hunting poems in the greyed, grainy stuff.
Walking night sidewalks
                                    now
for lack of a bed's rent
feet fading into the grey blocks.

Walk diametered night.
Walk against being busted for having no place to go.
Walk to shove blood through slowing serpent body.
Walk to get away from each spot as it takes on the smell
        of my death place.
Sidewalk mania
fingers tipped
into wet cement
years earlier,
glyphs deciphering into
"return to go."

Mist.
Glasses evolving into ice.
I look out through frozen waterfalls.
Owl telling me: "Get off my turf."
Beak shattering the water.

Color sucked from the flowers
by vampire night. Night underneath
teeth sunk into pores.

Watch beat slamming my wrist
breaking up my pulse
sending its spiked blows
to cramp my heart.

Along sides of the street
see...mental squares
in mazed sequence
for a poet's sightings.
My ghost going back to a coffee table and
        warming ghost hands around a wavering cup,
telling the Virginia Slim girl
against a burlap coffee bean sack,
"I'd take yeh home
an' fuck yeh into smoke, jinn;
but livin' like I do
I've lost my ki."

Stoned on cold.
Window's echoed light a man of blue granite.

Wanted, from the beginning, to teach.
To reach a poetfinger (non-electric brain probe)
into the quiet cells
and waken the fine hairs, the nerve hairs,
        the light drafting edges.
Secret of Jupiter: induce flow.
Nothing thrown. All done with mirrors.

Helios! The pyre amid the ghosts in my senses.
My feet are numb and numb the two legs.
My back is numb and time, gone numb, stops its flow.
A wooden bench melts to velvet.
A magnet of velvet tugging at my back, flesh drawn out
        from my rib cage
but lying down is a bust, a sun-burst of cop
in dark arrest.
Demon screeching under the street lamps
of his city.

Thick maple light in Mel's drive-in
        and golden waffles to soak it up,
if pocket lint were gold.
Stopped hands of the watch just above my stopped hand.
Blood running silver
in my 3:05 a.m. veins.
6:30 a.m.     yellow-brown vomit stain
stomach heat
a seared line in the sky.

My ghost going back to a coffee table and
        warming ghost hands on a wavering white dwarf,
silvered see...mental squares
against burlap windows.
Water gas under grey coat.
Water gas under grey skin.
Water gas under grey nerve lining.
Breathing an icy placental water
        cold belly of a bitch Muse.

Blood running silver.
'Lectric pain.
3:47 a.m. 'lectric vein.
6:30 a.m. platinum sky
gold tears fry
turn my head inside out
my hand on a cold dawn.

Night is 300,000 steps
on spongy knees
under broken lips and icicle nostrils.
Dawn is pale piss.
Everybody out and hurrying, hands in coat pockets.
And it's warm enough
to sleep on wet grass
dreaming a woman's warm belly
and smell of breakfasts
while ants crawl in my eyes.
Uncarved obsidian.

" . . . . Luis Garcia, my closest friend and collaborator, has been my greatest mentor, always present with insights and humorous twists of perspective. I met Lu right after the Berkeley Poetry Conference, and we continued meeting with other poets for weeks to come. Lu's style of writing is unique—playing with the words within the words, he directed me to meditate on the morning light and helped me understand that it was important to discover my own voice, to forge a blade, as he put it. Lu's poems sizzle. They move so fast, if you aren't ready, you miss them. By imitating Lu's use of jazz rhythms and breath notation, I began to read my poems aloud. Just like Leadbelly learned to play the 12-string, I learned my craft by putting my spine against the piano." (Richard Denner)

Finished the walk, went back and picked up the preface. Great. I've never seen a description of Lu, of his usefulness.... 'Course, the forging of a blade. Most anything jumping out at me will have a ref. to a tool....

The mention of people on the windows of California Hall wakened not only the memory of seeing people on those sills but where the lawn was that many of us lay sprawled upon. And the windows opened for warmth . . . . confirmed that it was weather for the peripheral encampments. But I do not recall seeing anybody entering through those windows or showing signs of listening . . . . I c'n tell you definitely that nobody reported within hearing distance that entry fees were tossed out or I would very likely have wandered in to listen — even in the good weather enjoyed on the outer edges. Continued conversation in homes and coffee houses? Well, no way I was likely to be invited to the homes, but I sort of remember sitting at the edge of a conversation in the Med, far back on the first floor. No invitation I c'n recall, but I had a chair, Hilary sitting on the floor beside me with long, amber hair. I recall her comment that Ginsberg was either looking at her hair or my crossed-legs ankle. No recollection of what I said. I'd have said today that he was likely listening to somebody (eyes would move if he was speaking) and his eyes were left where they'd been as he started listening. I don't know why I'd wandered back there. I usually went up to the balcony, sat near the front. Don't like sitting without a table . . . .

THE SEA

Again at the table.
My arms, just below the elbows,
calloused from the gentle
swells of the table pulsing
under these twin hulls.

And I watch intently
down into this paled sea
from which
forces of constant rising
push into the swells

those creatures that will burst
forth to flounder or find footing
on my beach
and tell me in their dying
gasps or first breaths of alien

ways that shaped them
beyond my ken
and sent them, in their
last moment, or first, to stretch
my ken.

I need the table to throw my poet kit, a South American woven bag with a "across the chest and back" strap, on and to plant a coffee cup on, and, often as not those twin hulls . . . . Anyway, my memory of that reading, and it's here I might have something to write that'd be relevant, description, what c'n be drawn from it . . . . And nothing. Not being asked, not going to a building and entering it. And just a few stills, or such short clips they register and stills . . . .

Tools and materials. You know from my other notes I like that way of talking, thinking. What I've been tossing into the cyberhum in the phone lines (I use a modem, too) is all about making the poem with tools, mainly the line-break. A lot of talk about the American haiku, for instance, being when you come down to it a three line poem. With or without syllable countings like 5-br-7-br-5. Well, you could make one of those with a single word, tying off a line by karate-chopping the word, with or without a marking hyphen (best without)

I outta say, that by is key. It's not the river that's jumped into . . . . I use the American yo for the Japanese ya which marks the major break and counts. With it, I've only 5-6-5, I guess, but I read the yo as a bell-tone and it feels like two. Anyway, I got onto this by thinking about blank verse and everybody thinking good Will was writing in "iambic pentameter" which means counting and leaving a line made only by the recurring count. I figured, he was, in your terms, tying off the stitching holding a line together and stitching up another one . . . . He was making, to keep the innards from their terms, pentiambic lines and made lines was the key and these were played off against the phrasing and the line-break was the tool. Not so much a blade, though, as a Swiss Army Knife. Anybody who c'n count c'n do the metric thing. making lines is harder.

If ye take the jazz guy (and I know, I ain't got a license), he's got to learn how to play the horn before he c'n get it to talk at all, and then, if he wants to get some different sounds out of it, he's got to find a way to make it do that. I talk about it to set up for talking about playing our language-and-body instrument the same way, which is enough to make eyes glaze over . . . .

Oh, I'll add about that sketching, still borrowing from the jazz guy who has to earn to play his instrument before making it do anything useful. I was saying to some folks - maybe not listening, but exposed - who were getting together to play audience and give each other "feedback". I was sayin', poets' shoptalk ought to be sketching ideas, not making suggestions or agreeing or disagreeing with content . . . . o, you pick up your instrument and you play a passage, then, maybe, riff a couple different takes on it to see how they'd work. I c'n imagine how that'd go over. Bill Evans, the jazz guy . . . .

One night we were playing "Tuxedo Junction," and for some reason I got inspired and put in a little blues thing. "Tuxedo Junction" is in B-flat, and I put in a little D-flat , D, F thing in the right hand. It was such a thrill. It sounded right and good, and it wasn't written, and I had done it.

What I'll do here is throw in a couple Med poems. First one on learning from place, a person, things at hand. The other's about blending times to let 'em transform each other and make a third thing worth playing . . . .

TARO
for Julia V.

Place them on the table
for reading designs in time.
Taken, each, from my deck.
The first card -
this cup of dark stained waters.
The second -
this squared, curl-fingered hand.
The third -
crossings in this live realm.
And more cards
to be laid out in woven array,
with each
only to be found,
its place in the deck
its last mystery.
And in this laying out
of Universe's momentary chips
there is no tarrying,
only the turning, in wild
rhythm, of rota-
ting, humming, reddened wheel.
And one thing
more - the reading in array,
the finding of what I've found.

QUICK SKETCH
for Vickie

Shadow haired
raccoon eyed
black clothed
interweaving the sophisticate
from some Balkan state
and Billy the Kid,
the wench, Trian's "beautiful
bi-sexual in Berkeley," half slinks
half stalks into
Caffe Mediterraneum
in her Balkan gunslinger's
black trousers stuffed
into needle-heeled gunslinger's boots
with gunslinger's black
blouse tail-tied to set off white
cleav-
age and fair
maiden breasts.

At the table, after she
paces off the streets between tables
where shootouts occur,
she unloads the trick holster on
her right hip.
And what's in there are photos
of her paintings -
and this Balkan Billie
the Kid is
a post-WWI German Expressionist
left out of the shows
with Munch and Schiele and Kokoshka
and Kollewitz, maybe
wiped out in the influenza epi-
demic before her first
canvas and waiting to be reborn
as Balkan gunslinger
in Berkeley.

The black Pilot
Fineliner lines going down
on the napkin
at the lower rim of my vision,
a growing blossom in
the napkin's center,
can't catch my vision
as I watch the pale
gunslinger's midnight
face, waiting
the bursts of umber
conflagrations
roaring up, again and
again, to see
splintered spaces where I
thought I waited to
exchange seeings.

" . . . . it's just that for me, the avenue was the grail"

"especially the ones i knew that climbed up on the window ledges of california hall to eavesdrop on the berkeley poetry conference, and paul x and i climbed up at random and found ourselves outside creeley's workshop, there were a number of these workshops going on during each day for two weeks, but creeley was going on at this location, and it was warm and the windows were open, and creeley was saying..." (Richard Denner)

How could such a Quest, once you'd swarmed up the aides of a building, not have Creeley inside an open window just then? How could a colleague not urge inviting you in? how could these magic beings not hand you a grail in which to catch notes . . . . ?

So, the focal point was a "conference" And, now, it's a refresh point maybe not quite an oasis in time, but a place in time when forces crackle like unseen lightning . . . .

Somewhere along the line, with nods to Attar and Chaucer, among my Cafe poems - meaning, mostly, Med poems - I broke down these conferences to their fundamental connivings, though I had more earthy interests than sweeping in disciples...

CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

Find the rebirthing
love? - personal renaissance?

The only way
is to nudge into being
a whole damned Renaissance.

No other way.
All the hunting grounds
are used up, worked
out.

Inspired thoughts come.
The design for a hunting preserve.
Pull those I might wave
my Poet at, pull
'em into a room.
Then wave it in long, slow
wavings, deep, encircling moves,
wreathes of voice and word, winds
from moving hands, lips, eyes.

Make it double barreled:

a conference, place
where secrets
are divulged.

A reading, a place
where egos, theirs, may unfurl.

Be subtle: not just women
invited. Everybody. Poets,
publishers, patrons, those tickled by
muses . . .

Then, slick down the heavy wool
on my bent leg, tune
my three note whistle.
Attend

BUT, how I loved, hell, envied, your quest and how the eerie forces of chance wrote that script, from CalPoly, up the coastal path, onto that building, in through the window and into Creeley's realm . . . . I thought, yes, I'm on that list of readers, some memory of being in the room, and, now, what with the image of people climbing California Hall (I'd even forgotten where the lawn was we were all camped on, the event coming back. I'd had, still have, no memory of seeing anybody going in, and I'm quite sure word never reached me of doors being opened to non-paying anybody. I wasn't included in after workshop gatherings or parties in homes, I recall that one gathering was probably in the downstairs back of the Med. Somebody must have said, Come on over," but that is only wild surmise. . . . If anything useful was said in my presence I do not recall it. So, while writing notes like a diary of my reading, I was envisioning a page…with two long out of print chaps (made of woven tumbling weeds) books thumbnails on the side. They are from 1965 and 1967 (close enough, and better printing). They were published in El Cerrito - though not by in publishers - and so would belong. On the page, well something sparkling, intriguing, coming out of being in that reading and touching the spirit, or spirits, of the conference and, as I picked up on it, your quest, fit for the refresh point.

The going back to that Telegraph avenue all too easy and not evoking anything much, the feel of shit and spit ground into concrete underfoot, shadows, being a shadow, a ghost of Telegraph Avenue. It's a fifteen minute walk from where I live now, but I haven't been over there in some years so it was easy enough to walk it from before. . . .

. . . . people, conversations, events, the long talks of discovery that, maybe, did happen in the homes and conversations, hell, even in a workshop. And, if you generalize to all the goings on in your "Athens of the west", well, I'm still a ghost. Hilary, who I was with until 70 (the year, not my age), went out at Sather Gate with Facino (Doug Palmer), wrote for the passers by . . . . I didn't.

My conversations of discovery, my following toward my grail (oh, I've got one, and God help, as they say, the man or woman without one, or more) will be pretty much dialogs or trialogs held in the confines of my imagination where, indeed, I can get at people long dead or as yet unborn. You saw something, for instance, of what poets around me, among friends, is with the "barnstorming spirit"

. . . . take Lu, he led me into Berkeley and San Francisco and what was to follow from that basement in Kaiser. Now, he drops by the house every year or two with a beautifully made book. (Sends me notices of readings he's given, such as the one in Cody's just before it closed and one at the 4th Street location just after they moved). I haven't given or attended a reading since 1980. Anyway,the visits with books. He generally says something about being impressed by my intelligence. . . . But the other half of the sentence would be "if not by the poems". . . . I'm not plugging in enough context. I'm grabbing at a feel and I'm only leading toward something else, anyway, about Olson, if you'd believe it. I have no recall of Lu ever saying he liked a poem, or a passage. . . .

. . . . I've not been reverential to the pillars of the scenes. I suspect people think I was name-dropping when I named Gary Snyder on 305 Honda. But too little, too late would be the official opinion. He was driving the bike. We'd been talking on the UCB terrace. I used Basho's sensibilities to phrase as a seventeen syllable, 5, 7, 5, haiku, if you take the embedding and read from a preceding comma and into an empty line after a period. . . . I did that, as they say, unwittingly. But this was my epiphany in the wind.

I mentioned my grail. . . . My grail is what's out past what I've got going in a poem. . . . And in talk about poems. So, I gave you a link to "Credo" in Felon's Journal . . . http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/FJCredo.htm

. . . which pushed "composition by field" into something useable, uses it, and turns that field into a poet's mind-stuff and reaches through for what comes from - well, I've got to use some word - "deeper". . . .

. . . . I'll explain how my grail search works. . . Then, I'll knock off this lengthy shoving through the winds of time to get back from, say, a cold, grey Telegraph outside the Soup kitchen where Julia liked to spring for soup and thick bread to my little North Berkeley village (of sorts) and, I fear, old age. . . .

. . . Olson spoke of going beyond phrasing to "forces just beginning to be studied" that integrate as impulse. He wrote (in a quote I just found on the Web), ". . . get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen."

Don't hurry it. Like a gymnast, do one skill at a time. Chunk it. Then, fast, slow, it's always full of time. Mark off the relative times. Sit at the center of it. For us, one skill at a time matches up pretty well to one phrase at a time. I thought of a gymnast as a follow up to thinking of the horn player (who I use to get poets to feel their voicing of the phrases) to draw on a bit of conversation I heard while watching a 2001 women's gymnastics team competition. Thirteen-year old Carly Patterson, the 2004 Olympic all-around gold medalist, was on the high bar. Al Trautwig, the sportscaster, said, "It's almost like she's moving in slow motion." Tim Dagget, ex-Olympic gold-medalist and commentator said, "She takes her time. She does one skill at a time. I don't know that this can be taught."

Two and half paragraphs and the pop-up annotations are in a small window. Here, it's spread out and I don't feel like punching in line breaks, but you can read the whole annotation if comfort and the poem. I grabbed a typical Olson thought off the Web as I was coming out of what I was saying about playing phonemes, and laid it down. Now, here's grail work. It's said by a boss poet. So, what's wrong with it? I'd take something I'd said and ask the same question. What's wrong with it? And I was playing old gymnastics tapes, because Carly was sixteen when she won the 2004 Olympic gold metal. I use the tapes when I'm working out. I don't want work-out tapes with just more gym. But I want indoors, individual sets, but some crowd and the noise of competition. So, gymnastics has been the best and I've got 'em going back to the late eighties. This one was one I'd been looking at earlier in the day or the day before and this small exchange had been in my head for years.

Amateurs, and it'd seem some pro's, even a boss poet, c'n get into that breathy'breathless kind of poetry, and to be sure, the desire for a "rush".... Two things cause falls from, say, the bars in gymnastics. Something happens and you lose momentum. Or, you rush it and lose it. . . .

Carly isn't in slow motion. She'd lose the delicate interplay of momenta if she did that... What she's doing is so clearly articulating what she's doing, the separate skills that are then seamlessly welded together that she forces detailed seeing and the time slow down is in the observer. . . .

Well, I get into playing it again, riffing on it. And nothing more would come of it. But, you can see how my conversation wouldn't fit easily with people who'd discovered guys who seemed to know something and around that something was acceptance and belonging and having a sense of some solid ground underfoot - maybe even ending up in novels.

So, I was a ghost on Telegraph and, now, I'm a ghost in the phone wires, an undetectable thread in the billion-thread coursings of cyberhum in the phone lines and the air currents. . . .

For the hell of it, I'll close with just the opening of "Credo". If spaces before or within a line are collapsed by your mail program, it's only a small death. The footnote number signals reading in a side note (the two column page) and that's a voiced phase-shift or shape-changing. . . . Figure it's a subtle grab at your attending, like the Old Mariner grabbing with his eyes when grabbing with his aging arm failed to grip the other, but now it's no Sargasso sea, but, abandoning surfing where vision is turned in toward the beach and the mall behind it, and taking up cyber- seafaring. . .

The syllable moved
somewhere in the void1
a basic block where we build.
Later, a phoneme was isolated
& another: a mu-phoneme & a pi-phoneme
several hundred in all,
but these are seen only in hermetic chambers
where magnetic forces are intensified to MIND.

The syllable moved
displaying an attractive intelligence
described, first, as ACTION

at a distance:
)syllables cluster(
-a one dimensional cluster forms
a LINE

-a two dimensional cluster forms
a STANZA

-clusters carry architect