palace of winds

I haven’t posted anything in a while, and I really don’t have anything to say at the moment, so I’ll give you the old creative writing cop-out.

Berlin The lion lying in the Pergamon, stone-faced and sleeping in this split city does not dream of east/west nor think of knitting scars, cranes, construction, but recalls the sun and the fierceness and having his knuckles where daisies are carved bathed in blood and milk. He is a stolen deity and their now-native god Guilt is (here) so much bigger, fat and feasting, that the lion closes his eyes against them and dreams by the broken blue promenade of Babylon.

We had to write curse poems for creative writing, and though yesterday and this morning I was feeling milk-mild and gentle and loving of everybody, now I’m all self-righteous and angry again. It’s going on two years this February, and I still hate him. A lot.

Om Mani Padme Hum “Nonviolence,” you claimed. “Lovingkindness.” Well, I’ll give you nonviolence. You stand there with your needle mouth up-curled, smirking, and with your sleepy Buddha eyes like you’re looking out beyond all of us, your platoon of trick sheep, out over the whole world and you’re knowing e v e r y t h i n g . Bet you’ve even guessed this, the fire in my twisting stomach and all the things I’d really like to say to you, all these words drooping a little at the edges, cowed, my lowing scorn, but remember: a flower can stand against the barrel of a gun. So next time you say The midterm is important You will fail the midterm I don’t give tests early I do not want to hear it don’t give us a “fun day”. Don’t chuckle at half of St. Louis ditching when I’m stumbling into Minneapolis at 2 a.m. my car shivering with frost and the night like pitch and the street lights out and the radio faltering and my mind swimming back to 7:30 a.m. wake-up time ’cause if I ditch now what it means is upside down in a snow bank. I am more than this body filling another seat in your classroom three days a week without fail five minutes early and ten minutes late (because we do not need to eat and those markers on the clock, those numbers, those are just suggestions, right? and we are not shifting in our seats we are not watching that clock’s spinning arms and thinking 5:20 on a Friday night 5:22 . . . 5:25 . . . 5:27 . . . ) We’re all finally free of you and your “lovingkindness”. But don’t mistake me: I have learned something. Now these thoughts are bullets these thoughts are nails and my mind a hammer and you splintered wood.

For creative writing tomorrow we’ve all been charged to plagiarize a poem from our book (Thus Spake the Corpse) — to steal the form and/or idea and make it our own. So, I did.

FAREWELL TO MINNESOTA POEM (in the tradition of Ronnie Burk) Bye now! abominable marshmallow coat factory, Mall of America ringing w/ wedding bells & screaming roller coasters, Dakota bone-sewn bedrock, old plump Norwegian housewife ancestors miles belowground, radio humming Garrison Keillor, I love you too! Showy Lady Slipper blinking pink beneath tall black ever-greens, moon hanging huge & orange & unseen above raging white blizzard, tiny Halloween witch-girls anticipating candy corn, cars full of waving friends-not- yet-met, Northern Lights white picket fencing stars all the way to Canada. Big red cherry balancing on big silver spoon at The Walker biggest ball of twine in Darwin Snoopy snooping around downtown Lucy offering advice near the Mississippi riverbank where I, for old time’s sake, pose with F. Scott Fitzgerald have a shot at the Pig’s Eye w/ ghosts of Al Capone, John Dillinger, Babyface Nelson see ya later friends, relatives, sprawling family tree grown up around potlucks w/ hotdish & bars & lefsa & lutefisk around ten thousand lakes, a hundred thousand boats barnacled w/ sly Eurasian milfoil motoring around heron, herring, mosquitoes, loons, monarchs, fishers reeling in sleek trout shivering w/ mercury, teach me to sing! robin in red-breasted fall maples over Summit Ave. copper dome roof of the Basilica of St. Mary turning slowly green in late Indian (Minnehaha Mahtomedi Wayzata) summer may your blessings spread over this coming winterland, quicken cold hearts & old hates into the sudden spring rapture of every fresh start…

My name is Bob. When I was eight, I joined the circus. It was all the elephants that got to me — a fascination with big ears, I guess. I spent the next five years moisturizing their knees. During that time I was taken under the wing of an aging, cross-dressing acrobat who trained me in the way of circus folk and bee keeping. One thing led to another, and I ended up serving cocktails at the UN, but unfortunately my allergy to green wool stockings forced me to quit that job and begin my life as a vagrant/hired assassin. Like all vagrant/hired assassins, I spent two years in a rotting Mexican prison before digging my way out with a rusted spoon and finally making my way to Wall Street where I earned my first million selling cheese dip for hot salted pretzels. My partner was busted for tax fraud and I decided to leave the life in pursuit of higher education.

In my first year at Truman State, I suffered a massive heart attack and died. The mad scientist who lives in the catacombs beneath Science Hall unearthed me and restored me to life via a risky experiment involving osmosis and candy corn. I have the brain of a psychopath, the heart of a baboon, and the toe of an emu. I also have 67 cats who I have trained via our psychic connection to jump above the ceiling tiles in my dorm room whenever the SA or George Bush is near. At night we huddle beneath my bed while my roommate performs elaborate seances, calling upon the baboon donor of my heart in an attempt to turn me and my cats into an evil army of semi-undead bee keepers. Come to think of it, my father always did say there was a fortune to be made in honey somehow.

When I’m not training my cats for the 2004 Olympics synchronized swimming competition, I enjoy the long walk to McClain, junk email, and cricket infestations. This coming winter I hope to debut my new recipe for the Honey Bun, so watch your grocer’s bread aisle.

All of Anna’s dolls committed suicide sooner or later. It happened so often that there arose a complex set of rules to govern it, a series of contests, a bi-monthly festival. The attrition rate was enormous because Anna’s mother had little patience for mending, but some of the hardier or more cautious dolls claimed to remember the summer Polly Purple swept the competition for three months running. Some people claimed she’d made a deal with the dog. He did rough her up often enough, but usually she impaled herself on crooked nails or got trapped in doors or, in one brilliant afternoon, slipped free at just the right moment to lose half her hair and a whole inch off her side seam in an escalator accident that shut down mall transportation for over two hours. The porcelain dolls whispered darker stories about assisted suicides, and though no one ever said Laura’s name, everyone remembered the glass-faced princess who fell from her high perch under mysterious circumstances.