i decided to miss out on the urbana slam in favor of good dining. i had a goat cheese/roasted tomato/seared onions/basil crêpe as the main course and then a fresh strawberry/nutella crêpe as dessert. ah hell yeah. chevre is one of my serious guilty pleasures. actually, i am a huge cheese fan. havarti (especially dill), gouda (not smoked), english & vermont cheddars (white over yellow) and danish blues are among my favorites though i am not a big fan of brie (unless its en croute) and dont dig the aftertaste of most swisses.

the spot is cafe la pallete and i seriously recommend it but get there early on the weekends cuz they get PACKED for brunch.

afterwards i checked out Wedding Crashers which was all kinds of funny. lemme say that vince vaughn has been crackin me up ever since Swingers.
YOU’RE MONEY BABY, YOU’RE MONEY AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW IT

matt gave me the quick wrap up about the slam which i already knew before hand. the nuyorican (i actually guessed team-brooklyn but you know… semantics) wins by ignoring urbana’s “new poem” rule as louderARTS & urbana go down in flames since they actually come to this slam with new work.

for the life of me, i dont know why urbana goes through this same farce year after year. i’ve been going to these things since 2002 and every year its the same thing. the REAL funny shit was when nuyo didnt come to urbana with new work but then half the team slammed with new shit the next night.

leading us to tonight and the fact that i will mos def be at the nuyo since team acentos 2005 (luis cartagena, raj & kyra wolfe) will be in effect. these three have been consistent readers at the acentos open mic and some of the best writers out there. i know they will bring both the hotness & passion to the slam stage.

there is a nice chunk of my ego that would love to make the louderarts team one year. i think it would be the bomb to walk into nats repping out my home venue but the more i continue writing poems with an eye towards publication and real posterity, the less interested i become about slam.

slam is about winning and the bottom line is i only have maybe six poems that embody the elements of slam which include but are not limited to use of narrative, political commentary, anaphora, humor, rhythm and of medium length. as of late, i havent been writing these poems as much as i used to and that doesnt bother me a bit.

for the last few years acentos has participated in these regional bouts with the same attitude. we dont care about winning, we just care about bringing good poems to the slam stage and you can bank on this year being the same. we are going to be the fly in the ointment that will make judges freak the fuck out and once out of their comfortable shells they will probably give us low scores since the common reaction to unrecognizable art is dismissal.

scratch my previous statement, slam isnt about winning its about the lowest common denominator and acentos plans to be the anomaly in that equation. werd.

Axis by Octavio Paz

Through the conduits of blood
my body in your body
                    spring of night
my tongue of sun in your forest
                                        your body a kneading trough
I red wheat
                    Through conduits of bone
I night I water
                    I forest that moves forward
I tongue
          I body
                    I sun-bone
Through the conduits of night
                                                                         spring of bodies
You night of wheat
                                        you forest in the sun
you waiting water
                                        you kneading trough of bones
Through the conduits of sun
                                                            my night in your night
my sun in your sun
                                        my wheat in your kneading trough
your forest in my tongue
                                                      Through the conduits of the body
water in the night
                                        your body in my body
Spring of bones
                                        Spring of suns

Octavio Paz

Some days are dry, some days are leaky
Some days come clean, other days are sneaky
Some days take less, but most days take more
Some slip through your fingers and onto the floor
you would think from my thoughts on death and faith that i woke up on the morbid side of the bed but i was actually feeling damn skippy yesterday morning. a crazy prospect park power walk, a set of stair lunges and a ton of water had my body getting back in shape and then i helped a delivery guy bring some stuff up to the snack box (code name for the crib– dont tell nobody). all this had my lower back feeling more pumped than it has in years. most gym heads live for the feeling of a good arm pump but my favorite one came from the lower back workouts. somedays it felt like my back was a canyon and my spinal erectors were twin peaks protecting the mesa. yes, visualization is a huge part of working out.
Some days you’re quick, but most days you’re speedy
Some days you use more force than is necessary
Some days just drop in on us
Some days are better than others
my day quickly went from atlas to prometheus on the rock. a deluge of deadlines and more tales of family heartbreak & personal tragedy than a VH1: Behind the Music marathon.
Some days it all adds up
And what you got is not enough
Some days are better than others
my sanity was held together by lorca quotes and constant feeding of my plant. dont ask me what kind of plant it is. i can tell you volumes about the history of pro wrestling but i am no botanist.
Some days are slippy, other days sloppy
Some days you can’t stand the sight of a puppy
Your skin is white but you think you’re a brother
Some days are better than others
on the plus side, i had a great follow up to the “a lot of books very little literature” (yes, i am quoting 72 hour old blog entries. shoot me now) comment about the harlem book fair.
conversation involved me putting together a panel for next year’s book fair discussing the (John Stewart sarcasm: ON) plethora of artistic depth in the latest hoodrat romance novella and gangstah TWISM epic (Daily Show voice: OFF) and thoughts of me, guy & lynne goin on a hateration rampage brought a sweet smirk to mah face for a sec but then i figured i should check out the fair at least one more time first.
“for real, i’m very serious. i’m good friends with __________ who can get you a panel moderator spot in a heartbeat.”
must… control… the devil… within…
Some days you wake up with her complaining
Some sunny days you wish it was raining
Some days are sulky, some days have a grin
And some days have bouncers and won’t let you in
a dialougue on faith and its many forms led me to some more beautiful memories of my mother and a rather impromptu confession.
the fact of the matter is i have missed my mother for more years than i have known her and that gap just gets wider every day.
letting myself say that in the open actually gave me a more boyish smirk.
Some days you hear a voice
Taking you to another place
Some days are better than others
“hey, anyone ever tell you that ya look like a bald billy idol?”
Some days are honest, some days are not
Some days you’re thankful for what you’ve got
Some days you wake up in the army
And some days it’s the enemy
i came damn close to writing my first ever yankee praise poem when the deadlines swept down on me again and the inspiration had to take a back seat to my rent. i even tried to get rich to jumpstart the process but no go. the yankee poem will make an appearance one day though. i’ve written bits and pieces of it in other poems so i am very sure that it will come through when i least expect it. speaking of unexpected muses- i was able to type out the simulation to a damn good bass trill. i think i also may have figured out the ultimate (blush) emoticon cuz for sure i was blushing.
Some days are work, most days you’re lazy
Some days you feel like a bit of a baby
Lookin’ for Jesus and His mother
Some days are better than others
off to acentos. lets recap. shitty day. hint of sunshine. deadlines. shitty day. talkin bout lit. shitty day. inspiration & hand hloding. deadlines looming. you get the picture, right?
for a sec i thought about not hosting but fuk dat acentos is one of the things that makes me smile on the regular and i wasnt gonna let a little thing like the universe slap boxing me ruin that. sheet, i even got down and kicked off the night with one my own poems. a visually driven esoteric poem involving the color orange without me ever sayin the word orange poem that put me in a good frame of mind for a show that was a ton of fun for me as a host. ¡basta! i made it through the show without letting my angst flow out but i can only rock the clown makeup for so long. exit- stage left.
Some days you feel ahead
You’re making sense of what she said
Some days are better than others
mercury in retrograde means that my ruling planet is in a near backwards spin. this may account for my excited utterances and willing confessions. i am travelling dangerously close to the sun which feels like new territory for the gemini/poet who has always been better suited to sewing together shadows.
Some days you hear a voice
Taking you to another place
Some days are better than others
* Lyrics from U2’s “Some Days Are Better Than Others”

yes, you can trace my lost of faith back to when my mother died but it has more to do with her burial than anything else.

in guayaquil, we bury the dead in above ground open air mausoleums. i dont know the reasoning behind this. i believe they do the same in new orleans because caskets, last breaths, marsh land and rain lead to horror stories for children and groundskeepers alike. like most things third world, chances are it has to do with economics.

the rich get family or even single structures where the inheritors get to visit them shielded from the heavy noon sun and indigenous eyes. most of my family gets the outdoor treatment. its a very basic structure; three levels of alabaster cement, each level houses four by twenty rows of mini-headstones.

my mother is on the top level by the northeast corner in one of the middle rows. a perfect spot really. you dont have to sit on the floor or hunch extensively to speak to her. you dont have to tippy toe or strain your neck as if looking for in the heavens. shes right in front of you, you can speak with her just as if she was still here.

the headstones are another measure of class or the desire to elevate up the ladder after the fact. barebones means just a simple square with the basic info. highend means marble and a photo etching with plastic flowers, the presence of a saint with votives to hold candles all kept safe behind mylar and a lock. the mylar enclosure is pretty important since anything left at the end of the day can be potentially sold again the next morning.

the view from mami’s resting place totally blocks out the city. the potential for earthquakes keeps the ecuadorian skyline grounded so i don’t see any towers in the horizon. to the left i see more mausoleums, a figure of christ on the mountain top and tin solares grouped together on the slope. on the right is the oldest part of the cemetery, the psychiatric hospital that looks more like a route 66 econo lodge and behind me are low sloping hills that almost make me believe we aren’t in the city except for the roar of the highway less than a hundred yards away.

most days, the highway isn’t what grabs my attention as much as the roar of bulldozers cutting into the earth making room for more mausoleums. my grandma has always lived a mile from the cemetery and i was always fascinated by both the messiah watching over the shantytown and the never ending construction wondering what will run out first– people passing away or the mountain. raised as a city boy, i always thought we would run out of earth first.

things change as i am leaving the cemetery, the closer you get to the exit gates the narrower the walls become and, as such, the dates on the headstones shorten. you pass from adults to teens to kids and finally lives measured by days and hours. all the times i would come to the cemetery, i would be so wrapped in thoughts of my mother that i barely noticed this pattern going in but always was caught off guard on the way out.

so as my tenth grade religion teacher reviews the sacraments in a basement thats been remade as a class room, i think back on the graves in cement right by the sound of passing cars and question why some of them will never see a catholic heaven because sister says they all carry original sin– a burden that excludes them from the love of the lord. they say that all these lost souls find their way to limbo where they’ll remain till the next messiah. which sounds like some bullshit to me.

i must have asked at least three times in the hope that there was some kind of out clause sister was overlooking but no go. so right then, right there, i decided catholicism was bullshit. a divorce 11 years in the making, as even at 5 i was testing the powers that be by openly cursing in church.

i still follow the rituals for what they are, mnemonic movements designed to bring us to supplication, confession and (hopefully) some redemption. church isnt the only place i can find god though i know my mother prefers the gothic walls over the rumble of excavation.