3.9.08 Yamatogawa

9/10ths closed,
an eyelid hangs in the sky.
Beneath this, I find my tower of
improvisation. Rising up
from mounded earthwork
and girded concrete, the steel diamonds
and crosses of inspiration.

Carry power. Carry voices.

Kaoru Abe's screaming
whispers of suicidal exhalations,
as though to live
in search of living
against so many edges
injects an ethic
of aesthetic self slaughter.

How much water runs by me:
so silent, a flutter of a fish fin
makes the city faint;
so long, the river reaches back
10,000 years.

Beyond names and symbols.
Beyond beyonds beyond.
I lie on this filthy levee and stare
at a blue so vast it fills my eyes.



by Jerry Gordon
3.9.08 Yamatogawa
Kaoru Abe

Musics

I can’t believe I’m here,
watching a man--a friend--
beat a music out of
an inflated vinyl insect.

The body rings and plings,
singing its swollen plastic tensions,
its zoological engineering,
its pillow-puffy carapice
as though the logic of emptiness
is sensitive to petro-chemical history
and the complex economy of souvenirs.

Walking there
against this street,
I lean away from the course of cars
and they give me my way as well.

Opposites need not be
in opposition.

My strongest ambition of the moment
is to not forget this
poly-falling-boxes-down-an-Osaka-back-street beat
emitted by a broken bicycle.

Riding in and out of my periphery and memory,
a man pedals a rattle-patter of percussive rhythm
that my ear follows into dark corners,
reaching beyond the nonsense I fathom
towards this momentary matrix of emotions
I desire to breathe with
through twisted metal
and realize as
the air.


by Jerry Gordon
1.12.08
Banco Cafe, Osaka


This is the initial inspiration by Charles-Eric Billard:
http://charlou2006.blogspot.com/

Midosuji subway

Every form roils in reform;
a woman wrapped in browns sits down
on the subway’s orange bench.

How many names has the dirt
from here to the surface above me
had? Daikokucho; burrowing,
insects churn the earth
through their bowels.

The tiny hidden hole amidst my teeth
fills with mysterious pastes of chew;
holding a thin red box of history in her left hand,
a woman closes her eyes
slow enough to be the envy of sleep.

Two women, enough alike to be each other,
stare at the window into darkness
to tug and touch their hair;
watching them, I watch these words
appear in my mind and then
so different on this page.




by Jerry Gordon
2.17.08
Midosuji subway

Playing with God in the Backyard

Looking up, I find my sky
in your eyes, deeper than any heaven
I can imagine.
Reaching for the edge
of your pocket, you move your ass
in a skillful intuition of
avoiding my ecstatic touch.
The romantic retreat just beyond
grasp. But, you can’t
escape completely and I catch hold
of your pant leg, by which
you drag me across the lawn
in giggling jerks, staining
my already stained knees.



by Jerry Gordon
11.1.07

A Stick

My favorite machine must be
a stick
fixed with gravity and perhaps
two or three strings. Used for
whatever purpose could invent it--
to fly a penent or dry a hat
or simply point towards heaven--
its economy is its fragility,
making it even more
perfect than my fingers--as
saturated as they are with symbols,
signals and habit.

Anchored upright, a stick is
its eventuality of leaning
too far inside a wind and becoming
the meat for beetles
and other lovers of infinity.



by Jerry Gordon
2.15.08