Leavenworth Writers Group

THE TRIO

Painting by Charles Curtis Blackwell, and front cover art for the winter edition of TRACKS #3, an anthology of the Leavenworth Street Writers Group.

Email me, >brennan.don@gmail.com<, about purchasing a copy of the anthology for $5. Here is a sample of what you will find there:


DUMB-LIPPED PETRIFIED MOMENTARY SETBACK BREAKS ITS SILENCE
by Marsha Campbell

Our homage goes out to you next time the fire our sun
drills holes in our pupils thus obliterating the need to see
whilst our ears pick up the least pin-prick or tinsel dance
upon the drumbeat of our hearts a drama so self-filling that we know now now our need to write to flex that head muscle.


Forget what animal I am blinking and hah-ing like the desert corpses of defeated mice covered in sand. Tonight won’t be just any night, Bringer of songs, Harbinger of Peace – my fear goes out to thee. I cannot speak but I can lie wasting away too many bodies’ unprecedented musical incidentals shiny white spirits punctuated by obstreperous mobs, nor will I seek out scintillating territorial surprises.

Reading you is taking messages and losing them, taking and losing, taking and losing…How could you not answer my intermittent cries for help but intermittently, like, they say, two ships that pass in the night?


My ship has sails that are made of silk. Without the edge of the world to slip off what direction do we flow in?

Oh, happy industry, my fellow man, this writing be! How jittery this exercise inside of me! You laid the law down with a wooden pen that was your gift to me, Amen.


by o.d.ludyeh
metamorphosis

a caterpillar catapults form a leaf on the moon
to a meteor in a mist,
there to weave its astral womb
a butterfly flits fleetly along the orbit of mars,
its swarthy wings swashed with a nebular catarrh


high in a bastard tree atop a steep lunar dune
a spark in an egg inscribes its shell with the runes
an eagle sears circles about peaks rougely charred,
its pennae pasted with the sediment of stars



from a grub of blue flame
from an ovum of white fire
spawned in the heavens
into flight burst two desires
sovereigns of space,
crowns jewelled with suns,
they flap silent thunder wings
to the clap of the big-bang drum

ON TRUE LOVE
by David DiGangi

What do I know of love?
I’m humbled by the question

I can tell you what I’m drawn to – I can speak of that which keeps me coming back

Is love like a basket that holds our treasures

Or is love like a tapestry
or a Buddhist mandala forever growing
for ever changing

I have no answer

I only know what I love.

The word love pops up over and over

Love as sensation
Love as a mammalian instinct
Love as a flesh desire

I’m sure I loved Willie Mays
on a Saturday afternoon

I know I loved Nat King Cole all through the night

I love Van Gogh for what he painted

John Denver makes me cry singing of love for Colorado

Grandmother on Life by George Wynn

My grandmother Bronislawa
Remembers playing in the park
In Cracow with her children
It is a very white night
She is in the graveyard
Of dreams eying every
Green leaf dying to twist each
Leaf into a Star of David
Inscribe her hands with
Something of the Hebrew
Alphabet into a prayer for the dead
Her impressionistic artist's mind rolls
Out the colors yellow, purple and red
Which do not fit on the canvas
Of her very black soul
Within where everything
Has already been said

SCRAPS by Ringo

Named for the bribing by store-owners of foot-patrolmen to curb shoplifing, the Tenderloin will always be remembered for its economically oppressed, cops on the take, trash in the strteets, dealers and pimps on the corners. The bright lights of the burlesque, like electric gumdrops, are the only eye-candy in this barren neighborhood.

AMERICAN PRISM
by Ray Valdez

I arrive in America,
I see myself in a mirror,
but not as I appear …
Rather, as I really am.
The nakedness!
The lion mane of long hair!
There, in my mirror image:
the natural rhythms of life.
But I’m imprisoned in
armor …
reflecting armor
imprisimed in refractions
of American Indian Time.

1967 REVISITED
by Charles Curtis Blackwell

Nostalgic yet real enough to be touched with eyes closed

Right on!

I tells you that’s soul, I mean it’s got enough soul to shout
AH-MEN!
Man, what chew say!
I ain’t seen nothing like it before;
Soul bellowing, blazin’, I mean set the stage on fire.
blazin’ brother, smoke and fire!

That’s right, see, see, cause you know, day say where
there’s smoke there’s fire

But see her drippin’ sweat, I mean she was soakin’ wet;
Shit man,
just like pussy, in the middle of the mood, Baby!

Shit! Tell her to cry for me, where’s she at?

I don’t know ‘bout dat, all
I know is she touched my
soul too.

New Genesis
by Dominique Leslie

God creates, Moving across the face of the water of nothingness;
Holy winds,
Holy Spirit,
Breath of life,
Creates life.
Nature creates,
Holy Spirit moves across the face of the Water;
Wind across the waters,
Creates ripples.
Moving out in concentric circles;
The Grand Spiral.
The dancer creates,
Holy Spirit moves across the face ofthe Water;
Dervish in devotion,
Spirals in, spirals out.
Breath of life moves them,
As they create a prayer/dance.
The artist creates,
Holy gusts, geists, whirlwinds move across the face of the Water;
From the depths swirling emotions,
Holy Spirits, Holy winds,
Breathe life into each work of art.
The Spirit moves across the face of the Water,
Creates this poem.

MEDITATION
by Janie Dickens

Have you ever sat
Or envisioned yourself
On a mountain top
Without someone breathing
In your ear or casting a shadow
Forever more over your
Soul, your being?

Wow, the sunlight is great
But the celestial power
Is better.

The god spirit, the
Metaphysical delight
Of all of
Nature’s creatures.

Keep on looking for the
Light

NIGHT LIGHT by JJ Rush

To diminish you is
To diminish me
Yet without your love
I couldn’t be.
This has nothing to do
With what you do
The whole eye shuts
And the world is new.

SISTERS by Patricia Anne Walker

We live, love and run from each other
Effervescence of perfume
Three cheers for sisters to sing
For the church, Ali and The Sun King
Down Larkin Avenue
Here comes the Sun King
For families, naturally, and apart and gray
Desert sands singing for the last soul
Lost as sisters on the way home

EBONY LOVE
by J.B. Saunders

Sweet mounds of ebony flesh,
Gyrating thighs,
Pleasing to the eyes,
Ooo girl, you’re something else
Movement as fluid ass,
Easy woman … a bird gliding …
Through the skies
Pleasing to the – do it girl
Gently entwined
Umm … you are mine.
Our bodies, our minds, together
Let us not part – never
Here my head rests
Betwixt two succulent breasts
Trapped between gyrating thighs
Pleasing to the eyes
Captivated! Never leave me …

WHAT WORDS ARE
by Carlos Ramirez

Words tumble, descend and lie
like insects pressed against supine books

Connected to one another like washed
garments hung along the world’s outdoor
clothes lines

Nuances emerge from their beholders’ breaths
like spit and stars shooting arcs across
the winds

What aren’t they, aren’t they …?

Water borne coins at the marketplace of
everyday’s dance of survival.


tg by Don Brennan

in these gratitude days we steep and grow
strong as herbal tea just off the tree
boiled creamed sugared
waiting to be tasted, cooling in a moment
that rises to a tired man’s lips

the life we sip scalds the tip of the tongue
singing to our rested bones that
joy is the burden we have sought since
the ancestors lay themselves across death’s
barricade and brought us here

and here we are, nowhere else, hearing the horns
the strings the bugaloo drums as we swallow
our brew more sacred now than we have ever
known her to be in her delerium, calling us to the
weighted down table

sauces dripping, stuffings stuffed, children on the
gallop into a living space where voices cram our
ears with uninvented poetry, shouting out love’s
unthinking nonsense in the only rhyme a heart
knows how to feel without bleeding

in these gratitude moments when rage is teased
into subsiding, when fear submits to hoarse laughter
and paws the air like a puppy begging for more, the
world’s current evils cower briefly in faithless
corners, leave us in peace.

BIRTHDAY BOYS

JAN. 27, 2008, THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF RAPHAEL (LEFT) AND OSCAR, APPEARING HERE IN AN EARLIER PHOTO (WITH THEIR MOTHER, ETHEL) WHEN THE BOYS WERE STILL LITTLE KIDS.

A new poem dedicated to the twins and all the rest of "us":

US AND THEM
by Don Brennan

Who and why are they, needing more and more
behind our backs?
We who have so little know they need
nothing more.

Who and what are they, other than their own
thirst? As though we
weren’t thirsty too.

The one’s who drink so deeply from violent
dreams swim downstream to salt water
cursing the sea.

Why are they and we in this matter of fortune
so distant? Needing one another behind the backs
of one another.

Who and why are they so driven to
conquest? We have lost them
and they, us.

New Poems, My Take, Thank You Canada

The following poem is to appear in the April 2008 issue of Poetry Explosion Newsletter. Thank you, PEN!

THAT WORLD YOU
LEFT BEHIND
by don brennan


When you went
the door clicked lightly

as though disappearance
forever requires
no fanfare

just the click of a dry tongue

slipping into shoes
late at night

a cool depression
in an empty bed

a house full of us
snoring, careening

towards our
new day, our sad
awakening


A new SF journal, THE POET'S GALLERY QUARTERLY, has accepted the following for the Spring 2008 issue. Thank you Ana Elsner and Richard Hackett, editors.

WHO WE ARE?
by don brennan

circles, galaxies, storm drain spirals
circles with destinations

logical tautologies, mental loops demanding
that we repeat the truth

teach us by repetition: the fire dance may
consume us but not destroy us, destroy us
but not consume us,

teach us the meaning that
belongs to mortality,
that is mortality

the galaxies we have come from spiral
back into their source, the soul a black hole
sucking life out of death
and spitting it back
to be evaporated in the
water cycle, the fertility cycle

the storm drain essential to
tempestuous existence, our ignorance
essential to birth and death,

the repetitive truth, babies stacking blocks
and knocking them down,
creation repeating for every generation

we have spiraled out of the earth, who has
spiraled from all the suns, and they are hers,
she is their storm drain

for a moment, a moment which is only
an eternal repetition,
we are allowed to witness history,
a spiral, a tautology,
a dialectic contradicted
by itself each time one of us
is born into the center
of the galactic storm,needing
a peaceful moment
to observe who we are as the
winds and rains gather,
spiral out of fire

we could use a moment
without injustice, cruelty,
war

or is that who we are?


MY TAKE on where we are going as a nation, JAN. 22, 2008, Don Brennan:

I'm reading END OF AMERICA (Naomi Wolf) now, and have just finished SHOCK DOCTRINE (Naomi Klien), and I think intelligent historians like the "Naomis" are reluctant to make predictions for good reasons. Marx set a disastrous precedent for predictors. Contemporary historians tend to avoid both apocalyptic and Utopian projections.

That being said, I figure that the US empire is nearing the end of its glory days ("gory days?"), and will probably be replaced on the imperial stage by Russia and China. These two bloated and corrupt super-powers will keep wars against the poor underway no doubt. Or maybe not. They are after all, socialist in principle, but power and greed can obliterate principle. Look at the USA now, today. Pathetic. Millions of our citizens trying to make it on the streets and in prison. The military harvesting recruits from the poor, the uneducated; economic policy driven by corporate lobbyists keeping the youth of the nation poor and uneducated. JFK, a few months before he was shot, said in a speech to the Organization of (Latin) American States that there is no freedom without freedom from poverty. Yet poverty around the world is created by the rich, for profit. Wars are waged by billionaires against working people everywhere, for profit.
Child labor is slavery. Using weapons of mass destruction against civilians is murder. The USA claims to be a free-market democracy, but it is not. Like Russia and China, this nation has become an oligarchy. The essence of oligarchy is class war, which has been known to degenerate into civil war.

I have been wary of what Naomi Wolf describes as impending US Fascism for a long time, and always have my passport valid and within reach. Keep in mind that under our highly touted constitutional government we supported a vicious system of slavery and Jim Crow through many generations, so the US power structure has had plenty of experience at denying rights and freedom. The newest assaults on domestic rights, from Lyndon Johnson through GW Bush are really not new.

Our system of checks and balances has been gasping for air since it's earliest days, born as something of a "blue baby" during Thomas Jefferson's orchestrated wars against the indigenous people of the continent. Jefferson called the theft of Indian land "The Empire For Liberty." What he managed to do in the late eighteenth century was fatten the US treasury by selling stolen property to real estate speculators. Just like our current incursions into Arab and Persian lands, the Indian wars were fought for profit, and quite successfully.

But the socialists have always been with us, struggling and fighting back. They seem to be making headway in Latin America under the leadership of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, not to mention the historical inspiration of Cuba. If Latin American socialism succeeds, US capitalism could be brought to its knees in the West while Russians and Asians eagerly pick its bones clean in the East.

On my gloomy days, I tend to suspect that time is running out for American middle class freedom. As our streets and highways become more chaotic, more violent, "the people" will cry out for iron fisted leaders and jack-booted cops, and the corporations will be more than happy to oblige. Also, I grew up under the nuclear cloud, and can't avoid the notion that greed and fanaticism could combine in a variety of scenarios to unleash global holocaust. But, like the socialists, our pacifists and non-violent activists such as Martin Luther King have also always been with us, struggling and organizing. It is they who inspire my optimism. These are the true citizens of the Earth who, in the words of Jesse Jackson, keep hope alive.

Finally, here is some tangible hope:

THANK YOU CANADA!

SF CHRONICLE, SAT. JAN 19, 2008, pg. A3:

Canada singles out U.S. for risk of torture

Toronto – A training manual for Canadian diplomats lists the United States as a country where prisoners risk torture and abuse, citing interrogation techniques such as stripping prisoners, blind folding and sleep deprivation.

The Foreign Affairs Department document, released Friday, singled out The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. It also names Israel, Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Syria as places where inmates could face torture.

The listing drew a sharp response from the United States. “We find it offensive for us to be on the same list with countries like Iran and China,” said U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins.

Martin Luther King

In the 1950's, a young preacher/activist of Montgomery, Alabama, USA, gave the nation the gift of his wisdom. He explained very clearly to all who would listen that the time for violence around the world had passed, and the time for universal justice had arrived. Many listened and have not forgotten, and many more refused to listen, condemned and ignored the man, jailed and abused him, and finally shot him down. But he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace at a time, before it was despoiled by its presentation to Henry Kissinger, when that prize still had meaning. King was not only a spokesperson for racial equality in a society that viciously demeans millions of its own citizens for the "crime" of skin tone, but the man was clearly a prophet for our time, for today, for the twenty-first century. His words, excerpted below, were spoken in 1957. The consequences of violence and the refusal of corporate government to commit to global justice, threaten a suicidal apocalypse for humanity. I suggest that if our families and children are to have a future, we need to revitalize the teaching of Doctor King, and to work hard to carry his thoughts into action.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., 1957

Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one's whole being into the being of another.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence and the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And he goes on toward the end to say, "Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.


--Martin Luther King, Jr., Justice Without Violence- 3 April 1957

Now the question that we face this evening is this: In the light of the fact that the oppressed people of the world are rising up against that oppression; in the light of the fact that the American Negro is rising up against his oppression, the question is this: How will the struggle for justice be waged? And I think that is one of the most important questions confronting our generation. As we move to make justice a reality on the international scale, as we move to make justice a reality in this nation, how will the struggle be waged? It seems to me that there are two possible answers to this question. One is to use the all too prevalent method of physical violence. And it is true that man throughout history has sought to achieve justice through violence. And we all know the danger of this method. It seems to create many more social problems than it solves. And it seems to me that in the struggle for justice that this method is ultimately futile. If the Negro succumbs to the temptation of using violence in his struggle for justice, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate life of bitterness, and his chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. And there is still a voice crying into the vista of time saying to every potential Peter, “Put up your sword.” And history is replete with the bleached bones of nations and communities that failed to follow this command.



HAPPY BIRTHDAY, M.L.K!