Litmus Test in 7 Bluffs

Name Dropping: My Notes From Atlanta AWP 2007
By Ron Palmer
[Subtitled Note to Self/Reader: This is my diary-esque attempt to capture and maintain a self-designed semblance of writer/artist subject position along side my ‘real-life-role’ as corpo-slave member of a Fortune 50 company. Also: to document my flight from the academic/ teaching realm while trying to remain worry-free and genuinely happy living in beautiful and chaotic San Francisco during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.]

1.   Voice of the Bread
C. Dale Young aka Delilah and her beau Jacob (Josie) Bertrand convinced me to go to Atlanta while drunk on divine wine in their living room in San Francisco so I couldn’t say no. It was too tempting to feel like a writer again. I wanted just one more day as a writer. Even with a Ph.D. a first book of poems and 6 years of teaching experience I panicked and escaped to the corporate world for dim security and inflated wages. I’m entrenched— 
I’m in the ground now. The mind jumps out of the body after death. Not ground per say. Per se persuade. Not sky.

Blurriness of box-view, daze of consciousness after baseball bat cracks the nose bridge. Painless nevertheless I’m bored with death. Watch the living you guessed it we want your bodies. Slip behind the skin blink inside a pair of eyes. Soldiers join us like blue fog we fumble and flurry above the city. I loved the readings of Natasha Trethewey and Kevin Young as well as all the readers at the Emory panel. I think in poetry mostly so their names were already familiar. Wow, their poems were beautifully read, and in my opinion as an onlooker, powerfully received by the audience.
Mischievous witch I never falsify my witness to jigger the invisible lock. Don’t beef up the body just to put it in a box. Burn it. We prefer the ashes.

2.     Survival is a Fact
I got blood in my meat. I got trunks in my treat. The hypocrisy of streets. The bland dichotomy of heat’s viscosity.
The sharp lobotomy of Beats.
The grand cacophony of Keats.

Worse than war you’ll regret your words everyone wants more. Never try to write if nothing arrives sobs out of you don’t force it the page will wither. What are we living for? Television? check Movies? check Hot Shower? check Lover’s Lips? check Good Food? check Orgasm? check Pay Day? check. 
The truth is that Mark Bibbins’ students were so charming over Joe’s hamburgers and Martinis and smoky beer-batter-wood-soaked rafters with our diva-black-queen-waiter that I wanted to add to the babble.

When Nick Flynn kissed me on the cheek in the Hilton Hotel Lobby I zoomed back to the East Village in 1992 (Nick saying “me and Ron were the only straight guys in the program that year”) (hee hee he was kidding cuz I’m a big ol’ Mary) angry and sheepish: I was a roast-beefish sort clinging to a scowl and he was another one of the few non-Ivys. Now I’m an owl. I think that’s my disease. Or at least how it manifests itself verbally—
=I’m a jingling hyperbole.
In the efficacious womb—
A crawling a crumbling toward ecstasy.

In the foreground of boredom, a severing from the self. If only the ocean would take me clean me. If only the purpose were scrawled on the rocks, on the walls of the hotel bar where the retarded monkey girl danced like a Flintstones character. I’m afraid of the monkey girl he said into my noise-y ear.  A big strapping blonde Atlanta Rugby type with a stubble goatee looking all gape-mouthed as we sucked our scorpion for the fifth round of turpentiney-gasoliney mouthfuls with long, white, play-fishing-rod straws. Erin Belieu’s boyfriend was sucking along with us: John the younger student writer had this agitated wince watching the dancing girl with gorilla coconut tits. All thinking, yikes she really is getting into her performance while his girlfriend Melinda danced on the chair.

The Blonde Atlanta man swayed closer to the fenced action thinking:  I’d fuck that retarded monkey girl as she faked her suicide with a real banana.

Gitty-up playing horsey-poo in the hetero-panda paradise yet just as Miss Bibbins hopped off my lap I was semi-relieved even though this is a Tikki bar we still might be in danger of receiving a smack on the mouth from Atlanta stud even in my flash-frame-mind for enjoying too much boy-lovin’ levity.
Distracted from his feverish slow-mo dancer near the David Lynchian bongos. We all agreed she was creepily lascivious quirky-jerky and really too far into her role near the shaved headed drummer. I was spanking Bibbins who giddily bounced on my left leg. I dream that I tackle the monkey girl onto the drum set and her coconut bra lands on the drummer’s baldhead.  Our job is to look for the invisible.
(Double-punch self in the face: spit out wine coughing pour wine on head).

3. We are all Afflicted
On elegy was my favourite (English Version of Microsoft Word only lets me spell this way) panel at Atlanta AWP. One presenter presented 3 elements of public mourning and offered that there are perhaps 4 structures of the elegy-(not limited to mourning):
1.    (Generalized sense of loss) Embedded with implied love.
2.    Mirrors speaker’s desire to transcend those things that are lost.
3.    Serves as an occasion to consider many things.
4.    Originates in longing to bring beloved back from obscurity. All the new thinking is about loss.

Shattered praise, newscasts present inauthentic grieving made into praise there evolves a sickening in between. Closes eyes on lose, forges a hip ironic swagger implicates a tone emotional texture splits the speaking voice. He said in a strong vibrato:  all the new thinking is about loss, which rang true. Undecided now I cried while D. A. Powell read Thom Gunn’s “The Post Office”. Afterward I met Doug’s sweet new beau Haines (who by the way is adorable!) and I told him I cried to which he responded “O, pishaw!” which I had to look up in the dictionary. This is the type of self-conscious obsession I have.
Pishaw:
a general word or phrase, pishaw has no definition. It can be positive, negative, both, or neither. It does not fall under one category in terms of sentence parts. It is entirely without a standard meaning. It means whatever you want it to mean. It also has no set spelling (although this is the traditional one) and no set pronunciation.

1. I am filled with pishaw.   2. His hair looked very pishaw.   3. Anna and Catherine leap and pishaw over the fence.   4. Life is ever so pishaw.

Pushing the sentence further and further, he ended his panel discussion somewhere around the utterance: We’re all living a life sentence.

4.   The Edge of Hoax
Rotgut. Sacrosanct. Atropos, she who cannot be turned Id-jit. id-it. id-pit. id-bit. Yippee! Yip-Hee! Sunned beef and cool-cocked liked not even you know what I mean. They’re like Pullu:Lating—
Chinaberry double first cousin of starvation! Vile Pantomime. Walkie-Talkie. I have two dads. Names that will sound weird in ten years:
Larry King (Live!)
Paris Hilton
Anna Nicole Smith
Iraq War
Britney Spears
Mark Wahlberg

80/20 rule: life limit: all average men fall into the sun. In the end Gods choke on paper. Even technology separated itself from the argument. Complicated saviour grew a sleeve of skin to treat the brick-less: the naïve celebrate the sickness of living in a sublime purgatory together in the loathsome elegance of time. A vile pantomime. I’ll see you later I have your number I’ll call you.
Render me rearranged by joy. Two decades blur everywhere I’ve arrived as the fun ran out even AIDS informed my play habits, restricted the now of desire. Slipped chaos into a viral storm: hello you missed the fun ended years ago bank accounts bursting, expensing extensive whores less pensive johns less defensive proceeding like a sparkler from the lost mind. Sit down and quiet long enough to listen. Next bonus: pay off bills: rent/student loan + write (in a circle!).

5.   In: No: Sense: De: Fective
Love is sucking the anus clean every time. The skin is alive with greeting naked in the snow bleeding from the hoof: Mozart Sonata for two pianos in D major without the symbolic habit of weekend visits.
Irreversible density of music’s invitation: unthinking mindspace colorblocked in the breech of fantasy gone wrong. For example, Conan The Barbarian as Metrosexual Barbarella.

March 18th Sunday San Francisco’s Iraq Protest----->>> I’m just not a good Buddhist by principal. Lick Lick. (Demonstrates the clicking sound). Before each lick of his peanut butter open-faced sandwich. Lick Lick. CLICK-SLAP>
Here’s the set up: capture the present long enough the silver Bay Bridge all passive with trucks looking like hollow circus tents but rectangular. We wanted to rest in the shade look at something spectacular. This view would do: the boats on the bay the bridge brand new but then the LICK LICKER refused to chew. Instead he would do this lick-clicking licking noise that inconveniently nauseated the listeners. He licked and licked while little bear began to stew in his own disgust until his mind turned blue.
Sit down and quiet long enough to listen, then your patient observation of worry (puttering around like a putz). Kevin singing I like New York in June, how bout you? from his Friday afternoon tub filling with hot water and lavender crystals. I too am afraid to feel again the love drama of beginning: O beginnings O beginnings
O     beg:     in:     nings! 
Orange light from your mouth torso of a chopped god flung down on the bed. Another career in waiting on the planet of un-forgiveness. Is this not the only country that gives a pink dawn feeling while riding on a bicycle toward the sea, gulping down salt ripe stank air soulmemory—render me rearranged by a creeping joy: I hope it’s a boy.

6.  A Tedium of Reasons
I dreamed on a co-worker, a woman, naked foetal hunched, knee-rocking sobbing into her knees on the mocha-brown close-cropped shag carpet outside her bathroom door.
Let’s begin with the tedium of reasons for wanting to escape to Europe or like the Buddha says it’s just the same suffering with the rotating stain on your memory. Two eyes two spirits the logic of depression evaporated memory Buoy me to the present I am birds spiked with dread pangs: singing to each other on the red feeder. Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky turning to hug me (I say something pretentious and embarrassing like “I’ll host you if you ever come to San Francisco!” which I’ll obsess over for weeks and feel like an eighth grader on acid) before they exit toward the parking lot.

7.  Earth in much more Danger
The earth is in much more danger from human action than from natural forces. –Stephen Hawking

Ever since memory began I wanted a man. People ask when did you know and I think when did I not know this tell-tale sign this mentally-scanning this frankness do not flinch. What other ways are there of exploring the truth, potentially dramatic way of revealing meaning? Guilt for having lived: snapshots of the sorrowful world: disem-panelled.
Silence is a violence: piece together your understanding of the world. The young man in his army uniform said, “yeah this is my second tour” on his way back to Iraq. I sat in my airplane seat and I thought of how easy and kind of pathetic my life is right now. My eyes filled with tears of awe but I didn’t cry for the unknown soldier. His seat-mate kept saying “thank you, man, thank you for fighting for our freedom” and I couldn’t push away my thinking that oil thank you for fighting for our oil seemed a better response but I’m a hypocrite so I can’t say shit.

Note: Through the void and avoidance build a better rage. Concentrate on an over-emphasis on innocence. I sat on the hotel chair and stared at the crown of hot bulbs within the chandelier as the female speaker said: Sentimentality is an early arrival at innocence. You must earn the passage to innocence.