The Geometer

When Hamsa Berlios awoke this morning, not much had changed. He had taken the precaution of putting a fresh box of chalk on his night stand, so that he could feel the giddiness of being able to use it liberally, and spare himself the frightening prospect of having to go outside and purchase more. Hamsa had figured out how to get out of bed comfortably over the past week or so- finally. Nothing is so geometric as getting out of bed. You don't even need to see a rectangle to feel the horror of your body being oriented in such a way- contorted as if following the contours of a box, but only partially the way round. He turned at an obtuse angle, to face a giddily threatening orientation of rhomboids that he had managed to construct out of his dresser and a broken end table he had found in the alley. This was the most pleasing orientation to wake up to so far. Soon he would grow bored of it, and have to hew something more like an isosceles triangle, or a comely pentagram. If anyone had made asymmetry a way of life, it was poor old Hamsa.
He followed the chalk outlines to the bathroom. The only rectangular objects that he had left unmolested were the top of the toilet, and the sink. He had removed the mirror and the medicine cabinet very, very carefully and installed a nice oval one instead, to trace the contour of his slightly roundish face. That was a dangerous rectangle, a very, very bad one, an awful rectangle that mocked his face- that tried to trap him in its sharp corners- that swung open at him to show him what? MORE rectangles? Empty like his head may have been if he weren't an educated man. What a dreadful, cruel, mocking object, the medicine cabinet; but to strike it would do no good either. It would just shatter and cut him, and then claim the floor! But he had managed some how. It was a great feat, the greatest to confront that thing, to feel ALL of its edges as cold as they could be. But thankfully the ordeal was all over with. He could look at himself safely, and confidently 'That's good, that's really good!' He would say to himself and smile without opening his mouth to see his teeth. How fortunate that there are at least two rectangles that I can cope with, that I can use, he would think to himself. All of the doorways had been altered with bits of scrap wood, or cardboard to make them appear ovular, like him. He had filled the corners of the room with sawdust, or dry concrete, or even salt, to round them out. It hadn't helped very much, so the piles in the corners kept building up, engulfing the feet of the furniture as well. He could scarcely bring himself to read anything, to concentrate that much on something so tyrannically rectangular was beyond his ability, like reading the phone book all the way through would be for a 'normal' person. He had virtually given up on reading, until one day when he found something written on a crumpled piece of paper.
It had been so long since he'd read anything, his eyes wept for lack of letters and his brain atrophied and became sentimental, self-defeatist. He carefully tore the edges off of the paper before letting himself read the words, which even then he accomplished with more than moderate pain. He called its writer, the Encyclopedian:



Before I knew I could talk,
I heard.

Hidden dialects, lost phrases, and angry letters
Soiled, tarnished, unbreathing.

Before I knew my voice,
I spoke.
Proofs, postulates and dead end theories
Railing against nature afraid the flowers would be right.

Echoes of winter yielding to the
Tendrils of an ever invading Spring

Which invarialbly lead back to
Summer’s silent hills, cast in shades of grey,
Shades of the setting sun.

In fabulous gradients,
fading from view

Like a Red paper napkin.


It hadn't crossed his mind in a long time what it was like to see objects such as signs, and screens, and tables, to be in restaurants. Going to a cafe was as foreign a notion as going to the moon! And a date? One might as well try and seduce a giant cock-roach! The only love he had left in his life was for all things ovular. Not necessarily because they were shaped like him, but because as far as he traversed their surfaces, he could never find an edge. Nothing sharp. They appeared to be the exact opposite of rectangles, yet they could still function in their stead. He had taken time to learn how to orient his body against parallelograms. He practiced a kind of body work which he often improvised if he felt his mind try to assemble rectangles where there were none. This is when he used the chalk he now was fondling to offset lines of extrapolation connecting corners had neglected to soften. He would boldly confront his logic like a defiant child to a friendly uncle capable of shocking cruelty and violence. If his life were to remain true and balanced, he had to offset all geometric logic. Triangles were a bad sign, but tolerable, like boa constrictors. He could occupy space, yes share space with them, but how rare they seemed to him to be in the world of men, appearing in natural arrangements.

The poem had inspired him to record all things NON rectangular. He still needed to see objects as they were, not as just shapes. That was simply an unfortunate bi-product of his condition. It doesn't really occur to a person how many rectangles they actually see in a single day, until you start to notice them, the same can be said of germs, and insects, and microbes I suppose. It sort of sets up on you one day, after getting on your nerves, the feeling of something hanging over your head, and a tickling sensation in your nose, your ears ring, your pupils dilate, it's really an awful feeling, not the MOST horrific of course, but bad enough, like bumping a bruise, or biting the inside of your cheek, or a static shock from an assertive door knob, over and over again. It was the first angle that sent the shock, quick, like a prick, but not oppressive. It was the entire arrangement all edges, sharp, perfect, un-collapsible, untouchable. What a primitive urge to flee from them he felt, what dread welled in his heart saved solely for that ubiquitous shape- The Rectangle.
It were as if the whole summation of the world of man and all the horrors he has wrought, and all the denial of his horrors and destructive appetites could be encapsulated simply in a pragmatic design so basic to comfortable life. An abomination, a form aborted by God, resurrected by man to do the devil's work, to let him come and go freely at leisure in plain sight, in signs, upon screens, against walls as shadows with no comfort in their coolness. A cutting board, a butcher's blade. A great stone for pressing a body. That is all they came down to for him. A great shape for pressing a body, for crushing a man's soft ovular form, that can then be washed clean and conveniently put back in it's proper place.

How do you feel about that?

Please don't tell her I said this,
but I really think she's cool

Please don't tell her I think so,
but I really think she's keen.

Please don't tell her I'd like
to see, the worst drawing that
she's ever done.

But if you tell her one thing,
tell her I liked that song.

And if you tell her two things-
tell her I don't like thongs.

And if there is a third thing,
that she just might not know-

Tell her I don't like falling,
or taking it slow.

So if you'll tell her something,
that I might really dread,

just say these last words
that I've written...

why are you stuck in my head???

In a Pachinko Parlour Parking Lot

Hiro sat in a Pachinko parlour parking lot in the sun drenched remnants of his town. He had remembered sitting in that parking lot before as a child in the back seat of his mother's car while she picked up the laundry before they moved into their house. Even then, he remembered sitting in the parking lot after his 8th birthday party. He remembered sitting in that parking lot in High School, smoking cigarettes and drinking, listening to Tupac and wondering what "Weed" was. Now, he sat here helping to dispense food rations and water bottles to survivors at mid-day. The colors of the pachinko machines were already well faded by the time he had seen them. The parlor had been there since the 1970's. Bu there was an arcade inside as well, which always seemed more appealing- but his mother always made him play a few games too many with this grandfather, an old WWII vet. Being forced to play, he always thought, against his will- yet it seemed to give his grandfather true joy, which even then, was not much incentive. He was so Japanese, Hiro's grandfather. As Japanese as one could get. Flat sun pocked face, small nose, thin lips, strong voice and hard wrinkled hands. Shirts always tucked into his high water Khaki pants. He was strong and loud. But too much for Hiro. Hiro, had been raised to distance himself from his Japanese heritage. By television, by music, by their humiliating loss in WWII accented by the war time atrocities of men like his Grandfather, also named Hiro who had participated in the Batan Death March, which his grandfather had indeed done. Hiro had grown up, very confused about Japan and it's place in the world. Japan, it seemed to him had been nothing more than what he had seen in the Pachinko parlour as a child. Bright lights on the outside, a well oiled machine but prone to breaking down, and producing strange odours. Not as clean as everyone perhaps thought, and a little bit- too friendly. Japan seemed like a place that had existed a long time ago with Samurai and Castles like Europe. The Japan he knew was all gray skies and boredom, a small town far from where anything really exciting happened. He remembered Japan feeling like those old Pachinko machines with the faded colors, and the crudely drawn illustrations of monkey's and salarymen who's faded colours stuck out more than their jovial features juxtaposed against sexy, doe eyed femme fatales. It was a Japan that appealed to him as a child, yet which he rejected strongly now. And it was all he knew of Japan and his connection to it. But what did he replace it with? Rap music. Black American music. He thought about being a rap star, about being a Black American. He wondered what the ghetto was like, what was so bad about it. He felt a connection to that music and those people yet he had no knowledge of them outside of their music and their poetry. Perhaps, the ghetto looks something like this. Devastation all around you. The remnants of lives shuffling around calling the names of missing loved ones, picking up trash that used to keep sakes, moving shovels of debris. Perhaps the ghetto had a young man like himself sitting in a parking lot in whatever the equivalent of a Pachinko parlor would be in harlem or south central, handing out boxes of poptarts and bottles of water. Hiro was lucky to survive the Tsunami, and over the past several days- had learned unknowingly what it meant to be a Japanese person. The realization gradually started creeping up on him, and crested in a great wave. Looking around him, he saw the devastation of the Tsunami, and wondered why the Pachinko Parlour was spared. He wandered around inside of it, manouvering around boxes and looking at those old, well used Pachinko Machines and their faded colors, and the unused arcade games with their bright colors and smiling giddy mascots, and he felt his heart rise for a moment at the sight of their familiarity, and he let it. He did not supress his childish glee at seeing them as he once would have done, because he knew when he turned around, he would see nothing but devastation. Nothing left of his town to make his heart rise in anyway. He stood bemusedly, and fondled the knobs of the machine, and pretended to close his eyes and be cordially forced to play 20 minutes of Pachinko with grandpa. He didn't wish those days to come back, nor did he grow too sentimental at the thought. But he knew that after the war, his grandfather had to help rebuild Japan, as he had helped destroy on it's behalf. He knew that he had the same eyes, but his face was a little rounder, his cheek bones a little less dramatic. He knew, that now he understood something about being Japanese the way his grandfather had understood it. It was a place that existed long ago in the hearts and minds of those long dead samurai and peasants. It was a place that had been destroyed, and that he had no choice but to help rebuild. He could relate to that experience.

A Tome in the Age of Blind Writers

Who writes symphonies to mourn the closing of American factories?
How can a string quartet articulate the dreadful sound of an Abrams tank crushing 20,000 confiscated Michael Jackson tapes?
Or the mind numbing silence of an office building without power?

It takes more than flowery prose to describe the temporarily infuriating sense of immobility which accompies the loss of a cell phone, or the empty detachment one feels at seeing a video of a journalist being beheaded by militants on a stranger's ipod, peeking over their shoulder in a chicago subway.

We, the auteurs of airwave pollution, sonic outlaws, and n'ere do well wunderkinde of the present are the music makers, and the dreamers of the dreams of this world, and we have taken it upon ourselves to be the nameless organizers of modern noise: modem screeches, chat bubbles, ringtones, lingering in parking garages banging other people's cars, hooting cautiously and clapping our hands. Banging space bars with anticpation in bedrooms. Aural masterbators, digital savants, charlatans with flashes of brilliance. Ignorant composers, yet poets all.

I'll take a moment to nod my head to the sorrows of your true minds and sing a tome in my head for this age of blind writers, because we breath an air that is filled more with sonic debris than oxygen, swimming in a static sea of crossed signal pathways, rich in harmonics guiding the lost through the wasteland of the Now.

Pipers at the gates of dawn,
of dusk,
of mid day,
or endless evening,
and reluctant morning,

playing a music that can only promise a future of the same.

We are the music makers, and the dreamers of the memes.
A sea of faces, without a name.

The Fire of Sighs

The affection held for us,
by those we have scorned
never goes softly from
their hearts.

We hasten to distance
our selves from the
desperation of their care,
from the agency of
their desire.

We hasten to plant
ourselves in places
where they can not find us
where we can despise
them openly among

friends.

The unkind words,
spoken of us in our
absence would fall
on deaf ears should
we hear them.

because our senses have
been dulled as our passions
burn themselves away,
consumed in a fire of sighs.

sxckvjh

Rain water room new method

me though squat ethos retain water

wait stand more methods new rooms

retail chain me to more drops in links

lining square quadrants in rails fir

even lux is a change in link to flux

undulating under wet wood

meaning is emergency calls

and dispatches to rooms where

meaning falls in meaningful

square routes round edges

stop.

jhc,

A lean drying time tied to tally rand

to robin's egg and blue shore

shell pink phosphor where camphor

colored wine remissions continue to

follow through to, too, two, who?