a mamaist ars poetica

     In my black sleep a voice says, "Change your feet."
    
                       　 And I do.
                           
     Then it says, "Change your hands."

                           And I do.
                           
     Then it says, "Change your legs."

                           And I do so.
                           
     Then, "Change what is small. Change what is big."

                           And I do that too.
                           
     Then, "Change what is near. Change what is far."

                          And without hesitation I do.
                           
     And when at last the voice says, "Change your heart."

                           in that moment it's as if I hear 

     a 'click' and suddenly everything is falling 

                           into place at the same time as







Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist home

One day upon returning home I said,
    Is anybody there? 
    Does anybody care?
And I heard a voice calling back to me, saying:
    Voyager, welcome!
    Settle down in these depths--
    Make yourself at home. 
    But know also that your reservation
    further on down the road 
    is already booked. 
    We're expecting you.
And home for me after that wasn't what it used to be...

Another day when I came home I said:
    Don't they know what's mine Mine MINE
    is not theirs Theirs THEIRS!
    The difference is nothing to sneeze at!
And I heard the voice say:
      Hardships prepare you 
     for the work ahead.
And home for me after that wasn't what it used to be...

Another day on arriving home I said,
    Hey! I wanna join the club of bards!
    Who's holding all the cards?
And the voice said to me:
    Down in the dumps? 
    Taking your lumps?
    Why, it's more than you can bear?
    Time to learn the ropes, and beware.
    This isn't everyone's cup of tea,
    nor should it be.
And home for me after that wasn't what it used to be...

Not long ago I returned home and said:
    What in God's name is going on?!
And the voice said to me:
    Drifter, settle down!
    How many times are you 
    going to burst today?
    Put a lid on it! Pipe down! 
    What goes unspoken
    goes golden.
And home for me after that wasn't what it used to be
 as I went on falling into the openness of the world--




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist gloss

     




     The title says, Listen to the noise love's been making...
     The first line says, Anybody can speak these lines. (And since 
            I'm anybody, I am.)
     The next line says, I was raised as a parody, a patchwork.
     The next line says, Our town was famous for spreading
            hollowness.
     The next line says, My name was rejection. I was called
            "No-tie, No-two-me." But who could live like that?
     The next line says, When the mirror commands, "Reverse
            everything!" then is the homecoming you seek perceived.
            For here, beneath the beatific dream, is Buddha.
     The next line says, Yes, you're a wild cool lazy poet who can  
            paint the moon a delirious egg and is crazy friend for life.       
            But to achieve true identity you must make a name for your 
            Self! Love has to recognize this distinction.
     The next line says, Now go ahead! Untext the load. All art can   
            heal by helping us recall who we are... For out of these    
            cleansing waters the snake emerges an eagle.
     The next line says, Swimming out in the deep: it takes a lot 
            of concentration...
     The next line says, Remember, this is a sacred process--a   
            human being is being formed here. If you're afraid, others  
            will be afraid too.
     The next line says, Stop trying to be with the moment that's  
            just passed. The point of our trip is that we love each other.  
            We gotta live our dying!
     The next line says, Now, let's go down and see the light...
     The next line says, In trying to unify the threads of a disturbed   
            psyche, everything happens in the same instant as you're     
            letting go.
     The next line says, It's a kind of surrender to the moment, and 
            a deep deep listening...
     The next line says, Here walls have ears... money talks...
            time flies... opportunity knocks... and ideas catch fire.
     The next line says, Facing your pain may at times be 
            overwhelming, but by a leap of faith you realize you are     
            connected to others.     
     The next line says, For deep down we are all brothers and  
            sisters. The aim, for the mind not yet prepared, is to live    
            this reality.
     The next line says, Yes, you may think you die and that's 
            the end. But it's just the beginning. The moment that you 
            die is the moment you are reborn.
     The next line says, And, yes, it's true--everyone should know    
            they'll be going out the same way they came in--in a  
            blinding flash of light!

    
    The next line says, But not too deep now, not too deep...
           You see how it's all connected--how the writer's life and   
           the writer's light are converging? how going home is the   
           waking up from all your dreams?
    The next line says, Now entering a new phase--acceptance
           and tolerance of these depths and all its contents.
    The next line says, O isn't it wonderful to know something you 
           can't see but know is there? Be glad you saw it so others 
           could see it.
    The next line says, Yes, you thought you were hearing a story of 
           your Muse,  but what you've been hearing is the Muse of 
           your story.
    The next line says, Now rest your weary bones, so you can fight 
           another day. What's in store is a brightening of your life.
    The next line says, In the meantime, given an opportunity
           to reflect your moral self you will be trying to give others 
           what you got. But you'd be better off just walking naked 
           through the world.
    The next-to-last line says, Be not afraid: Mistakes will have a    
           way of pointing you in the right direction.
    The last line says, And, remember--placid placid lifts the 
           mind up.





Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

Dadirdydebil

          Now Reader, hold fast--you're in for a crude awakening!
          It's time we got this show underway da udder way
          and were together, you and me, all-one at last:
          for I'm the soldier in an all-out war
          who, upon learning how to read REDRUM
          in the writing on the wall, sees
          what he hadn't seen before--
          how we all get away with murder;
          I'm the once-and-future poet
          who, upon climbing her poet-tree 
          goes out on on a limb, unforks her tongue,
          and tells the whole world her storked story;
          I'm the rabbit in the screen cage
          who, by projecting from reel to real,
          animates the loony New Age,
          then hops out cagily and says,
          THAT'S NOT ALL, FOLKS!;
          I'm the dei-man, the Sissy-fuss Elf,
          the soul's survivor of the Fall 
          (R.I.P., from my p.o.v., is a non-stop R.E.M.
          where every D.O.A. is a V.I.P.);
          I sing and dance this girdy-birdy
          in every un-un's womb-sleep. 
          For I'm Dadirdydebil, don't you know?
          I word the world together by try-all and eros,
          plucking appellations off the Tree of Know-how
          and creating doublebolical meanings everywhere
          -- O to my ear to err is erotic!
          As a born lyre I'm forever being told:
          OH KNOW YOU DON'T! YOU SHOULD NO BETTER                                                         THAN THAT!
          WIPE THAT SIMILE OFF YOUR FACE, RIGHT NOW!
          But that's a rite -- isn't it? -- we all should urn
          (I'd be lying if I said I was lying).
          For with laws as walls,
          and innocence in the sense the allest wall,
          what else is a human being human to do?
          Binary thinking puts us in a bind
          and makes us all pair-annoyed, and 
          unless we lose this chain of thought, 
          we won't have a legacy to stand on.
          As for me, I'm just (pardon the fun) keying on
          where it says, LOCK! DON'T TOUCH!
          And such places, mind you, I'd never break in-two,
          nor would I ever pryde myself in, either
          -- I've got more-roles, after all!
          I prefer, instead, going behind the seen
          where see-sins circle in an endless psychle
                     and every moment's a peek experience.
          And the best way in, I've found, is in-word
          (by the spy-role stare-way) where
          once past the Guard and into the Den
          I spy w/ my mind's I sth beginning w/ Y,
          I spy w/ my mind's I sth beginning w/ O,
          I spy w/ my mind's I sth beginning w/ U --
          beyond the sly-test doubt the greatest show on earth!
          For don't you see? Everyman's a womb-man!
          Just look below your waste... remember how
          Dadadnotsobad, man-nipple-elated by whore-moans,
          got Mamanotsogood oaverly excited?
          Remember how, in a flash, ex-static
          at the thought of being human, you went
          merrily merrily merrily down the tubes
          to catch forty winks in the Waist Land?
          And remember how, bursting at the seems,
          you ex-seeded yourself and finally up-peered,
          ruddy or not, an 8-lb. prime-evil mothersucker?
          You see (anyone can see it's a conceit) how
          I'm always being re-membered for my Body?
          This isn't just idol talk, either:
          bearing the Cross of the Truth-of-fiction,
          I write wrongs based on hysterical fact, 
          make whatever's latent blatent,
          and say what I mean mirrorly by meaning what I say
          (You can, too -- if you say you can't, it's cant).
          For with each syllable both a silly label & a mything link,
          what's a word worth if not a thousand pictures?
          The evidence is in Eve's dance with Adam --
          in which the phallus says, DON'T FAIL US!
          and the uterus says, UTTER US!
          and the fetus says, FEED US!
          and the carrion says, CARRY ON!
          -- and when all's sad and dumb there's no place like OM.

          Now there are some who say, IT'S SATANIC!
          But I say, IT'S A TONIC...
          For I make a conscious Joyce
          to demonstrate my demon's trait:
          I enjoy pulling off the tab -- boo! --
          and letting the hole thing come
          (the pleasure's all mine, and what's mine is yours)
          out into the open where (O, pun it!)
          pubic hair goes public.
                     -- For not having anything to hide
          is one's greatest treasure!
          But be aware -- a new sense 
          can be a real nuisance
          (if Saul can turn Paul, warrior
          may turn worrier, or therapist the rapist).
          For in order to get from HA-HA!
          to UH-OH!
          to A-HA!,
          one has to go through an awe-full "ache."
          Then once your I's grow Y's, you stop
          asking the reason why -- you just
          mind your own peace and cues.
          Ha-ha! The yoke's on you!
          This motherlode's been unloaded!
          Do you God it now?






          _______________________________________
          The power of the Word is brought to heal
          only by a daring feet of the Imagination.
          But remember -- toeing somebody else's line
          is self-defeeting, unless it tickles your fancy
          or touches the depths of your sole.
          Reader, kneel thyself.

Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

mamaist reconciliations

rivals turn partners in a soul's wink
there are nobody's shoes to fill anymore
we like to look at it and leave it,
for in taking, there will be nothing left,
in leaving--look, no footprints!

*

I am a sick animal too
releasing this energy, pushing it
through, makes me feel better too

*

songs of surrender in this big sleep
the secret scroll we're all learning to read
walking a dark trail, approaching unseen
time to face each other out in the open
this adversary and me-- 
we both need translating

*

you'd think we would've learned by now
these missing bits and pieces
is the old secret
of brothers and sisters
coming together to offer 
the world a new skin,
that says, That's who I am!
to old habitual ways of being--

karate expert, huge sumo wrestler,
wise sensei, silent ninja,
robotic salaryman, submissive geisha --
these stereotypes would put us -- yes, us --
out of action...
Mr. Smith versus Mr. Muto, punch! versus chop!
Say it ain't so!  versus Ah, so!
you want to get in on the act, 
worm, after fertilizing this soil, 
then keep burrowing till you reach
the other end of the earth...

...you are now entering the City
welcome to the Soul's bedrock


*

here's what it's like:
a bird released from its cage
makes its way to wide open spaces,
only there's a huge window
between the bird and the wide open spaces

until the window can be opened,
there's no getting anywhere

so stop beating your wings and making
such a fuss
if you stay still long enough 
you might even see your reflection in the pane

*

yes, we keep coming back to meet ourselves
shadow puppetry is one of the oldest forms
of entertainment,
what did you think this silhouette was made of
--words?


*

every time you reach a crossroads it's time
to open the doors again
the rich/poor divide inside you,
the one always asking if the price is right,
makes the flow possible,
while negotiating the price makes
the world outside habitable

*

all this coming and going
in our dreams 
cannot be contained by words,
feelings run too deep
in the stillness--
 the way I'm dancing this dance I don't even have to get up 

*

re-creating moments, you think, is some kind of homage?
to what?
in loving memory of my mother
or in loving memory of my father
is your brokenness speaking
which, in being spoken
as a voice saying, Welcome to the Great Outdoors, Nature Boy!
makes your being whole, and your whole being
worthwhile

Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist b-ing

it gets so you start worrying 
things would start falling
away from you, if their being
other than they are were to start getting 
more intense, but focusing
for a moment on feeling
the tension rising 
in you is a way, you realize, of not forgetting 
how one thing
as much as another thing
(or anything
else) can be a wellspring
of imagining
in which everything
--from what you're not seeing and hearing
to what you're not thinking and feeling--
can be a seeming plaything,
and if at times it's like hanging
by a shoestring
over the abyss's deepening, you keep from worrying
too much on account of the painstaking
way the branching world has of reminding
you that, with all things being
equal, our living
through the suffering
of these infrequent raptures pales when considering
what might be lurking
behind, or beyond, say, a painting or a piece of writing
that didn't itself have an inkling,
an innerspring
of desire for everything
else, including 
what it's trying
to become, as in something
of a process, an indispensable, indisposable 'othering'
of the world through being
itself  (with you or without you), and what it's like, like a human 
being
on the wing,
capable of being
imagined, as in conceiving
oneself without uttering
a thing, 
as simply being,
in itself rewarding,
a rewording,
not by relating, not by identifying,
but by fascinating, entrancing,
like the action and the fact of a swing,
oscillating




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist post-modernist serenade

Be a puffer, boney-plated, spiney, ossicled. Breathe secure.
Network the anastomosing selves, suppley, freely...Grace with thee
in full, enfolding, yet uncontained 
by any save all.
Be a polymorph but never redundant (as in the man he said);
Be copious, pleiotropic, but please no one
    or nothing as a drudge. 
Be abundant, crystalline throughout (as Pluto would have you),
     worth plundering but never subject to plunder.
Be a plumule. 
In the presence of the genus "plug-uglius," however, drupe unedible, plow 
     under.
Plumb the moment for its pathos,
for its poiesis,
tactful, pneumotropic.
Sinking neither into mud nor mire, 
poacher, unless it be poco a poco,
      expressive of imaginative awareness only.
If poised point-blank, depart
as a point of honor,
for polarity's sake. The dusty bloom
of your eyelash
would impregnate the world.
Polyonymous, the poor, not petty,
will know you.
Posthumous you already are.
Now append, post-haste, this note (how sweet the sound)
to grace's amazing proof, already
prayed for, 
perceived,
that would not (no, not ever) pre-empt the past,
but would redeem it
re-read, without prejudice,
serenely serpentine, as serio-comic serifs
   (& seraphs)of serendipity. 




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist conclusion

I've tried everything: 
I tried pretending; 
I tried not pretending; 
I tried trying not to pretend; 
I even tried pretending not to be trying.
I've tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried--
To whomever would deny me
who and what I am,
my least action has said,
or seemed to say,
"Just try me!"
It has all been very trying... 
But trying to be what we're meant 
to be, isn't that what we're here for?
For try as you might, 
it cannot be helped-- 
what you are, your own way 
of being, your sensibility 
--that about you which feels, 
at times, tried--
is entirely inescapable. 
This whole business of being
--its trial and error--
what else can one do 
but keep trying?

Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist citizenship

        



        I live in a country of darkness.
        Dark eyes, dark hair, the darkness
        of a garden's shade. I'm surrounded
        on all sides by water, where the dead
        keep rising at their own leisure
        as I listen, though I'm not sure
        (how can I be?) what it is exactly they're
        trying to say to me, and where
        the living go in search of 
        adventure, the unsurpassing love
        that seas only can bestow
        on whomever would dare to go
        into (especially) those deep
        places, that can cause such sorrow
        at the awful losses, and make one weep.
        This country where I live I barely know.

        Inching my way, in meters
        now, in a land where the air
        all around, in spring, is full of flowers
        and edible fruits, which for all Demeter's
        splendid beauty and powers,
        cannot, once eaten, unensnare
        the eater, who would be tantalized
        by what in days past was prized
        for being unattainable,
        before it was spread on the table
        uncooked, like raw fish popular
        among my fellow citizens, that blur
        of so many faces until I am able
        to face myself, alone, in the mirror
        again, and see, no, not in horror
        but in thanks, the twin, the double
        that, no matter where or how far
        I stray, is always home, a star
        in the distant field of my childhood wanderings,
        where the boy lying on his side sings
        a tune, or whistles the time away,
        in a country where he did, and did not, stay.




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

silences & ambiguities

in everyday life silences & ambiguities have
so much (to) say--
suppose, for example, you compared billboards
(the public persona) of communist Cuba, 
where you might read 
something like, Long live the Revolution!
or, Onward to Victory forever!
...with capitalist America, where you can read,
Come to where the flavor is, or Think Different.
...with blood-brother Japan, 
where you're likely to come across 
something along the lines of 
searching for myself, or I'm here saying nothing.
admittedly, such 'signs of the times' are subject to
change, but...

                          ii

not a peep from the world today.
great silences fill
the void, the poem going
as close to the divine as
sanity allows--holding 
its heart wide in 
the openness on which the moment
and its wholeness perches,
as if on your hand, feeding... until finally it’s had its fill, and flies
off past the billboard that reads
Save changes before closing?
into the distance, way past where you say Yes or No.




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a father begins to tell his story

he picks flowers for her, 
takes baths with her, 
climbs into bed next to her,
tickles her,
but a son's first heartbreak
(the first sign of it at least) comes
when he realizes he can't marry 
his mother, so, broken, he goes out into
the world, to marry the moon,
but when she won't have him, passing
him by disdainfully on the wooded path,
or alighting momentarily on a branch, he,
grief-stricken, goes looking for
his double, his twin, recognizable by
her voice, her smell, the slow circling gaze
when he's near her,
and when she says yes the no
that broke open his heart swallows
the door to his inside and as he steps
through it, to where the outgrown self
has a new skin, touching the sky,
he bows at last at the feet of what he means,
blessed and redeemed by,
         and in, her sight.




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist stalker

one day she comes into view
and you're stunned--
suddenly everything you do

is like swimming against 
the current--you don't 
get anywhere,
or seem to.

silence is one answer.
only the game can't be played
that way,
so

you up and marry, 
have a child,
move far from home, still
dumbstruck, still
searching for the right
words, going nowhere, it seems, until

many years later with family
in tow, you're at a pool in town
where everyone's making their rounds,
circling with the tide, round
and round--some swimming, some walking,
some playing, some sinking...

when a man appears, some would say
unlike the others, a little different, going
where everyone else is coming from,
circling effortlessly 

against the current, round and 
round, passing you
by so often you barely even notice he's there until
he sails right out into

another future, entirely
unimagined by you before, 
and in that instant it's toward
where he's already gone, where
he doesn't speak anymore, that you're going, you realize, 
unstoppable,
stalking your prey,
reading your way

into the still waters 




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist taboo

somebody puts outta version 
(or reality) of reality,
using words

their friends & then friends of
theirs (have to?) accept that
take on reality
put out earlier,
which in turn gets spread

eventually you come across
this reality of reality
and decide to weight it
among the others,
investing the words w/
meaning and so on

in time, enough people
have supported this view of
reality that it gets to have
the status as fact

we buy into this 
reality, and thus w/ our
support it takes hold

pretty soon lots of people
support it--like a mask
worn at tribal
ceremonies--and woe
      
betide he or she who 
      would remove it




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

conflagration

The father and son are negotiating--
who shines brightest in the heavens?
After a trip out shopping you come home,
spirits high, carrying your load proudly,
you look across the room at your son
burying his head in a game and you say
it's time,--but it could be anything,
music lessons, homework, cleaning
his room--so now, after his first day
in junior high, and his friends already
left for home, he's gone quietly inside the game
he's playing, body and spirit...
it's time, you say again, and the words,
this time, like a gun, triggers a wave
of fire that starts engulfing you both,
a fever-spreading fire, its heat
rising, source of the fire undeniable
yet unseen in the corners of your
mind, in the corners of your house,
and suddenly you see an entire wall coming down,
as if a car having lost control crashed
through, and in the tangle of wreckage
and the dust of aftermath the flames draw
higher--to where now your mother, lost
years back, and your sisters, O beloved
sisters, and an older cousin, strong & upright,
are all standing there beside you as surprised as you are 
standing in the midst of the flames, but they don't
panic, they face the inferno that's raging
inside you, they help the firemen who
have pulled up outside the house to
try to douse the flames with their long
hoses spraying at the bright blaze,
the bright, bright energy of its
begins weeping, the heat of his pain
on his face, twisting it, wet with his tears,
and you stop... and you begin to listen.
you're listening trying to feel what it's like
being him, all ablaze, in the mounting of
the licking, leaping flames that have spread
inside you both, as his body shakes loose its tears
and your breathing and his breathing begin, 
ever so slowly, ever so gently, to merge, 
while the others, far away in a distant time,
are doing their part to save the house from 
being lost entirely, as the firemen rush in
with streaming water and then out comes,
hissing, volcano-like, the smoke as if in reply 
from the broken bits of debris lying
about, while his body, shaking with sobs, 
keeps trembling, and I strain to hear what he's saying,
to listen to the hurt my word has put a match to,
the hurts at the 12-year-old heart of his childhood, his
daily torments, the power of injustice he encounters,
and as I listen I know I hear the flames licking
at the corners and around us at our feet,
and I realize that he and I, the two of us,
we are dancing in the flames, wildly stomping in
the unforeseeable fires of our manly love,
the fires of our timeless, whole love,
which we are now, just now, beginning to feel.




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.

a mamaist entertainment

don't put so much food on the table, says earth--just what you 
      need for a growing child (and the capitalist laughs)

here's the thing about an egg, says earth --whichever way you 
      cook it, it's tasty (and the consumer laughs)

is it fun, asks earth, trying to 'unravel' the mysteries of the 
     universe (and the scientist laughs)

is it fun, asks earth, trying to exploit the world's resources for 
     your own ends (and the technician laughs)

is it fun, asks earth, trying to take over 'other worlds' (and the    
     tyrant laughs)

is it fun, asks earth, pushing your children into the spotlight when 
     you're unable to go out there yourself (and the parent laughs)

is it fun, asks earth, trying to remake a pupil in your own image 
    (and the teacher laughs)

is it fun, asks earth, trying to play god (and the poet laughs)

what now, little man? asks earth




Botsford, Alan. mamaist: learning a new language. Kamakura, Japan, Minato No Hito, 2002.