The Rivers Run Away In Their Own Direction And Vanish To Flow Under Other Skies

by Greg Hall
copyright 2007, 2008

This world may never change
Though a grain of sand and the wide curve of sky
Change every instant
Every man a rip-tide breaking on himself
Every woman an undertow
The fluid knots tying and untying themselves
Under the flat gun-metal of the bay
Men with guns guard every diamond
The real treasure hidden in a handful of dirt
The joy is wandering with empty hands
Embraced by the wind and immersed in the changing light
That falls on us in the course of a day
One among an endless number
Swept away inside remorseless and merciful tides
Moved here and there under the constellations
Born to live inside the ecstatic journey
Which is nothing more than a traveler on a short visit
With both eyes open
and the hands always empty
Moving about beneath the treasure of the sky
And over the treasure of the earth
Weightless and amazed
And drunk inside the rain.

Note: This poem was previously published in the Redwood Coast Review, November 2007.

Obedience

by John Kurtyka
copyright 2008
computer enhanced drawing

Figs

by Bea Garth
copyright 2008

I reach up
and pick the tender sacks
amongst the gnarled branches
the sun filling both the fruit and my desire
barely shaded by the sparse green leaves
as I think of us
in the wee hours of the night and morning
describing the twists of the honey bee
and the bounty of the Goddess
saving us both
despite our tortured pasts,
our smiles deepening
sharing honeyed passion
savored like these sweet gritty seeds
I bite into
red and pink
beneath the sun purpled skin.

The above poem is in Eating The Peach, a book of poems and drawings about love, illusion and self discovery, soon to be published by Crooked Running Tail Press.

Bea Garth will be the featured reader at the Sept. 18th, 2008 Thursday Gig. She will be reading from the proofs of her manuscript Eating the Peach as well as more recent poems. The Gig will be at the Stone Griffin Gallery, 287 E. Campbell Ave., Campbell, CA near the corner of 1st and Campbell Ave. The gallery is in a loft upstairs. Al Preciado will be the featured artist. Open Mic follows the featured reader. The Potluck starts at 6:30 PM; featured artist talk at 7:15; featured poet at 7:30; Open Mic. follows. Call 408 410-2313 for more information.

Red Sneakers

by John Kurtyka
computer enhanced drawing
copyright 2008

Waking To A Thought Of A Shark

by Bea Garth
copyright 2008

You tell me your mind is like a white shark
as we walk amongst the aisles at Albertson’s,*
I buy yogurt and bananas and you a submarine sandwich
--and suddenly I see you
with your eyes gleaming
sparkling with dangerous
mischievous intelligence,
your mouth wanting to chew
on the minds of others,
wanting to swallow our whole civilization.
You swim down the aisle
like a shark smelling the fish,
the blood, the discarded entrails
chumming the water
from the boat called “Western Man”
and I being a woman wonder
where is the Goddess, the Nurturer
except in the food that poisons your body?

Your Goddess is like a crusty old crab
moving sideways, hiding amongst
the seashells and half eaten bones
that your teeth missed.
I want to take her, to take her
and your mouth
and your excellent eyes and nose,
and say yes, look at the detritus,
but also look at yourself—
what kind of shark are you
when you yourself are poisoned by the chum,
by the bright neon lights
of the supermarket aisles
and extruded civilization?

I look at your soft white underbelly
as you circle your prey dreaming of mermaids
with their thick shining tails and full breasts
and long hair wafting about them like seaweed
in the magazine and video sections
and I wonder if you will ever
be more like them,
enjoying the soft sensuousness of the sea,
the discovery and play of being in water without needing to kill,
without needing to open those sharp teeth
quite so wide. Gingerly,
I put my hand in yours
and you grin, winking at me,
your body swaying
slightly voluptuous yet dangerous
as we round the bend.

(*Albertson’s is a chain grocery store in the Pacific Northwest)

Note: this poem is from Eating the Peach, a book of poetry and drawings by Bea Garth about love, illusion and self discovery. Bea will be reading from the galleys of this new book at the Thursday Gig reading September 18th at the Stone Griffin Gallery at 287 E. Campbell Ave., Campbell Ave. in Campbell, CA. Phone: 408 806-1352 for more information .

TO LIVE AND DIE ON EARTH

by Greg Hall
copyright 2008

Hamburgers sizzling
On an open grille
"and Chuck Berry
Is so glad to be"
"back in the USA"
How
Ever
"Mikes
"do
"not
"make
"the
"man
And
ALL
"slides"
"away"
"before"
Your
Personal
And actual
Feet
"Despite your"
"education"
And all that followed it
And "all"
Preceding "it"
)?
Your
Nates
Sizzling
On a grille
)a big eraser removing all exits
)"Lenny Bruce and Robert Crumb and Sartre
)"gone gone so GONE"
And
"you"
Are on
"your"
"own"
)"ART"
)"IS
)"smegma"
"THIS"
"IS"
)the
)beginning

Here Kitty

by John Kurtyka
computer enhanced drawing
copyright 2008

Two Deserts

A Message to Environmentalists
by Erik Sutter-Kaye
Chigasaki, Japan
8/20/08

Until you understand the nature of the unfolding environmental situation, your efforts to reverse its process will be in vain. There is no chance of undoing the damage to the environment perpetrated in the Industrial Age. It is too late for that; it has been too late for some time now. Which is not to say that things cannot get better; they can and will, but not before they get worse. But turning the clock back to the way the Earth was before the Industrial Revolution, that is not going to happen. Restoring the Earth isn't about utilizing breaking science and technology.

It isn't about engaging in a Global New Deal. It's not about trading Carbon Credits. It's not about replacing gasoline-fueled, tarmac- riding automobiles with ethanol- or electric- or hydrogen-fueled tarmac-riding automobiles. It's not about reversing global warming. It's not about being a White Knight in dazzling White Armor and riding in to untie Mother Nature tied on the train track.

It's not possible to do these things. It's too big for us. It's too late. Some of us saw this destiny of planetary desertification coming thirty, forty years ago, perhaps longer. But we didn't listen
to us; we didn't think clearly or well about how to warn ourselves. (Spiking trees? Tossing acid in whaling boats? What were we thinking?!) We might have stopped these self-destructive
trends then if we understood the true nature of it; but we didn't then and for the most part we still don't.

It's about admitting the mistakes of the past. Of History. And yes, I just used the word self-destructive. It's our nature we have an opportunity, and responsibility, to correct, and not anything else. It's about opening up our hearts to the grief. It's about discovering that the grief-- our personal grief, grief of lost species, lost habitats, grief of lost opportunities-- although finite, appears to be infinite. It's about deciding as a global society to stop escaping from the grief, and turning around to embrace it, without being consumed by it.

Above all, its about memory. We are on the verge, as a 7 billion-person-strong Global Village, of remembering the last Planetary Crisis, roughly 6 to 8 thousand years ago. When the vast grasslands from Morocco, in Africa, all the way to the great savanna in Mongolia in Central Asia, all wilted and died and turned against humanity, against all life, in a sandy inferno that still burns today.

Recorded history began in the aftermath of this great Old World famine that consumed the center of the populations in the Eastern Hemisphere. The record shows us a steady trend of migration, for 5 or more thousands of years, out of the bitter lands. Throughout the Old World (excluding Australia) the essential experience of epidemic starvation has been transmitted to every corner of the vast human expansion that began in Africa 7 million years ago.

Through war and scorched earth, through socialized traditions of violence to women and children, human slavery, and the apprehension of the reproductive process as a weapon of war to out-populate the enemy, the essential emotional conditions of the Great Old World Famine have been exported at present to the 7 continents and the Seven Seas.

Like the woman who was raped as a young girl, and maintains in her adult life a consistent pattern of self-destructive sexual relationships (with men who resemble her rapist) 20th and 21st Century human societies have been slowly and steadily replicating the moral values and conditions of desert survival into the abundance of the wooded, forested vastness of Asia, Africa, Europe and beyond.

We who carried this pain into Paradise are the walking wounded, surviving descendants of the Great Saharan-Asian Inferno circa 6000 BC -4000 BC. (“BCE” is for wussies!- E.S-K) Sworn to survive no matter how, we carry within our broken psyches a distorted sense of identity, like an Operating System in a software package that is riddled with glitches and bugs. Like a bad OS, we are neither straight nor true, yet we know how to boogie-- we carry within us memories of our condition before the Saharan-Asian Inferno f___d us up.

How can anything good come of a technological fix, when we environmentalists who would do the fixing are carrying the same inherited distortions of history as any corporate robber baron or Warlord? I see a clear pattern in so-called Post-Modern society, of modern institutions from the United Nations down to privately-run think tanks, attempting to solve far-reaching problems with plans that don't include a consideration of the planners' own completely human predilection for self-deception.

Modern history is rife with examples of big fixes that created bigger problems that generated a quantum of large fixes that just keep on expanding exponentially, until the whole system collapses. (I think, for example, of the whole history of the CIA, who has a history of arming rebels against a mutual enemy until the enemy is defeated and the rebels become the new enemy. And what does the CIA do? They go find a new group to arm!)

Our human survival at any level depends upon the emergence of a critical mass of women and men of all cultures who can reverse the societal trends of escapism and emotional suppression that keep buried the old racial memories. Then we can fully remember the buried memory of the Great Saharan-Asian Inferno. We must then all link up, all of us who remember, in order to maximize the practice of collective emotional support. This will be necessary since the emerging memories of our buried past will be devastating to us without a collective structure to anchor our healthy spirits onto. Then finally can we emerge simultaneously from the Two Deserts: the Desert of our buried past, and the Desert of our present unfolding on every continent before us.

For those of you who read this, you need never again fault or blame yourselves or your own species' capacity for stupidity and greed. That would burden you unnecessarily with self-loathing. Rather, take pride on yourself for emerging, however incompletely, from the past infernos, and have compassion for the great wounds and trials you and your ancestors have incurred. Each and every one of us , scientist and terrorist, visionary and prostitute, are all a piece in the puzzle of getting over the current evolutionary challenge. For there is nothing we have ever done, or can do, that Nature hasn't provided for. We are not separate from Nature; we are not separate from God. The coming crisis of Global Warming is exactly necessary to recalibrate the Gaiain Computer.

Note: Erik invites comments on this essay. He would like nothing better than to be either agreed or disagreed with. Given the current goings on with Gustav reminding us of the killing torrents of Katrina on the eve of the RNC, this article as well as discussion of the environment in general seems more important now more than ever.
-----Bea Garth, editor