what was so great about my old plans anyway?

I'm surrounded by this abstract feeling
of depression

it's like i know the universe springs from a tunnel
that implies something was before nothing

i know that the river exists in no language
nor sound of running water, no sight of rapids or eddies,
no feeling of skin or bark or wetness, no taste of refreshment
no smell of cleanliness and cucumbers

yet the river exists, it is real
as this sensation of darkness is real

is it losing forever the one that i loved?
is it knowing my life lost the glitter it once held
of many women, of many languages, of many cities?

what was so great about my old plans anyway?

No Eye by RMC

i have no eye seeing
what's going on.
it all goes by
like a dandelion floating
in a summer day

the Eye by Ralph-Michael Chiaia

i eye irony here in Korea
land of many lost mornings

i eye which is wasted
as not being an asset
those who think it is

are far away across oceans and time zones
seeing a different play unfold before their eyes

2.
i worked in a flower shop
with green filler in foam
sticking arrangements
with colorful shticks of liatrus
roses, lilies into

in Korea flower arrangements
only spring out of wedding tables
costing thousands of Won

Fuck Knuckles by Ralph-Michael Chiaia

he is upset
because when his girlfriend
found out that the cops
knew they had hash
up their ass
she roped her neck

he is upset
because he wants to be a Father Figure
and i guess he is, drunk
forgetting the names of the Greek
Finance Minister who he Despises
and calls Fuck Knuckle

he is upset
because nobody buys him as father figure
trying to protect these girls
who want to taste a bit of the Exotic and Erotic
whether they are drunk or not

I am upset
I watch the bar
learning what drives customers
what they hide below canned Speeches, Jokes, and Cliches
what most people consider intelligence

these girls are upset
their English skill isn't more passable
to lower the inhibitions, they are aware of the men
that men want women -- that women want men
the nature of all interaction focused on this fact
and drink

he is upset
because there's nothing he can do
these girls will make the same choices over and over
and go home with the wrong guy again and again

he is upset
because there's nothing he can do to undo
the knot around her neck

For Her, Who Has Nothing To Fall Back On by Jina Bae

for Seungoen

Betsey Johnson,

she said,

my beloved friend gave me this bag

made by who called

Betsey Johnson

one in the soho

in a low rise dutch style brownstone

made up with black scaffolding awning

stuffed with fishnets, laces, leathers, rainbows and jewels

watched and tended carefully by kind and rigid workers

whose boss

whom i saw on the television up on the wall of the store

in her pink wig, horsing around

on a runway show

in her body suit that revealed the wrinkles and sags

after all the models catwalked by

Synchronicity,

i said,

between you and her.

Billy Collins shares his poetry turned animated films on Ted.com

Recently Jina sent me a link to an Animated Billy Collins Project in which his poetry is spoken with animation that captures the charm and wit of the poems. The project is showcased on Ted.com. I have always enjoyed Ted.com and Billy Collins who was one of the most fun parts of my MFA life in Southampton College. For me the most influential people during my MFA were Kit Hathaway, Indira Ganesan, and Roger Rosenblatt. Billy Collins was always a lot of fun to listen to because of his humor. On this clip on Ted.com he shares five poems that have been turned into animated films. I was lucky enough to meet some great people during my short MFA time and Kit Hathaway was the most influential mentor but Billy Collins was the most influential reader.

Billy Collins shares his poetry turned animated films on Ted.com


I used to work for Admissions at Southampton College as part of a fellowship that I received. The university paid for my MFA as long as I worked 20+ hours a week. I can no longer remember what they called it, an apprenticeship, a work-fellowship, a indentured serviceship. My original problem was that I overdid the charm on a phone interview and got the "best" position. Admissions. This meant doing these asshole open houses on Saturday mornings. I came into the university at 8 a.m. one of these Saturdays for what they called a meet-and-greet (whatever that is!) and said "Good Morning" to Kit and he replied: "You are not surly enough. That's why you can't write." It turns out I ended up spending hours with him in these jackass meet-and-beats that he didn't want to be at any more than I did, so we talked a lot of shop. He used to go on these long personally-insulting tirades about my writing, "But what does it all mean?" or "You're hurting my little head with all your intelligence!" or "You're just writing fiction in neater lines!" Listening to those tirades which grew more and more intimate and less and less insulting were probably the best part of my education. He explained simple things like the need for taking lots of walks, to remember to look at things, and to only use one verb per poem.

Some blogs I like

I was telling Tony in the bar a few days ago about this blog called Defenestrations. I am a big fan of tumblr blogs because I like the ease of sharing things that you like and the fact that there's no length restriction like on Twitter. That said, I'm also a big fan of Clara Ng's one sentence short stories. Clara Ng writes in Bahasa Indonesia (throw it into Google Translate, it's only one sentence at a time) and/or in English.

Defenestrations, by J.R.R, first caught my eye because she wrote a bit that she feels fortunate to be able to make money doing one of two things that she's good at and is still surprised when people pay her for her writing. J.R.R says she makes a great cup of coffee and can turn a phrase. I asked, "Isn't making coffee more remunerative?" Tumblr has a great Ask function.

While talking about Tumblr blogs, I have to big up my own Tumblr blog and Literary Chaos.

Ode to a Bathroom Window

My head aches, and a floating numbness bastes
my neurons because vodka got drunk
again, the bottle emptied itself past my dull tastes
the bottle followed a nymph towards debauchery
holding her head in my lap
contriving to impale her with the hardest part.
Snap out ready of this taxi nap!
Who wants of wantonness?
of shadowy lust? I help her up the stairs
then hear her full throated ease
into the toilet. Asleep on the bed,
my bowels need to unfurl what I’ve been fed
tonight. The faucet leaks with sonorous whaps
a musty stench combined with the raw
intestinal sewage of the nymph's rotting innards accrue
phosphaturia with it’s waterfall sounds queue
and the phosphorescent chemical attack via jaw
all have one thing to save them, thrown wide-open elf of adieu,
I pick up the pink with black lace, g-string wet in the sink
an aberration to the dank, the dirty, and the stink
and return to the bed a man of review and armor
to deflower this smooth girl's empty-stomach'd honor

found this and believe it's my version of "Ode to a Nightingale" 

during my massive John Keats phase (which thankfully  has passed)

Success

I don't think
you've really succeeded
until you start getting
hate mail

Thought I had something to say

i had something to say

but couldn't remember my password.

now it's all gone

TV – The Master of False Drama (from a collection called Household Items)

The freshman class always has winners and losers. There’s always a telegraph machine, some guy with a pompadour and socks pulled up to his knees, reading comic books and eating crackerjacks off fine China that he keeps stacked in his locker under physics books and comics. The freaks. That’s what the other kids call them. A high school with its cliques is like a living room—potted plants, tables, pot holders, water, candles, and ashtrays, or TVs, lacquered consoles, VHS machines, DVD machines, and wires. And popularity—it’s always a battle.

            “I have been Mr. Popularity since I was zapped in and charged up. My click is better than yours. I don’t care what happens to this future, let ‘em hook PCs to me, or conglomerate everything they can. Let ‘em. I’ll always be a brain’s favorite. I am entertainment manifest,” TV says whenever he’s allowed time.

            Plant always answers the same thing. “Listen dude, you are numbness manifest.”

            Surely if they could move on their own, TV and Plant would brawl, leaves smutched against volume knobs, but as the laws and parameters of physics and technology and entertainment currently are, nothing ever happens except the bickering. I think Plant secretly admires TV’s charm and TV actually respects Plant’s stability and quiet strength. “Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid’s nemesis, was afraid of plants, you know.”

            “You know that, Plant, because I showed you that history program! You were all glued to me then!”

            The bickering is eternal. Really I like Plant a lot more. Plant is older for one thing, by millions of years. Plant saw the fish take to the land, she saw the dinosaurs disband into factions and then fall, she saw comets slam the skull of the earth, she saw the cosmic serpents disappear into the spinning milky way stars, and the planets in the sky change color of the years. You’ve got to respect age. And she’s a good plant, not the kind the weeps, or looks like an explosion, or tries to eat you. No, she’s just real green and standing tall—the kind with honor and integrity and pride.

            TV is a blockhead. He looks like the Korean radish side dish, kak-doo-gi. Even the flat-screen new one’s look like radios on steroids. TV that Plant argues with is at least eight years old.

            “Imagine a life without movement. He’s not even real. He’s just an empty tube,” Plant says confidentially to pot holder. “All that life and excitement passes into him and then out of him—it’s elsewhere. With me, I’m real. I am what I am.” If Plant could smile, this current pose would be a smile. People come and think that it’s a tribute to their good watering schedule. Little do they know to attribute it to self-satisfaction with her own wit.

            “You know, you’re not exactly running water yourself!” says Pot Holder, and all the items in the room collapse in stitches. “You take forever to get any bigger and then once you do, they come and snip it off. They—what’s it called?—prune. That’s it, they prune you.” TV is now laughing the hardest.

            “Laugh it up,” Plant says. “Get that picture tube so hot that it ruptures. Then who’ll be laughing?”

            TV, always a bit paranoid about that particular demise, tames his laughter. He can already feel the pixel electrodes spinning inside of him. It makes him dizzy, just to think about. Then he gets superstitious like thinking about it alone will cause that downfall.

            “Am I too hot? Do I look hot?” TV asks VHS Machine.

            “I don’t know.”

            “I’m serious! Something’s wrong.”

            Plant looks at TV—always somewhat aware of what he’s doing but, of course, too coy and sensually hesitant to say anything about how she really feels, but wondering if his teasing isn’t the symbiotic other end of the same thing, that same fire deep from the inside, those strange resonances, somewhere on the DNA word strand of what makes a thing a thing. Are these things ever one-sided like the Romantics obsessed about?—and notices there is something strange about him. For one thing, he’s on. There’s that radiance, that electronic fizz in the air. She hadn’t noticed it actually, but had felt it surrounding her the whole day. TV usually emits that sludge under the full beam of images and sound that makes his programs, but now something was wrong and the whole room knew it. There was even a faint line across the screen like the final fadeout had come and the electric eye had closed, or like a garage door had come down and left a trail where it smacked the ground.

Plant, Pot Holder, Water, Candle, the whole clique was looking at TV. TV knew it. It was pity. The pixels were spinning. They were heating and firing up all over the place, little swirls of pink and green shooting over the screen. The crowd hissed with surprise. There was a suck in of breath, which now was collectively held. The front door opened. In came the human. Immediately, as if sensing something was wrong, he came to TV. He leaned down, looking his weird blinking circular dual television receptors right at the swirling pink electric line, and pressed a button twice. TV jolted. The screen changed to a different shade of brown nothingness with pink and lime swirlies and then suddenly there was full-blown picture reception—a news broadcast showing politicians mingling in a big indoor amphitheatre with flags and banners strewn inadvertently—for a brief glorious moment. Then TV was turned off.

The human went to Fridge (but that’s another story).

When I looked closely, I could see tiny patches of blush on the insides of Plant’s leaves.

Photo of Jina

     It's quite a nice photo of Jina     

On

Blind Miss Pbaeln Waevff shot with electricity when she woke up. It was something of a click and then circuits were somehow opened like a thing, an invisible thing, could now resonate. Imagine a river flowing, then a raging waterfall. Erase sight and sound. That feeling! That’s what happened to Miss Pbaeln Waevff when she awoke—changed, sizzling and vibrating maybe from the too many wine coolers she’d had last night.

            There was some tone—a steady duet that played through her head. She felt like, and the neighbors would say this was the wine coolers, like her head were expanding. It’s as if companies or men were inside it roping together new networks of cables, stretching her synapses, stretching her, stretching the tonal duet through her like her head were it’s own universe, and she heard music like she was in an elevator, and talking, but it was not one conversation but many like what you hear when trying to sleep in an airplane, and felt a kind of Morse code on her, fingers and fingers, some heavy with fatigue, others anxious, pressing her and waiting with self-aware breathing, and few pre-planned lines of copy, all this electrical highway in poor Miss Pbaeln Waevff’s throbbing head. It was a constant headache. She couldn’t get out of bed anymore. No, not since that high-pitched ring began about ten years ago. The first click was one hundred, the expanding headache around fifty, but now there was something new, a ringing like ears after a rock concert with blaring guitars and keyboards, bass drum that changes the speed your heart beats, but this sound was moving, searching for something. Oh, that’s what’s wrong: Miss Pbaeln Waevff’s heart. There was no beat!

            A heart beat consists of a beat and a non-beat but it’s like she was but on indefinite pause, but an active indefinite pause. Her whole existence was beat. She was suspended sound and activity—the duet, the talking, the ringing. She couldn’t take it anymore. She fished around behind her to unplug the prong from the wall, the first of such a connection to ever exist, the central something from which all current transmission emanates, passes, lives. Unplugged, it would all suddenly cease—never remembering that it ever had been. But the headache was too much and we all agreed that no old woman should have to endure the pain for all of dumb eternity. We supported her right to pull the plug and go from a state best characterized as on to something like off.

            She felt the prong where it entered a kind of quarry in the wall, a shaft as it were, and felt all the tiny voices swirl, all the need and longing, the missing and loving, fighting and hating, repenting and forgiveness, and decided tonight she would just take it easy on the wine coolers or all of it would vanish because someone else would have to replace her but there was no one else, and that was the problem, she had always been everybody else, she had always been them everywhere always a vibrating wave, had never been her, a her, a thing in itself that was anything more than a receptor and transmitter, resonance that eternal lighting of existence, that links the three arch angels, the Faust, the Zeus, the mushrooms in their phyla—spores soaring in the air, like comets crashing on planets, sending their new information via a resonance-sphere, one of the big ideas of the time—Miss Pbealn Weavff noticed that, yes, her ego had grown, itself like a spore, or better yet like a tumor and that was precisely the problem, the notion that she could even have a headache was ridiculous, for a woman could have a headache, but not a machine, nor a network, nor Blind Miss Pbaeln Waevff.

Searching Instructions

I lost something I needed. I had one strand of hair I needed. It was my favorite strand; it had a dot of white, a genetic streak, a mark, a sign, a symbol. I checked it everyday. But today after de-fogging the mirror with my hand I found it missing. That hair had gods etched in it the way those pre-Hispanic savages carved their ornate language delicately into bone. It had instructions. All the little things. The basic, the taken for granted. Now it will break down. The swallow, the wink, the blink, the right touch for heart-fluttering flirting, the smile, the walk upstairs, the cry. I need it. It’s all written on that hair—my genetic code. It must have gone down the drain, into the pipe. My abilities are floating through the city sewer system. They’re being carried under the streets, under the subways, down into cesspools past flies and cockroaches, that essential hair, forever an enigma, one of a billion follicles, a zillion molecules, dumped clandestinely into the river.

So I don my bathing cap, beat my chest, and slice into the sludge with an awkward and horrible dive.

Story originally published at Word Riot Magazine

The Sickle of a P (from Dali Krab Day)

The Persistence of Dali by JM Reinbold (DKD)

The Sickle of a P
by Ralph-Michael Chiaia

did you see the krab aid lady, Nanook?
Nanook stared with a question mark for a face
his face was gone, except for two equally parabolic moustaches
each slight apart from the other
do you know Hitler’s moustache, Mr. Nanook?
you mean that imbecile’s patch of hair
yes, that imbecile’s patch
that’s exactly what you don’t have
you have have the handlebars of genius on your face
but your face is gone
my face is what? his voice was emanating as if there were speakers
because his mouth was gone
El Salvador Dali was standing in the background
in front of the tsunami, Mr. Stubborn The Whole World Must Surf
Building Cities Oil Tankers Robins
holding a Tiger Lily the flower that Quetzalcoatl brought to Ixim Ulew
from the center of the universe, the Orion’s Belt, the Three Hearthstones
the Crab the Crab the Crab Nebula
Flaming Time Nebula
Horsehead Nebula
Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka the persistence of memory
imagine time is a reader
this Dali Krab Day is the sickle of a p, not the spike
just the curved sickle of a capital p: P
in a poem, in a book, in a volume, on a shelf
in a room, on a floor, up an elevator, in a building
on a street, in a city, of a country, of continent
of a planet, in a system, in a universe
moving towards another like a great big muffin top
while in the sack of crabs
slung around Dali’s back
his eyes not tracking right, tracking better than right
super-right
he makes eye contact with Nanook, and the questionmark face
becomes an exclamation mark! 

--------

Painting: The Persistence of Dali by JM Reinbold

Poem: The Sickle of P by Ralph-Michael Chiaia

My new Email Signature

Biography of Ralph:
I keep blogs: http://www.formonksonly.blogspot.com where the secret to the universe will be revealed, and http://ralphadelic.blogspot.com and http://chiaia.tumblr.com/ where no secrets exist nor will be revealed.

Consider buying my books! They are good although not famous.

Nice Night for a Walk

Damani and I had a nice walk today around Korean Art School (한국예술종합대학교). He let me put a baseball cap on him, which he rarely does. He also put himself to sleep as we walked, which he always does. I wanted to play tennis with Jerry but the courts at Kyeonghee were taken. It's tough to find free courts in Korea, nothing like back home where they are everywhere and accessible to everyone. 

Four Pieces for Dali Krab Day 2012