Last night lying in bed, you were reading poetry. You are reading books again, you suppose, after a fashion these days. One must do something when time opens up and spills through the gaps, and reading as good as a way to pass time. So yes, you were reading Amichai, whose poetry is quite like a branding iron, for once you press your tongue against certain metaphors in his lines, you carry them with you like can intimate icon. Or as Amichai wrote in one of his poems:

"On Rabbi Kook's street I walk --your bed on my back like a cross-- though it's hard to believe a woman's bed will become the symbol of a new religion."

So that later, much later when the weather has changed, say from sunny to cloudy, one of these brands will resurface, and glisten on the tongue like a piece of live coal. Another strange thing is that some of these poems, which are really sad, which are almost laments, come packaged in a book called "Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems". Go figure that out. Is it becuase love, which is also dissolution of the ego, is a painful alchemical process when it happens, and even more painful when it doesn't?

Then this mind game, of trying to remember the details. What was the color of her t-shirt the day you met? What about the first thought in your head? "Good god!" or "god, thy goodness overfloweth"? So little is remembered, which is good because too much weight might kill you in your dreams. But still you must try to remember some details:

"Try to remember some details. For they have no face and their soul is hidden and their crying is the same as their laughter, and their silence and their shouting rise to one height and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees and they have no life outside this narrow space and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing and paper cups that are used once only."

...

Then you remember a voice, a woman's voice, rough and smooth at the same time, like the hollow of a stone pestle. A voice to grind down the days of youth into dust, which can then be sprinkled on wings of song, as well over sea surf. But you don't remember the voice, you only remember these sensations under your hair and you eyes that can somehow still evoke that perhaps are similar to that time when you were sung a song. You know, in spite of your cynicism, that doesn't happen everyday. But perhaps it is necessary that it not happen everyday for otherwise will the eyes widen or the hair stand on its end? And you read:

"A man doesn't have time. When he loses he seeks, when he finds he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves he begins to forget."

...

Later when you are done with eating morsels, bit sized pieces of poems, you lay on your back, and try to blank your mind, your eyes are already blank with the heavy secrets of nights. Nothing happens. There is no difference if there is a roof over you head. You still see stars aligning themselves into impossible angles, meteors going back into cosmic dust, which is also light, which is also a wave, which is also thought. So you wake up, and play this song because the woman's voice has a tenderness similar to that you knew by a sea. And then you disappear.

"In vain you will look for the fences of barbed wire. You know that such things don't disappear. A different city perhaps is now being cut in two; two lovers separated; a different flesh is tormenting itself now with these thorns, refusing to be stone."

So to cheer me up, and because I realized that I am posting something or the other here almost everyday (mostly as a way to distract myself from myself), I decided that I need to change my logo. And by fortuitous circumstances I discovered the work of Hundertwasser, an Austrian artist. I think it is highly impossible to view these paintings, and still feel as angst-y as before. Thus-ly a logo is made out of a painting, a sort of a reminder to myself that life does not follow (perhaps it was never meant to) the tyranny of straight lines, that it spirals, circles, sits in large blobs, sprouts as trees from high windows, grows globular Islamic domes, slides on floors that are slightly titled, is slightly deranged, and is always colorful, even in moments of heavy sadness (what would its color then?). Also here are few further links.

And here is today's music video (courtesy YouTube), featuring Cowboy Mouth, a band from New Orleans (now nearly gone, Lordy!) whose music is not very well know, perhaps deservedly because they are not all that sonically hot, but whose live performances resemble some good ol' fashioned revival meetings, i.e., they rock in the truest sense. My first encounter with these gentlemen took place a few years ago, when I was a greenhorn at the Heartbreak Bar, and to substitute that fallible religion called Love, I took to live music. It was a concert of some 30,000 souls all jumping up and down hollering as Fred beat mad rhythms on those drum, and make all of those present believe, for a moment at least, in the milk of human kindness and love. So yes, if they are coming to a town near you, kind readers, you should go get some religion.

Speaking of New Orleans, I wonder if anyone of you have read Michel Ondaatje’s novel "Coming Through Slaughter"? It apparently is styled like set of jazz tunes, with improvisation at its heart. While the writing in this novel, like the latter novels, throws off sharp sparks like those that can be seen off a knife grinder's wheel, I felt it doesn't somehow congeal into an artifact called a novel. Maybe this is because of my limitations as a reader?

Someone called, perhaps, Z was born in 1982 to someone perhaps called Mr. A & Mrs. B. These A & B perhaps divorced in 1987 in a state that begin with the letter T. When B was still Mrs. B, perhaps she was criminally indicted, perhaps, in the year of 1986. Eleven years later, perhaps, Mr. A too was criminally indicted along with Ms. Mo, who perhaps is another daughter of his. For these alleged or real crimes let there be no 'perhaps-es'.

Nearly tweny years later, Z perhaps attempts to forget all this by making some additions, and attempts to become someone who is not Z. Is this Y?