Don’t ask me to be glamorous. I won’t do it. I have a look because others have eyes. Would that we were all less sighted, so we might be without the encumbrance of gaze, be more plainly, level, visible. Yet the drive to shine is strong and hailed by civilization itself as charmed, a twisted grammar pulling power from light and blinding others to our animal regret. There is privilege to be had in the glam, the canto, the allure, imbued with rays we don’t need eyes to see. The question to my mind is why the need, what fundament or currency yields such a cavern that craves filling? A simple hunger or an ace of evolution? A portent of our essence or a fleshly circumstance? In my mind ever a mystery as I seem to lack the drive itself: some molecule un-formed, some strand broke, or haps the resounding hollow never sounded in the first. Or maybe the drive is here but lacks a me. Don’t ask glamour to be me. It won’t oblige. It has a look because flesh sings with eyes but cannot know how far it really sees. Perhaps the glamour lives in spectacles, lives between blinks, then slips and cracks on the pave, brittle as any grammar ever was.

~ ~ ~

UPCOMING EVENT  ::  The provocative voices of Babar in Exile is will be heard again at the First Annual Hayward Lit Hop. See us from 5-6 pm on Saturday, April 30 at the Oddfellows Sycamore Lodge in downtown Hayward. Readers include Kimi Sugioka, Josiah Luis Alderete, Paul Corman-Roberts, Jan Steckel, and Steve Arntson. I’ll be a-hostin’. The festival begins at 2pm at the Hayward downtown library where the city will announce its first teen poet laureate, then moves outdoors to nearby Heritage Plaza for a Ballet Folklorico show and further readings. Different venues will then open up for readings of one hour each between 4pm and 7pm. Eventually there should be a schedule for the whole thing at the Lit Hop event page. Okee-doke!

~ ~ ~

Cant, incant, incant a lore; grieve, engrave, enclave a core; shine, enfine, incline a shore and merrily merrily morn ring, merrily merrily more. Long, in song, in wrong a deed; true, ensue, in rue a need; mind, enkind, unwind a steed and galloply galloply make a plea, galloply galloply plead. Do not mistake the eyelid for the eye, nor take a face for granted lest it wend away. Today, to prey, to fray a seam; fling, to bring, to ring about; rout, to shout, to sing your spine; to glamour is to live in true without a mooring truth to feed, ring-a-more ring-a-more freed. Cant, incant, incantator; fan, infant, infant-afire; roar, aroar, aurora bore; chant, enchant, endure a-more and chant a-more, chant a-more, chant a-more day, chant a-more chant amour day.

~ ~ ~

I AM SOJOURNING in New Jersey for a couple of weeks, land of cheesesteaks, birch beer, and 1/2-ply toilet paper. Visiting and helping out my mom and brother, both (as so many) challenged by the stresses of the past few years. I’m spending a lot of time in a storage locker hoisting heavy memories. Wading through Redneckia to grab a soft pretzel at the Wawa. Waking in a room filled with antiques and keepsakes. I pour through boxes of my past. The rain pounds taunts to the West. The glam here is entirely sand.

~ ~ ~

They enter the room and everyone within. They are she; they are he; they are manifold. They thrive in an ensemble yet imagined, saunter every corridor where water waits. They swim; they brim; they slip into something more fluent. The language of tide is upon them, becomes them. They take tithes of time and reify zeal. Skin leaps from them, demasking and rebounding. The boundless is key and unspoken, unspeakable, the terror that drives, the forest that gleams in the moonlight. In they stream, in we stream, in you stream as the glamour runs through all, alive in shadow and new in the leaf and leaving, coming, bursting again. And we ken.

Sincerely,
Richard