Excuse Poem

12/28/2009 6:50 AM

For almost a year, now/
My journal has been kept in haikus/
All of it has been posted on twitter/
Life seventeen syllables at a time/
Just like my prose journal/
That I used to keep/
I’ve not reflected on it/
I know, however, that/
This I must organize/
Because the Haikus are/
Of certain life-themes/
Family, my wife, life and kids/
Philosophical, bromides of life/
Artistic, moments of beauty/
That I catch in seventeen syllables/
I really look forward to reviewing
The thousands of Haikus/
I’ve distilled my life into/

Worshippers

Those that worship Baal/

Are Jesus’ most ardent followers/

After they make burnt offerings/

@ Home Depot. Staples, & WalMart/

They recede to the church of their fathers/

Acting like their reverence for/

Their Romney-ing at Gates Trump-Buffet/

Was not as serious as their adoration/

Of Jesus’ scaffolding/

It is important to note/

Their wealth is in/

Products/

That project/

Their faith in stuff/

Happy Birthday To Me

12/04/09 05:10am
Its my fiftieth birthday.
I haven’t written in my journal since february, though I have been keeping my Haiku Journal on twitter pretty assiduously on my phone.  I want to write this one “birthday letter” that I was thinking about as I couldn’t fall back to sleep.
Sometime in the fall or Winter of 1976 I was walking through the basement of the church where whe had theatre at Copley Sq. High school.  On the table of a room we didn’t regularly have access to was a newspaper.  It looked old and I am inveterate newspaper reader so I walked over to it. It was the sports section from the Boston BGlobe from the day I was born, December 4th, 1959.  I wish I could remember something pithy, like “the Bruins were winning when I was born,” but truthfully, I don’t that was a long time ago.  And, since I was born in Japan, and thought of myself as a New Yorker even then, it didn’t seem particularly relevant.  But I picked it up and kept it at least until my parents through my junk away when they sold the House I grew up in in the 80s or 90s.
I remember this bit of litter all these years later because it is a good reminder of my special sense of aesthetics.  I saw it then, in my tight high-wasted bell bottoms, as a sighn of my special providence.  I knew that I was not “select” like in some pilgrim’s progress sort of way, but in a nead coincidence and left-handed style sort of way.  This was long before I would read Siddhartha but I knew that my life was not going to be one of great import to anyone but me.  I guess I am an existentialist at heart, because I would have to find my own special meaning in the symbols of the world.  Bradshaw or Winthrop or one of those pilgrim-y types saw an eagle fighting a snake and took it to mean something (the rightness of evangelical colonialism).
I saw an old sports section from the day I was born in a basement and I took it to mean something.  I think it meant that I was to be happy with the quotidian (not vocabulary I had then), the everyday pleased me in ways that I cannot easily explain.  But, Since this is my 50th Birthday, and I did wake up at 4 against my will, I will to limn it out.  Looking back at my life I can see this aesthetic and moral value system even earlier.  My first recollectionof it was when Scott and I walked to school alone in the winter of ‘69-’70.  We walked past a vacant gas station that was in ruins between Warren Ave and Columbus Ave.  Methunion manner projects lay there the last time I was in Boston.  It was across from Braddock Drugs where junkies would get paragoric cough syrup and there were always lots of cough syrup bottles littering the abandoned lot.  It was there that the beginner junkies would “get straight” with codine.  I would always marvel at the repetition of these bottles in their decay, fragmentation and crystaline green form.  When the old came Scotty and I would crush the ice as it formed embedding the glass in the water crystals.  It is now over 40 years later and I am still mesmerized by the formation of Ice Crystals.  I look at their random perfection and skewed patterns and I am struck by their rightness.
Now I knew that this was a vacant lot full of litter.  I knew that this was a place of peril and filth.  I knew that this was where the lowest of the low went to shepherd their diminished chemical dreams into the abyss that was their lives. But I also saw a beauty there.  I saw patterns, textures, artifacts, symbols, shapes, colors, textures, causes and effects, and, finally, meanings that Scott and the adults who told us not to got there didn’t want to see.  I was a junior archeologist of some sort of hidden aesthetic that no-one-else saw.  I was an anthropologist of the despair of those junkies (that were never there frozen December 8-AMs).  What made them, like ants, repeat the same futile track across Columbus to the gas station and empty those light-green glass bottles?  Why did those bottles and shards embedded in the thin -first of the season- ice attract me so?
So now I am 50.  I’m not the child I once was.  I don’t care about the Bruins, Celtics, Three Stooges or even girls (outside of Linda) anymore.  But I am still the person who sees the hand of beauty in placement of litter.  Indeed, for better or for worse, I would have to say that this is my “signature move.”  I see the art and poetry that is littered evenly all around like the first snowflakes of a blizzard.  The sidewalk is still visible, but it will soon be obliterated.  Lost in a blanket of temporary beauty.  The white that will come, the even-ness and sound absorbing uniformity that most look to as payment for the inconvenience of the snow is not stunning to me as the discarded little tykes truck that once made a kid so happy. The litter of our lives tells us much more about ourselves than the prized possessions.
Those things we want, that we work so hard to get, will be the beaters, whoopdis, litter, of the next snow storm.  When they are new, they tell the story we want to hear. When they are cast away, discarded in heaps, like coffee grounds, tea leaves or the bones of the orishas, they tell us the truth.
Here’s a truth I can tell.  I am fifty today. I am alive today.  The world hids treasures for me today.  And  I will continue to be the archeologistof today, looking for the sports section of weighted import.

Love, Stafford

Spring Ennui

Spring Structure View Lament

As I stand on the hillock behind my house looking over the gentle slope that rolls down to the stone wall that separates the cemetery from Woodside, I am filled with sadness because of the warm breezes that blow down the back of my neck. In the darkening sky I watch the empire state and Chrysler buildings jump to life I lament the warmth that I’ve been crying for all winter long; this the first winter of our puppy, Lucky. As the buildings get to full voltage on the horizon on the other side of the stone wall, graveyard and river the skies fall dark. Through denuded branches the empire state glows two flavors of pink in a spring cross-marketing promotion of breast cancer and brassieres. The Chrysler building arcs a bright deco-rococo filigree in the center of the mountain of Manhattan skyline. The brilliance of the verge of sky and city on that warming cold spring evening seen through the branches flogging the sky pulls at my heart. Soon the warmth will stimulate the branches and coax out the flush-lush green that will blot it all out. In a week, two, or a month I will stand above that brown stonewall topped with concertina wire and see nothing but trees and leaves. The obstruction will be celebrated far & wide. From the 7 Manhattan-ites will remark “how bucolic” it looks with all the trees & Tudor buildings. I will cringe thinking about all of the views the foliage has suffocated.
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I.
The picture of the building is cracked
Irregular lines and shadows of lines
Scribble in every direction, track
Crossing out the columned stone station

II.
Cops quickly passing a crenellated
Columned, staired stone castle
The cracks are crooked boughs
Of December trees, up and out gasping

III.
Long branches reaching for sun long gone
Zig-zagged boughs couldn’t dodge trucks
Cracked and reversed lay bare winter pain
Now I can see how summer shade is struck

IV.
The spring brings out cover to hide
The old “house.” The green pollution smears
The leisurely passing of what’s inside
The strength of the skeleton structure

After Winter Falls

After Winter Falls
Through snakey black trees
A hard world emerges
Out the grey windows

Folks, kids, dads, and moms
Love and hate and pain
Streets of hOpetemism
The course of city life

Branches separate
Branches unify
People living out
City life as humans

Spring buds out green life
Tinting strong lines green
Blotting out the lives
That run past the windows

Buds to leaves become
Hinting at the branch
That holds leaves up, out
Over and along

Bulbous leaves foam out
Green from everywhere
Lush plush green of lies
Life of lives to hide

California Vacation (Day 5)

Dawn

Cali Day 5
Waiting for sunrise over the east-bay hills from the west berkeley tracks

Grumpy shape-up from “quiet please” motel tells us all that we’re ready to fly back home @ 1:30.

stack of Corn meal pancakes: poached eggs and applewood smoked bacon, currant scone with lemon cream and sourdough toast with scrambled eggs (extra toast & syrup because they’ve cut to 1/2 rations to keep prices low).

Royal cafe above solano: been going there since village days (where my daughters learned to like runny eggs).

The hit toy of the vacation, better even than the mood rings, is a series of multi colored blocks teathered with bungie elastic: insainly playable.

Burritos from Gordos Taqueria in Berkeley on jet blue gave me a twinge of missing cali that I felt when I’d enjoy my last slice of pizza before returning to grad school during breaks. The grilled chicken, guac, salsa picante & frijoles are somehow un-replicatable in nyc.
-sigh-

Driver’s licence has expired, but in spite of the fact that the airline noticed homeland security didn’t: I was spared the sanctimonious predations of finger wag

Insane jostling for overhead storage space: I’m resenting the later boarders who’re repacking the stuff above my seat: even though I can see down her shirt.

Manchester united vs. Inter Milan on jet-blue flight: good start to flight
Punchline: espn showed only the 1st 1/2

Back to nyc with a newly minted 14-yr-old daughter, more confident -look-’em-in-the-eyes- son, and happy 7-yr-old: bittersweet because of time change (amped kids on cali time).

Next Morning:
Retrieved Lucky-Limpy from the pound & she woke things 1 & 2 with happy licks & buzzing tail: sleep is strong with thing 3.

California Vacation (Day 4)

Cali Day 4
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The mesage on the tablets/
Was your ad here/
Space for rent/ (aplogies to the clash)

3rd street in Berkeley

I wandered around the swank shopping precincts/
That erupted on 4th street like mushrooms/
As the flatlands were gentrified since 90/
Store after store & even a whole factory/
Building retrofit mall have died & dried/
The flouncy organic linen garments/
Hand-picked cotton dresses that hide/
Or camouflage curves and desire in plain/
Earthtone wrappers have blown/
Away in the recession and hard times/
Of necessities and rent leaving empty/
Architectural spaces with neatly lettered posters/
Prophetic tablets of our times before 1000 sq ft/
And the message on the tablets/
Was Space for rent/

The days roll out slow & finish quickly when you are on vacation in a motel with three kids.

too sick to scurry in his warren

Two hours on the berkeley marina (formerly known as the city dump). Watching the dogs run through the weeds in the rain by the bay. Across the icy waves occassionally pelted by rain showers that hung between san francisco and the east bay we watched the “ground squirrels” flit about the rocks and burrows. One didn’t run and sat shivering by its warren like rocky the guinea pig did before he died.

A quick trip to peet’s for hot cocoa after the rainy bay: it proved that thing 1 is lactose intolerant (it almost ruined chez panisse).

We took the kids -7, 12, & 14- to Chez Panisse for their first truly gourmet meals: it is never too early to start to develop refined palettes.

Avocado citrus salad with hot peppers: Roast chicken leg, garlic mash potatoes & broccoli: linguine with arugula pesto & sun dried tomatoes, and ricotta:
YeLlowtail jack with fennel pesto & artichoke hearts with two wound yukon jack potatoes & plain noodles with grated cheese: mandarins & dates: and surprise! Straicciatto ice cream with chocolate hazelnut compote (?).

banana JUNIOR

Fentons for a birthday: coffee cookie dream, toasted almond, hot fudge & caramel, malted whip-cream & nuts & a cherry.

Dessert for a 14th birthday with another family that’s a good fit for us: simltaneously reviling and enjoying the rich excess of an old fashioned blue-collar ice cream joint.

According to my newly minted 14-year-old birthday wishes are the most powerful.

California Vacation (Day 3)

cali day 3
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When are we meeting & where
I’ll have at least one groggy teen
Who’ll resent doing anything for
Either of the siblings, that means
Unless this one’s the star
There might be hell to pay

The only sound in the little motor court/
Was the broken blinking charged neon sign/
That bug-zap-buzzed itself to full-on orange/
In slow but determined sweeps of obi wan’s/
Charged light saber’s sounds so alien out here/
In the mission revival motel by the tracks/
Of the southern pacific by the bay flats/
Qui-i-i-i-i-et Please the sigh would say/
Through the clenched teeth of shock therapy/

Four hours spent with ivy & her dad,/
whom I miss more than when I left/
California when all was well with the world/
Reminds me of the greatness of friends:/
It restores my faith in my choice in friends/

Simple fare with a berkeley family/
The avocados and acme bread,/
An array of madarins and mangos/
Salami & smoked gouda with corn-nuts/

Remind us that the finest meal is/
Eaten with true friends and made of/
Simple elements in the spirit of the family we left behind/
Berkeley is on my mind/

Best thing about this year’s oscars? Watching it on the west coast so I can bag ZZZZs at a reasonable hour.

Dinner @ meaghan’s with her beautiful fam/
Plenty and happy nothing too glam/
A costco of roast & 2 costcos of that/
Broken anonymity opened that trap/

Berkeley Vacation (DAY 2)fter my pre-dawn walk along the berkeley rails and a

Cali Day 2

West Berkeley Agitprop

Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 1:39am

Early am photo safari around west berkeley & the rails: sad the destruction of graffitti by gentrification now forclosed

As has been my pattern since the kids were wee, I’ve always gone out for walks or exercise before they woke or after they went to sleep.  I remember exploring Sunnyside and woodside when they were babies and I visited NY with them.  This vacation I woke before anyone and walked around my old neighborhood.  I walked to 4th stret, teh trendy shopping district of Betty’s Ocean View that sprung up in 92, but is now bloated and long inthe tooth.  I went to the Albany Bulb and walked around the racetrack but avoided UC Village, which is so gone now. I wish that I had the time to  go on, but hopefully later I will.

John from easy street, paradise

A little gray-bearded man announced himself that way to me on McGee Street on Saturday morning.

Backyard flower safari/
Three big girls of 7/
And a toddler brother/
Pressed aphids & buds/

We sat in the comfy livingroom/
While the kids played out in the yard/
We sat nustled in the familiar memories/
Of the time when they were too wee to be alone/

The two previous stanzas were keyed in right after we had a wonderful afternoon with Noel and Joellen and all of our kids running in and out & playing with the recently departed Buster.  The bigger kids eavesdropped on the adult conversations, but the little ones could have cared less what we were doing (except when they needed us for something).

Two sets of rails/
By the homeless/
In the morning/
Little train at night/

The day started with my predawn perambulations around the tracks and warehouses that remain in West Berkeley.  By first light most of them are empty, though still warm.  Interestingly, they seem less fecal and dangerous than I remember them from when I lived there before.  There were way fewer bicycle parts too, so perhaps they are less larcenous.  That night we went on the little train in Tilden park which is, to paraphrase Rocky Horror, a different set of rails.  It was so nice for me to see both of them in the same day.  I love it when the world ties together disparate strands of my soul.  The kids still laugh when I mock fear of the tunnel on the Redwood Railroad (only Lennox beleives it).

Albany bulb pheonix
Of graffitid rubble
Homeless encampments
Embellished into popart

We went to albany bulb/
The Bay area landfill/
Where the homeless created/
Art on the crumbled surfaces/

Highways made into land/
A rough primative landscape/
With plinths and columns breaking/
Out from the hardscrabble ground/

The wonder of the vagrant community/
The forced intimacy of ostracization/
That can make a two pound jar of peanut butter/
Obeisance and sustanance worth celebration/

Archtypall community/
Lost entirely to the well-to-do/
Lives around campfires of rubbish/
On the bulb made into art/

Fire-pits and shelters decorated/
In the manner of homer and hopi/
Cro-magnons and vikings huddled/
In their decorated hovels and loopholes/

Five Days in Berkeley (Day 1)

Here is the chronicle of my five days in California After I submitted grades and a draft of my Powerpoint Paper to In-Transit.  These were written on my crackberry as facebook notes and updates as well as twitter-tweets.  Day One seems a bit cryptic, so I’ll embellish in bold.

Rockaways from Jet Blue 91

Cali Day 1
Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 1:37am
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Day 1 in CA/
royal cafe for a familiar breakfast (our favorite breakfast place where the kids learned their restaurant manners and I love the cornmeal pancakes with poached or fried eggs); where we met Diane and were remembered by the staff (Diane was one of the staff workers and ex residents of University Village in Albany CA [we hashed over residual bigotry in Albany Schools and the architectural destruction of the village community])./
noon mtg: familiar faces and places
Books, chairs and views that are perfect/
Le Petit Cheval bun (vermincelli salad w/ fish sauce), pork chops, pork sandwich (Simply the best low-hassle Vietnamese food I’ve ever had: Le Cheval in Oakland is better, but more involved)/
smyth fernwald flashback (Chandler and Mason’s last daycare before public school) with Mary and Leslie we recounted three years in kids life (Fond memories of really good kids)/
dinner @ greg & chalon’s was so comfortable and affiming of our friendship (I am amazed at how close I feel to Greg, Chalon Sophia and Maya, they were one of the families who spent my 40th Birthday with me: damn fine people)/
chandler to sleepover with zoe, arnelle & meagan (sleepovers have unseen costs when tired kids return)

Comicon and Me

2/9/2009 5:29 AM
I went to Comicon twice over the last weekend and had a smashing time.  It is funny how much you learn about yourself in unusual environments (More on that later).   Back to the quotidian, I went to an academic panel on Friday (as well as just walking around and engaging in my geekdom).  At that panel I learned about storyboarding and I got some great ideas about teaching comics.  I want to quickly write down the plan that I got (at http://dw-wp.com/).  They did a quick “story lottery,” where you have each student draw a picture (of the same character?) and then you through a voting system put them in order to make a narrative.  I think more about this can me seen on their website (and they showed a place where they had a completed random one done in a bookstore in Brooklyn).  I never did find their booth after the panel or the completed one in BK.
Comicon was full of the people I always wish that I could have admitted that I was when I was younger.  I loved being there and have to say that the excitement of the crowds when I went on Friday and Sunday was refreshing.

I saw myself over and over.
The self I wanted to be
The self I was
The self I am
I saw the Stafford that was
Who could never admit
That he loved Comics and art
When he was a teenager
And had to disco down and check
It all out
When I was into my comics’ renaissance
1987 was too old
To put my shoulder to the task
I was more a “mature guy”
Who just happened to read comics.
Needless to say, at 49
I am a mature guy who loves comics
I don’t think Ill ever be able to let my hair down
And dress up as a soul samurai or planetary assassin.
Sigh, when will I loose my reserve?

Other things that have been happening.  Old Friends including Henry Jackson have found me on facebook and I am really not free to be friends to more than my life right now.    Here’s a bit of odd confluence; at comicon I saw the vampyrella booth and they still use the design he did in the 70s for her costume.  I’ve also found my JH best friend Stephen Ferry.  Funny, I thought of him as I rode the bus up from comicon to meet Chandler at rehearsal at Hunter.  I googled him and found his website.  Sent him an email and got a response as I got off the crosstown bus. Quick.  He is a photographer based in Columbia and quite good if the time I spent on his site this AM is any indication.