Mr. Googly-eyes in light and shadow

Mulberry Madness

The mulberry tree is ripe and berries are falling like mad, like crazy, like mania. Millions of berries on the grass. Birds are going wild for the one's in the tree, knocking down tons for us. Eating them, right from the grass and low hanging branches makes one feel like a bear. I am one. I feel like a bear.

It's on.

Oh little green globe, how the immense blue bowl of the sky and I have missed you. Welcome. Soon I will eat your little face off.

Turn red and meet my basil and my fresh mozzarella from the Italian butcher on the corner.

I will eat you all.

Pink lies. Like white lies, but a little redder.

Dear Bleaders,

Me and the kids made this white spherical objet d'art and I hung it in the tree I'm always hanging things in, and then a month goes by and the rose bush blossomed such that a rose was right there next to the objet and my mind delighted in the confusion this caused my eye-brain. So to make it delightfully worse, I made a rose out of clay, painted it pink and hung it in the tree near the rose bush and objet. Then I took a picture of it and I sent it off to you.

Love,

Jennifer

Bridgacoaster to the Isle of Staten

Fake Science - Coffee

Find out more Fake Science.

Red Bird District

Poetry Brothel Tonight

Dear Bleaders,

What did we really learn from Eliot? I mean, we learned a tome, but all of it was wrong. So what singular gem that holds up did he leave us embroidered in braille on his trouser hem? This center piece in the puzzledox parabox of the universe I'm in (you're in here with me. watch your hands. redheads and my husband aside): There will be time.

There will be time.

Life is long.

There will be time, there will be time.

Redheads, real or imaginary. If you want some of my honey, bunny, better paint your head red.

At Poetry Brothel's I always bring presents for redheads. A polished stones. A pearl. An Advil. Whatever seems appropriate. It's a trick to get them to kiss me. Sue me. I like them. Real, dye, or imaginary.

There is going to be a Poetry Brothel tonight at the Back Room. Maybe you like life a little dirty. Maybe there are crumbs of poetry down your shirt even now. So you'll join us tonight, we will be high not on life but on essentially legal substances, being used in ways slightly at odds with their stated directions. Poetry will be said that will hurt your poor ape heart and bruise your knuckle-eyed head. How could we have lost so much and ended up aloft in bounty, riding what used to be the purple sage but is now a delightful settee? I do not know, but I am glad that it is you and me. Seriously. I don't care if anyone shows up, but I do hope you drop by. I am going to lounge around lasciviously and tell people important secrets.

I love you. Don't kill yourself. For those of you who can't make it, I'll see you in your dreams.

xox

JMH

ps ok i wrote this post for the Best American Poetry site and then put it here too, and having done so i have to add that the Fonz, also, can kiss me. yes, i know he is fictional. haven't we discussed this? seriously though come tonight and drink and have poetry with delightful people. it is always different and always, in hindsight, perfectly reasonable.

Ode to a Nightingale

When you study the history of science you find out things you might not want to know. What you find out makes it difficult to believe the things everyone around you believes. Because people believe a lot of things and you have learned that most of what people believe, in any time period, in any place, is a kind of nonsense.

Look. After germ theory was very well discovered, explained, and used to change real outcomes in the real world, it took a good four decades to convince people. Some of the most trenchant deniers were the most educated people. We can look back now and see.

Maybe you think doctors and nurses would all say: "Thank goodness, finally, something that actually works!" Instead, the new theory felt so threatening to everything these people had spent their lives doing, teaching, writing, and believing, that it was too painful to turn away from all the details of the medical world before bacteriology. The world just had to wait for them to die off. Florence Nightingale radically changed the world through a belief in cleanliness and order, through her work, for the first time in the history of history, armies did not lose more men to sickness and infection than to sheer physical damage. Yet when germ theory came around she denied it. For decades. Died still wittily deriding the idea.

The role of self interest as a real loud voice at the table of truth, even in these most obvious examples, goes unnoticed by the person trying to figure out the world (isn't everyone living in the world trying to figure it out?).

Think about the things we have invested in too much to reconsider. Consider first the cases in which we are right to do this. We have invested a great deal in learning to use the English language. Whether or not the writing on the wall is in Chinese, it makes good sense for us to stick with what we’ve got. There are cases where we should start changing and are ready to do so: We’ve got a lot invested in books, and we are trying to step back and see what changes might be bearable. Oil. Big agriculture. Those of us interested in reconceiving the world do manage to do so in some impressive ways, no question.

Still, it is worth saying clearly. There are things we believe that are not true. There are ways we behave that are holdovers: We keep jumping over where there used to be a pothole.

After a while, a person asks her or himself, Where is different? Where is life? And in those moments it is useful to remember that one answer is: To the right of where you always go. Under the puddle into which you do not want to step, and then to the left. Where you are strong, instead try weakness. It can be salutary to self-suggest that everything youve saids been sort of wrong.

Surrounded by Michelangelos

Want to know what i looked like the other day?

Dare-link Fonz and Sweet Bleaders,

I have decided to make some Mental Movies. This is the first one. Don't click play on your computer, click play by tapping a finger. Here is the movie. It lasts fifteen seconds. This woman (me) eats her glasses. That's it. Go.

Did you do it? Isn't that a funny movie?

I'm going to watch it again! It's different every time. In fact, it keeps getting longer, as each time I see it I see what I imagined before and often a new image as well: me biting a lens like a potato chip, drawing in a frame arm like a noodle, plucking off the two small nose rests, like berries, and popping them into my mouth. At last, nearly blind, I smile at the camera's lens, which, of course, now fears me, but shouldn't, as I am utterly sated by my recent feast.

Love,

Jennifer

poem on the quick

Poem of May 5, 2010

Fireworks and fertilizer

in Time Square

an SUV where no car should be

smoking a little.

A vendor sees, tells a cop

on a horse.

The other way it might have played

was that the bomb

went off and fifty-seven people

died, millions heartbroken.

All of them wished so hard

it hadn’t happened

that the world bent back

like a twig and snapped

to this world,

where it didn’t happen.

Have a cocktail or something.

I’m going to drink champagne.

Fireworks and fertilizer

and a man on a horse.

It's very strange.

--Jennifer Michael Hecht

garden jewelry VI

Being in a tree

I made this being and I put it in a tree.

May the fourth be with you

Happy Star Wars Day