Where The Pieces Fall

Pic By JHM OF Jim Dine Lithograph

Revenge (Jim Dine) by Sinlab

Recorded At 17 Frost

Painting By Jim Dine

Jim Dine Poem (Javier Hernandez-Miyares Guitar Composition) by Sinlab

This Track Was Recorded And Produced By Steven Pacia And Javier Hernandez-Miyares

First Run Through Of This Track:
i am composing it and this is the first version.

Jim Dine: Voice, Poetry
Javier Hernandez-Miyares: Guitar, Composer
Steven Pacia: Producer

JD And JHM

Painting By Hugo Consuegra

Caminante Sin Lunas

Tú, en la palabra
(You, inside the verse)
Here, hidden in verse,
behind the exact viagra that defines
your essence,
I traverse your landscape
of hills and valleys,
of coves and rivers,
of palm trees and ceiba trees,
of doves without light.

And, with the foam of the sea
and blue embraces of
seagulls and memories,
I envelope your mountainous waist,
your coral thighs.

I cross the paths of
ancient cathedrals,
down sad alleyways
with empty carriages containing
neither passengers nor drivers,
past weeping poplars,
unadorned gray arches,
silent palm trees,
without a breeze or a sound.

Silence has gone
with its cloak of darkness;
the perfume of legend and mystery
that surrounded your countenance
has been stolen:
the slave laughs while his sorrow weeps
to the steps of an ancestral dance,
impatiently desiring for history
to return with its triumphal march.

Meanwhile, hidden,
sheltered by verse,
I embark on the long
journey of exile and remembrance,
searching for the word that is
incessantly out of my reach,
the word that allows me to recreate
you once again.
_____________________________________

Poder del ensueño
(The Power of dreams)
I rediscover myself
in verse bearing your name,
dreaming of you
in each moment of clarity.
_____________________________________

Ausencia y soledad
(Absence and Solitude)
In the shadow of remembrance
the birds of memory sleep:
broken-winged-trills at
the shore’s edge,
drifting away in a sea without waves.

Even the fish do not come to the shore
and the wandering wind,
distances itself silently
without leaving a trace in the sand.

Up above, a seagull waves
goodbye to the horizon
as the waning afternoon, drenched
in blood, slowly collapses
behind the slopes, while
the shadows arrive in an
immense gray procession of penitents,
to rest on the shoulders of my anguish.

Oh, solitude,
virgin without yearning!
listen to my silent cry,
while I remain alone, one
among the shadows.
____________________________________

El poder del recuerdo
(The Power of Memory)
I no longer reside in the darkness
of your being,
that escapes in silent embraces.
But here, in the core of my being,
I jealously possess you,
with the green envy of remembrance.
____________________________________

El camino del destierro
(The Road of Exile)
On the path of the forgotten,
death comes to nostalgia,
funeral services for remembrance.

Each step is a beat of silence,
that sorrow repeats like an echo:
solitude swings in the balustrades.

In the hills a brightly lit star,
-the pilgrim’s beacon.
The traveler takes fewer steps
while anguish waits around
every corner.
____________________________________

Sabiduría
(Wisdom)
They will summon you
to the edge of oblivion.
Better to ignore the words
of those who don’t understand.
To be true to oneself,
be yourself and rediscover
yourself in verse and with
an embrace.
____________________________________

Recordar es regreso
(Remembering is returning)
Wanderer of time:
the past is the present
fixed in words;
the roots are never lost,
neither diminished nor augmented.
All that is needed is a pound on the chest
Or a kiss from the breeze;
remembering is returning
without borders or time.

Poems By Julio Enrique Hernandez-Miyares
Translations By Dennis Aberle

I’ve been following a rhythm that’s playing in my head…

Drawing By JHM

Compound curvature
Flowers crush concrete sorrow
Anatomic bombs

Haiku By CheeseFlap

WTPF: What can you tell us about yourself without betraying your anonymity?

CF: There are only half a dozen people who know who I am, and I get nervous about
that sometimes, although it brings me comfort to know that most of them have
probably forgotten about it by now. I’ll go so far as to tell you I live in the
United States, and I’ll leave gender, race and age out of it because I choose to
believe it does not matter. When I write as CheeseFlap, the intent is to share
an idea; I’d rather have helped 10 people laugh, cry or see the world
differently than to be known as the world’s best “mid-thirties female urban
haiku poet active in the early part of the 21st century.” And from the comments
I’ve received I am know that CheeseFlap haikus appeal to a variety of people,
and I want to keep it that way. I’ve been writing since I was in my teens, and I
have gotten away from the free-verse of those years. I feel more comfortable
with essays and shorter forms of written expression than with longer styles. I
can’t imagine writing a 500-page book unless it is a collection of shorter
pieces. I think I get bored with my own thinking after a certain point, and it
seems awfully self-centered to think people would want to hear what I have to
say at length. Politically, I am an “appalled bystander.” Most American
politicians are intellectually and morally lazy, and our political system is
designed to parcel out such things as comfort, safety, security and well-being
in just the right amounts needed to keep lower-income people from revolting. At
higher income levels, the system parcels out wealth and power, which keeps a
certain class interested in maintaining that system, and those people go into
politics, business and marketing. The quality of discourse in this country is
embarrassingly low. If I were a teacher, I would use everyday examples of this
as a way to teach logic and writing skills, but I’m sure all it would take is
one student’s parents to accuse me of being anti-American for pointing out the
silliness. See, now I’ve gone off and started rambling, and I didn’t even get to
religion.

WTPF: Your poems are haikus. What is it about the form of the haiku that meets your
poetic necessities?

CF: There are probably several elements to this. I enjoy the challenge of trying
to say something complex but in a very compressed form, and one way to
accomplish that is to invoke images and associations with the senses. I don’t
sit down and say “I must come up with a suitable metaphor,” though. When I have
something to say about an event or idea, the way to express it often just comes
to me. Sometimes I can write a haiku in about 15 seconds; other times, it takes
a while to come up with the right phrasing and imagery to make the point, but I
almost always start with a visual of some type. I especially enjoy haikus that
work on multiple levels. So if CheeseFlap can make a point and do it in a
humorous way, then that’s what I’d consider a successful haiku. Sometimes for
fun I even add another level by hiding an additional message in the haiku,
usually by capitalizing or bolding certain letters. While the haiku form may
seem simple and somewhat limited, I see nothing but potential. Language is such
a powerful form of communication, and it just seemed like my kind of challenge
to use the form as a vehicle for my view of the world. Puns and homonyms are
also useful, but again, if it seems forced, I won’t publish it that way.
Frequently while writing, I realize that I’ve made a connection between two
words that might sound the same, or that force the reader to view the situation
from a different perspective, and that’s satisfying. Attention spans are much
shorter now too: I don’t think most people would read any poetry if they thought
they were reading poetry, so it is beneficial that they are short. It’s like
slipping broccoli into your kid’s hamburger, but ideas belong to a whole
different food group that doesn’t seem to have a place at many dinner tables. If
a haiku makes me laugh or cry, that’s pretty cool. But if a haiku makes someone
else laugh or cry, that makes my day.

WTPF: How does the immediate experience of publishing on the internet influence
your poetry?

CF: This depends on whether the haiku is meant as a contribution to another blog,
or whether it will be published on the cheeseflap.com site exclusively. In the
former situation, there are blogs in which so many people are making comments
that they can be on to another topic by the time I prepare something I consider
worth contributing. And many blogs have changed their commenting structures to
allow more deeply threaded comments. I see the value in that, but the
conversation breaks down into a bunch of side conversations really fast. A lot
of the CheeseFlap haikus are comments about the totality of the story, or the
topology of the comment thread itself, so it is becoming more challenging to
find an effective insertion point. It’s really easy to get lost in the
cacophony. Now if I’m publishing solely to the CheeseFlap site, I can add haikus
as they come to me. As soon as something new is published, the bots swarm the
site, but the content remains for people to view at their leisure. There is an
immediacy to the publishing process, but it lacks the tension and urgency
required when it’s on someone else’s blog. And since I don’t feel rushed, I
don’t want to feel obligated to publish something new every hour or every day;
I’d rather populate the site with haikus that meet my standards. The internet
has been an influence in another way too: when I first started doing haikus as
CheeseFlap, many were published as comments on the Think Progress website.
People started asking if I was going to publish a book of them, which is
flattering, and it would be a lovely thing, but it’s a lot of work and almost
seems a luxury nowadays. And I realized that all this work was just “out there”
and it wasn’t under my control, and it wasn’t consolidated in any way. The
internet is such a pain in the ass that way, where content is so disposable that
it is almost designed to be forgotten. This might help the propagandists in the
world, but for poets and writers, it’s not always good. Think Progress was very
generous in allowing me to copy what I had already published on their site, but
by the time I really got serious about trying to find them all, many had become
masked by a new commenting system. Search engines still showed that a CheeseFlap
haiku had been written, and I could get to the archived story, but the comments
were closed and unreadable. I spent a lot of time searching for and recovering
as many haikus as I could, and was able to find about 150 or so, which were used
to start CheeseFlap’s Haiku Site. There were a couple of sites that had for a
time archived Think Progress content, and I found a bunch of them on that
service, which was helpful. But I probably lost another 150 or so in the
process, mostly those going back to about 2007, and I blame no one but myself.
The lesson learned was that just because something is “in the cloud” doesn’t
mean you will always be able to find it again. Now, CheeseFlap.com has over 400
CheeseFlap haikus, and continues to grow. So I guess the real answer to your
question is that it hasn’t so much influenced my poetry as much as it has
influenced the process of writing and maintaining control of them. My last
thought on this is that when I publish on my site at my pace, it can be on a
topic that doesn’t require a backstory, which you have to include if the comment
is in reaction to another story or post elsewhere. I’ll still probably do a book
of favorites but I have to find the time, and there is a cost. I still enjoy the
feel of a physical book. The batteries never run out and no one can change its
content while you’re asleep.

WTPF: Some of your poems are political, and some are elegiac observations of the
nature of sight and sound, and for me they seem to be about the same thing.
Please explain the nexus.

CF: They are inseparable. Humans are complex, and can be very creative, but our
main failing is that we tend to believe we are somehow separate from or superior
to other life forms. I think this arrogance is what enables us to objectify
other living things whether they are plants or animals. The way I see this,
politics, government and business would be markedly different if we didn’t have
this attitude. Through CheeseFlap, I can express a very personal view. For
example, people have a tendency to cluster according to their similarities. We
do this politically, racially, through language, heritage, appearance, fashion,
and many other ways. People derive comfort from similarity, and seem
uncomfortable with what is different. Then I think about something like sound,
and realize that if all music were composed of simple, pure tones, that is, no
chords or simple triads, it would be horrifically boring. We find pleasure in
harmonic variety, but we start wars when people are perceived as different. Even
if the song is in C Major, there will be secondary and tertiary harmonics
finding their way into the listener’s ear. To me, our politics are about as
interesting as a song that consists of two unwavering tones of equal volume that
are just enough out of phase to cancel each other out. So we hear nothing, and
there are no new ideas. Of course, light offers us vision both literally and
figuratively. Without light you cannot have shadow or nuance, which
differentiates and fine tunes objects through reflection and absorption
revealing their individual texture, shape or color. Yet in politics, we seem to
abhor individuality, seeking instead one of three things in our leadership: pure
light, pure dark, or the average of the two. And if you had a politician that
represented each of those conditions, they’d be called leftists, rightists or
centrists, each of which is an insult in someone’s ideology. As a kid, I was the
one hanging around inside the house reading the encyclopedia, and we were very
fortunate to have a good set that went a little deeper than most of them out
there. I think they were Collier’s; in fact reading them was a lot like today’s
internet experience, as you could jump from topic to topic but without the
annoyance of advertising everywhere. I always wanted to be some kind of
scientist when I grew up, which didn’t happen (nor have I grown up much). I
still have a love of the physical world and see ourselves as a part of it, so
we’re subject to the same laws of nature as a rock or a star, which the
CheeseFlap haikus definitely reflect. I bet you’re thinking about rock stars now
aren’t you? Lastly, haikus often invoke nature anyway, and that goes way back in
the tradition. I do the same thing but it’s a CheeseFlap approach. It may be a
little inside-out sometimes, but I still address nature. Don’t get me wrong, I
like the look of snow falling on cherry trees, but I also like to imagine what
it must be like to be a photon. It makes politics seem quite trivial.

WTPF: your nom de plume CheeseFlap is whimsical, and i suspect deceptively so.
is there a code embedded in this neologism that warrants further analysis?

CF: The short answer is no, there is nothing embedded other than evoking the image of some kind of flap, perhaps designed to control the flow of air, or block the spray of water from the wheels of a truck, that has been made of cheese. I have to admit that this is just something that taps into a very deeply rooted element of what I think is both terribly funny and terribly sad. There is a famous scene in the movie “The Odd Couple” in which Walter Matthau throws a plate of linguini against the wall. Matthau’s character declares that the food is “now garbage.” There is something about that instantaneous transformation from food to garbage that I think is hilarious but very sad. It is hilarious that, existentially, the food just hangs there on the wall, its meaning forever changed. Some might call it art. The linguini has no free will, and therefore cannot act to improve its lot in life. It has been transformed from a growing, living entity into something intended to be anticipated, enjoyed and then turned into shit and abandoned. It is sad because so much of life is like that, where people are born, raised, have expectations thrust upon them, are used and transformed in many ways into nothing but society’s abandoned turds. On another level, it is always sad to see any food wasted, knowing that there are people for whom a plate of linguini would be a feast. There are people on this planet who would like to be able to abandon a turd if they could only find the food to make one. The “mommy’s little piggy” scene in “A Christmas Story” has the same effect on me. Many years ago I was in a theater waiting for the start of the movie and a kid, maybe 6 or 7 years old, came running down the aisle with a big bucket of popcorn. He tripped and dumped the whole thing. I had to leave the theater. I just want to make it clear that while I may on the surface appear to be an uncaring jerk enjoying an afternoon of schadenfreude, underneath it all, there’s cognitive dissonance. So back to CheeseFlap. The stuff found in plastic wrapped slices that was obviously poured into a mould is not really cheese. They want you to believe that it is cheese, but it has seams in it! It may as well be a mudflap. Plus, it looks pretty funny when stuck to a door and it starts to peel off. But it’s not linguini, it’s a haiku that has meaning for a brief moment, when I throw it against the internet, but then it peels off and falls to the floor. I hope I have sufficiently strangled the metaphor.

WTPF: You have honored us with your sharing, and we have been made more human with your poetry. Thank you CheeseFlap.

CheeseFlap is here

WTPF: Share with us some of your Haikus and explain what inspired them.

CF:This question makes my brain hurt, but I’ll try. And these are in no particular order. As I go through the archive, I realize it is very difficult to talk about even liking your own work so let’s just say these are some of my favorites today; that could change next week. Let’s start with one that goes back a few years. In fact, this is the oldest haiku on cheeseflap.com. Someone asked Sarah Palin whether she considered herself an intellectual, and she apparently hesitated and gave a long, drawn-out “yeesss,” which I think is pretty funny. I can almost hear the question mark at the end. So here’s what CheeseFlap said:

Brain cells school like fish
Inside the mind of a true
Intellectual

I discovered that this haiku had inspired a discussion thread on what I believe was a website for Canadian librarians. It spawned about 100 other political haikus, so this one holds a special place for me. I don’t expect CheeseFlap to be the J.K. Rowling of haikus, but you have to admit, once you have the Canadian Librarians paying attention, you’re on to something! I was very pleased and humbled that someone got it and was inspired to think in haiku about politics. Here again, you’ve got comparisons to nature, patterns, and an attempt to equate the way ideas can form with the way fish form schools. From a distance, they appear to move as one, and in a very fluid way. A school of fish can adapt, move around an object or predator, and come back together again. To me, this is a cogent idea, as constructed and expressed by thousands of different memories and bits of information in our brains. Sarah Palin doesn’t have that ability. If her head was an aquarium, there would be a fish in each corner, panicked by the presence of the other fish. At night, one of them prowls around and bites the sleeping ones, like puffer fish do.

WTPF: Our fish bowl is rapt in attention; give us another.

CF:
Big guns and cigars
Waved in America’s face
Don’t make you a man

I wrote this about the time the phrase “second amendment remedies” was popular in some parts of the country. For the record, unless you hunt and eat what you kill every day, having guns in an advanced society is stupid. Gun ownership is always argued as if it were a legal issue, but i believe it is instead a moral one. So I don’t need to get into Freud to tie the penises and the cigars and the guns together do I?

WTPF: Penises are good when they are placed in the right place; Cigars in that place were not so good for a former POTUS. Forgive us for not being able to resist that joke More poetry please.

CF:
Warming deniers:
Time to adjust antenna
On your cave-paintings

I liked this one because it functions on a lot of levels, and the image it creates is funny. Again, there are so many people who seem threatened by the possibility that we might have some influence on the natural order of things. On one hand, we have this great human tradition of conquering the forces of nature, and exploiting the planet’s natural resources for our immediate purposes. On the other hand, these people claim that we couldn’t possibly have an influence because we’re so insignificant. So which is it? Are we amazing (especially Americans, who are exceptional) or are we impotent? This is another issue that is framed as a legal one, not a moral one. Perhaps this is just my modernized version of Plato’s allegory.

WTPF: Cave Men dragged women by the hair; We saw it on T.V.
Your poetry helps us evolve…more please.

CF: Now we get to religion:

Belief in a god
Allows irrational acts;
Sky-dwelling scapegoat

If I believe in the Christian god (which American politicians must believe in if they ever hope to be elected) I can pretty much do whatever I want to do. I can lie, cheat, steal, kill, covet, curse, and be forgiven for it. And I don’t have to be accountable to any other person, because I’m only accountable to my god, and that’s between us. Of course, if you don’t believe in my god I can hate you, and that’s not a sin because I’m hating in the name of the one true god, who has blessed me and my country above all others and that’s why we’re exceptional. When I hear politicians talking about their faith in order to persuade people to vote for them, I substitute “space aliens” for “god,” which would be the death-blow to any campaign. I guess you can’t talk about space aliens in general without sounding crazy, but you can talk about one specific space alien, the Christian god, and millions will be convinced that it’s safe to have you run the country.

WTPF: You are on a roll; Keep going.

CF: Here’s one that I like that’s somewhat related:

The real stone tablets
Show history, fossilized;
The real word of god

Hardcore Christians deny the evidence of evolution but put their faith in fiction written during a period of immense illiteracy and scientific ignorance. If there is a god, he’s probably texted “forehead hits desk” more than once. This next one blends the two previous ideas:

The year: forty-ten
The find: SUV remnant
Attached: Christian fish

WTPF: That is tragic but funny. Give us another so that we can laugh ourselves to death.

CF: this one in honor of Newt Gingrich:

No, no bad puppy!
Newt paddles across the floor
Long streak on carpet

And if you get your carpet professionally cleaned, no one will ever know it happened! This could apply to almost any of the major politicians today, although the conservatives have really left their mark on the fabric of society in a lasting way. FOX News almost has a monopoly on carpet cleaning these days, but my sense though is they don’t really clean, they just darken the rest of the carpet to match the streak.

WTPF: We thank you for your poetry. Now it is time to ask you questions about who you are and why.

The mysterious CheeseFlap will reveal somethings on the next chapter of this blog.

Poetry will never change the world; art only changes art. Nevertheless, there is comfort
to be found in the ideas that chronicle a place and time, and make us feel that we are not alone. The poetry that endures are fossils in the resin of our microchips, and shared by a humanity that stumbles along in the darkness while seeking the light.

Martial was a Roman poet that wrote epigrams almost two thousand years ago, and they could have been written today. In fact, they are being written today in haiku form by CheeseFlap.

By serendipity i encountered CheeseFlap on the “internets” and immediately recognized the genius in the poetry within that medium. CheeseFlap is todays Martial, roaming the avenues of cyber city (the new Rome) and engaging us in essential poetry. Poetry can’t change the world, but it can save your life.

On our next post we will share several Haikus by CheeseFlap and we will include annotations.

Too Many Bugs (33 Haikus by JHM)

My voice is choking
from too many grasshoppers.
I wish i could sing.

Cicada cadence:
Everything must be written
and it will be law.

My mother was stung,
and by serendipity
i came to being.

How to cover ass:
Burrow like a Cicada;
Hide from predators.

Voices of crickets
describe our moment of death.
Tiny violins.

All crickets must die.
Their tiny violins crushed
by the conductor.

I don’t like roaches,
because they make me jealous;
They scare girls away.

Metamorphosis:
Gregor Samsa is my friend
and so is his dad.

Music and laughter.
According to Kant we can’t
understand insects.

Heavenly beehive:
Where angels are the insects
stinging men to death.

Katydid or not
is the telescoping gag
that fossilizes us.

For mother mantis:
I did not want to exist.
Why did you mate me?

Is there shame in this?
Lorca was devoured by
fascists and maggots.

Insect universe:
Where sound devours silence
and we are silent.

Bunuel loved insects.
He knew what was coming to him.
They took him away.

Dante observed bugs;
In Empyrean, angels
swarm heaven like bees.

The universe drones
and a wurlitzer of bones
whistles a graveyard.

Creeley lost an eye
and that socket was a hive
for a swarm of bees.

The katydid speaks
in a language that fools know:
Binary Hipster.

Who killed the poet?
Only Lorca knows the truth:
The sound of crickets.

My corpse is shameful.
Insects devour my sex
while i am naked.

What i expected:
God dreamed me and then woke up.
Thank you for the flies.

Bugs Devour God:
His great book is on a vine
that xtians consume.

If God were a bug,
I would stomp it and crush it.
I hate intruders.

You make me human.
Exoskeleton in you
dissolves in your sex.

The universe dies,
and like a praying mantis
is a cannibal.

There is no way out.
We are in the roach motel
that god left to us.

The flies will signal
the place where the poets died;
Via Appia.

Bugs that frighten me
scatter me in my silence.
Can’t turn on the light.

What we will become:
Insect robots created
with anguish and steel.

Flies of the future:
Nanorobot memories
of humanity.

Piping is over;
Supersedure now begins.
Long live the new queen.

What does space smell like?
It smells like honey sulfer
stung by our being.

For Mike C.
_______________________________

7-22
i have added this Haiku by CheeseFlap:

Are we not bugs too?
Gnawing at god’s creation?
Trapped by gravity?

and my Haiku response:

Our thoughts are fossils;
Creations sticky resin
is where they reside.

A Quiet Riot:
Enduring Every Moment,
I Shut The Fuck Up.

Haiku For John Cage By JHM

Piano sculpture
Volume inverse to output;
Heartbeats grow louder

Haiku By CheeseFlap