progress held up

I had a very rough couple of weeks dealing with newly discovered medication allergies. I think I'm on the mend now but still don't feel myself I will be away from blogging until I do until then I'm sorry but I can't it's just too intense. gimme a week, I'll be back at it. In the mean time I'm 4 cantos away from the end of Inferno 1st draft and will have more second for you when I'm better.

thank you for your patience.
CR

Canto 15 The Desert in Hell part 2: Sodomy

Fire and steam meet
And cancel above our heads
As we walk the banks

It's high and narrow
The red stream above the sand
Flows through a channel

A pack of dead souls
They stare at us with strange eyes
I see an old friend

He was my teacher
I can barely recognize
His face through the burns

He walks up, greets us
It grieves me to see him here
He taught me to write

He speaks prophecy
As he walks alongside us
And I mark his words

My guide nods his head
In the seething desert heat
I ask who's down here

My old friend tells me
Sodomy is the worst rape
Read Judges 19

Priests, Warlords, whole towns...
I don't ask him what he did
I don't want to know.

"Write of me Dante
I can not leave them for long"
He turns, sprinting, gone.

Canto 14 The Desert in Hell part 1: Blasphemers and The Old Man of Crete

We piled the leaves
before we set off again
He so loved Florence

The woods surround sand
Like the river does the trees
God's fearful judgment

Pay heed to my words
You, reading of punishments
For I saw terror

I saw herds of souls
Pinned down, in stress positions,
Wandering the sands

A rain of fire
Sparks the desert, violent
Snowfall in winter

Those wandering brush
To and fro against the flames
It is of no use

We see one stretched out
He curses God, his rage burns
Virgil, who is he?

He shouts back at us
"As I was alive, now dead!"
He was once a king.

Oh Capanaeus
You cursed God until you died
And you curse Him still.

We walk the border
Between the sand and the woods
A small red creek flows

Out of the forrest
Like a skid-row gutter stream
The colour of dread

Virgil tells me it's
Unlike anything I've seen
And I ask him how?

"In the wastes of Crete
Stands a mountain with no trees
A god's safe cradle

The mountain has caves
In a cave a statue cries
His tears form Hell's streams

His face set to Rome
He's Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron,
His right foot is Clay.

Cracked from the neck down
His tears are for all mankind
They form rivers here."

Played a gig today

I played the Summer Dreams Reading Festival in Stanley Park here in Vancouver today. a short bit of it was filmed I will post it when it's been e-mailed to me.

I was described after my set as the Al Qaeda of Vancouver Spoken Word I can only assume that this is because my poetry hit like a bomb and scared the shit out of the audience. I like that...

Public Disturbance doing Dante in the park

Canto 13: the wood of the suicides

We entered the woods
No light, black leaves, no fruit, thorns.
The Harpies nest here

Half woman, half bird
They break and chew the branches
The empty woods moan

Virgil knows my thoughts
My questions will be answered
If I snap a twig

A shout, then comes blood
The tree is bleeding, it cries
Why did you do that?

Virgil tells him I
Wouldn't have believed the truth
"Who are you?" We ask

"Pier Delle Vigne,
Frederic II's Counsel was I
Envy sealed my fate.

Liars in his court
Had me blinded and then jailed
I was innocent

Still I killed myself
Please tell my tale, and clear my name."
Pitty silenced me

Virgil asked him tell
How his soul will met judgement
The tree answered us:

"Our bodies returned
Will hang from our souls branches
Unincarnated."

Two naked men sprint
Past us chased by pack of dogs
The slower one hides

The dogs set on him
Howling, eating, man and brush
They tear him apart.

Weeping foliage
We pile the leaves 'round it's roots
He was from my town

We talk, I'm sorry
I hanged myself in my home
This has been zone 2.

I think this came from the subconcious of Elvis Prestly

Canto 12 The Circle of violence against others: Bestiality, Rape, Warmongering

Long climb down steep trail
Landslide, boulders, and ruins
The wreckage Christ made

The first violent zone
Bestiality and rape
The monster of Crete

It sees us. Virgil
Curses at the Minotaur
It goes wild with rage

We slip past unseen
Further down, a blood river
Boils, and froths, and screams

We're stopped by Centaurs
They draw their bows, a rape gang,
A hunting party

Virgil calls Chiron,
Explains our mission and asks
Safe passage across

The river of blood.
We ride the centaur Nissus
Past the Violent Damned

Bush, Cheney, Hitler
Alexander and Pol-Pot
All submerged in blood

As we reach the ford
I recognise many souls
From my life on earth

On the other side
We are left by the centaur
And move on, alone.

Canto 11: answered questions, an explanation of the lowest deeps of Hell

On a rocky ledge
the stench forces us to stop
we sit down to talk

near a tomb that reads
"Here lies Anastasius"
I learn of the depths

So we don't waste time
Virgil explains the circles
Fraud and Violence

The worst in God's eyes
Is Fraud for it comes from man
They suffer deepest

Above them: Violence
Against Self, Neighbour, and God
Each has it's own zone

The first zone is for
The violent against others
Murder, theft, rape

The next zone is for
The violent against themselves
Suicide, Arson...

The last zone is for
The violence done against God
Cursing, Sodomy

Usury as well
those who lend at interest
are in this last zone

Below that is Fraud
First against strangers, then friends
Con-men, Liars

And last in all Hell
The traitors trapped with Satan
Suffer forever.

I ask a question
What about the upper parts?
Why aren't they in Dis?

Recall your "Ethics",
Three Human things Heaven hates
Lust, Vice, and Malice

If you think harder
It will all become more clear
Why God willed it thus

I look to Virgil
Why is usury down here
So far below us?

"It scorns creation
Making men wealthy through theft
From those who labour"

This was his answer
"Now we must start our descent
It is almost dawn"

Summer Dreams Reading Festival

Saturday August 22 2009
starts at noon
I'm on at 1:15pm

Lumbermans Arch Stanley Park
Vancouver BC

This is that gig I wrote about yesterday if you live in Vancouver and you want to come out it will be awsome I'm on the Main Stage!!

more info here at the Pandora's Collective website

The one thing better than attracting negative attention to yourself

is attracting positive attention to yourself!!!

So I've been doing this thing with electronic busking. I have a synth that is battery powered and a couple of stomp boxes and I've been taking it to the streets!

this was day three. My first day I made a lot of dirty looks doing this on the beach, the next day I tried a neighbourhood on the east side that I thought would be more tolerant but I was mistaken I made a dollar and a guy tried to pick a fight with me.

Today I took it out again and things went a lot better! I went to a third neighbourhood where a couple of friends said I might have better luck and I did! I made almost five dollars and I bought a copy of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne.

I had a really good time and met with a lot of positive people! including a couple of very inquisitive infants and their parents. I'm going back to that part of town more for sure I don't need the up-tight hassle of the neighbourhood I live in, bleh.

Also I've been invited to perform at a poetry festival in Stanley Park on August 22 2009 I'll be reading selections from my Divine Comedy and Allen Ginsburg as well as performing with Public Disturbance! (that's the name of my electro-busking outfit).

I'll post details soon. More Dante tonight.

Canto 10: speaking to a heretic, walking to the abyss

We walk through the tombs
Open and burning, Dis cries
Judgement will shut them

Un-answered Questions
Epicurian Graveyard
My mind is troubled

A voice from the graves
Hey Florentine, what's your name?
Says Farinata.

As we exchange jabs
A soul asks about his son
I fail to answer

He cries in mourning
Farinata ignores this
"Your party will fall"

I ask a question:
Why can't you see the present?
Because it's God's Will

We see the future,
It's like being far sighted
but with time, not space

I ask forgiveness
Of the shade who weeps below,
His son is alive

Who else is in there?
An Emperor, a Cardinal
and thousands more souls.

I follow Virgil
Our path crests a high valley
The smell... deafening.

Canto 9 An Angel helps the travellers enter the city of Dis: first impressions of heretics and a change of direction

The Mosques of Dis burn
I turn pale while Virgil frets
Help has not yet come

Shrieking above us
The three furies claw and bleed
They call Medusa

Virgil shuts my eyes
Then a flash, bright, angelic
We bow to him

Walking on the Styx
One thousand souls run and hide
Our help has arived

He opens the gates,
Warning the Demons away.
We enter the town

A burning churchyard
Open tombs on fire and full
Here lie Heretics

All faiths, sects and cults
the leaders and followers
burn inside their graves

A long time ago
Virgil had to make this trip
Constrained by a Witch

Past burning churches
We turn right and keep going
Down to the bottom

Square Waves and Square Knots: time to write a blog entry

So it's almost 7am and I'm tired and a little buzzed and I've been awake all night listening to music and learning how to make a hemp necklace with spirally square knots it's time to write about what I did yesterday.

First of all my wife found a cat! we weren't looking it actually found us, his name (according to the tag) is Stewart, and from the look of him he's been outside a long time. I've decided to name him Stewart Nagasaki Squarewaves at least until his rotten negligent family insists on having him back.

Nagasaki because yesterday was the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki and Square Waves because it was the day that I was supposed to go to the Square Waves electronic music festival at the local library.


I was lucky I remembered what with the new cat-guest and all but I got up and went out to see music and meet up with friends.

I'm not a very competent reporter so I'll just describe what were, to me, some of the highlights of Square Waves and my impressions of the event.

first of all I missed th first two acts. I found my way down to the Alma VanDeussen Room at the library and when I got in there were three ladies playing home made synths and lots of guitar pedals. Finally I was in a room full of people who understand me! Seriously after over a year of disinterested relatives, friends and a saintly-tolerant wife being in a room full of real live not on the intertube synth geeks was a blasy of exciting and headdy fresh air.

At the interval I met these ladies and found a couple of my friends. The next act was one of the highlights for me, a dance troupe called Prophecy Sun did a composition of modern interpretive dance to really penetrating ambient vocal music and tape noise. I think of all the performances this one was my favourite.

I finally got a chance to hear Andrew Short's project Vedic Space Program do a tongue in cheek set consisting of samples from a hypnotism record and other interesting sounds including James Brown and clips from the riots after Martin Luther King was assasinated.

The next group, Stimulus Package played some really amazing electro-accoustic stuff featuring a Tenorion, the first one I've ever seen in real life. I might have to get one.

and lastly a group called Spectrum Interview, composed of members of the other acts and others got onstage for an eery and beautiful experimental synth oddessy. After the show I introduced one of my friends to the rest of them and mingled a bit, there were people filming the event and I'm hoping to get some footage to share with you soon.

If this is the experimental music scene in Vancouver then I want to be right in the thick of it. It felt a bit like coming home.

this orange used to scare the crap out of me when I was little

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