(Soma)tic Poetry Workshop, 5/30/12, NYC

CENTRAL PARK

as part of

MOVEMENT RESEARCH

ALL DETAILS AT THIS LINK

#69: QUARTZ CRYSTAL SHAKESPEARE SONNET TRANSLATION

--for Paul Legault & Sharmila Cohen

Piezoelectricity has proven the capacity quartz crystal has as a battery for electrical charge as well as its ability to store and transmit information. Let’s take it a step further, a step FORWARD! Purchase a small clear quartz crystal. Set it in a bowl of salt over night to clean it. When you wake, flush the salt down the toilet, rinse your quartz, and DON’T LET ANYONE put their hands on it from now on. It’s YOUR crystal, don’t even let them SEE IT!

Choose one of Mr. Shakespeare’s sonnets for an English-to-English translation, or have someone choose one for you. Paul Legault and Sharmila Cohen chose sonnet #6 for me. I translated two lines a day for seven days by holding my crystal to my mouth like a walky-talky to whisper the lines, SHOUT THE LINES. Several times every hour I STOPPED, held my crystal to my mouth and spoke into it, “Then let not winter's ragged hand deface / In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill'd:” JUST LIKE THAT! Tell your crystal the lines over and over throughout the day. “THEN LET NOT WINTER'S RAGGED HAND DEFACE / IN THEE THY SUMMER, ERE THOU BE DISTILL'D:” Years ago in a dream I found an enormous cluster of crystals emerging from a forest floor. A voice whispered to me, “Crystals are the bones of the Earth.” Talk to your crystal, talk to our planet’s bones!

At night I spoke the two lines into my crystal one more time, then instructed the crystal to PLEASE translate the lines for me in a dream. Programming our crystals is our right as citizens of the Milky Way, but they respond best with PLEASE and THANK YOU! In the morning, before rising, I placed my crystal on my forehead and meditated for a few minutes, lying quite still, just like that. Then I picked up pen and paper and wrote the first two lines that came to mind. Then I thanked the crystal, and started over with the next two lines.

A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON: New (Soma)tics (WAVE Books, 2012)

(book trailer animation by Luca Dipierro)

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon from Luca Dipierro on Vimeo.

CLICK HERE FOR BOOK DETAILS

FEBRUARY, 2012 PHILADELPHIA WORKSHOP

PERTHO

(Soma)tic Poetry

SUNDAY

FEBRUARY 12th

3pm

(includes a vegan meal)

workshop is $25

please use the Pay Pal button below

(if you miss the workshop you may use

payment as credit for a future workshop)

PLEASE USE PAY PAL BUTTON TO PURCHASE WORKSHOP

if you would like to make other arrangements to pay
please contact CAConrad888@gmail.com

CAConrad updates the (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises web page monthly. He has also conducted (Soma)tic workshops in Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle, D.C., Boise, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

(Soma)tic Poetry Workshop 1.22.12, Philadelphia

VIDEO FOOTAGE FROM WORKSHOP
14 participants had black thread leading from their wrists to a carrot. The carrot dangled in mid air. Later we cut the carrot into 14 pieces and ATE IT! The NASA Space Voyager recording of the actual sounds of the rings of Saturn playing in the background. We consulted THE BOOK OF SYMBOLS as divination. Everyone counted from 1 to 9 out loud, the book was opened and closed with each count. The page we landed on was PHALLUS. We also reviewed the top 5 regrets of the dying. We ate food, drank wine, CELEBRATED our lives together on this beautiful day in Philadelphia!

#68: CATHETERS FOR SANITY

for Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Let’s be honest about our culture and say that anyone who makes us remember we are naked animals under these clothes is dangerous. To remove the scandal of it would first require the total annihilation of every bureaucratic agency sending memos through our doors. It is 2012 and some of us have our boots holding back the Return To Modesty Campaign. The American homosexual in 2012 unapologetically celebrates surrendering to the dominant culture’s taste for marital equilibrium and WAR! A swift, unmitigated return to values acts like bookends many willingly throw themselves between. The opportunity to challenge these stifling, life-threatening institutions passes out of the conversation entirely in 2012.

Stupid faggots putting rainbow stickers on machine guns! I’m going to say it: GAY AND LESBIAN AMERICA HAS STOCKHOLM SYNDROME! The campaign to be included in the multi-billion dollar military industrial complex comes at a time when three children die of war-related injuries EVERY SINGLE DAY in Afghanistan. And after ten years of American occupation, Afghanistan has been deemed THE MOST DANGEROUS place on our planet for women. No other place on Earth is worse for women than Afghanistan. How else can I repeat this so you hear it? America DESTROYS women and children! Did you hear it that time?

The genocide of thousands of gay men in Baghdad is a direct result of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The most famous homosexual apologist for fascism Dan Choi helped make this genocide possible while serving as an American soldier in Iraq. American gay rights are all that matter I guess? And the destruction of Iraqi gays is just another item on the list of collateral damage? WILL NOT! To be repeated, WILL NOT SERVE WILL NOT SERVE I WILL NOT SERVE! WILL NOT! Today I WILL LISTEN to only my voice for NOT serving this sanctioned, collective, and REAL evil.

In the morning I performed reiki on a long, thin piece of plastic tubing, reiki with intentions to BE conscious throughout the day of being queer. Queer. Only queer. Today I will NOT ALLOW anyone to change the subject when I talk about what it means to be queer. Today I will NOT ALLOW the liars to step in front of me. Today I will talk about the frustration of watching war go unquestioned by the homosexual community of America. Reiki. I did reiki for half an hour on this plastic tube, then lubricated every inch of it, then inserted it inside my penis. It was not for pleasure of pain, it was for a chronic reminder of HOW this culture inserts its will on my penis more and more each day. You may now be married under our rules. You may now engage in the murder of innocent lives by our rules. I had many strained, bizarre conversations this day, constantly FEELING the tube inside my penis. The following poem is the result of this exercise which was more painful in spirit than it was for the tube inside me. THIS YOUTUBE is of me reading the resulting poem on January 1st at St. Mark's Church in NYC:

JANUARY, 2012 PHILADELPHIA WORKSHOP

NEW MOON

(Soma)tic Poetry

SUNDAY

JANUARY 22nd

3pm

(includes a vegan meal)

workshop is $25

please use the Pay Pal button below

(if you miss the workshop you may use

payment as credit for a future workshop)

PLEASE USE PAY PAL BUTTON TO PURCHASE WORKSHOP

if you would like to make other arrangements to pay
please contact CAConrad888@gmail.com

CAConrad updates the (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises web page monthly. He has also conducted (Soma)tic workshops in Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle, D.C., Boise, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

#67: CORMORANT STAGECRAFT

--for Caitlin LaCourse Ryan and Kepler-22b

‎"Venturing into the sun to smoke

I am proof of nature and all its declarations."
      --Ariana Reines

Kitten is my favorite spirit animal, a totem to conquer my various forgivable, discordant planes of constriction. But it is the cormorant I surrender to for my most morbid of human needs. A cormorant DIVES into subconscious water-worlds to resurface somewhere new, and agitates my soul into happiness. When I was a boy I yearned for webbed fingers and toes, and was grateful to Benjamin Franklin for inventing swim flippers. Telling Ryan Eckes about this new (Soma)tic exercise he said, "That's what I try to do with every poem, I try not to drown."

What animal will you require yourself to meet for this exercise? I wore nylon stockings on my hands, then DOVE into the morning ocean off Virginia Beach, American fighter jets howling across the coastal trails, deafening the gulls, frightening the dolphins, and me. Eggs in the sand, nest in the dunes, a wind where all instruction flattens my eager crest. Love in a cormorant call compels a vibratory trance throughout a feral heart, lungs, liver.

Draw eight pictures of your spirit animal in different phases of your enactment of their lives. On the back of each write a message. Write a bit of confession from the bird, hippo, or alligator you choose to be. Create an email account for this exercise to include at the end of the message. Leave the pictures on the subway, in the bathroom at a museum, or on the counter at a coffee shop. Anyone who writes you must receive your animal’s reply. Your animal correspondence is YOUR TRUE correspondence! All your notes from the exercise are for the poem(s) you will create.

video for PRETERNAUTURAL CONVERSATIONS

JUBILAT Magazine has published PRETERNATURAL CONVERSATIONS and the seven resulting poems in issue #20. To celebrate, they have asked poets to make videos reading the poems.

#66: THE SILENT MEETING GROUP

--for Ariana Reines

On Halloween, 2011 it is estimated that the 7 billionth human child was born. 7 billion humans are here now. And we have displaced or made extinct SO MANY other species of creatures that we have ACTUALLY lost track! When poet Emily Dickinson was alive less than a billion humans existed on Earth. When she was alive wild bison roamed the open plains of the United States. Today there is just a small group of them in Yellowstone National Park, and those were put there to be wild on purpose because there were literally no wild bison left. They are museums of fur and hooves. We love our museums, they comfort and tranquilize us when we feel uncertain of the choices we have made. I have NEVER been MORE TERRIFIED than I am this Halloween!

Find a space in public to meet with other humans in silence. Create a flyer inviting anyone to come. Please do not invite your friends, it's IMPORTANT to let this time be for you to come together with total strangers. But let it be silent. Make several flyers and hang them in libraries, coffee shops, grocery stores, etc. My flyer read: THE SILENT MEETING GROUP -- WEDNESDAY – 10/26/11 – 5pm to 6pm – 2nd floor couch area of THE BOOK TRADER (2nd Street near Market Street) – ONLY RULE: NO TALKING. Show up a couple minutes late. I lurked around a bit, not wanting to appear too eager because I didn’t want anyone to know that I had created the flyer for the meeting.
To be perfectly honest this (Soma)tic is something I have NEEDED to do. How many people do I meet a day where I say to myself “IF I HAD TO LISTEN TO THIS PERSON EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE I WOULD KILL MYSELF!” Today’s answer: 7!!!!!!! (an exclamation point for every one of them) My threshold for small talk and stupidity is so low in this time of acute poverty and war that I could actually SCREAM when I face it! And in the past five years I have watched rich hipster yuppies take my neighborhood over. It belongs to them now and they know it, and they want me to know it. The amount of bullshit I have to witness at the grocery store is incredible at this point. INCREDIBLE! Watching the spoiled rich be malicious to stock clerks, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU RAN OUT OF IMPORTED OLIVES!?!” This brand of selfishness INFURIATES me! And there are now so many new condominiums in my neighborhood that those of us who rent apartments are the extreme minority. In fact the last public Laundromat in “our” neighborhood shut down and was turned into a ticket office for the ballet and opera. I’m doing my laundry in the bathtub because otherwise I would have to get on a bus and go many blocks across the city to even find a Laundromat to use. My soul is worn thin by human beings who don’t care about the infrastructure of community.

The Silent Meeting Group was – quite honestly – an incredible experience! I hovered around before joining the small group. There were six of us, and after being together in complete silence for awhile you begin to SMELL the others. Smell you, I SMELL something, maybe it's you, yeah, IT'S YOU! And it's okay. You smell just fine, but I smell you just the same. At one point a man in the group started to talk, but stopped himself, then wrote on a piece of paper for us to pass around, “Maybe we can all get a snack afterwards.” He seemed very sweet, however---

IMPORTANT: Do NOT go for a snack! You have poetry to attend to! For the entire hour of the meeting take NO NOTES! Meditate with these other humans, these fellow travelers in complete silence. If no one shows up the first time KEEP TRYING! People WILL show up! Enough humans will show up. You will all show up together. The only notes you take should be in your head. Make note of ALL THE SOUNDS around the group. Do not fear LOOKING at these people. The kinds of people who show up will understand, and will be looking at YOU as well! Look at how WEIRD our world can be! It’s beautiful and peculiar! What and how are we communicating without talking? Remember these things. Then as soon as the hour is up, casually walk away WITHOUT TALKING! NO TALKING! GO, GET GOING, GO SOMEWHERE where you can sit and quietly take account of your silent meeting. Take the quiet with you. I took a subway to a grocery store in my neighborhood. This is what I observed:

Outside the grocery store tonight a man and woman approached the entrance. He grabbed one of the large shopping carts. She said, "Why don't you get one of the smaller ones, we're only getting a few things." He said, "I'M A MAN I'M NOT PUSHING AROUND A SMALL CART!" She rolled her eyes and went inside. HOW FUNNY! I must admit that I had thought he was hot, but when he said THAT he was suddenly 10 times HOTTER! He reminds me of my old boyfriend Nate, a double Leo with a Scorpio moon and a fresh ax to grind every morning until he's had sex and coffee. HAHA!

Take your notes and shape them into a poem. The Silent Meeting Group might be something you want to continue in your life. I think I want it in my life!

2 (Soma)tics published online today!

MANY THANKS to
Peter Moysaenko of
BOMB! Magazine for publishing
(Soma)tic "Aphrodisios" and its
resulting poem! You can see it
by clicking THIS LINK!!!!

MANY THANKS to

publisher Adam Robinson

and special guest-editor

Benjamin Spivey of

EVERYDAY GENIUS for

publishing (Soma)tic "MINDING

THIRST" and the

resulting THIRST

poems! Click

HERE to read!

#65: SAMHAIN BOTANOMANCY Magic Ritual

a collaboration by CAConrad & Debrah Morkun

We went to Occupy Philadelphia on 10/31/11 where the tent city grows by the day for the world that is possible! The encampment is on the west side of city hall, facing the cavern of skyscrapers, forest of glass and villainy. This was late at night, between Samhain and Day of the Dead.

We were down near the subway entrance, and spent time meditating on two small gemstones we had given to one another earlier in the evening. CA’s was chrysocolla, and Debrah’s was red jasper. As soon as the meditation began a snare drum from the camp commenced, followed by another drum, then a bell, then a flute. We took notes for our poems.

We began the botanomancy by reading sprigs of rosemary and sage. One would hold and meditate on the bunch of herbs, then drop them to the ground for the other to read through their fallen patterns. These are the readings:

CAConrad: Two anarchists were making out by the strands of long wild grass, rocking back and forth to the beat of the snare drum. This is truly sacred space. Debrah threw the herbs, ALL the sage was together in the east. Two sprigs crossed over the pile, making a solid railroad tie. Tracks of the spirit world have brought her here to this day. Not just this day today, but to this day where she is the amazing poet she is. Her bio on the last page of her new book (The Ida Pingala – Blazevox Books) says she believes in near death experiences and prays to the old gods. Those are the tracks. Solidly. And they have brought her to the pile of rosemary, bunched together in the west. Rosemary being the foundational herb for magic spells, this packed bunch of rosemary to the west is a magnificent opening to the new, all the sprigs together in the same direction, a concentrated magical force PUSHING toward some unanticipated beginning.

Debrah Morkun: CAConrad threw the herbs, and the majority of the herbs fell into one pile that beamed with light. I held my hand over the pile, to sense the herbs’ vibrations. Botanomancy is a choice endeavor, for plants have a very communicative vibration. I kept hearing the words “planning” as the vibrations of the rosemary & the sage entered my hand. I heard this word “planning” like a cacophony of multiple herbal voices. Soon, Conrad will embark on a world tour for his amazing upcoming book A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, & he will spend quite some time doing necessary planning & prepping for this magical tour. I noticed two rosemary sprigs that had fallen outside of the larger pile – one to the Northeast of the pile, and the other to the Southeast. I touched the rosemary sprig to the northeast first, felt the vibrations of this foundational herb tell me that this beautiful tour itself will lead him into positive magic spirals & he will remember something that he forgot a long time ago. This memory will be so large & so good that he will wonder how he ever forgot this. Next, I touched the rosemary sprig to the southwest. This sprig indicated that before CAConrad leaves for the tour, he will experience a heightened spiritual transformation that will send his entire body & spirit into the highest spiritual vibrations. This spiritual transformation will manifest itself in the most proper ways to prepare him for his tour.

For a little while we took our notes, then we each built further botanomancy ritual-meditations for the poems. These are the rituals:

CAConrad: The drums had changed to a more sustained, deep, steady beat. It felt as if they were working with us, which is part of the magic of coming to Occupy Philadelphia, or going to Occupy Wall Street. The community is a complex mixture of feeling HOME, and feeling like entering a new family, a new kind of family structure. The vibrations were ripe this night especially. At this point I asked that we fix our eyes to a lighted window in a skyscraper beyond the trees above the subway entrance. It seemed as though no leaves were moving, but in fixing the gaze on a solid, unmoveable point, the slight, hidden motions and gestures of leaves would reveal themselves. Sometimes you can only see what moves by staring into what will not. This flickering parade is then revealed at last. To the snare it shines. After a long drink of this meditation we again took time to write our notes for the poems.

Debrah Morkun: Another set of snare drums. I was reminded of Shango & CAConrad’s divinations from our previous (Soma)tic collaboration. I rode the drums for awhile, & felt pulled to a sculpture in the center of the cavernous part of underground City Hall where CAConrad & I sat. Was this a sculpture of an angel or a paper airplane, folded properly & ready for flight? Either way, the sculpture bespeaks of flight, of leaving one moment to seek another, of hope & aspiration. I said, “Conrad, we must walk around this circle & gaze into the bizarre world below.” For this sculpture sits atop an ancient Masonic magic spell of lava rocks & yom kippur, of footballs & elephant ears. An underground glimpse of flora native to Philadelphia, weeds & trees & an interesting bush with red bark. We walked around this circle & gazed below, receiving wisdom transmissions showing us that there is another piece of magic spell in Philadelphia’s magic sluice – where lava rock, non-native to Philadelphia, & nonexistent for miles & miles & miles until you reach the Pacific Northwest or Hawaii, rests creating an eruption of energy that catches flight in the wings of the angel or the paper airplane above.

Drunk from this experience, we took more notes.

#64: HELEN DRIVING Magic Ritual

(a collaboration by CAConrad & Debrah Morkun)

We made our way to the roof of a ten-story building. October, Philadelphia, late at night. There was a large yellow arrow painted on the ground. We called the four directions over the arrow.

We took turns standing at the arrow’s tip, facing Polaris, the lodestar. We each drew Polaris into our circle and carried it to a large cement pedestal. We ate from a bar of dark chocolate with a snarling black jaguar on the label, and then we took notes for our poems. Jaguar chocolate and poetry, perfect together. We later used chocolate pieces as chalk to draw a celestial orb with rays and waves emitting off the top of the pedestal.

On a different pedestal far from the black jaguar we had tiny rabbit cookies, which we arranged in a star pattern, eating every fourth one. The large fluorescent light shining down on this pedestal was used for two meditations. First we were to each find a word for this star. Debrah saw the word HELEN. CA saw the word DRIVING. HELEN DRIVING.

The second meditation with the rabbit-shaped cookies and intense beams of industrial light was to listen for a message from a god or goddess for the other. We offer our findings:

CAConrad: Well, first of all the black jaguar made me RAVENOUS for the little bunny cookies! I wasn’t even hungry but I tore into the little cookies! They were incredibly DELICIOUS! We deliberately kept the jaguar and rabbits on different pedestals, far from one another, but I must have brought the giant cat’s energy with me! It didn’t take me long to hear Shango calling. God of drums, thunder, protector of children. He wants to help Debrah safeguard, even inoculate an exposed wound from her childhood. He says “LISTEN TO DRUMS” for drums are the vehicle He rides when He is needed. He says listen to drums while driving in the car especially. Shango wants to raise a wound and in doing so transform the life.

Debrah Morkun: Rabbits are much like stars, & jaguars like the night sky that holds them. Realizing this, I felt the presence of Egyptian Goddess Isis hanging in the air around CAConrad & I. She was not alone, however. Much like the night sky holds the stars, & just like the jaguar holds the rabbit-star, the spirit of Isis came to us residing in the spirit-body of Simon Magus, apocyphral magician & heretic whose magic was so powerful that he was hated by the Apostles because his miracles rivaled the so-called divinity of Jesus. Isis told me to tell CAConrad that he has great powers stored in his hands – that they vibrate with creative & healing energy. To compliment these power-hands, he must find a powerful writing utensil – a pen unlike any he has ever before seen or experienced. This pen must be purple, & it must border on the “gaudy” (Isis’ word), replete with a purple feather, so it looks like a psychedelic modern day quill. This feather must not be from a real bird – feathers of actual birds must not be bought but found – it must be a synthetic feather. The commingling of CA’s energy vibrations & the magic of this pen will spin a power-poem.

After these messages we took more notes. We returned to the yellow arrow and closed the circle in view of our lodestar, our night’s guide, Polaris!

#63: SoMA MoMA de Kooning LoMA

a collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad, Stephen Boyer, and Filip Marinovich

for the current, 2011 de Kooning retrospective at MoMA in NYC


find a favorite de Kooning. what
do you imagine it
smells like at
10 paces then
5 paces then
what does it
taste like? (ass and gravy, pitch and starlight, calm and sea grass, asbestos and miles of candy, etc...)
SCRAPE OFF
stare at a de Kooning
for 5 minutes
keep track of the image then
free-write for
5-10 minutes then
reduce it to 10 words
use these words to
create an image
or landscape
GOD COCKS
Become a pink angel
in De Kooning's painting
"Pink Angels."
Don't leave the painting
under any circumstances.
If they put you in the painting
in a crate don't leave it.
Stay in the painting
when they vandalize it.
When who
vandalizes it?
When the museum gods vandalize it
stay in it, a Pink Angel
Guardian.
When the museum gods come on the painting
after midnight
with their long thick
museum god cocks
reach out and grab god cocks
and pull them off and
use them as paintbrushes to
paint a reproduction
of De Kooning's "Pink Angels"
on the walls of every bank ATM stall
in New York City,
and then, dear Pink Angel, please
feed me your Ass-To-Mouth god cock now.

2 new (Soma)tic Poetry publications!

The (Soma)tic exercise,

"OIL THIS WAR" and

its resulting poem

"DUCK CALL FOR DEAD DUCKS"

are in the latest issue of INTERIM Magazine!

Many thanks to

editor Jonathan Skinner!

The (Soma)tic exercise, "DOUBLE-SHELTER"

and its resulting poem "EXPRESS AN INTEREST IN LISTENING OR

FLOWERS WON'T BOTHER" are in the latest issue of LOADED BICYCLE Magazine! Many thanks to editor Martin Rock!

#62: Gender Continuum

--for Anne Waldman (aka Outrider Anne)

Every morning for seven days I gave my friend Elizabeth Kirwin treatments of reflexology and massage, and she in turn gave me craniosacral therapy. Each morning while on the table I would fix my mind to meditate on seven possible genders for my body, intersex intersecting day to day. Starting with the female skeleton, hormones, glands, and genitalia. OF COURSE START with woman against the fairytale of Adam and his magical life-giving rib!

Day seven was male, but days two through six were variations of our world. The aim of physical, political, and sociological outcomes were in constant flux days two through six. Margins were permitted to drop in meditation. Permission to drop margins is an exceptional space to offer yourself and others. The craniosacral therapy was straightening my spine, relaxing my muscles, and challenging my thoughts throughout the gender exploration. The craniosacral lifted my consciousness while in deliberate concentration on the sex of my body.

Each morning after our healing exchange I would take notes about my physical condition, how it was shifting, mending, and notes on my gender meditation. The notes took no specific course other than a personal demand to divulge all hidden words and needs breaking free through the experience. I am a woman. I am a man. I will be neither, or bits and parts of both with blood and imagination flow on the increase. And that increase is a prodigious stream tempering the spirit, today, tomorrow, again, again against a wall. Up the wall. Over the wall. Away from the wall. The world as it could be (or a collective version of it) is always trying to bend the air around itself to be heard. The risks of the day are holding themselves out to us, yet we all know too well that the power structure is far ahead of us, the ambush of the ages. My notes from this exercise were plucked and shaped into a poem.

#61: TICULI Magic Ritual

(a collaboration by CAConrad & Debrah Morkun)

We went to Atlantic City at dusk where we found a dilapidated wooden dance floor on the beach outside TRUMP PLAZA CASINO. This was perfect for the ritual that would lead us to our poems.

In a gazebo overlooking the crashing tide we called the four directions. We took discarded four-foot tubes and placed them on the dance floor one at a time to form a hidden word: TICULI. We offer our definitions:

Ticuli (tih-coo-lee)
1. Noun. A color not detectable to the human eye, as in the color of ghosts.

2. Noun. A sand bar where the detritus of a tidal wave has left a lingering historical shadow.

We placed a large chunk of orange calcite on a wet and sandy TRUMP PLAZA black jack table in the middle of the dance floor. We touched both ends of the stone and meditated with a long, low hum. We then wrote notes for our poems. Orange calcite is known for enhancing our creative functions and dissolving obstacles blocking our way to our highest potential. We took notes to the flashing lights of the casino and the roar of a warm, September ocean. Aphrodite. Yemaya. And now, Ticuli.

Next we took turns walking off the dance floor, across the beach, down to the ocean to find and bring something back for the other person. We offer our experiences:

CAConrad: Warmth blowing off the ocean pulled me into the water. At first I stood knee-deep, then felt an electrical EXCITEMENT and threw myself onto my back to look at the sky. There were three bright stars directly above me, two for my shoulders, one for my feet. But then the incoming tide forced my legs apart. I went limp to allow the ocean to position me, waves fucking me, waves fucking me, waves fucking me, waves fucking me. A small animal was in my left palm for a moment, something that looked like a miniature armadillo or beige beetle with many legs. After it swam away my hand felt a large shell fragment, smoothly worn into a hook. I brought it back for Debrah, told her it was from Aphrodite, to help her gently hook and pull love into her life.

Debrah Morkun: After receiving this goddess lore sea treasure from CAConrad, I made my way to the waves, listening to the communal oyster, crab, sea urchin sounds that one can only hear through auditory spying. I listened to the human sounds, the sounds of human ghosts, humans who spent centuries dying at sea. I thought about the communal voice that these sea ghosts create – a cacophony of both dead human voices & the sounds of sea creatures mating. The Earth is often referred to as The Blue Planet due to its astounding hydrosphere, so I thought about what it means to be a Blue Person on a Blue Planet as I finally reached the ocean, embraced it, allowed it to bring its salty survival all around my legs, drenching my dress, feeling the eternal pull of the ocean. While connecting to the salt & its commotion, a seashell kept finding its way under my left foot, rubbing against my big toe. Despite the tumult of the waves, this shell remained there. I knew this shell was to be my gift to CAConrad, for when I looked at it, I realized it was an "essence hook." With this hook, Conrad will be able to catch those little things that are really big things, the essences at the root of all life.

We took more notes and asked if the ritual was complete. Wind pulled a gate at the edge of the dance floor closed: our answer. We went back into the gazebo to bid farewell to the four directions and close the circle. Our notes from this collaborative magic ritual were shaped into poems.

#60: MINDING THIRST

--for Jamie Townsend

Watch weather report for heavy rain. On the day before, drink NOTHING. No beverages of any kind. Eat no soup or broth. Eat only steamed vegetables with soft noodles or bread. Wait for rain. Set your alarm to wake in the middle of the night, and then sit by the window peering into the dark sky with binoculars. Think about your first memory of being thirsty. Take notes, go back to sleep.

Wait for rain. You are still not drinking the next day and you are very thirsty. When rain arrives sit by the window. Close your eyes, take your pulse, hear the rain, feel your blood. Imagine that the water you hear coming to earth will never touch your lips, can never quench the dryness that is your mouth. Were you ever so thirsty that you were in pain? Open your eyes, take notes.

Go out into the rain. Lie on the ground. Look into the sky through binoculars with your mouth open. Drink DIRECTLY from the air while watching the streaming drops fall onto the binocular lens. Open an umbrella and take notes to the beating of rain. You are a drought that is cured. You are a body sponging back your life. Shape your three sets of notes into one poem or three.