#75: SCRYER’S INVITATION

--for Hoa & Owen

Having lived with a ghost for more than a decade I knew where he hovered and settled into walls and lights. This is where I aimed my scrying mirror. I sat on the floor with a handheld mirror and a large mirror behind me. The ghost is named Owen. He lived next door and killed himself where my new neighbor brushes his teeth each morning. Owen was 21; he liked books and used to work at Rizzoli’s Bookshop on Broad Street. Since his suicide he has accommodated my often-unquenchable thirst for life and my addiction and sickness for poetry!

Late at night, blocking all light from windows I read to him Hoa Nguyen’s book AS LONG AS TREES LAST. By candlelight I read a poem out loud, saying, “OWEN, THE POEM IS TITLED ‘RAGE SONNET’ AND SOUNDS LIKE THIS….” At the end of each poem I snuffed the candle to peer into the mirror behind me through the handheld mirror. I stared for a long time, dark to dark, then the candlelight again for taking notes. Then the next poem by Hoa, “OWEN, THE POEM IS TITLED ‘I’M STUCK’ AND SOUNDS LIKE THIS….”

Finally there was a face in the mirror. After a long, assiduous stare I saw my face with another behind and above. The last book Owen read when he was alive was MOBY DICK. When I told his mother she said, “That’s a children’s book isn’t it?” I said, “No ma’am, it’s not. Not at all.” Tonight I’m here, with poetry by Hoa Nguyen, being productive with a 10-year suicide, but making sense is the last thing on my mind. By candlelight the note-taking and poem reading, “I have thought for / a dirty starved circle” until the ghost and I were finished, and Hoa was finished. My (Soma)tic notes forming into a poem dedicated to Hoa and Owen. Thank you!!

#74: ARBOREAL CRYSTAL ARIA

--for Marianne Morris

“I guess I should have closed my eyes when you

drove me to the place where your horses run free.”

--Prince

Find a plant, tree, some living nonhuman entity you want to communicate with. For me it was a giant sycamore tree in Philadelphia, a tree I’ve known for years. I cleaned my quartz crystal by resting it on a shallow bed of sea salt over night. I touched the tree with my left hand while speaking into my crystal in my right hand, “PLEASE translate any messages my tree friend has for me.” I then touched the tree with my right hand while holding onto the crystal with my left hand. I stayed this way for fifteen minutes, quiet, with eyes closed, letting the communication course through me and into the crystal for processing. My hands grew HOT.

As soon as I opened my eyes I began taking notes. I asked the crystal, “Was there a question for me, please say.” I heard “NOTHING!” The word rang through me. Trees don’t need to ask us anything, but they have plenty to tell us and I let my crystal tell me and let the notes flow out of me. What will it take to recognize the intelligence of such a quiet giant? Years ago I was leaning against the tree, earnestly writing a Frank poem and suddenly looked up into the branches who seemed to shake with no wind, and I HEARD the anger aimed at my pen carving into paper, paper made of tree, wood. There I was, the human carving my own thoughts in my oblivious imperialism. What love do I really have outside my own kind of animal? I took many notes for a poem through the crystal translations of a tree.

(Soma)tics in THE The POETRY Magazine

CLICK HERE FOR THE INTERVIEW

#73: SUFFERING MAKES NO HOME ALONE

--for Michelle Tea and Ali Liebegott


I attended RADAR Lab writer’s residency in Quintana Roo, Mexico. For 9 consecutive nights I prepared my crystal-infused water dream therapy. Each morning I would implement the final stage of the dream therapy, then I would listen to a different PRINCE album in its entirety: DIRTY MIND, CONTROVERSY, PURPLE RAIN, etc. Lying still with eyes closed, allowing the dream to braid and dissolve inside the musical landscapes of my beautiful, androgynous muse. As soon as the album finished I would write for fifteen minutes, which was not so much a dream-journal as it was a dream-lost-inside-PRINCE-journal.

After breakfast I went down to the beach. Each morning from 9am to noon I would sit in the same place, one foot closer to the tide each morning. On the last day I sat directly in the tidal break with sturdy paper and a pen whose ink imbeds into paper, a pen invented to prevent check fraud. PRINCE may wash my dreams away, but the ocean would not take my poems.

For a few minutes I would close my eyes to listen to the tide. Then I would suddenly open my umbrella and stare at one of its polka dots, each one a different color of the spectrum. After staring at one polka dot for five minutes I would suddenly look out at the beach, coral reef and ocean. The polka dot’s color would show itself in the hue of a broken shell, or be found in the bow of a distant ship. One morning my eyes landed on the white of the umbrella, which is all the space surrounding the polka dots. I decided to go with it. When I tore the umbrella aside I noticed FOR THE FIRST TIME tiny white crabs who made their homes at
the wettest part the sand, continuously washed by the tide. The study of the crabs consumed my morning. One day I looked up from writing to see a hundred yellow butterflies fluttering in a line down the beach above the surf a few feet from my face. The parade of beauty kept me in awe: giant sea turtles, iguanas, and magnificent sea birds. One day I placed my large Lemurian crystal in the sand under the surf. RADAR Lab’s amazing chef Christina Frank sat with me to witness the little silver fish surround the crystal. They LOVED IT! They would ride the surf to the crystal, surround it and KISS IT, ride the tide out, then ride it back in and KISS IT AGAIN!

From 3pm to 6pm I would sit in the bathtub to write. My favorite childhood liquid was FRESCA! I thought it went out of business, but it just moved to Mexico! I drank FRESCA all day long at the residency, and used it for the bathtub meditation, drinking mouthfuls, letting the grapefruit bubbles roil in my mouth while turning the shower on. I would touch the falling water with the tips of my fingers then I would swallow the FRESCA and turn the water off. I would meditate on arguments from the archive of my unforgiving brain. Arguments I had, and arguments by others. Once I heard my mother and sister shouting in another room. My mother yelled, “I SHOULD HAVE ABORTED YOU!” My sister yelled back, “GRANDMOM SHOULD HAVE ABORTED YOU AND WE WOULD ALL BE FREE FROM THIS GODDAMNED MESS!” My mother BURST into tears, my sister left the room with a smile. She saw me and said, “I TOLD HER!” I returned her smile and hugged her saying, “YES you did my dear!” The MOMENT we embraced THE RELIEF of our grandmom’s imaginary abortion WASHED OVER US BOTH! We laughed from so much pain and nonsense for a rolling tide. The brain holds all of our disasters in little, decrepit files marked and mismarked and repeating their vomitus sick, and sometimes a little too quiet from too much damage. These notes became nine poems, my homage to my mother who was not aborted, and to her children who were also not aborted.

#72: WORMWOOD WALKMOUTH

a collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad & Ryan Eckes

--for Pattie McCarthy

We created this (Soma)tic exercise together, then performed it separately. Then we wrote the poem together via email. That first poem is “BEFORE ABSINTHE.” Then we spent the evening drinking absinthe together and writing a new poem off the first one, and it’s titled “AFTER ABSINTHE.” Here’s the exercise:

Burn sage over the area where you will be meditating for the exercise. Coat your face with the smoke, infuse your hair, FILL THE ROOM WITH IT!! Place rose quartz over your heart while lying flat on your back, eyes closed. Be quiet and still for ten minutes. Move the rose quartz to your forehead, have pen and paper within reach so that you can begin writing. WRITE down the message your heart told the rose quartz to tell your head. Every single day for five days after writing with the rose quartz, maintain your position on your back to taste a different spice. Dip your finger in cayenne, next day, cinnamon, next day salt, next day oregano, and next day black pepper. By the second day, after writing, notice if the cinnamon sent you in a different direction than the cayenne had taken you. Take your pulse, write more and then prepare for part two.

Go to the internet, find the e-book L&O by Pattie McCarthy and click on FULLSCREEN view. Put your cursor on the page-scroller, close your eyes and randomly move your mouse up and down for a few seconds, stop and open your eyes. The first line that you focus on, remember it. Go outside for a walk to the park, repeating the line to yourself every few seconds. As you walk, try not to think about anything but what's immediately in your view, every few seconds saying the line to yourself. After a minute or so, let the line transform by adding the names for what you see during your walk or by substituting words from the original line with words for the things you see during the walk. As it changes, feel free to sing the line to yourself or whistle it. Once you get to the park, sit down, get comfortable, say the new line to yourself a few times. You can say it like it's a question, then an exclamatory imperative, or however you like. Wait for the first animal that comes near you, seems to look at you, and say the line to the animal. Take notes. Every day, for five days, choose a different line from L&O and walk to a different park, changing the line.

(Soma)tic in MEXICO

details of communicating with fish through crystal

#71: Grave a Hole as Dream a Hole

--for Brenna Lee

Set a clear quartz crystal on a shallow bed of salt over night. When you wake flush the salt down the toilet, the crystal is now clean and ready for you. Dig a hole in the backyard. Sit by the open hole with the crystal; speak to the crystal in your right hand, close to your lips, telling it you will bury it over night. Tell it you will dig it up next morning, then take notes and go to bed. (This transgressive act, putting a crystal BACK into Earth, I mean imagine someone taking a bone from your FOOT or below your heart, then putting it back for the night!! Sick, but also quite beautiful to permit ourselves this.)

Wake and write down ANY DREAMS you had in the night. Unearth the crystal, hold it in your right hand again and ask, “What was it like down there? Was it comfortable, please say? Was it fearful, please say?” Hold the crystal in your left hand and write as fast as you can WHATEVER comes to mind.

Next night hold the crystal in your right hand telling it you will both climb into the hole of your dreams together. Place the crystal under your pillow. Next morning write down ANY DREAMS you had, then ask the crystal the same questions you did after digging it out of the backyard. ADD ONE QUESTION by asking the crystal if she had any dreams, or if we were traveling together. For seven nights alternate burying it in the backyard and placing it under your pillow. Take notes take MANY NOTES. The crystal will translate the way to the poem(s) with you.

#70: TIME TRAVEL APPLICATION

for the TROLL THREAD Collective

I was invited to give a poetry reading in Buffalo, New York April 7th. This is a time when spring is in FULL BLOOM in Philadelphia, while the land in Buffalo is still asleep with winter 400 miles to the north. On the train I had a photograph of snowy treetops and another of a worm-stuffed robin with violets. Every 10 minutes I would look out the window. While what I saw was spring, I would hold the picture of winter to the window, step hard on a piece of broken plastic placed in my shoe and say, "THIS IS DEAD!" At the midway the pictures were switched, and I pressed into my now bleeding foot to say "THIS IS ALIVE!" Notes for the poem were taken all along the rail. Spring rolled back into winter, the only season America deserves.

(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!