Just Ash: Poetry from Last Year

By Gabriel Leif Bellman

Just Ash is a book of poetry written over the course of a year. If you notice the subtle changes in the prominence of your cheekbone, elasticity of your skin, if you feel a general decline in excitability over mass catastrophe, then you are tuned in to the passage of time. Before time passes too quickly, we can capture it in word, in print. This book of poems is the eleventh book by Gabriel Leif Bellman, who still does not get it. Or maybe he does. This book is the equivalent of a look in the mirror by a bottle of whiskey, poured over a fire, on a sinking ship. What does a flame see while it burns? What is left of us when we die?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 21, 2005
• ISBN: 9781462824717

Gabriel Leif Bellman

Gabriel Leif Bellman was born in Eugene, Oregon. He was awarded a Bachelors from USCs School of Cinematic Arts (95), a Masters from New York University (99), and a Juris Doctorate from U. C. Hastings ('05). He has been a high-school teacher; MTV producer; umbrella salesman; restaurant host; dishwasher; lumber feeder; assembly liner; slam poet; warehouse stacker; SOMA magazine correspondent; opera composer at Juilliard, groundskeeper; and Playboy assistant. He has worked construction (Mexico); lived abroad (Spain, Ireland, Holland); and devoted extensive time to traveling (Europe, North Africa, the United States, Middle East, and Caribbean). He directed a film while traveling with the circus in Ireland (Duffys Irish Circus 2005). He has worked with female prisoners in California. Currently, Mr. Bellman lives in San Francisco where he is an attorney. One of the underrated 3-point shooters of his generation, Mr. Bellman won the Los Angeles city hoops championship in 1995. His agent gladly fields calls about his NBA availability (he will only sign with a title contender).

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Copyright © 2005 by gabriel leif bellman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Introduction from the ‘author’

keeping it real

and

election day

indian girl

way

Frog (ten parts to letting go of a lover)

letter from an s.f. jail

cover

shared

fog

greatness

dog

canterbury

nap

worldbank

the celebration of two lovers

who are friends of mine

avocado

sundae

hair

bounty

Letter from a Mexican Medicine Man

weed

door

pop

puddle

card

election

nothing

poem

tree

berlin

late

vday

able

fallsend

louse

turkey

dream

dreamdead

drizzle

dagger

mint

sinking

belly of winter

feet

without

yoga

grow

stretch

what

wave

shampoo

junk

break

young

beefeeling

attached

hunger

were

likeyou

wait

phone

puzzle

merely

forblair

handle

feb

smell

dream

you

hurt

last minute

event

snoopon

statue

interview

you

her

lai

napa

pump

leaving

was

sleep

sweatnawling

spirit

bed

in love/the checkout girl/angry tattoo/smiles anyway

over

morningfrost

end

were

hawaii

hawaii return

parasito

tree

thepen

luminescent

pucker

soon

lazyfuck

crop

formymom

A film poem about what little girls dream of when their father’s girlfriend dies

worm

slut

robot

spring

smile

ducksong

bigbed

jessica

cruelty

winner

passed

lease

goodsoup

now

back

gloves

type

mono

you

music

graduatingfromlawschool

story

horse

now

saw you

finalwritlaw

grad

splash

skypaint

fuzz

symbol

rope

kitten

might

tornpants

smile

soften

learn

monday

tree repetition

fish

crying

leave

there

birthday 32 and what now

something

context

dream

wallpaper

heat

brazil

someday

past

the bar exam

prebarjitters

*(after the test):

Why I Love You

fin del libro

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.

– Jack London

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

– Leonard Cohen

other works by the author

    (novels)

An Apple in My Back

Sleeps Never That City

    (short stories)

Coast Left Past

More Coast Left Past

Flatbush Fiction

    (poetry)

Bodies of Waste

Therefore, I Think

Special Features

    (stories and poems)

Spoon Me

Sum Swerve

Introduction from the ‘author’

Here is an introduction to a new book of poetry. After a few years and books, I come back to the mantra: the words are the thing. I cling to the notion that writing is paramount to a joyful existence. I cannot play the piano, but to sit down and clack! on a keyboard for me brings about a certain amount of inner peace. I am not sure that anybody can share with anybody else what ‘inner peace’ means. However, it is the hope that language can create shared experience that keeps me interested in writing, and thankful at your reading.

These poems are raw, not dressed up too much, and I hope they feel a bit like they were taken from unhaled lungs. Here in these pages lies the exhale.

I also hope you have such a wonderful, crazy, magical life that you are unable to put it into words because it is so full of beauty and sadness and laughter and pain that your mouth curls into a smile and tears pour out like boiling water at any thoughts you might have upon reflection. I really do have hope for all of us, sharing skin-covered bodies, with some notion of a center. In that center, or soul, or shared human experience, or collective unconscious, or individual self, I know that you will see how beautiful you are. It is so amazing it is fucking blinding.

Here are some poems I wrote last year to slice through the clock-movement. They are about funny, sad, happy, depressed, stupid, annoying, invigorating stuff. This ‘stuff’ really piles up around here. To not collect it purging through poem has proven essential. As the Leonard Cohen quote suggests these are not the burning embers by which I live, just the ashes of last year. I hope you enjoy them.

Also, here is a piece of advice:Do not amass ‘things.’

The more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to take care of. If you choose the stuff that can’t be sold off at a bankruptcy auction to take care of and nothing else, you’ll never be poor or overburdened. Carry the weight, but not more.

– glb 9-19-05

keeping it real

Ours will be remembered as the generation that gave up, finally, on imagination, and reimagined reality into something resembling entertainment. And then rewatched it on Tevo. After a solid two-thousand years of relying on myth and the supernatural, we turned the lens completely convex, running around like ants under a magnifying glass, watching people get burned. Our societal consciousness shifted like it had been eaten by the other Olsen Twin – no, not that one, the other one. After all the ‘isms’ – cubism, surrealism, dadaism, modernism, postmodernism, we have arrived at a space where we’re jaded with stories. We demand reality like it is actually out there, organically churning out NBC’s fall lineup of parachuting billionaire bug eaters with 45 second gaps for commercials.

Let’s be clear: there is no ‘reality.’ Grainy footage doesn’t make things ‘true.’ There are only competing narratives. Science, religion, and ‘reality shows.’ The truth? For some reason, we’re choosing narratives told by billioneiress bitches over thoses of Moses. We’re stuck in the mental traffic of everybody craning their neck at carwrecks we set-up! Ask not whom the crash-test dummies are.

What caused the obsession with ‘reality’? We conquered the earth, moon, mapped out the human gene. We record everything. Coppola prophesied that an eight-year old girl with a video camera someday would emerge as the Mozart of filmmaking. He didn’t expect her idea of concerto to be Li’l Bow-Wow dunking over Jordan.

In Music, we went from appreciating activism accompanying songs of the Guthries and Dylan’s to requiring it. The ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ true-ness of songs must be proven before an album gets play. Shyne’s new album is great because . . . it’s fucking FROM prison. Forget about live from Folsom Prison, what about dead and In prison? Tupac has turned out more albums while dead than he ever did alive. (Still got luv for you, Pac) Biggie’s ‘Life After Death’ was released after . . . death. The ante upped, the standard we hold is not how good – but have they fucking lived it? Bat-eating Ozzy’s retarded family have reemerged with Cobain’s shotgun eating depression. Marilyn and James Dean set the standard – be young and beautiful (or fat on SNL) and then die. Or grow old and document your therapy sessions. We’ve typecast improvisation.

Our ADD culture found a way to scene-select past the hundred years it used to take painters to get famous after death. Jay-Z’s ‘retirement’ album features his mom telling stories about buying him a boombox. It’s this window we are obsessed with – because maybe something’s in there. Beauty? Meaning? W e want improvisation. It’s ‘real.’ We’re done with scripted – art has gone the way of jazz and basketball – there are rules to mediums now, but we watch for the chance for a rapturous solo. Somebody to freak out, die, fall in love, get fired, swap parents.

Movies are all incorporating true-stories. Not like Citizen Kane based on Hearst, but like Raging Bull with DeNiro gaining weight. We have movies about making moviemakers who can’t make movies (American Movie), Project Greenlight, everything Matt and Ben. We are the IMAX ticketholders. Where every movie review exlaims in bold: It’s so REAListic. Forget artistic. We want to enter the folds of reality.

And no surprise then that pornography has become the biggest moneymaking industry in the U.S. – outperforming the film and music industries combined. One thing every porn film has is a ‘money shot’ – where you go okay, he wasn’t faking it. Where will this obsession with ‘real’ lead ? How many ‘natural’ Cost Rican adventures can we go on before we realize we are still nobody else? How many fantasy-football teams can we run before the Oz-curtain falls and we’re baring selves like Jacksonian nipples? Who are we?

We’re watchers and documentors – cellphone snapshotters. The battle against commies, druggies, and terrorists manufactured us into spies that spend leisure time spectating would-be neighbors. We skip to Monica’s part of Bill’s book because it seems real. Devil with blue dress on – yet it follows the rise and fall of poor-Arkansas-bastard-meets-girl. We camouflage modern myths in soap opera played by unrehearsed actors.

The ‘blooper’ and the flying chair reached their apex in the last decade. God is Dead? Off-camera is Dead. But television always had’reality’ – the first t.v.’s paid for themselves with commercials for stores selling them. Ads are for ‘real’ products – phones that make you popular. Even sports and politics, two ‘real’ t.v. domains of the last century, can’t avoid mishmashing’reality’. Stories are about athletes who make plays, beat up somebody, lose money in contract disputes, retire, unretire, get acquitted. Politics is about not just a cigar, but a metaphor for what is lacking in the world today – heroes. Jessica Lynch books outsell Pulitzers. All because they’re’true’ – just not according to Jessica herself. Welcome to Docu-world. Where we obsessively document. Where we download Paris Hilton’s blow-job that just happens to appear before her show about . . . Paris not knowing how to use rotary phones? But who the hell is Paris? She’s the attraction ihappening in real time, the new video never (‘really’) meant for distribution. But we need editors. We need theme-music, we need all the boring moments in between roommate fights cut out for continuity. And while we’re at it we want immunity. We want to talk about people like we know them, but without knowing them. We want anonymous friendships, and later we’ll pick our fuckmates on match.com. We want the same stories we wanted before, but dressed differently. We still want boy meets girl but now we want it for ‘real’ – imitatating art.

Isn’t every Olympic ‘true’ story, every OJ-Peterson-trial, every out-from-the-crack-dealing-game-song, every back-from-heroin-addiction-album, every tune-in-and-watch-the-blind-girl-win episode, every based-on-a-true-story based on the story of the epic journey – the conquering of enemies, the winning of love, affection, money, fame, fortune? Is this ‘reality’ so different from the mythological Odysseus setting out into the world and doing right? Is it different than the fables and lessons of the Grimm brothers? Doesn’t Dr. Phil tell us how much we learn each time we turn our attention to these stories? Don’t we learn about ‘overcoming adversity’ by watching a man slim-down on subway sandwiches? And aren’t we secretly crying for the Asian kid to sing a mean karaoke song? Aren’t these epic tales the same stories recycled? Don’t we hear beautiful melodies in the cacophony of talk-radio?

The next time we look to ‘reality’ and judge a book by the writers killed telling it to Dick Chaney, we should remember Bunuel teamed up with Dali on the film ‘Andalusian Dog’ in 1929. It started with an eyeball being cut with a razorblade. At the time, the height of surrealism, it didn’t make sense. Maybe now – in hyper-realism-the message comes across: we are looking at ourselves, and the razor-cut is that we only ever have been. Stop staring. It’s all ‘reality’ – and none of it is. Art reflects us, and what is more interesting to us than us? Narcissm, voyeurism, exhibitionism – the ‘isms’ are back.

No man is an island, but we stand together fighting for immunity in this new ‘war’ that our society is fighting against ‘terror,’ The oldest mythological battle of all is against fear itself. It’s why we have myths and stories to begin with. Where did fire came from? Where does the sun go? What makes people attractive? What would happen if we put an extra nose on a lady from Oklahoma and filmed it? What if a nu-cu-lur bomb goes off in a subway? And if fear is the only thing to fear, terror is the only thing to fight. And we fight terror through creativity – we create art to fill the void. So what happens when you fill a void with another void? What happens when your creations are all just imitations of non-creations? This. Here. Now. A mirror reflecting back a hungry crowd looking for exhaltation, freedom, peace, justice. Just us.

As we obsess on the ‘real’ happenings in the world as the war-game-election fades, there is one thing we can be sure of: we don’t really know what the hell reality is. We can’t see it – our vision of reality is blocked with ‘reality.’ And maybe we don’t want to admit reality is that deep pit where social injustice and poverty and illness fester (most of the world) and we’d rather look away.

Cue the dark, brooding music created by Cuban musicians, and listen for the dancesteps of hipsters in