Fucking Deadwood
is one of the three best shows
on television today
or anytime, it's the language,
it's Shakespeare for the 2000s
and David Milch is an angry genius
of the magnitude of legend
weaving America back into itself,
standing history on its head
or back on its head.

If you can figure
out what's going on
by fighting through the language
and run the numbers on pure
emotion, you'll get it.

It's about power
but it's also about love.
I love this country, the racism,
the slavery, and the long climb
out of the shit with gold
in our eyes.

I can accept it. Al Swearingen
can accept it and so did
Seth Bullock.

Can you?
Meet the language at the source
and see if truth fucks you
up to the point where you're
just as right as America is

Problems, faith, and all.

LINKS:
Deadwood

TAGS:
Deadwood, Joshua Minton, Poetry, Writing, Poems

I was sleep walking through work
when I saw a face as familiar
as my own, a fraternity
brother I'd lost contact with ten years ago.

I put aside the professional
and put on the good times
mask. The one I wore in Panama City
in 1995. Back when Skerski was still alive
and he and Kohler drove that golf cart
from Spinnaker's into the ocean
and got arrested. At least
that's the way I tell it
and the way we still remember it.

He was eating dog food
the first time I met him.
We were at Colvin's end of the year
graduation party in high school and my future
big brother was in a toga, on his hands
and knees, scooping Alpo
from a thick plastic, all-weather food bowl
on the back deck. It was spitting rain
and his hairy little Jewish body was stained
with sweat, beer, and fallen rain.

Pink Floyd blasted from the window screens
and the liquored up hard bodies
melted into each other on the living room floor.
I was too short to make out
and too drunk to sing. So I just watched
Epstein eat that dog food.

The night I walked into the Phi Delt house
on Digby, it was dusk
and Fall was a lie no one willed to believe.
I saw his face, leaner than before;
carved away like Superman in the crystal booth
in Superman II. It flies--
time. I mean, it flies fast
because he became my big brother for exactly nine
months.

The whole thing ended in shit, really.
I was in a bad place, a dark time--
lost and no one but me could pull me out--
you know, the same old writer bullshit.

There have been women in my life
who I could never take home
but prayed to carve a piece off
to keep them so much closer.

Am I still the same person who threatened
to blow up the universe ten years ago?

There have been women like moments
too beautiful to ingest
and trying to grip them was like poking
a tiger in a cage with a sharpened pool cue.

And there have been moments like women
bellied up to the bar and broken
down in a man's world.
Sometimes everything needs a chaser.

It all washed away when I saw his pudgy face
no longer carved by the undertow of adolescence.
We hugged, still brothers, in the middle of my office
me in my suit and he in his. He was there to fix
something, install something, or break it down
(aren't we all?)

I've reached the point in life where every embrace
is a finality, a way of saying, "If you get there
before I do…how can I help you say goodbye?"


TAGS:
Joshua Minton, Poetry, Writing, Poems

...is the issue of publicly-funded art. So Rush and Hannity can humbly kiss my ass as I disagree with them on this point.

I have been without cable since the last night of the Republican Convention of 2004. I did this for the main reason of purchasing a new computer while not having it affect my monthly budget. So, for almost two years, I was living without the influence of any mainstream media source upon my intellect and judgment. I chose every avenue from which I received my information on a daily basis.


But until I started watching my local PBS HD channel (which is the best looking channel on my $50 antennae); I had no concept of what fantastic programming they hosted on there. This is worth funding; but I believe it is paramount that partisan political thinking (the worst kind of thinking there is for everyone) must be kept to a minimum or always brought back to the center.


That is being fair and level and letting your audience decide; Right?

I support PBS for the same reason I passionately support the private funding of local libraries who participate in a large-scale sharing program. It's far better than the alternative...

...Imagine a world where the poor and disinterested had no avenue to gain the information and skill sets to encourage their passions to become their livelihoods while giving back a significant portion of that wealth to the social structures around them.

That is what living in a community is all about and it seems that we should be making more of an effort to sanctify the ground around us and see it reflected in the other inhabitants of this planet who immediately surround us in life.

A significant part of any "compassionate conservatism" should be compassion and neither sides in the political rift in America have any abundance of compassion. That's where we as individuals must step in, step up, cock our weapons once again and aim at the tyrant who seeks to take away that which Providence allowed a great nation to be built for the sole purpose of--bringing to light the freedom of the individual acting in the best interests of themselves and everyone around them.

And this tyrant is not any one man or group of people--the tyrant is fear. The tyrant is ignorance. The tyrant is compulsive disregard.

This is the enemy to be defeated in the War on Terror. This is the whole point of fighting a war, right?

Or is the goal still taking away the toys and essentials of others, call them us, and move on to the next unlucky culture? If this still is the goal, then someone at the committee forgot to copy me on the memo because I was under the impression we were trying to get to the whole "I Have a Dream" world, just over the mountaintop, where everyone eats at the table regardless of their skin color, where they come from, or who they are?"

If this isn't the goal then what the fuck are we celebrating on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday? Are we rewarding ourselves for slipper further into the nightmare? Or are we celebrating the ideal as a substitute for the action?

I believe in a world where every human being whose lungs are filling and emptying with the correct oxygen to atmosphere ratio, on regular basis, has complete and total access to the creative thoughts and artistic productions of fellow human beings.

Art should be both publicly and privately funded. It will be the true mark of historical social progress for us when artistic funding has been unleashed from the corporate and political fence post it has been tethered to for three thousand years. But when art is totally funded by private citizens, you will know that we have reached a milestone in our social evolution.


TAGS:
Art, Funding, PBS, HD, High Definition, Sociology, History

I believe that reading poetry is the mark of the truly civilized man. And I'm not talking about just reading the lines and going onto the next mundanity in life. I'm talking about getting inside the poem itself. With a really good poem it's like standing inside a prism and looking at the world from a strange place.

And for my money, there are three poets you need to know about. The first one is one of my college professors, George Looney, who writes some of the best poetry I've ever read. The second is Richard Hugo who was one of my professor's inspirations. And the third is this poet, James Wright. Wright was an Ohio poet and therefore writes for my heart.

I chose to analyze his poem "The Seasonless" because it appeals to my Mid-Western nature. I could not imagine living in a place where the winters weren't bitter one year, mild the next; the summers blistering one day and icicle monsoons the next.

I like to examine poems by breaking up the stanzas to analyze them. Here is the first stanza:

When snows begin to fill the park,
It is not hard to keep the eyes
Secure against the flickering dark,
Aware of summer ghosts that rise.
The blistered trellis seems to move
The memory toward root and rose,
The empty fountain fills the air
With spray that spangled women's hair;
And men who walk this park in love
May bide the time of falling snows.

So, obviously we're starting off in the beginning of Winter. And I really like the line about how it's not hard to keep your eyes secure against the dark because it's a strange way of saying that your sight is safe in this time of approaching death. The summer ghosts that rise are the memories of the beginning of the death of Summer (which is Fall) and the blistered trellis moving our memory back to spring when the rose grew from the root. And memory is played expressed fantastically here with the empty fountain filling the air with spray that spangled women's hair. But love is the one thing that draws the human mind away from the death all around them and even allows them to find comfort in the passage.

The trees recall their greatness now;
they were not always vague and bowed
With loads that build the slender bough
Till branches bear a tasteless fruit.
A month ago they rose and bore
Fleshes of berry, leaf, and shade:
How painlessly a man recalls
The stain of green on crooked walls,
The summer never known before,
The garden heaped to bloom and fade.

In this stanza we move from nature back to man in the eternal dance of death. What is interesting to me here is the phrase about the summer never known before because if you think about it, the life cycle of a rose is the season in which it grows and dies but man's cycle is longer and therefore allows for contemplation of the death going on all around him. This is the root cause for all of mythology--somehow making the death all around us right in our heads and in our hearts.

Beyond the holly bush and path
The city lies to meet the night
And also there the quiet earth
Relies upon the lost delight
To rise again and fill the dark
With waterfalls and swallows sound.
Beyond the city's lazy fume,
The sea repeats the fall of spume,
And gulls remember cries they made
When lovers fed them off the ground.

Now we've moved from nature to the city, the world of man which pumps on as if ignorant of death and cold to its natural fact. But we are reminded that this ultimate fate still underlies the immortal illusion of the city which is a jungle always waiting to creep back in and overgrow the city. And here we have nature remembering that it is fed off of human love. This is one of those chicken and egg things because it is humanity which has imbued nature with its beauty and is not something inherent outside of human reason and art.

But lonely underneath a heap
Of overcoat and crusted ice,
A man goes by, and looks for sleep.
The spring of everlastingness.
Nothing about his face revives
A longing to evade the cold.
The night returns to keep him old,
And why should he, the lost and lulled,
Pray for the night of vanished lives,
The day of girls blown green and gold?

Here is the ultimate surrender, the man who no longer evades the cold and is looking for the ultimate sleep. Here we have someone going gentle into the good night, but the poem ends on a beautiful vision of spring coming again with the feminine image of spring colors coming back into bloom.

What a fantastic poem. I like the idea of analyzing poetry every now and then on this blog--bringing some culture to you knuckleheads.



Links:

James Wright
George Looney
Richard Hugo


TAGS: Poetry, George Looney, Richard Hugo, Richard Wright

This poem was written ten years ago, when I was a Freshman in College (for the second time). It is highly political and very angry. At the time, I was embracing what I considered to by "radically true" ideas, but ideas that eventually came to be embraced by many on the left. And while I might not argue some of the finer points of politics and history that this piece deals with, I cannot deny that when I wrote this, I believed it.

Throwing Dirt on Dad by Joshua Minton

1

It took twenty-one years to murder the man.
When you steal a life, they will cut off your hand.
But if you father sorrow then they'll give you a rank.
They'll let you give a couple orders and they'll strengthen your bank.
By protecting their walls, you straighten the flaws
that drive the human race into the demon's paws.

Claws on your back try to tickle your mind.
The genius drank the mud from the shores of the Rhine.
The he went to war and he saw the facade;
his home land was plagued by the hand of a God.

Then he picked a scapegoat and nailed them to a tree;
"Behold the wandering Jew with the blood at his feet."

Then he went to prison for thinking certain ways;
he wrote a book, named a crook, and waited out the days--
till the thoughts would fester in the soul of mankind.
Then he seized the power in the battlefield of Mind;
enslaved with propaganda, takes the light from obscured eyes.

Slash their Gods, burns their words, replaces them with his;
Der Fuhrer seized control from the adults, infants, kids.

Rolled into Poland in 1939;
tanks crushing bones of the dying blind.
Seizing even more from the leaders of the dead;
their minds were all clouded by ideals in their head.

"If we give a little, then maybe he will stop.
If we grant him sacrifice, he might not steal the crops."

Twelve million humans dead as we drove into Berlin;
the man, he got away and didn't answer for his sins;
with cyanide, he took a ride, hollow through the door within.

2

Mothers cried, the papers lied;
"Maybe we could use these guys!"
Tried, convicted, silent set aside.
We brought back all the Nazis and we learned from their lies.

We admired all the order, we respected demon strength;
and in this play, the CIA was measured out to length.
The CIA killed JFK and the mob backed up the coup de tat.
They put a Texan in the White House, to take us off to war;
to make some trucks, to make some bucks and peddle guns to the poor.
The Presidents spoke of the budgets of defense.
Unspoken lies killed childrens' eyes as they learned about the fence.

The Presidential Pretty Figure pushing buttons for the puppets of the play;
The CIA put crack cocaine in the ghettos of LA.

The children warped by public education;
their minds attached to a permanent station of observation--
and every day the children pay by measuring out the length.

The Nazis killed twelve million
and the Russians killed their own.
But twenty-five million in the USA were slaughtered from their homes.
Invasion of the white man brought a holocaust of life,
a fucking double standard used to justify the strife.

3

"So now I stand in the Temple of Jerusalem
underneath Western skies-
the Master of the Servant with a new disguise.

"You can't take power with you
and my Kindgom's not this realm.
When space and time release the Mind,
a heaven's made of hell.

"My Indian brothers, I took so long;
it's been a couple million years since I've been gone.
Ever since you saw the fire that exists in the Mind,
I've been hidden from your eyes, but I've stayed with you through time.

"Hello my Jewish friends, could you bend down low?
I have something very special to place inside the hole;
the hole that has been empty since the "Coming of the Lord;"
a hole you tried to cut away with your Uncle's sword.

"A Salaam Aleckam, my crafty Muslim kin;
Allah gave me greetings to bring back to you again.
Ever since he heard the call in the cave of his name;
it's been a process of growth, a full circle of blame.

"Avalokiteshvera, I am Shiva and the asp;
descent down, struggle, overcome to see the path.

"See the simple scriptures as the metaphors they are;
look up to the stars and wonder what we are.

"Out there lies the answer to what we are within;
and in here lies the reason we are caught up in this sin.

"It's up to each individual to bury their deceased--
fathers, mothers, uncles, brothers, every little piece.

"Then we have to understand personal death
until there isn't one bit of experience left.

"Then you'll awareness of the energy of Mind
and then you'll find your place in this cosmos of Time.

4

Fly the martian planes on the Arizona borders
when the sins of our fathers no longer burden shoulders.

©1996 by Joshua Minton

In honor of my buddy Jon losing his dog as well as the dogs that I wrote this poem for, I am reposting it on this blog. This poem actually netted me the 1999 BGSU Alumni Award for Poetry.



Dogs in Pain

She looks like something poured,
melting and dribbling into every
room, back legs shaking, it could break
your goddamn heart, it could
make your mouth unhinge,
lock your neck in a coronary floor gaze,
the way she creaks and revolves around the blanket
reminds me of the Earth and me slow circling,
dancing around ourselves every twenty-three hours
and fifty-six minutes. She looks at me
like I’m tossing paper wads through invisible flame,
praying for an incinerated resolution.

If the old girl could talk she’d say, “The length of
a television commercial is the right time to die, you spend
your whole life preparing for one minute and television
commercials are only resurrected for a short time.” I want
to lay down next to her but I’m already there,
the circle she hurts inside, a fleshy gill that breathes
in our head, makes our lives unhinge, tongues hang out,
blessings cut themselves short. Every day
some dream we prepare for, some fence rusts.
Pace in a circle and the ground opens up.
Dig for things to make us humans again.

©1999 Joshua Minton