...qlaboration...
...a poetic guest post from an eastern coast running (4th generation Californian) not-dutchman...
“First and foremost, I'm fans of the people I'm collaborating with. And collaborations expand who you are.”
-Flo Rida-
Alohahaha friends,
After brief detours into the worlds of business, rolling rocks, and poetry written during construction set-up at a security convention, we return again to the world of collaboration, or in this case what I will call an extra special Qlaboration.
Q is a friend of mine who specializes in Spanish omelettes, fathering, advanced innovative cocktail design, football (soccer) enthusiasting, fantasy mapmaking, and metadata management. He has worked with the Coen brothers, helped your cars tell you what you are listening to, and overseen the ingestion of millions of pieces of text, images and video for the backend of multiple video services.
Q was also a touring theater improvist in Australia, a land where they test water for gators by savagely tossing dogs into lakes before swim sessions. He has worked in India, Moldova, and the wildest of locations, the fifth floor of a half empty mall in downtown San Francisco.
In a previous Qlaboration he ran an impromptu marathon with me in the east bay hills.1 We ran six parks that mission, and as I understand it we plan on doing a different path to impromptu seven more sometime soon. I’ll share that adventure then, but for now I simply want to share his writing and poetry with you.
Q is a speaker/amplifier and has taught me much throughout the years. He taught me how to better listen, how to pay attention, and how to own confidence in public settings by wearing cat masks and long red ties.
I asked Q to send me a poem he wrote in the style of hashish and below it is. Please, a small round of applause, and a glass of your finest fermented sugar. Give a warm welcome to this week’s grand guest writer…my good friend…
…Q…
…writings by Q…
Thirty years ago I fancied myself a poet.
I lived in glorious squalor in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement building, with a futon on the floor underneath two windows that looked out onto a brick wall and never really closed properly and definitely didn’t let in much light cause no cleaning product could cut through the accumulated decades of desperation and poverty that smudged the panes. In winter I stuffed rolled up newspaper between the frames to keep out the draft. Two cats kept the vermin at bay except for that one time when a rat the size of a chihuahua managed to get inside and I tricked it into scurrying into a paper bag I’d left on its side like a tempting hidey-hole and I grabbed that bag, closed it, threw it into a plastic shopping bag and struck that thing on the ground so many times until the scratching stopped then I deposited it into the trash can on the corner of 9th and 52nd.
If doing is being then I suppose I really was a poet. I have a shoebox of floppy discs and Zip drives with megabytes of proof… musings, creative indentations and formatting all wrapped around words carefully chose to convey… something.
But all this is in my mind, and the tenuous embrace of magnetic storage… until now.
Back in 1993 I actually got one of my poems published in an erotic literary journal. I’d also started my own publishing company by printing a letter stating the company’s name, date of creation, owner, etc. and then sending that via certified mail to myself. As long as the envelope remained unopened, it would constitute proof that the publishing company existed, or so I thought at the time based on some vague understanding of some article I read somewhere.
I also self-published a chapbook of poetry, which I gave away as Christmas gifts to friends and family because, well, I wasn’t very wealthy and it seemed thoughtful at the time but looking back holy moly it was a selfish and self-centered act.
In any event… I found the chapbook, which now constitutes physical proof that I was, indeed, at one time, a poet. It wasn’t easy to find. Thirty years can hide things. I had a memory of seeing it in a birch-colored IKEA drawer at one point; that now holds my collection of old pennywhistles and some paper binders. I checked all of our bookshelves to no avail, including the massive 12 foot long by 8 feet high one whose top shelves hold my CD collection (before you scoff, at least one-quarter of these are not available via any streaming platform), though I did rediscover some old Asterix comics. Finally, I opened the top drawer of a tonsu I’d inherited from my dad, and it was there. It took some digging, as the book was buried beneath a stack of objects that included: citrix credit-card holders you stick on the back of smartphones, the AnimeExpo 2016 catalog, NorCal game cards from my son's 2017 soccer team, trail maps to Mt. Tam and Briones, four copies of Hausfrau magazine which is not some creepy fetish thing but a now defunct free periodical out of Brooklyn that published letters and photographs and even though I knew the editor quite well he never published my work. But I digress.
You wrote: ...tell me about this poem you wrote in the style of hashish…
And here it is (transcribed):
When One is a Gazelle in a Stall Full of Donkeys
after Jalal al-Din Rumi
When one is a gazelle in a stall full of donkeys,
and smells on the wind hyacinth, anemones and
sweet basil from the free plains, the fodder of dry straw
offers little sustenance indeed, and though the snorting
asses mock you for your arrogance you remain firm
in your devotion to what you alone can know, namely,
wild moonlight runnings through the verdant fields
and deep soul-drinks from the hillsides’ chilly pools,
and though you grow gaunter longing for what cannot
be had, and the donkeys nip at your rib-bones,
you steadfastly resign, and your soul travels
beyond its own cage, towards the eternal gardens,
when one is a gazelle in a stall full of donkeys.
“If a donkey bray at you, don't bray at him.”
-George Herbert-
love the Flo Rida quote at the top. And also just noticed that Flo Ride also spells Florida—and a little cursory gooogling shows that's where he's from. Ahhh. This world 🫠
Being a libertine cut from the finest thrift-store cloth, Señor Fis is, as best, liberal when it comes to facts....
For sooth, though I do speak passable Dutch and have a diploma from a school in Amsterdam, I am not Dutch. But being called Dutch is not the worst thing I've been accused of... once I was called English.