Riding on the MUNI June 29, 2010

a poem meant to be spoken aloud

by Tina Fields

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[Note: The MUNI is a form of public transportation in San Francisco, linked municipal railcars (pictured below).  It sort of shakes up and down when it gets going fast; thus the jogging rhythm of this poem.]

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So I’m riding on the MUNI…

Yeh I’m riding on the MUNI…

I’m riding on the MUNI…

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I just came here from Nevada, on the edge of the Great Basin,

where my very nearest neighbor is a cow five miles away;

Where your psyche reaches out, expanding,

breathing out, and listens to the thoughts of birds –

a hawk!  golden spirals overhead;

bloodmind riveted on rustling,

slightest movement in the grasses…

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And I lurch to San Francisco, where I’m riding on the MUNI

And we’re packed in like anchovies but pretend no one is touching:

With my clothes wrapped tight around me I am riding on the MUNI;

With my thoughts wrapped tight around me I am riding on the MUNI

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And I’m riding on the MUNI

And I’m riding on the MUNI…

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And he swoops!  with talons twisted, each in perfect ballerina’s pointe,

exquisite fatal symmetry, dull gleaming in the twilight;

And my heart it hears the mouse scream!

and my mind shrieks bloody victory!

…and  … somehow I’ve got possession of my nearest neighbor’s paper;

got it clutched here in my talons, with a death-grip on Dear Abby…

I’m here, riding on the MUNI,

with ink tickling my tastebuds

and the scent still in my nostrils of fresh literary kill…

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But a furtive glance around… reveals…

I don’t know if they notice!

All their eyes are hid by glasses darkly gleaming in the foglight,

as we strangers huddle lonely, cradled in each others’ feathers;

With our buttocks jammed together

and our minds like shattered sunlight

as we’re riding on the MUNI.

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Animistic Architecture April 3, 2010

I recently attended the 30th annual conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC), a subsection of the American Anthropological Association, held this year at UC Berkeley’s Faculty Club.

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This is a lovely old building very appropriate for such a gathering of psychonauts; one of those made by master architects from the last century with one foot in the Dreaming.

In its rafters are dragons…

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Tim Lavalli presenting beneath the dragon posts

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…and even the door catches on the floor seem sentient.

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Here a view of those door catches in context.  Would you have noticed their faces?

(Look along the line where the two wood grains meet. They’re right in the middle, where the doors will come together.)

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A lot of speeches and discussions have taken place in this place. (For a description of one of them, see my post Molecular Dancing with Water.) If everything in these lovingly-crafted buildings, even the seemingly-inanimate bits, is looking back, does that mean they’re also listening? And if so, how much knowledge must they have amassed in their years here at this center of learning?!  I would not want to have to argue with them, that’s for sure.

Delights like these little faces in the architecture are everywhere; the world is just waiting to open its petals before your imagination.

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