News eventually reached me that at one time he was looking to kill me over some comments I made in a review about the main character in the film, comments that he took negatively. I have luckily remained for the most part out of his sight and a safe distance away from him.
Further research on this person J.J. Blickstein proved to be unsurprising. Seems he is a martial arts instructor and works as a stonemason from time to time. Just my luck. He lives by a river in upstate New York. He is married to a biologist. Just the type of person I would be attracted to in order to have a meaningful confrontation. My history with stonemasons is not good. I wrote a screenplay several years ago based on a mason I knew that was made into a feature film titled Alphonso Bow.
News eventually reached me that at one time he was looking to kill me over some comments I made in a review about the main character in the film, comments that he took negatively. I have luckily remained for the most part out of his sight and a safe distance away from him. I have respected the masonry trade ever since a childhood incident involving my mother, and also went on to enjoy many years of getting a living by working with the same clay materials even though I used my pen and mouth instead of a mason’s trowel. Today I could barely fight my way out of a used and empty Colombian burlap coffee bag so I am hoping for the best here from J.J.. But still I persist. I found two more poetry examples that both came from the same collection. In that particular google search I discovered the Blickstein poem titled Blues for a Feather. I found this poem on the Big Bridge Press online site and it was the second poem of three issued in that assemblage.
BLUES FOR A FEATHER
Finally, you realize that the moon isn’t following you. It’s just a shadow as a courtesy to bend into disappearances without symbolic agent. Sleep is where two lovers embrace inside of a bird, and their unity perfects flight where the bones merge with intent into a wonderful machine, and the night, being more relevant than articulation, cradles the sun for yolk as a vesper for origins. Blues at the crossroads where a man is torn apart from the inside, a member rendered for each direction, and yet it’s not the fear of pain that is overwhelming but the indecision before dawn with nothing to embrace but bones and ashes where the seasons move at an unnatural speed when the mind is fatigued by the dark and incapable of surrender. You name your fingers after little ghosts with special abstract qualities like solicitude, negligence, speed, lust, mercy. A dog corpse at the feet is a music box playing a haunting tune at a fast tempo, until you pull your knife out of your pocket and sink it into the dirt to untangle the heart. You sing your own tune until you’re covered in water and all the women you ever had sing back to you until the cold is impossible to feel. A little bird lands on the chest and barks at you until reverie becomes a traveler and you set out to live somewhere, restless, quelling the beggar at your throat for gravity and perfect pitch. __J.J. Blickstein
Perhaps a hazard, but not meaning to exhaust the point, J.J.generally produces on the page for me a few good words and some lines worth noting. I really do enjoy fiddling with Blickstein’s words and decided to do something creative with Blues for a Feather as well. I am not convinced J.J. Blickstein could ever compose a short poem or even a condensed version of one he has written. He would have to prove to me otherwise. But these words, all of them, are available to him, just as they are to me.
The Beggar at Your Throat
The moon bends into flight,
merging at the crossroads
where ashes speed the dark.
Your fingers play a haunting
tune at fast tempo. You pull
your knife out of your pocket
until you’re covered in water
and all the women you ever
had sing back to you until the
cold is impossible to feel. A
little bird lands on your chest
and barks at you in perfect pitch.
for J. J. Blickstein
___M Sarki