Coming Soon

LET THE CRAZY CHILD WRITE: One-day Workshops June 2, Larkspur July 7, Oakland

UC EXTENSION CLASS: "Exploring Your Creative Writing Potential" Starts June 5

FEATHER RIVER ART CAMP Crazy Child in the Sierra June 17-24

WHAT'S NEW

Writing Occupy

Clive's new blog arises from his involvement in Occupy Oakland and will chronicle the local Occupy movement from a collaborative approach. Submissions for future entries gladly accepted.

Poem

YOUR HANDS ARE IN MY EMPLOY (SONG 22)

(From the forthcoming book of Chalcedony songs.)

No! No moving on your own!
Your hands are in my employ.
You may touch only places I anoint.

I breathe and reddish plumes
whoosh through lung
bottoms, fan
out and disperse flecks and threads
over a featureless landscape.

What route is your hand taking?
Do you know the trail
nose crest to collarbone? The curves
neck cleft to shoulder blade?
That dusky brow
and desert beige could be eyelid wrinkles
or metabolized oak and Jurassic loam
grown under clouds of amoeba exhale.

These patterns are all maps.
Unlocking the universe.
Three billion years evolved dinosaur teeth and ours.
Electron shells climb into space.
Siren lace
loops around my sacred triangle
hip to hip to thighs' juncture mimicking
templates of Aphrodite and her sisters.

One of your hands is Captain, the other Sergeant.
They go where they go
and I approve. Or sway them
elsewhere.
Wherever fire opal meanders.

Grasp these angle brackets on my shoulders
tight, Officer. Hold me in your
handcuff grip and groan and preen
while I tell you a secret.

                    Between
caresses this drop-off
where you stop and silence starts
reforms and warps the map.
                                   Listen.
Your body morphs into an ear.
Layered faint percussion accompanies
your hands
                    and my sternum shakes
how near you miss one pepper nipple.

Follow the dancing spot. Follow
a loose filigree with your fingers

among soft puppies and furry kittens
tracking sweet myrrh in the sensual
until it's lost.
Lost!
There's no map.
No skein of trails.

Put your hands on my front
and on my back, Sargent and Captain.
Make me a love sandwich.
We'll draw topos with our fingers.

Poise your hand one inch
over this pubic canopy.
Listen.
Listen through onionskin bones.

Let me tell you a secret.
Is your body still an ear?
Your hands are in my employ.

Five hundred trillion synapses seep
mysteries into the brain.
The sky and wall
throb yellow, the spot two-steps
away, the crystalline air pulses.

My drum-skin plexus hums with a secret.

I don't know where it is.
Let's go find it.

YOUR HANDS ARE IN MY EMPLOY (SONG 22): from the forthcoming book of Chalcedony songs.

On Clive's blog, Sudden Wind and Moonlight

Why Write?: "The power we experience in writing may be beyond anything. One grain of authenticity may be worth all the self-doubt, all the naked feeling, all the struggle with demons. It weighs more than a mountain of effort and pain."
full entry

Muscle: "We follow the restlessness in our psyches, or the itch in our bodies, and we come to a place where personal issues weave into the characters and into the plot. And, to continue, we have to develop a lot of strength. We have to solve problems."
full entry

Magic: “Writing workshops are exercises in magic. The entire creative unconscious operates according to its own logic, by definition a logic we know nothing about. When we dip into our creative source, we're dipping into magic."
full entry

Why So Vulnerable?: “Assessing what’s of value may be chancy, since we filter out so many impulses in our writing lives, and advanced writers filter out more. They’ve learned what works for them and what doesn’t. But when we’re on a developmental spurt, or when we’re beginning, it’s useful to have no filters."
full entry

"Best Writing Teacher": East Bay Express, 2006