the most time of the year

The broken and ploughed stalks blow listlessly
utterly stuck, unneeded, unknown
under endless meaningless grey;
The crows that shriek their oaths
outside of time, unanswered
by December's silent roiling bristles;
The distant highway's empty endeavor;
A thought diminished, broken in mid-life,
gone underground, a seed for another season.

To the fixed hissing song of the radiator
and its redeeming, knocking-far-away heart,
we draw faces on the windows
in the afternoon's cranky half-light.
The sun is young and already waning,
the bed is warm and us-enveloping,
the day so crisp and blank as if anything
could happen – anything!
Even nothing.

The last tinsel-strewn trees dot the roadside,
a canopy of wishes now supine,
while in the air, accounts are settled
or unsettled, trimmed and redressed,
and the choirs are returned to their homes.
A gesture of glittering sleet tickles the night's curtain,
and she laughs, with a dry heavy howl that
hollows out the valley,
ripples on the static lake,
tears into the skin, the bones, the walls, the pillow.

A taxi sweeps the dusty pavement,
barely breathing its brittle trail.
Two streaky red eyes trace the mottled
building faces,
holding hardly a memory of before and
the barest hint of the next.
What left to open but these boxes of light?
These lives of four corners, four seasons,
for doing, foregoing,
forgiving, forever.

Profiles in Letting Go

You sit there, in a rare moment of sitting there, looking out the windows and watching the sun dodge behind drifting clouds. You sit there, watching, wondering how it is all going to turn out. Maybe it will never turn out. Perhaps it already has. What is this phrase – "turn out?"

You stand at the top of a long hill and instead of walking down it (and certainly instead of rolling), you walk further along its ridge. From here you can see the town, and the town behind the town, and the steeples of towns that aren't even any of those towns. From this land's shoulder, stray beams of sunlight illuminate patches of somewhere, nowhere. All of this, and you are the figure on the ridge, someone else's epiphany.

In Japan, December is the bounenkai season, or the "Forget-The-Year-Party." Alcohol is an excellent amnesiatic agent, so you see many drunk people on the street on Japanese December nights. Me, I prefer the classic flowerpot-
dropped-on-the-head method of forgetting, but this is not always practical, especially in a Northern climate.

Then there is the King who was crowned Master of All He Sees. Turns out it was a curse as well, because every time he blinked, chaos took a step closer. He tried not to blink, but his eyes dried out and soon he had more than made up for the not blinking. In time of course, he grew tired in his vigilance and fell deeply asleep, where he became master of nothing. Well, perhaps of his dreams, we don't know, he's not a king anymore.

You soar across this bountiful land. You soar across oxbow lakes and skewbald fields, past the ring road and the warehouses, over the neighbors and their fences, joined together on this land. You soar as an angel, ministering shared concern and individual outcome, a siren without a name. You braid these concerns into a heavenly rope. You soar ever higher, past the airplanes and the oxygen, past the questions and the answers, past the moment into no moment, into a peace that is all that peace is. Yet, from the ground you can see that far. You soar.

peace to you
from all of us

Happy Hanukkah

from NBC Tower. December 5, 2007

Wang From The Holidays

"The Little Drummers Boy"
The newest Oswald Wang deproduction.
Josh Groban v. John Bonham and a side of Shitmat.
Not recommended for newborns.

Jan, Jan, Jan!

Presenting the Jan Terri Fall Collection,
currently on YouTube.

"Losing You"


"Baby Blues"


"My Little Brother"


"Get Down Goblin"


"Journey To Mars"


"Rock And Roll Santa"

A message from Steve Howe

Dear Fans,

Despite my best efforts otherwise, I have become ugly. Some of you may quibble with my choice of the word "become," but I hear no dissent on the adjective "ugly." For it is true, I repulse. Though no one will tell me directly, it is as clear as the face on my face. I feel I owe you an explanation.

Why has Lady Time left others ennobled and dignified in their accrued appearance while rendering me analogous to a moldering stump of lichen? Why have I been especially chosen as canvas for her full panoply of ravagements? It is not karma, for I have been as good, or bad, as many others. Neither is it hereditary, for I could easily afford to gaze upon my parents, even upon their deathbeds, though I may more closely resemble them in their current states.

Did it happen suddenly, I hear you ask, ominously attentive to your possible future as a craggily dissolute, loathesomely-visaged sexegenarian? (Who, I might add, is to this day still very popular in Japan, where they enjoy a thriving horror film industry as well as greater sympathy for the Hibakusha.) Or did it happen slowly, bruised and burnished like the icy, pock-marked surface of Ganymede? Perhaps it was the drugs, or lack of drugs, or the injurious ultrasonic vibrations of Jon Anderson's voice? Would death have not been preferable, my mirror asks me, daily?

I suppose by way of explanation, I have no explanation. In my defense, I do not force myself upon your eyes. You do not see Asia music videos on your television. I did not appear in "Rocky Horror Picture Show." All of my public appearances are witnessed voluntarily by paying fans. My website does not feature a photo section. You do not see me on the cover of People, Fangoria or The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. You will not see me on a package of Ipanema or Iams. It is not me on the Preparation-H instructions of use.

I would hope that my music would speak for me. I play a mean guitar. Close your eyes and that's what you need to know about me. The rest is gravy, or looks like it. If you poured it over kimchi, offal and barbershop dustpan. But enough about me.

regrets,
Steve "don't look now" Howe

New Products Review 2

Unlike most spiritual packages, this "one size fits most."

City in a garden 2

City in a garden 1

Chicago without XRT would be...

2:00 Arcade Fire "Keep The Car Running"
2:04 Talking Heads "Burning Down The House"
2:07 Melissa Etheridge "Imagine That"
2:10 Crosby, Stills & Nash "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes"
2:17 They Might Be Giants "Climbing The Walls"
2:26 Marvin Gaye "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)"
2:30 David Gray "Babylon (live)"
2:41 Mark Knopfler "Punish the Monkey"
2:45 Goo Goo Dolls "Name"
2:51 My Morning Jacket "Off The Record"
2:57 Tom Petty "Won't Back Down"
3:00 The Cure "Why Can't I Be You?"

...one step closer to the future.

Corner Store

I'm just popping down to the corner store. Need anything?
85th & Burley, Chicago IL

New Products Review

Inside this beaten bottle, under this nicked and rotting cap, is preserved the gloriously dodgy "Put it een Wine." The Jamaican woman told me she drinks one every day. The Jamaican men said it will help me "get my buck on."

Like me, you are probably interested in what is inside this glass of ill-repute. But not interested enough to open it and drink some. Here are the eengredients:

Find yours wherever ugly, frightening FDA-free Roots Drinks are sold with a wink.

Art.

"spoke"

A meditation on faith, not exactly for the E79FF07. File under Oswald Wang.

End Less Summer

O wall of heat, blast of purely sensual, carry this message across the murmuring villages -
O bad news, its bitter certainty between the teeth, a swan song come to call -
O end of Summer, and her echoes of ends gone by, how do I measure this proof of life in fading light?
O Tessa, tumbled in torn and turning waters, chasing the last in churning repose.

The strolling glowworms of the ending embers
The heart of the valley in so dense a mist
The springs of heaven & her illusion of give -
The answer is again and again and again.

When, with the turn of a wind, long shadows are nailed to our quickening footsteps,
Tongues are tightened and the branches sway: "Speak low," and "Whisper not."
A wave breaks on lowly shores, and it is gathering time.
In the sweet spiralled smoke of encampments' remains
what we have found? Or: what are we not missing?

She thought about the boy.

An especially wan installment of The Timbertoes.
Highlights for Children, February 2002.

internet cafe

This is one of those Third-World internet cafés you've read about. In the front of the store by the registers, near the winter coats, next to the partially-stacked boxes of undershirts, behind the pallet of disassembled what? Also, no "cafe." The spirit of Zayre is alive and well at Kmart store #9360, Forest Park, Illinois. August 29, 2007.

In case of emergency

In case of emergency, break glass. If this had been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed to go to your basement and run around in your footie pajamas and scream. Or air raid shelter. Or Underoos, if it's the warm season. You would have been instructed.

In case of emergency, break glass. Break hearts, break dance, break out. In case of emergency, melt the ice caps and move to higher ground. If this in itself is an emergency, invent a time machine, go backwards in time, and do everything right. If this creates a space-time continuum emergency, you've really mucked it up now. Come back forward in time and see me after class. In case of emergency, clap erasers for an hour. "Will this help?" I suppose you know better, Mr. Thundercats-On-His-Underwear-Time-Traveller? When you have all this cleaned up, go forward in your little machine and tell me if it helped. I won't be there. In 100 years it will be no concern of mine.

The broadcasters in your area, in voluntary cooperation with the Board of Directors who own them all, have established that email is effectively used in case of emergency as proof that we did try to contact you. See here's proof, what do you mean you didn't get it, or deleted it, or were outside on the beach having a life? Anyway, we sent it. You would have been instructed. Hey, what's all this broken glass?

In case of emergency, write something down in the middle of the night and try to decipher it in the morning. "We are [something] ratsbag-angel 7-into..." oh for heaven's sake. In case of emergency, call someone you know and speculate. Filter and calibrate blame. In case of emergency, drink. Water, silly. It's good for you and keeps indefinitely. It's really refreshing. In case of emergency, press zero to speak to a representative. Para Español, oprima el numero dos. "No es el defecto de representante." In case of emergency, sweep up all this glass. There. Feel better? That's better.

A face to meet the faces...

Various street art: Springfield, IL; Grand & State, Chicago; Hyde Park, Chicago.

Country Single

This is my favorite personal ad from Country Singles newspaper, available for $1 at the Beloit Wisconsin Welcome Center, or on the internet at Country Singles.