POSTCARD FEAT #5 WITH JIM HEAVILY

Peru and Bolivia have recently overtaken Colombia as the next Afghanistan.

In addition, roughly 80 percent of U.S. cocaine was thought to be Afghans using opium to placate their children.

Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis were found not to be flapping rubbish.

Economic hardship in the U.S. was linked to abusive head trauma; a different study concluded that Americans abuse the gene responsible for Urofacial Feces Grimace when they try to smile.

Excessive burger consumption was correlated with wheezing Herpes.

French researchers reported that 52 percent of young exposed their phone numbers to an average-looking young man who hit on them.

Physicists recorded an iridescent corona, and made subatomic particles that were found to be more watery.

Sixty-one percent of African Americans, 40 percent of Hispanic Americans, and only 23 percent of white Americans use lubricants during pond snails on Crystal Meth.

Scientists created crash helmets that stink, and fruit flies whom gonate squid, and a pelagic eel-pout, all native to the North Pacific.

African leaders discussed Trees spanning the continent from Senegal to Djibouti, to check the spread of male Topi antelope who issue alarm snorts.

Imaginary predators in the presence of Female Heat make more linger.

ODOMETROCULTO

Who's in charge of assigning retinues?
Like, what Greek Olympic forward
got to rampart the elemental cuentos
we are later taught through rote
to materialize and spangle?
What is occult, often inks prehensile
doodles in a maven theater; furthermore,
a ferule with which to calibrate the dank:
Odometroculto.
Likewise, how many majestic conifers might
it take to fashion a thyrsoi that meets the
gait of demi-gods, fabulists, and fanny-ologists?
Fanny, as in the silk girder of stockings
stretched across the haunches of an Amazon.
Fanny as in Betty Page spliced with Nina Hartley
in a concert hall manned by Souza or Sondheim.
At one time, aren't we all culpable of requiring
a thiasos, a gaggle of the uninitiated waving
the fronds of inequity? Who here can honestly say
they are above and beyond, over the river and through
the woods with maeneds or bacchae? Who will remain
to walk away from the largesse of losers
who wore their hubris like pirated pelts?

BOOTLEGGERS_&_RUMRUNNERS

I have an all-in-one printer, and it was having a paper jam the other night, so I yanked the page out of its maw and watched in awe as it made this pretty pattern.

POSTCARD FEAT W/ JIM HEAVILY NUMBER FOUR

Scientists lack standard ingredients.

The abundance of sugary sports drinks increase in alcohol consumption when American college students study abroad.

Doctors at the American Academy of Toddlers expected small black wasps.

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park had failed to stop elk from eating scientists.

It was found that exposing young platinum bodies rather than the researchers is currently too low to spur widespread Drosophilia flies by giving off the deceptive scent of fruity wine.

Loud noise and white noise improves Swedish children but worsens sensitivity to common painkillers.

Half of stroke victims experience phantom limbs, and two thirds of Americans fail to report Spike Lee telling harmful lies.

Following brain surgery, genitals evidence self awareness previously limited to higher primates.

An elephant named Happy can smell light.

New clocks made it possible to measure altitude on the speed of time.

Two centuries ago, the method whereby cuckoo chicks obtain Killer whales.

A U.S. murder was estimated to be urged of the newly devised Boston Bowel Preparation Scale.

Clinicians across the globe report on the cleanliness of the largest known genome, fifty-one times the size of Spain.

Scientists in New Guinea discovered a new genus of very beautiful.

WEEK THREE POSTCARD FEAT W/ JIM HEAVILY + POEM

FINDINGS FROM SCRATCH

The practice of and popularity of Blindness prompted wild, American Herpitologists
in Vietnam to examine all-female lizards and to conclude that what they were really
looking at were Japanese Ichthyologists.

Only 2.4 percent of "bourgeois males" knew how to build a snail-shell house, but an overwhelming amount of female malacologists could converse about 209 yet-to-be-discovered micromollusks.

Scientists noted that strongly religious American consumers have weaker brand anger than the sight of cooked meat, regardless if that meat were on a spit or exchanged for goat meat.

Blindness accelerates a person's sense of Dogs.

The death of a child causes Slavemaker Ants to enslave the strong.

Australian researchers initiated "rude," "rough," and "mechanical" sex while asleep.

Parthenogenesis was observed in the study's lead author, as that entity proceeded to strip the honeycomb of any meaning and/or male sexual apparatus in the light of day.

Anorexia was correlated with eye damage.

Adolescent girls make the best unplanned scientists.

Overweight women had a higher propensity to use penetrative texts and find Polar bears incapable of eating modern Neanderthals.

Few Egyptian mummies had cancer, or a pen of porpoises.

TEASER: NEW POSTCARD FEAT WITH JIM HEAVILY

WHAT THE PHRASE, COLLATERAL DAMAGE, LOOKS LIKE

Cables get read by your eyes only type
dudes, but the Miniskirt Ministries enjoy dossiers
housed in calf-skin vacuumed minutes.

Confidential dozens cloud the secretariat
but the firm's switches are at the control
of knowledge dullards on opposing sides
of a wormhole.

An open source Trojan horse rifles through
desktop landscapes, peeping at the poker
hands of analysts, pilfering elections
from councils that can photocopy your shadow.

Looking more infiltration than honey-pot
malovolent computers first axe basic entity
then memory specs followed by revenant regiment.

And, now a true test for battery acid amendments
for the doctrine mongers who sell us short, the spectacular
incumbents: a daft, silver-haired Swede, unafraid

to delineate the contours of what collateral damage
looks like outside the foreground of the recorded.

NEW INTRODUCTION FOR NEW "RUBBERROOM," ILLUSTRATED BY CARLOS FOLGAR

INTRODUCTION

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain

On the morning of November 16, 2004, in between third and fourth period, I threw a chair at a dry-erase board and went on an obscene tirade for several minutes in front of many impressionable, ghetto high-school children. I still can’t tell you what set me off that day, or what I was hoping to accomplish by lashing out so awkwardly. I was suspended indefinitely from my position shortly after fourth period; towards the end of the school day, two detectives came by to “talk” because the chair I threw had nicked a girl student as it came down and her parents were pressing charges against me. The detectives had come by to inform me that I was being charged with reckless endangerment and 2nd degree assault. Two days later, on the advice of my newly appointed U.F.T. lawyer, I walked my dumb ass to the Fordham Police Precinct and turned myself in so that I may be “processed” for a court appearance.

The Office of Special Investigations directed my principal to conduct the investigation, a lucky break. But, it did not help my case that the girl who I had managed to nick with a chair was the niece of some secretary for some bigwig ator and I was reassigned to the Regional Operation Center on Fordham Ave. in the Bronx. At the R.O.C., I was told to report to the “rubber room” for Bronx teachers in the south Bronx (not a coincidence). Even though I spent less than two weeks in that “rubber room”, I couldn’t tell you the street address, if I took the 2 or 3 to get there, or even the name of the stop. All I remember is that there was a Blimpy’s on the corner of my new “assignment,” and that the rest of the neighborhood was an industrial whorehouse. I also knew, deep in my heart, that I was the only person to blame for my present predicament. Surely, no one had prompted me to throw a piece of furniture at another piece of furniture because the children were “wilding out,” off-task and/or in a frenzy.

The document you hold in your hand has been disseminated by me to colleagues and teachers in the Bronx since 2005, but especially among the eighth and ninth cohorts of the NYC/DOE Teaching Fellows. It is a mea culpa, of sorts, written by a rookie, inner-city high school teacher; it is directed to neophyte teachers that toil in third-world conditions with third-world resources and try to deliver a first-world education to impoverished, throwaway U.S. youth. More importantly, this sequence of poems is the closest I have come to explicating to myself why I thought that throwing a chair against a dry erase board in a room full of disenfranchised freshmen was the most effective way to quiet a gregarious room. Was it a momentary lapse of reason? Had the moon assuaged its nuttiness into my cerebrum the night before? Did my melt down have an origin, a source that fed its bellows? Could I plead partial insanity?

Ultimately, I spent two weeks, “reassigned,” to the “Rubberroom” in the south Bronx. My principal, and a cadre of parents, wrote to the district superintendant and advocated on my behalf. I was back in the classroom just in time to help wrap up my school’s program before Xmas break. I finished the year and then completed two more years before resigning in 2007. By my account, I was actively involved in the education of between 300-450 children in the Bronx (20-30 students per class, 5 classes a day for nine consecutive months in the span of three years). That experience has laid the foundation for everything that I think I know about educating high school children to become better writers and readers. On February 29, 2008 Radio Diaries (Joe Richman, Samara Freemark, and Anayansi Diaz Cortes) produced a segment for broadcast on This American Life. The segement, titled “Human Resources,” told the story of several teachers that had been “reassigned” to the various “rubberrooms” located throughout the boroughs.

Of all the things I have written, in my short life as an author, this work has sparked the most interest and notoriety. Is it because it defies definition (i.e. it’s a poem written in acts and scenes)? I suspect it is because this is the most honest and accurate thing I have ever had the audacity to write.

POSTCARD FEAT # 2 WITH JIM HEAVILY: I WALK ELAN

I WALK ELAN by Yago S. Cura


Saturday morning, operating on Gargantuan Blvd,
I walk an Xmas-dog I like to call, Elan.

Elan feels like an over-eager Midas associate.
Elan feels that I am trying to pull one over
on him grossly damn loud.

He is that unassembled by the elements.

However, this happens to be a particularly crisp sojourn
into the Solstice, through cobalt, and Pacific heather.

And, I am not the homestead of startling properties
that I once was when the Boulevard was therapy for the solvent.

Nowadays, I am at a branch of the library where torque is a sonata:
a pianissimo played by the collusion of automobiles "exhausting."

Elan is driving to work in a totaled crimson Volvo which
exhibits regenerative protocols; he is driving to his job
designing Ferris Wheels.

They are building one for the Sesquicentennial called,
Derelict Specter.