Inverse Origami (1998) now on Google

My very first chapbook (from 1998),  Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding is now available for reading though Google Books....   If you visit its page on books.google.com/  you can download a pdf file of the book via a dropdown menu on the upper right. Or you can view a full text preview on this page by either scrolling down, or clicking the arrows, or jumping to the table of contents and clicking on each poem title. Very cool, Google!!!

I started this process around Xmas of last year - sent off the package and documentation, and never heard anymore about it. Just this week, it came online!  I sent the physical book in to be scanned as the publication's original MS Publisher file predated Windows XP, and was so antiquated as to be unopenable.  Though I have second thoughts about the 2012 cover and front matter, the rest is reasonably presentable for something captured in an automated scan.

  I also have also discovered I can make a ebook pdf on Google docs. So more books are coming.  Hurray!

POEM: Discovering Home (from Inverse Origami)

Discovering Home      

--- a poem from Inverse Origami

 I used to live in the front entry
       with the hall table and a mirror
       reflecting latched glass doors
       leading inward, heavily curtained
       I dreamt in shadows, vague confusing rooms,
       a twisting maze opening into light
One day, unexpectedly
I came out from behind the doors
       introduced my self to me
       stepped in as
       the doors opened
to living space, a country
       of dangerous mountains,
       temperate forests, prairie grasslands
       rippling; full oceans
       frothing to universal currents.
I am one
       with this geography
       it matters to me and I to it
       here I embody magic
       lead turns to gold daily in my hands
       in the hands of those around me.
now the entry is for guests
        the curtains are drawn back,
        the door, ajar,
        so visitors can wander
        see the sights
leave delicious word-maps
       to their own countries.

c) 1998, MM Walker

This is a poem from my 1998 Chapbook "Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding" Most human beings have capacities far beyond what they see of themselves everyday. Sometimes it takes a while to discover all the various people you contain - and who you might be, could be, will be. And to honor even those aspects you choose to hide..... The photo is a digitally finesed picture taken in a dark room where lights hung behind heavy curtains. Only after fiddling with the settings was I able to see the unknown woman sitting there in the dark. I hadn't realized there was anyone in the picture.  It seemed a match for the poem.

Poem: The Uses of Nature (from Inverse Origami)

the Uses of Nature

Down at the interplanetary 2nd-hand nature boutique
I’d like to buy the night sky. I'll take the round full moon,
and put it in my pocket so I'll always have a coin.
I'll pick the stars, every one. I'll put some in my hatband
I'll put some across the shoulders of my coat,
and I'll stuff the rest up my sleeves so I'll
finally be luminous and amazing.
And when I am tired of being admired,
I'll take the darkness that remains and slip it over me
and become invisible so I can rest.

But look! There are lovers there under the night sky
clutching nothing, clutching everything in each other.
What will light their way when I have the moon?
What will hide them when I have the dark?
What will they wish on, when I have every star?

Hey! I could divide the moon into quarter acre lots,
and they could get a variable rate mortgage
with giant balloon payment and health insurance
and chain themselves to jobs they hate for 30 years to pay for it.
I could portion out the stars, one to every house,
An heirloom,a family treasure kept in a little box on the mantle
taken out as a conversation piece to impress visitors
I could pour the darkness into pint containers
and have it delivered to people's doorsteps
I think there's enough to go around....

----------------

by Mar (Mistryel) Walker
10/95, POEM 27 - From Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding  - c 1998

I am posting this because I read it Friday evening.  (it's 12:36 am Saturday) I read it last night really I guess, during a Google+ hangout. One poet was from India another from UK. etc etc. I just looked in, and was surprised when they called on me to do a poem. I had no work within reach so I did this one - an old stand-by from my chapbook that I have slammed with in the past. I have it memorized but I forgot changes I had made to the beginning of it.....

Poem: Unmask (from Inverse Origami)

Unmask

the fall of your soft eyes,
so suddenly slumped and weary.

This weight,
a whisper,
a formless something
hinted at.

I have stepped
unthinking around it,
my words,
waxed brick
brittle and waterproof.

Unmask,
gather your chaos
and conjure the thing itself by alchemy:

sweetness
from the tin-acid taste of emptiness.

------------------------

I just realized I still have a lot of work left to do as I have only half of my chapbook, Inverse Origami online. This this is the 13th poem in the book and it appears on page 19. After this one, I have 17 more to put online.

from Inverse Origami -  the art of unfolding
by Mar  (Mistryel) Walker
Puzzled Dragon Press, 1998

the drawing was not a part of my book. 

POEM: Koan (from Inverse Origami)

---

Koan

head-lamp                                                                shining

out of the eyes                                           wholeness

hiding                                               nothing

admitting                      everything

swamp songs of peepers at twilight

love                              hate                  indifference

shoeless feet slapping clay tile

one

flat surface of soup in a bowl

I am

holographic

mist drawn up from the lake

interior                 exterior

unchanged at 5 a.m.    the same at midnight

elemental         &         spacious

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

POEM: The Matrix of all (from Inverse Origami)

The Matrix of All rumbles at critical mass,
a macro-synaptic storm
in cascade
in perpetual toss

Opposed and opposing:
heads-tails
crest-trough
light-dark
alph-nul
the perception of water and thirst

---

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

POEM: Intensive care (from Inverse Origami, 1998)

Intensive Care

It's you, there, under the sickish lights
the mint walls, the turquoise bedpans.
Strangers with syringes interrupt
your feverish sleep.
your pale familiar face and matted hair,
your tubes and tethers.
Come home. Just come home.

---

 

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

Poem: Wannamakers Rising - from Inverse Origami

This is a poem from my first chapbook, Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding. (Puzzled Dragon Press 1998) It's about the progress of personal growth.    Wannamakers is or was a big department store in downtown Philadelphia.

---

Wannamakers Rising

We'd like to rise
on the gliding stair
of effortless progression
a smooth escalator ascent
over a receding panorama of display.
More often we grope blindly
up sweaty
closed stairwells
steep and demanding concrete
followed by
emergence.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

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A Poem & Digital drawing regarding the "Heaven's Gate" cult suicides

Heaven's Gate was a religious cult a bit sci-fi in nature.  The believed a UFO hiding behind the comet Hail-Bop would "beam"  their purefied beings into another, better realm. First of course, they would have to shed their mortal bodies by putting plastic bags over their heads after eating poison tapioca pudding.

Religious delusions haven't changed much since I wrote the poem below. Since the early 1990s we have seen countless religiously motivated killings in the form of suicide bombers, the 9/11 attack, abortion clinic bombers and doctor shooters.  Cult suicide is a tremendous waste of human life and potential. Of course it can't occur without blind faith. Heaven's Gate followers believed these things because their LEADER told them so.  Just one more little reason to never subscribe to a religion of any sort.

.One-Way Portal -

As Earth’s mechanical eyes scan

this not-so-empty darkness, her restless

children ache to dance down galaxies,

chase cosmic winds on callused primate feet.

Unsatisfied as voyeurs, 39 webheads queued

at Heaven's Gate, backpacks at the ready,

humming at the window, eating tapioca.

They clutched plastic, vacuous and opaque,

waited for data retrieval, personal uploads

facing unrecoverable error, depression

deferred in bunk-bed suburban stillness, escape

velocity for the purple-shrouded dead.

They hardly knew their Mother.
Bury them in her darkest loam,
rich compost of stars.

April 6, 1997
©1997 M. M. Walker

-from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

  I was thinking about the ever expanding galactic structures of space and the even more convoluted eddies of the human mind when I drew this. As with all my digital drawings, it has been manipulated electronically in a host of programs over the years.

Poem: Tea at the end of the World - how crazy people who fear it mightcause it

a poem from my chapbook, Inverse Origami

Incoming at 4 oíclock... "Tea?" he asks,
slinging shiny steel kettle onto black coils,
citing communist conspiracy
revealing two red mugs
and two tarnish-patina-ed teaspoons,
my host, a post-glasnost peddler
of prefab fiberglass bomb shelters
pounds the pine table
predicting economic collapse
and unidentified flying objects
from the Book of Revelations.

Circumlocution, no pause, no breathing,
he's apple-pie slicing,
cerated knife in hands
ticking minutes
he does not have
years he will refuse to see
that he ís plastering over gaps in the logic
smoothing over the entrance
to a room under the lawn.

No matter if some other pie bakes
fragrant apples cooking easily
peeled and unpeeled the same,
he would seal his own fragility
under the browning crust
in under ground chambers,
closing his steel door
with its peephole and gun-sight,
sheltered from nuclear hell
by a thickness of cement
from change by brittleness of belief.

Radioactive words
firestorms over tea with mint:
"Commie pinko feds, homos with aids, the IRS,
fat people, stock brokers, illegal aliens
Don't trust, just stock up
on canned goods and ammo....."

He shoots peach-marmalade volleys,
apple-crisp pudding, his eyes, his ears impervious
to the kettleís screaming, to oven doors slamming
his cards face down, without looking, he folds,
pours boiling water for tea,
smiles and makes a little joke,
flexes eyebrows overgrown
as untended graves,
arching hoar-frosted inch worms
measuring Armageddon.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

Rainy Night Reverie - a poem from Inverse Origami

I am stained with streetlights
and rain-glazed mcadam

a damp changling in this vibrant night
As I wade, greyed grayed grasses give way tickling

Katydids converse, the pale arms of sycamore
scumble shadows around me

A culvert gurgles couplets, Hiaku
in the soft patter of droplets as wind stirs in wet leaves

Overhead the clouds burn by moon sparks
in the sultry mysterious dark.

 

---

 

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

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Blood Brothers from Inverse Origami

The poem Blood Brothers was included in Inverse Origami (1998) and also in From We Shijin Book I" 2004, from Hanover Press
    

Hemoglobin shovels O2
into the furnace of this flesh,
Mt. St. Helena hot in the veins,
the blinding burn of this mortal mess:

Volcanic Serb and Croat erupting
Christian, Muslim, Jew, Tutsi
Hutu spew fire and ash, Skinhead
Treader of the Shinning Path, smoke
and vent like Irish Catholic and Protestant
pro-life bombers, policemen with plungers
unemployed militiamen with
fertilizer and fuel oil.

We all wear the white hat and
god is always on our side as
hungry and hissing we blister
to flame ---- and blood flows always
just as red as the time before.

Whatever cause we cite, there is another   
and we avert our eyes --- In each generation
the ancient animal wakes anew, the sleeping
mountain rumbles, metaphysicians mumble
incantations, the people bring their offerings to the craters rim:
.....learning and law
.....compassion and tolerance
.....forbearance and forgiveness.
These spread their opium salve and the   
Blood-beast dozes a while
under a gilding of grace.

Pick the scab of blessedness
and blood roils forth once more.
Some new Pompeii is burned or buried
smothered in sulfur, an ocean boils
but the mountain does not care

for blood has no age of consent
no theology nor dogma   
blood holds no point of view
no nationality, no vote
no academic certification
no credit rating, no latex condom.

And the blood dries to a crust,
of ugly smudges down the pages
of every sacred text.

Cain and Abel were brothers
blood-brothers.   
O blood without end --

Ah men.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Inverse Origami - a poem from Inverse Origami

Instructions for a Timed, Juried Performance:
(hear the author read this poem)

Be sure to
to unfold yourself
as the music begins
or the universe

will unfold another like you
less, perhaps, or more
or in another key
but similar enough.

Chaos conjures you
out of the void
can conjure an army
of you if need be

like you, less, or more
but not you not quite you
not you in all your intricate detail.
You've come this far - unfold.

Expedite.
Don't make them call you twice:
flatten out the soul
until geometry recedes

and winds roar
through you the code
written there
time's sweeping hand.

Unfold before the shredder,
before the trashman turns you on end
before the recycle plant
dissolves you to pulp

again.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Thoughts after a funeral - poem from Inverse Origami

I drift east of the moon,
a vapor dispersing,
a dimension perpendicular to noon.

Call to me.
Tend me with great remorse.
I am wrapped in death's granite skin.

I have become
an over-the-counter medication
encapsulating formaldehyde in a time-release formula.

Call to me.
I will answer
with silence, in temporal immobility.

I am less
than a breeze,
a nuance of dark matter falling to a black hole of being,

building
to a critical mass...
Will I shriek into nova after half a billion years?

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Waiting for Experience - a poem from Inverse Origami

Under the canopy of slender lacy trees
sits Shahna, flecked with sun,
feet in hand, flexing
nimble innocent toes.
Her toes are pale and fresh from socks,
dustless and dainty,
without calluses.

She smiles idly,
waiting for experience to drop
ripe from the trees,
Newtonian and unexpectedly revelatory.

She, passive.
She, postulating.
She, perplexing under the trees.
truant to action,
tacit and unmoving.
She winds wisps of hair on spindly fingers,
smiles and sighs,
singing eyesum songs
to no one in particular.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding, page 12

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Re-Generations - a poem from Inverse Origami

Kitten, stiff-legged fur frumped up, eyes a-glare
lands on old-man cat who was asleep:

"Hey old papa won't you come and play?
We could chase our tails all day,
We could slide on the rug
and tumble
and jump,
I could bite you on the nose,
I could bite you on the rump,
I could shock myself chewin' on 'lectric cord...

Old-man cat raises his head
slowly opens one green eye,
spits and hisses in reply:

"Go away. Don't you bother me .
Stop hoppiní ëround, all crazy
like some hot-foot flea.
I want to eat and sleep.
That's MY wish.
Calm down little fool,
and STAY OUT OF MY DISH.
I want to lay in the lady's lap and purr all day.
Silly little fur-ball won't you go away?"

Now, it's old-man cat who's gone
permanently sleeping under the lawn,
become one with an azalea.
The kitten has grown lap-lazy with years.
has hairballs now and one ripped ear,
and outside, mewling on the front porch steps
is another kitten:

"Hey old mama, won't you come and play?"

---

10/21/91 written at Zum Zum's Cafe
North Conway, New Hampshire, 1995 rewrite

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Alien - a poem from Inverse Origami

Alien

This world is humming and busy
but i am alone,
apart,
vapor,
a trick of light.

People chat easily on balmy earth
while I sit condensating,
turning to ice crystals
out here on Neptune.

I try to speak, to make contact
but my protective helmet
takes up too much space
calls attention to itself
with its enormous nest
of convoluted filtration hoses.
The compressor
roars in my ears.

- October 1996

- a poem by Mar Walker

The picture, a custom digital drawing by the poet appeared with the poem in the book..both appear on page 16 of Inverse Origami...

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding

--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998

Puzzled Dragon Press

/

First-aid instructions for video addiction - poem from Inverse Origami

SYMPTOMS:
Victims often appear passive as cows,
butt to couch, knee to elbow, palm to chin
nodding in pale cathode light,
humming jingles in unguarded moments

In the most severe cases,
the remote is clutched and waved about
While channels spin and ad men shout
Lingual clues to addiction include agitated exclamations:
---- "You're blocking the screen."
---- "Give me the damn remote."
---- "Where the hell is the TV Guide?"
---- and "OH MY GOD THE CABLE IS OUT!"

REMEDY:
Work quickly: Crush the remote.
Yank the plug. Ax the cable.
Slap the victim vigorously
with butterfly wings or dandelion puffs
to stimulate the circulation.
Get the victim walking
preferably along rows of rusty,
saw-toothed words in the local library
until the high wears off
Occasionally allow small swallows
of strong coffee or garlic pizza.
If the victim becomes agitated,
run down the white porch steps
out into the meadow
and earnestly roll in the grass
until laughter is induced and the crisis passes.

WARNING:
The victim will be in denial. Expect a relapse.

- Mar the Mad Walker, 1995

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press
the  picture is a n altered cropped  portion of
an old oil painting of mine called Ascension of Video.

/

Gould's* Contingency (from Inverse Origami)

Just questions, and like Damocles,
the point is over our heads, spinning
like roulette, wedges of color and number blur,
when the odds favor the house and its hordes.

Dalmatian cubes tumble in twos
Old Snake "I"s writhing-down,
the double helix hissing "There's a world
outside this garden, aren't you curious?"

Clever Snake Integral, the atomic wait
of putty sings in your "I"s.
Give us the rest of the apple and a helmet
before the next twist in the chain.

---

- Feb. 16, 1996 ...
* Stephen Jay Gould, the late evolutionary biologist

Custom digital drawing by the poet, and the poem, appeared on page 8 of Inverse Origami

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

POEM: Tattoo Me (from Inverse Origami)

Went to the parlor.
Studied steel needles under neon.
Shaved my head
and the burly guy began to make
tiny holes into which he injected
three and a half gallons of windshield washer fluid
so I could see what was already tattooed there.

Look! The internet directory
lawn clippings from Walt Whitman
the TV GUIDE
the golden rule
ma's one hundred thirteen
favorite rules of thumb
the law of the jungle
the Khama Sutra
the Windows help index!
(Boy have I got a headache.)

I expected roses
but here I am in a downpour
waving a torn baggie
which only moments ago
encircled a half-pint of blue fluid and a goldfish.

Suddenly my blond mopís matted, slippery
the world, a fish-eye-hubcap reflection.
And I am only beginning to breath/see/hear.

When I complained about the mess
the burly guy
pointed to a disclaimer on the wall
noting that birth may involve screaming
and that the midwife may NOT cut the curls of self-reflexive cord
which loop back for generations
through thickets of abandoned fishbowls.

This act you must own for yourself.
For this act, you own your self
For stealing fire you get to lay on the mountain
and offer up your liver daily at dawn

Each night in fecund darkness
you grow another.

---

- Mar (Mistryel Walker
pg 12 & 13 Inverse Origami, the art of unfolding 1998, Out-of-the-Mist Press

this poem was also published in the original print version of the CT Poet Newsletter

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

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