Jan Sand
jsand@walrus.megabaud.fi

Bio(auto)

I was born in New York and, through circumstance and a Finnish wife, ended up in Helsinki in 1968. I was trained in industrial design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and practiced that profession in New York, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Berlin, Germany, Paris, France, Tel Aviv, Israel and Helsinki. I am now retired and fool around with poetry, painting, and sculpture and whatever interests me...and seems to pay nothing.

The following work is Copyright © 1997 and owned by Jan Sand and may not be distributed or reprinted in any manner whatsover without written permission from the author.

Fall Helsinki

The first cool hint of winter
Came this Sunday morning
To shine
With lemon light on yellow leaves
And fire up maple reds.
It jostled stiff brown stems
To rustle in the flower beds.
So frail and shy a creature
With the slightest touch
Transmutes the summer's feature
By not much.
In such a gentle evil way
One does not even quail
To feel the softest brush
Of faint death's tail.

Has this ghost pupa hatched
Set to sleep through summer

Or merely tipped and spilled

Which wobbles
With the planet's bobbles
In its sunswept swing?

No matter.

Transparently
It glitters in the weakened sun
To stiffen out its membranes
With their needle spines.
Cooling breezes tease away
The heat of summer
Shed like sunburned skin
To sweep like flying silken scarves
Far down to Africa.

It needs three months
To knaw away from green to brown
And brown to black.
To fill its lungs with poison cold and ice
And crack the shell of life
To spill the snow with frozen birds
And mice
And etch its black-white artistry
On dead grey clouds.
A moon-white sun
Awaits for when
The Earth slides down its path
To certain rendezvous with life
Begun again.

One Second

Take any second, such as makes
The red hand on my kitchen clock
Twitch forward, so the red hand shakes
To mark just one more thinnest skin
To wrap the total cosmos in.

An eggshell, large where it is near
But smaller at the other end:
That time, in Time all towards the rear
When all was less and less was more,
Eons before the dinosaur.

That shell, so thin, which reaches back,
Encloses all that's fixed and sure.
The Past inside a membrane sack
Where choice becomes, no longer, will;
Events and objects fixed and still.

And staring blindly, looking out
Like frozen fish in a block of ice,
Deaf to the loudest noise or shout:
All humankind, all history
Embalmed by temporal mystery.

Ordinary

The sun came up again this morning
To cut another notch into the year,
Milling out the days, no warning
Of particular disaster come near...

Just an ordinary day, late Spring,
Leaves still tight packaged on the trees,
Clear blue sky with birds, not extra-ordinary.
The air is quiet, windless without breeze.

Strength is gathering for summer,
The world is rolling towards the sun,
Nothing is much smarter nor much dumber.
We all keep murdering each other.
Sometimes for profit,
Sometimes just for fun.

Residues

The birds, they come,
One by one
To gawk and peck
At the window feeder.
Then, with a thrum
As with a finger touch
On a drum,
Their wings thrash
And they disappear.

So remain these living crumbs
Of hind-leg dinosaurs,
Warm and soft
With small ferocities.
The fragments
Of magnificence
That once thundered
On the Earth.

What small shards
Of mankind's terrors
Shall remain?
Perhaps a mouse philosopher
To scamper near huge legs
Of stainless steel
That crack and strain
The dusty plains of Earth.

Fizzical Excercise

The blot of night wipes world from sight
To freckle skies with spots of light
That needle from infinities of space and time.
The eye collects the ray that intersects
The retina which connects each photon pulse that reflects
Its origin which intellects can trace and mime
The volume of the universe, its pace and its perversity
And quietly converse at the university
The nature and relations of exploding constellations
Mapping all erratic mathematic integrations,
Pumped into computers to confute and suit disputers
On the nature of reality which alters all normality
Into a conformation that relates in confirmation
Of hypotheses and theories which subdue all manic queries
In mesmeric fits of beery theosophic enquiries
Never quite specific but stuffed with esoterics
On the nature of the meshing of the alphanumerics.
Thereby, filled with mental scars and small inside elation
In the tentative, derivitive, contemplative sensation
Of relaxing satisfaction with the stars.

Infection

This great ball of molten iron
Encased in boiling rock
Has skinned itself in frozen stone
With bits of water here and there
Beneath a few thin wisps of air.

Toasting in a distant sun
A hundred million miles away,
The merest veil of a thinnest film
Invests the skin with faint decay.
A hazy greenish applique.

Within this thinnest film resides
A multitude of mobile flecks
That cultivate and modify
The patterns of diversity
In fancy and perversity.

Infested speck, iron and rock
Twirls in space, sterile, vast
To signify, not at all.
The smallest grain in vacuum seas
Bobbing in infinities.

Those flecks of thought
In green embedded
Detail themselves: almighty, dreaded
Convinced they are superior
Planetary bacteria.

Hot July

Sailing through summer
On a film of sweat
On a sheet of shaking heat.
Trees applaud the mildest breeze.
Small birds drill whistle holes in thick air
Letting lassitude drip out the atmosphere.
Deep in grass
I watch haytips seek the angry eye of summer
In cybernetic arcs.
Alto-cumulous steams off the land,
Mutters with small lighting spits
To build into a final hissing piss of rain
And a goodbye garish yellow glare
Before the day destructs into a night
Of galactic blurs and planetary disks.

Laying the Ghost

The pain of someone's death is real.
It's sharp and numbing in proportion
To the closeness that we feel
And felt before that life's abortion.

Only slowly do we know each other.
Knowledge is a structure in our mind
Built by contact with another.
We assemble pieces that we find.

Thought by thought, love by love, hate by hate,
To place another's mind inside our own,
The particles must meld and integrate
To make it in the way it can be known.

And soon, this mind inside our mind
Can think and feel to match the one outside.
Constructed well, it is to it designed.
A congruence, all points justified.

Inside our mind this mind performs
To ascertain, make knowable and plain
The mind outside, its outages and norms;
What can give it pleasure, confer pain.

This internal mind that we treasure
Is fashioned of ourselves to outer shapes -
This simulacrum tailored to another's measure
So, its every turn and nuance, apes.

When the outer form dissolves in Time,
This inner duplicate persists.
In our mind it breathes and loves and lives
As if the master template still exists.

So, with reason's eye on sanity,
We must, this inner form make still
Within the universe inside our head,
We must, ourselves, this bit, kill.

So, murder is the pain of grief -
The murder of the one inside.
To expunge a life for hard relief,
We commit a bit of suicide.

In the Suburbs

These streets are well walked.
I know their concrete patches,
Lightning cracks, tufts of wayward sprouting weeds
Broken trees with jagged boughs, blackboned fingers
Shielding curtained windowed walls,
Corridors of cheesebox houses neatly laid
On squares of grass deployed like plastic rug.
Nets of sparrows fling across the open spaces.
A mower chews and spits a useless crop.
Preferable to inner city honeycomb,
But eaten with the same tesselation.
How does one escape this labyrinth?
The string is broken, crumbs are all consumed.
I spiral inward to the beast.

Refuge

There is, in dreams, a magic transformation
So that Fear appear as watching doors,
A clutching claw a hair behind your frantic run.
Or something simple, like a painted square
Upon the sidewalk of a silent city.

In dreams there can be crystal cliffs
That glint within with fields of flowers,
Birds and insects captured in rock glass.
Time and space are stilled in milky depth.
Stars no longer compass 'round the north
But strew like sugar on a kitchen table.

Dreams I've had that swirl and drown in love.
Some girl I could not see but know
By how I felt. She was a vacancy, a blank
Defined by feelings strong outlined
That flowed like buttered honey milk.
So I spun in weightless space, in love.

In sleep the human mind falls into disarray.
No floors, no ceilings capturing the beast of feeling,
Wild to play strong games of madness.
We free ourselves to flee through mazes
Sown with pleasure and with pain.
At night we all go wearily insane.

KiYehMoon
KiYehMoon@aol.com

Bio(auto)

When He Asked About Me I Replied..........

I am not that great at biographical subject matter pertaining to myself......
Some have said this is to a fault......
I should kiss ass.....and ask whose later......
I won't.
I can't.
I was born on the anniversary of the atomic bomb blast at Los Alamos....
years later.
I am fall out.
Somewhere inbetween the two Temples of Isis I live.
Facing East.... I question the dawn.
I question everything.
Now you question me.
We have met.
Once.
Inbetween the dirty old man and the checkerboard cat.....
It was a Tuesday...and the moon had just gone home.

The following work is Copyright © 1997 and owned by KihYehMoon and may not be distributed or reprinted in any manner whatsover without written permission from the author.

untitled

I read the words in the Sefer Yetzirah........
" And if your heart runs return to the place..."
and it did...and I did.....
but then I began to run.......
my feet were flying...
I was running to feel the wind
I was running to feel
the power of life
in my blood.
I was running for those who cannot run.....
running for those who cannot return
to the place.....
when their heart
runs.........
The balance...
is a moving balance......
Some of us......
must not grow weary......
Some of us......
must run.

My Thoughts After the Screen Went Dark

" They fill the void -- so they will know the essence of their being."
He turned to me and said,
as the credits rolled away the life of J. M. Basquiat.
I spoke to him for hours then of art-
of all the artists,
and the suffering,
and loneliness.

At times I feel as if I were
a towel drenched with rain
in the process of being
twisted and wrung
to the point
where not another drop
shall fall...
moist,
yet to the touch appearing dry.

But it swings back around-
the drenching
the twisting
the wringing
the damp.
And I know the process.
And I welcome it.
It keeps my feet moving
one before the other.

He knows the program
but it is locked up in his head
he hasn't found the switch
to bring that which would save him
from the faeries
from his head
into his hands...

So I search..and I try
to find the way to show him
the connection
get the circuit open
save him from the
Green Ray.

All in vain,
at times I think.

SUNDAY ....... Reply to Someone's Note

I'm cool.........
breathing.....
connected at the molecular level.....
microcosm thang happenin'
macrocosm thang happenin'
Body surfin' on the "Tide" that's changin'
Full blast
Tuned in
Clicked on
A-Ware.
Doin' inventory in a few houses
on the wheel.
Textual is happenin' now......
Increasing as she disappears up there......
Introspection.
Sublimination.
As I always say.......
Know Thyself.
Question Everything.
As Above So Below.........
I walk a fine line between a woman and a warrior.
I'm cool......
Breathing........