Author: Rocco

don’t come round but if you do…

yeah sure, I’ll be in unless I’m out

don’t knock if the lights are out

or you hear voices or then

I might be reading Proust

if someone slips Proust under my door

or one of his bones for my stew,

This is not an apology for those I’ve been ignoring. This is only an attempt at an explanation. I’m not sure if it’s my age that causing my circle of friends to get smaller and smaller, but steadily, over the last number of years, the number of people who call me, and the number of people who I want to call has shrunk. It’s only at moments like these, moments when I am able to come up for air, or moments when I lose another friend, that I realize how isolated I’ve become. The problem is not that I am running out of friends, the problem is that I’m not really bothered by it. I am startled by my lack of feeling on the matter. Lately, with the exception of Lisa, my parents, and one or two others, I’ve had no need to call, or to receive calls from anyone.

and I can’t loan money or

the phone

or what’s left of my car

though you can have yesterday’s newspaper

an old shirt or a bologna sandwich

or sleep on the couch

if you don’t scream at night

and you can talk about yourself

that’s only normal;

hard times are upon us all

Maybe it is my age that I am not calling you anymore. Maybe it’s that I’m not the person you want me to be any longer. Every time you call I can feel you baiting me with the same old stories, the same old inside jokes. I’ve tried, believe me, to play the person you need under those knowing looks of yours. It’s just not me anymore.

only I am not trying to raise a family

to send through Harvard

or buy hunting land,

I am not aiming high

I am only trying to keep myself alive

just a little longer,

so if you sometimes knock

and I don’t answer

and there isn’t a woman in here

maybe I have broken my jaw

and am looking for wire

or I am chasing the butterflies in

my wallpaper,

It could be my work. I spend five hours a day talking to class of level three immigrants, trying to help them understand me. And when I get home, I have no more words left. I don’t want to speak. I don’t want to listen. I get your message, but all I want to do is sit and write or watch TV.

I mean if I don’t answer

I don’t answer, and the reason is

that I am not yet ready to kill you

or love you, or even accept you,

it means I don’t want to talk

I am busy, I am mad, I am glad

or maybe I’m stringing up a rope;

so even if the lights are on

and you hear sound

like breathing or praying or singing

a radio or the roll of dice

or typing –

Do you really need to talk to someone this badly? What do you get out of it? What’s wrong with simply being alone? Why do you always need to have someone around, another presence in the room with you, another voice on the phone to hear you breathe?

go away, it is not the day

the night, the hour;

it is not the ignorance of impoliteness,

I wish to hurt nothing, not even a bug

but sometimes I gather evidence of a kind

that takes some sorting,

and your blue eyes, be they blue

and your hair, if you have some

or your mind – they cannot enter

until the rope is cut or knotted

or until I have shaven into

new mirrors, until the world is

stopped or opened

forever.

I’m not sure what it is. It could be apathy or agoraphobia. You might think I am selfish, but I help the world in my own way. With my teaching, I help people get accustomed to a new life and a new country. With this website, I help artists around the country and world get acquainted.

Because I don’t wish to speak to you means nothing. What does talk beget but only more talk. You only want to hear your own voice to justify your own anguish. Clime a mountain, walk on the moon, sail the world, or watch Oprah.

But please, tonight, like every other night, there is something in the silence that can solve me. There is something in the emptiness that I find soothing. So please, for now, just let me be.

Rocco de Giacomo

The poem used in this article is “don’t come around but if you do…” by Charles Bukowski

Once upon a time, I saw some poetry that I really liked. So, I emailed the poet – lets call him MELVIN – and asked him if he would like to be a feature on Latchkey.net. MELVIN was more than happy to, as you can see from his reply.

Rocco,

“….honor!…”

“…….love to….”

MELVIN.

If you are wondering why I am only giving you fragments of his email, you’ll understand at the end of this article. Anyway, we at Latchkey went ahead and posted his work on our site. However, as an oversight on my part, we not only published some of the poems he sent us, but also pieces that he had on his website. It was an oversight – please understand. In the past we have been encouraged by other artists to copy works from their sites when we feature them. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, considering our site doesn’t make any money or profit from featuring whom we select. MELVIN, however, was bothered by it.

Rocco,

“….thankful…..”

“…..not too keen……”

“….lifting works……”

“…..other places….”

“…..permission….”

“…….laws against that…”

MELVIN.

Now, I could have simply removed the poems that MELVIN told us to remove, and been done with it, but I was annoyed with MELVIN’S response. Technically, I understand now, it was infringement. But along with these poems, we posted:

-a photo of him

-a link to his site

-a brief description of his art, written by him, for this particular feature

-a rather complementary write-up on his work written by yours truly

Considering this, what I did wasn’t exactly what you would call stealing, but that is what he was accusing me of. I was beginning to believe that MELVIN was a bit of a twit.

MELVIN,

Sorry it has taking me so long to get back to you, I have been very busy of late and have had little time to do any emailing. I would like to apologize for taking some of your other pieces without permission. Thank you for letting us at Latchkey.net know about the rules and laws of the Internet. I am very relieved that you informed us about our trespassing. Especially since we were just about to make some minor alterations to your featured pieces. Believe me, I loved all of your pieces, but as a collective we felt that we could enhance some or all of them by giving them more of a slant, or a dialect, so to speak.

We decided that your pieces would benefit being translated into “Jive” talk. Working hard, and researching a great deal of Ebonics, we have translated one of my favourite piece of yours,

[Actually, what I did here was run the poem through The Dialectizer, an online program that takes normal text and alters it to give the text a selected dialect. For example the previous sentence, run through The Dialectizer, would come out looking something like this:

“Acshully, whut ah did hyar was helter-skelter th’ poem through Th’ Dialeckizer, an online program thet takes no’mal text an’ alters it an’ gives th’ text a selecked dialeck.”

Pretty neat, huh? The link is http://rinkworks.com/dialect.

Back to my reply to MELVIN.]

Wow, huh?

I bet you see your poem in a whole new light. We’d love to feature all your poems like this, but of course, as you say, there are laws against doing such things without a person’s permission. So we’d like to ask for your permission to go a ahead and do this

Thanks kindly,

Rocco de Giacomo

My response was both to inform MELVIN that his pieces had been removed from the site, and to subtly suggest he loosen up a little.

MELVIN did not take my response kindly.

Rocco,

“…ripped from…”

“….pissed off…”

“….bait me….”

“…..remove…..”

…MELVIN.

He ordered me to remove his entire feature from Latchkey.net. This is where things got a little more involved. MELVIN was not used to being joked with, and I am not used to taking orders.

MELVIN,

The chances of us doing anything more together ended as soon as you sent that curt, rather unappreciative email. To imply that I am a thief after a month long exchange of emails and hours of preparation by Lisa and myself was insulting. But I will forgo you for your exceptional writing. In regards to removing your writing from my site, we’ll decide at the end of the month,

Thanks kindly

Rocco de Giacomo

I figured that since he had given us permission to post his remaining poems, he couldn’t take it back.

MELVIN figured differently.

Rocco,

“….blunt….”

“…….thief…..”

“….copyright……”

“…….without permission…..”

“….until midnight…..”

“…remove……”

“…….copyright violation……”

“….the RCMP…..”

MELVIN.

Yes, MELVIN, threatened to get the RCMP after me. Does the RCMP have a Poetry department? I wonder if instead of those broad hats, and snug red blazers, they wear little berets and long wind-blown scarves. Anyway, as much as MELVIN was angered by my refusal to remove his poetry, I was angered at his reiteration that I was a thief, and his threat to involve the Poetry Police.

You believe that the RCMP are going to come after me over some poems. Let alone poems that you gave me permission to publish.

Hello in there MELVIN, what colour is the sky in your little world?

You can sue me if you want. Fill out this form:

MELVIN hereby sues Rocco de Giacomo for the following:

1. Emotional pain

2. Creative pain

3. Lower back pain

4. Singing in the rain

5. Johnny Coltraine

6. Rogaine.

7. Blaming it on the Rain.

Total pending: __

Or even better, you can write Latchkey.net on a paper cup, fill in with hot coffee, then pour it on your crotch.

Once you do this, contact me and I will send you a cheque. We have proof of your permission.

We will keep your photo, the poems you gave us, and my rather beautiful write up on you, until the end of the month. I will then make a decision whether to keep you on our site.

Thanks kindly,

Rocco de Giacomo

I was convinced I was right. In a regular magazine or newspaper, once a piece is published, the author can’t change his mind and have all magazines and newspapers recalled. The Internet should have the same kind of laws, right? I was determined to keep MELVIN’S work until the end of the month. He was a twit and he called me a thief. End of story.

Well, almost. While MELVIN and I were busy exchanging compliments, Lisa, resourceful, intelligent Lisa was researching the Internet for Copyright laws. While it is not clear on whether MELVIN did in fact have the right to recall his poems from my site, Lisa thought it would be safer to remove his work, even though he had originally given us permission to post them. So while I was in the midst of anticipating MELVIN’S next move, and relishing my own response, Lisa was removing his poems, photograph, bio, and write-up from Latchkey.

As much as I disapproved, she was right.

During the little ordeal, I was beginning to forget the real reasons for us making this website together. We made it for ourselves and for the world community of artists to enjoy.

We haven’t heard back from MELVIN yet, and for all we know, he’s already hiring a lawyer. I regret getting caught up in pettiness, and in the future I will need to show more patience if I want this to work.

I will say this:

MELVIN, if you are out there, you were right.

But you are still a twit.

It comes down to a matter of architecture.

I had not been to the States in about two or three years, and even then it was on the blind movement of a Greyhound bus, where I was unable to see much except for the taillights of passing cars and the

halogen halo’s of overhead street lights. It had be a long, long time since I had driven down in a car. It had been an even longer time since I can remember taking the side roads instead of the interstates.

My girlfriend and I were driving down to visit some of my relatives in Rhode Island and at the last minute we decided to get off the New York Thruway and take the minor roots. It was our second day of

driving. On our first day, we had been stalled up in Canada by a flat tire. So up until the morning of the second, our trip through the states had been at night. It was on that bright an clear morning, driving out of Schenectady, New York, that we had both begun to notice the difference in the architecture.

In Canada, especially in Southern Ontario, there is a general pattern of movement. People come here; they move to the cities and rent a house or an apartment. They save money, and when they have enough, they put a down payment on a house of their own. They live there for a while, usually in a neighbourhood of a similar ethnic background. They raise a family, and then, either they, or their children, sell the house and move further out of the city, usually into an area with a similar ethnic background. This time however, they don’t move into the house on the property they just bought. They instead tear down the house and build a new one.

This is where the major difference is. In the States, from my travels and experiences there, when someone moves out from a city and onto a property where they want to settle, they do not usually demolish the house that is already there. They renovate it, they add to it, they change the colour, and perhaps the trim, but they do not usually tear it down. When they want to start a business, they don’t turn their 4-story, 200 year old Georgian into a parking lot. They simply they make minor adjustments to the interior and hang a sign out front.

What does this difference have to with Canada’s survival as a country?

Everything. Americans keeping the old houses and buildings, and consciously or not, it gives them a sense of continuity, a connection to the past. You can feel it when you walk down the close streets of New York’s little Italy, or tour through the old bank buildings of Boston. Unlike us, Americans don’t like a clean slate, they prefer to simply add the old one. As a result, the wooden, brick and stone faces of history are everywhere to remind them of who they are and where they came from.

Canada is not a young country. One of, if not the oldest street in North America runs along the waterfront of Saint John’s Newfoundland. We are considered young because we look it. We do not wish to keep our historical landmarks. Instead we prefer to tear the drafty, dated, things down and put up something bigger and more expensive looking. As a result, the area where I live, just north of Toronto,

once an old quaint neighbourhood, has steadily become a neighbourhood of pocket-sized mansions, all with about as much character as your average big box shopping plaza. In Toronto, a small group of

preservationists had to fight tooth and nail to stop the powers that be from demolishing the old city hall when they were building the new one.

This desire to wipe the slate clean, to start again, results only with a general disregard for our own past. Ford might have said “history is bunk” but it is us Canadians who habitually practice what he preached.

This lack of respect for our old architecture is representative of a great national apathy that pervades Canada on many levels. How may of us vote? How many of us can remember being taught a decent

lesson in Canadian history when we were in school? How many have us have travelled much in Canada? How many of us care?

This apathy has spread to the younger generations as well. Children today have no real concept of what Canada is. I have personally witnessed this myself. A 10-year-old student of mine knew who George Washington was, but couldn’t tell me who John A. Macdonald was. Another student thought that Toronto was in New York. It’s hard to believe this, but to our very young, Canada is not a country.

I wish I could offer some easy solution for our predicament, but there is none, especially when most of us don’t really care one way or the other. Like an Alzheimer patient, we are perfectly happy in our own softly fading world, ourselves completely oblivious to what we are losing.

Even if I was to show you, how many would care that we are losing our country, our history? How can I convince you that you are suffering, when you sit on your plump leather couches in front of your wide screen TV’s? How I can make you realize the importance of what we are losing when you have more than you need?

Perhaps I can’t.

Maybe the only way that people will learn of the greatness of our country is when we lose the more obvious characteristics of our country, like gun control and health care. It frightens me to think that having a gun to our heads or having to use a credit card when we visit the family doctor are the only things that will wake us from our deep, peaceful slumbers.

But before that happens, I can offer you some preventative advice: if and when you do get a chance to move onto an older property, think twice about demolishing the history that is already there.

It’s official. Myself and a good number of people behind me declare that Christmas really does suck, and should be canceled with all the stress, hypocrisy, and gluttonous spending it represents.

We are not scrooges, nor are we schmucks. In fact, we are people who are very kind, generous and giving throughout the year, and find the Christmas idea of giving as contrived as the acting on a late night infomercial.

The fact is, we are all tired of it: the crowds, the traffic, and the line-ups. We no longer choose to wonder aimlessly down the crowded isles of department stores, picking out gifts with as much thought as pocket calculators; devices that know only one thing: that they should by something for somebody, because that’s what they are supposed to do at this time of year.

Nero once said: as long as you keep the masses happy with bread and circuses, you can control them. Like $13 movies and $5 Pepsi’s, Christmas is a circus in itself. Its a sham, a way of feeding the pockets of the wealthy by encouraging the desperate masses to be generous and open their wallets and spend more and more of the money they don’t have. The sense of power and control that consumers feel when they use their bank or credit cards lasts about as long as it takes Visa to send them a bill when its all over. And any hopes of getting out of the financial shackles they’ve grown into dissipates into yet another year of interest payments, and any hopes of North America’s average savings rate to rise above 0% vanishes into the next 12 good ol’ days of Christmas.

Look at it this way: at Christmas, do the companies you work for, the same companies that invest millions of dollars every year into TV commercials that convince you to spend your savings on presents, do they show you any generosity by giving you a week off – not even a paid week off – to be with your families? What about their contribution to the Christmas spirit? Most of the people I know had to be back on the 26th. Every year, Christmas becomes less and less an act of giving and more and more a payoff for not seeing your loved ones enough.

The fact is, Christmas has little to do with religion, and it has little to do with giving:

A) It’s neither mentioned in the Bible, nor is it for certain when the three wise guys made their way across the desert to find the baby Jesus. The Christmas tree is just a mishmash of beliefs from China, Egypt, Germany, and the lights are representative of an ancient ritual where victims were burned alive as an offering to convince a sun god to warm things up a little.

B) Santa Claus, the old Santa Claus, not the contemporary Santa Claus invented by Coca-Cola, but the original one known as Saint Nicholas, was a simple Bishop living in Turkey who once a year – NOT DECEMBER 25th – would stuff candies and trinkets into the little shoes of children. He did this because he, and the children were poor. Then, it was a humble act of giving. Now, in today’s North America, it’s not about giving, it’s about spending. It was an idea bread from poverty, and was never meant to be a novelty of luxury.

C) The original idea of Christmas has about as little to do with a developed country like ours, as Buddhism – another idea bread from poverty – has to do with BMW driving yuppies in Kitsilano, Vancouver.

And so, it is for these reasons, that many others and myself believe that Christmas should be canceled and replaced with daily acts of giving. Instead of one day of spending, people everywhere could enjoy showing their appreciation for one another in the some of the following ways:

1. Don’t tailgate. Its annoying.

2. Start a conversation with a complete stranger, every day.

3. Never send group emails, like this one.

4. Volunteer once a week.

5. Look people in the eye and say “please” and “thank you.”

6. Don’t be a snobby, ignorant bigot.

7. When some one wants to change lanes in front of you, don’t speed up and try to block them.

8. Don’t complain or brag repeatedly about your problems, they are meant to be solved, not worn as a badge.

9. And when you complain about your problems, don’t snub the advice you receive. When people give advice, they are giving a bit of themselves.

10. RAK: Random Acts of Kindness. Do one nice thing for someone, every day.

11. Don’t swear.

In conclusion, we believe that by following some of these examples everyday, instead sheepishly heeding the corporate call to the cleaners every Christmas, we could make life better for everyone ever day.

Happy Holidays (what holiday?)