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[17 Nov 2010|11:56am] |
add me, & i'll probably add you back. cheers.
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[08 May 2009|11:16am] |
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THINGS CAN ONLY EVER BE A CERTAIN WAY FOR SO LONG
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[07 Feb 2009|01:35pm] |
fact: i and the rest of ohio (test population, it appears, for every strange new cereal on the market) have been missing this for 13 years now
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| bill callahan |
[24 Dec 2008|02:49pm] |
Well, I rode out to the ocean and the water looked like tarnished gold. I rode out on a broken horse who told me she'd never felt so old. She asked me if I'd feed her and ride her now and then - no no no, no no no, no no no - I break horses, I don't tend to them. I break horses. They seem to come to me asking to be broken; they seem to run to me. I break horses - it doesn't take me long, just a few well-placed words and their wandering hearts are gone.
At first her warmth felt good between my legs: living, breathing, heart-beating flesh. But soon that warmth turned to an itch, turned to a scratch, turned to a gash. I break horses, I don't tend to them. Tonight I'm swimming to my favorite island and I don't want to see you swimming behind me. Tonight I'm swimming to my favorite island and I don't want to see you swimming behind, no, I break horses. I don't tend to them.
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| gerard manley hopkins |
[02 Nov 2008|05:38pm] |
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ -- for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
( remember )
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| "The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy", Jeffrey McDaniel |
[14 Oct 2008|11:07am] |
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end
of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds
of women—those you write poems about
and those you don't. It's true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction
lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast
as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don't have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power
never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely
a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,
as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed
antibodies for your smile. I don't know how long
regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don't know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light
of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that's just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing
into each other's ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn't make the silence
any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses
I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out
of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you'd press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I'm sorry this poem has taken thirteen years
to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade's precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we'd put our hands away like chocolate
to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other's eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn't be said.
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| "hypothetical" (john k. samson) |
[20 Aug 2008|08:52am] |
Say you wake up one morning without a language.
Taken away. Stolen by a monster from a childhood
fever for some small slight. You didn't eat your peas.
You find a pen, begin to draw a day of watching
shadows wander towards the door, of smelling the garbage and touching the
furniture, pressing your face to the radiator, walking
with eyes open, eyes closed, living without naming. Unnamed.
Say you wake up one morning without time.
That stoner's lament, "Dude, it's just a construct"
You didn't anticipate that there would be nothing
to say. No "Busy", and a sympathetic sigh to reply
to the "How are you"s that line everyday with possibility.
Crowds of helpless mutes stand beside their wrecked
cars at intersections, traffic lights pulse black.
Say you wake up one morning without a body.
You miss your hands like a dead friend.
You play their favourite songs, mourn all their potential,
what they held. Make a Missing poster for your heart
with a description and a photo and your phone number.
Find your ribcage full of topsoil in a garden down the street.
Transplanted yellow flowers peeking out.
Say you wake up one morning without the world.
The world leaves you for another, never returns your calls,
passes you on the street like a stranger. All you can
do is eat potato chips, cry, drink warm vodka from
a jam jar, and watch t.v. The National Geographic specials are
especially cruel. Secrets of the Amazon. Plains of the Serengeti.
And tearing up topographical maps doesn't make you feel better.
Say you wake up one morning, or be honest,
afternoon, without your constant fear for what you have.
The season is a verb, and a window is open.
The telephone rings to the traffic and birds. The clock
is broken, blinking, you stretch beneath a single white sheet,
and the world looks like it's about to say something,
but then just shrugs.
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| "landscape with the fall of icarus", mary jo bang |
[19 Aug 2008|10:14am] |
How could I have failed you like this?
The narrator asks
The object. The object is a box
Of ashes. How could I not have saved you,
A boy made of bone and blood. A boy
Made of a mind. Of years. A hand
And paint on canvas. A marble carving.
How can I not reach where you are
And pull you back. How can I be
And you not. You’re forever on the platform
Seeing the pattern of the train door closing.
Then the silver streak of me leaving.
What train was it? The number six.
What day was it? Wednesday.
We had both admired the miniature mosaics
Stuck on the wall of the Met.
That car should be forever sealed in amber.
That dolorous day should be forever
Embedded in amber.
In garnet. In amber. In opal. In order
To keep going on. And how can it be
That this means nothing to anyone but me now.
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| "what the living do", marie howe |
[19 Aug 2008|10:07am] |
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
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| Corrigenda // by Yusef Komunyakaa
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[12 Aug 2008|12:45pm] |
I take it back.
The crow doesn't have red wings.
They're pages of dust.
The woman in the dark room
takes the barrel of a .357 magnum
out of her mouth, reclines
on your bed, a Helena Rubinstein smile.
I'm sorry, you won't know your father
by his darksome old clothes.
He won't be standing by that tree.
I haven't salted the tail
of the sparrow.
Erase its song from this page.
I haven't seen the moon
fall open at the golden edge of our sleep.
I haven't been there
like the tumor in each of us.
There's no death that can
hold us together like twin brothers
coming home to bury their mother.
I never said there's a book inside
every tree. I never said I know how
the legless beggar feels when
the memory of his toes itch.
If I did, drunkenness
was then my god & naked dancer.
I take it back.
I'm not a suicidal mooncalf;
you don't have to take my shoelaces.
If you must quote me, remember
I said that love heals from inside.
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| THE NINTH ELEGY (1977) |
[06 Jun 2008|09:47am] |
WHY, when it’s possible to pass away the interval
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other green, with tiny ripples along each
leaf’s edge (like a wind’s smile) —: why then
human necessity — and, evading destiny,
long for destiny? ..,
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty advantage of a nearing loss.
Not out of curiosity, or for training the heart
that would also exist in the laurel...
But because being here is much, and because we apparently
are needed by all things here, the fading things that
oddly concern us. Us, the most fading of all. One time
each thing, just one time. One time and no more. And we also
one time. Never again. But having existed
this one time, even if only one time:
having been earthly seems irrevocable.
And so we press on and want to achieve it,
want to contain it in our simple hands,
in the more overfilled gaze and in the speechless heart.
Want to become it. — To whom to give it? At best
to keep it all forever . . . Ah, into the other relationship,
alas, what does one carry across? Not the gazing
learned gradually here, nor any occurrences here. None.
Then the pain. Then especially heaviness,
then love’s lengthy experience, — then
only inexpressible things. But later
among the stars, what’s the use: their inexpressibility is better.
The wanderer brings after all from the brink of the mountain cliff
not a handful of earth (inexpressible to all) into the valley, but rather
an acquired word, pure, the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we perhaps here in order to express: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window; —
at the utmost: column, tower . . . . but to express them, please understand,
oh to express in such a way as the things themselves never
thought to exist so fervently. Is it not the secret cunning
of this reticent earth to induce the lovers
that every single thing be ecstatic in their emotion?
Threshold: what is it to two
lovers, that they slightly wear down their own older threshold
of the door, they too, after the many before them
and before those of the future...lightly.
Here is the time of expressible things, here is their homeland.
Speak and profess. More than ever
the things are falling away that we can experience, for
that which, pressing them out, replaces them, is activity without image.
Activity under crusts that willingly burst as soon as
action grows out from within and forms other borders.
Between the hammers withstands
our heart, like the tongue
between the teeth that still
nonetheless continues to praise.
Praise to the angel this world, not the inexpressible one, him
you cannot impress with glorious things you have felt; in the universe,
where he feels more feelingly, you are a newcomer. Therefore, reveal
to him simple things, things arranged from generation to generations
which live as our own, next to the hand and in the gaze.
Express things to him. He will stand more marveling, as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or by the potter on the Nile.
Reveal to him how happy a thing can be, how guiltless and ours,
how lamenting sufferance itself purely decides to take shape,
serves as a thing, or perishes into a thing — and on the other side,
blissfully exudes from a violin. — And these things that live
on passing away understand why you celebrate them; ephemeral,
they trust that we, the most ephemeral, can save them.
Want us to wholly transfigure them within our invisible heart,
into — oh endlessly — into us! Whoever we may be in the end.
Earth, is it not this that you want: invisibly
to arise inside us? — Is it not your dream
to be someday invisible? — Earth! Invisible!
What, if not transfiguration, is your pressing task?
Earth, beloved, I am willing. Oh believe, it needs
no more of your springtimes to win me over to you —, one,
ah, a single one is already too much for the blood.
Nameless, I have decided in favor of you, from far away.
You have always been in the right, and your holy inspiration
is intimate death.
See, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
diminish...Overabundant existence
springs forth in my heart.
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| a pureness as of coitus between crocodiles |
[01 Oct 2007|10:54am] |
I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as of for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.
You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depths of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.
from Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
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[26 Aug 2007|07:17pm] |
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[22 Aug 2007|04:37pm] |
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[25 Dec 2006|01:43pm] |
"Deer Tracks"
Richard Brautigan
Beautiful, sobbing
high-geared fucking
and then to lie silently
like deer tracks in the
freshly-fallen snow beside
the one you love.
That's all.
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| excerpt: "litany in which certain things are crossed out", richard siken |
[14 Nov 2006|02:02pm] |
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn't say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you're so great, you do it—
here's the pencil, make it work ...
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.
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[25 Aug 2006|03:52pm] |
"spooning is innocent foreplay almost entirely restricted to facial nuzzling. as described by lawrence, it is a form of sex in the head. spooners graze around each other's necks, ears, hair, cheeks, mouth, taking time off for a digression here, a little essay there, a bit of exploration, a pause for effect. what happens to the rest of the body goes unremarked & undescribed by lawrence who enjoys spinning out the spooning too much to bother with anything south of the throat."
- melvyn bragg, from the introduction to dh lawrence's mr. noon.
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