11.7.09
and i wonder
what face will my death wear. it's a trip to think of. the sea in my mind, did it exist and then the import or was the import always in its form?
10.7.09
rose garden
I thought these words in the rose garden before I wrote them. I spoke them in my head to hear the rhythms. I imagined the spacing and caesuras. I said to myself, Spacing and caesuras, that is how I will say it, in that order I will say it. I can no longer remember the content. What I wanted to say, in the garden.
Coherence is no longer a luxury I have, under the circumstances. Taking refuge in fragments. Trust that a connection will make itself apparent. All the small matters that pass through my mind. Dozed in a chair and felt the sun on my arms though all in the sky was cloudy. Kept my eyes closed for the tears. My legs very white, my arms mottled. Thinking of writing and these words or words like them, picturing them and knowing that even as I sat down to type them the sitting and what I saw on the screen would change the words, and the time elapsed between having the drink then and sitting down to type now.
The novelty of knowing a new person, natural to think, to invent. How long will it last, and what significance, and what hurt will you do and what good. Irrational fear on my part, but fear and feeling that I fall too easily out of girls' affections. And wondering, from time to time, do they still think of me as I think of them, and feel it as important, and use their memories of me as I use my memories of them. They of me and me of them. They theirs. Their fun and how they does it. Their fun, not mine. The lives I entered into. Imposed myself. Their names became magical to me, and the names of the places where they lived, and things they said, not meaning it to mean much of anything other than the contextual moment of the saying. Just a bit of skin you work on, or, This is bonding. And I took the phrases and put them to purpose.
that's very nice to think about
that underneath your clothes your skin an even color continuous
said last night and stuck in my head. And the V formed in line with collarbones, which are very prominent. Images that flash on me and stay, moment to moment. Imagined conversation where I say I don't feel a terror of time passing with you like I did with others. C stepping up onto the bed and over me. And not sure of any real meaning of any of it, and coming to no conclusion today other than dangerous as any other girl is dangerous, and liking that, and liking the drink but not the taste, and the roses and the beetles on them, and the breeze, and the clouds making the sky gray, but not liking the situation, or my avoidance of it, or the failings I can already intuit and anticipate.
Do I care anymore who reads these words and what they think of them? No. It is more important to me just having written. To write after so long having not written. And what happens to the writing is less important than simply having written. I do not care what image it gives of me, what impression. Whether I am weak or strong or stupid, most definitely stupid. Crashing through this day and these weeks like. Like nothing. A madman through the underbrush, breaking twigs and panting but nothing passing the lips, not breath, not sound. Never mind. The energy is not with me right now, and I don't know how to get it.
Coherence is no longer a luxury I have, under the circumstances. Taking refuge in fragments. Trust that a connection will make itself apparent. All the small matters that pass through my mind. Dozed in a chair and felt the sun on my arms though all in the sky was cloudy. Kept my eyes closed for the tears. My legs very white, my arms mottled. Thinking of writing and these words or words like them, picturing them and knowing that even as I sat down to type them the sitting and what I saw on the screen would change the words, and the time elapsed between having the drink then and sitting down to type now.
The novelty of knowing a new person, natural to think, to invent. How long will it last, and what significance, and what hurt will you do and what good. Irrational fear on my part, but fear and feeling that I fall too easily out of girls' affections. And wondering, from time to time, do they still think of me as I think of them, and feel it as important, and use their memories of me as I use my memories of them. They of me and me of them. They theirs. Their fun and how they does it. Their fun, not mine. The lives I entered into. Imposed myself. Their names became magical to me, and the names of the places where they lived, and things they said, not meaning it to mean much of anything other than the contextual moment of the saying. Just a bit of skin you work on, or, This is bonding. And I took the phrases and put them to purpose.
that's very nice to think about
that underneath your clothes your skin an even color continuous
said last night and stuck in my head. And the V formed in line with collarbones, which are very prominent. Images that flash on me and stay, moment to moment. Imagined conversation where I say I don't feel a terror of time passing with you like I did with others. C stepping up onto the bed and over me. And not sure of any real meaning of any of it, and coming to no conclusion today other than dangerous as any other girl is dangerous, and liking that, and liking the drink but not the taste, and the roses and the beetles on them, and the breeze, and the clouds making the sky gray, but not liking the situation, or my avoidance of it, or the failings I can already intuit and anticipate.
Do I care anymore who reads these words and what they think of them? No. It is more important to me just having written. To write after so long having not written. And what happens to the writing is less important than simply having written. I do not care what image it gives of me, what impression. Whether I am weak or strong or stupid, most definitely stupid. Crashing through this day and these weeks like. Like nothing. A madman through the underbrush, breaking twigs and panting but nothing passing the lips, not breath, not sound. Never mind. The energy is not with me right now, and I don't know how to get it.
7.7.09
Serial Freewrite for June 09
Teagarden as last name. Don't T'ell Maman/Where do souls go when they die, the wild valley, the smokehouse, wherever they want/akedia the torpor of monks. am crappink my pants ^^^^^ |- typography as a means to influence eye travel + pace of reader or reader's pace but don't know formatting in Word for that, seems exciting to me Wanted to read + see what B. read + saw not as means of self-improvement but out of sense of competition / A Brightnesse in the sky [the palmed
silence of
the lilywhite
buttock
antique soups/Tehom, Heb. "deep"= waters of creation. American Dream. Mammon, athwart + askance, MammonN ~ //the insect automobile
in the green hills, afar. Pash Rash watches the mermidons, admiring how well they take to the water. To the water.
cosmic mtn in center ------>[a triangle]<------Drowned Cathedral alone, desert winds are sweet companionship
Just hashing out ideas here. Trying to generate something. Runners @ the corners. Into an ocarina. Solomon. //Peru. All knowledge given to me. Blue black, black blue. Plaisir. Theogony + theosophy. Sephardic. It was a good century for the song. A chipped drinking cup and a small book. Everyone has a sound. His softly grandfathering look. Semata the signs in which heroes wrote. Perhaps I would have gone into medicine not law but I would have made a poor physician (para. Blackmon) Golden passage. Lifts her skirt to reveal the subtle metaphysics of Heraclitus.
"Linsabor" Swedish word for loneliness I misheard in Wild Strawberries. Absence of dreams usually heralds a surge of waking creativity. It does not feel so this time. So this time. Does not. Feel so. Fe. Oes. Notdo. Cambre. Arched back. Foot of the arch nudity that makes uncomfortable saying nothing, having to cut through the denseness of the prose to reveal even the smallest occurrence. Says Br. Distance -------> lessening opacity a defense formulated on the fly. Fire is the Gate. A mind undone by solitude. Loosened in the middlebehind the eyes, and gently drifting apart from the edges outward. Conversing only w/ the voice of the lonely mirror. Covet your books. Yellowed lips talk from a point beyond death. The Religious Cuckoo. \A straight bed A crooked bed/ Sense of something small weeping under the showerhead a depression and tragedy leads to great posting (?). Appleshine nonsense. Applejack fashions. The pleasure of writing well, of correct placement.
"I should have felt less / my old troubles." Classic Jewish Chapel.
Tapers. Frigorific = producing cold. Frigger = glass maker's sample, masturbater.[Inverted triangle with horizontal line bisecting near tip. "Me & My Mate Pash Rash" above line, "BL" below] Everything is down. Died fat + riddled w/ scrotal pox. To dread death. Physician to dogs. Disgust at the sexual act. Bisexucycle.
Remembers yet his old desires Fragmentary thoughts. Dioscorides, the name.
Can sustain nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Crying, drunk, and laughing w/ skinheads. No tits or ass pictures, but we are bonding. Reclamation, vicariously, of those initial sexual experiences denied in youth. And never a true/r word. A note on the type. Zen mustache. Zen soul patch. Three knuckles deep + squirting sour limoncello. Obelus [the symbol thereof]. Wholesale holesellers. Inspector Joppa. My seminole masterpiece. The sound of two waters meeting. Mermaid Cafe. Anamorphoscope. My mourning sack. My sack of mourning. Smoking tabac. Fastfanny. Capercock. Chubcheeker. Pinkpot. Arsievarsie. Tollhole. Bumfrig. The two hour's traffic of our stage. Living down the hall from Bedlam. Living cheek-to-jowl w/ Bedlam. And yr young men shall see visions. And yr young men shall see visions.
Alejanda Pizarnik. Portion of death in her body coming to the surface. Spotwood. When someone comes out to investigate.
silence of
the lilywhite
buttock
antique soups/Tehom, Heb. "deep"= waters of creation. American Dream. Mammon, athwart + askance, MammonN ~ //the insect automobile
in the green hills, afar. Pash Rash watches the mermidons, admiring how well they take to the water. To the water.
Just hashing out ideas here. Trying to generate something. Runners @ the corners. Into an ocarina. Solomon. //Peru. All knowledge given to me. Blue black, black blue. Plaisir. Theogony + theosophy. Sephardic. It was a good century for the song. A chipped drinking cup and a small book. Everyone has a sound. His softly grandfathering look. Semata the signs in which heroes wrote. Perhaps I would have gone into medicine not law but I would have made a poor physician (para. Blackmon) Golden passage. Lifts her skirt to reveal the subtle metaphysics of Heraclitus.
THE LIBRARY OF SEXUAL CONGRESS.
"Linsabor" Swedish word for loneliness I misheard in Wild Strawberries. Absence of dreams usually heralds a surge of waking creativity. It does not feel so this time. So this time. Does not. Feel so. Fe. Oes. Notdo. Cambre. Arched back. Foot of the arch nudity that makes uncomfortable saying nothing, having to cut through the denseness of the prose to reveal even the smallest occurrence. Says Br. Distance -------> lessening opacity a defense formulated on the fly. Fire is the Gate. A mind undone by solitude. Loosened in the middle
"I should have felt less / my old troubles." Classic Jewish Chapel.
Tapers. Frigorific = producing cold. Frigger = glass maker's sample, masturbater.
Remembers yet his old desires Fragmentary thoughts. Dioscorides, the name.
Can sustain nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Crying, drunk, and laughing w/ skinheads. No tits or ass pictures, but we are bonding. Reclamation, vicariously, of those initial sexual experiences denied in youth. And never a true/r word. A note on the type. Zen mustache. Zen soul patch. Three knuckles deep + squirting sour limoncello. Obelus [the symbol thereof]. Wholesale holesellers. Inspector Joppa. My seminole masterpiece. The sound of two waters meeting. Mermaid Cafe. Anamorphoscope. My mourning sack. My sack of mourning. Smoking tabac. Fastfanny. Capercock. Chubcheeker. Pinkpot. Arsievarsie. Tollhole. Bumfrig. The two hour's traffic of our stage. Living down the hall from Bedlam. Living cheek-to-jowl w/ Bedlam. And yr young men shall see visions. And yr young men shall see visions.
Alejanda Pizarnik. Portion of death in her body coming to the surface. Spotwood. When someone comes out to investigate.
27.6.09
Dreams: Heist, Angels, Pilgrimage Road
seen from a 3/4s view, one continuous shot tracking right to left. the progressing events of a failed bank heist, myself, another man, and a girl. time late 1920s or early 1930s. long line of buildings that we enter and exit as the camera moves, bullets exchanged, cops arrive, escalating violence. the wounded moved under a plastic sheet but a car careens into them, burst of blood underneath the plastic and a man in a brown suit manages to crawl out, clearly in pain. more and more absurdity and gore. at some point i alone escape. view no longer 3/4s. i stumble along alleyways and between one-level houses, until i meet a woman, wife to the man i was with. she takes me down stone stairs to the beach. their house is like a large blue cloth changing tent. some potted plants inside, mirrors, a large comfortable coach takes up most of the space. i lay back on it. she sits next to me and feeds me chocolate chip cookies, chewy and hot. there is an understanding between us, that her husband won't mind what happens. i set the cookie aside on the couch and motion to my sudden erection. she nods, undoes my pants, and lowers her head toward it. i wake up.
*
a desert mountain range, sky turning brown, dark rifts opening and out of these come angels, in the form of razor-like birds almost too thin to see, and manta rays but with the consistency of fabric and strange patterns on their skin, unpleasant color combinations of dark greens golds and purples. they are hostile. later it is deep night and we are in the backyard of a large empty house. trees, a pool, and fireflies. we are moving the bodies of fallen angels but cannot see them. still the sense that they are massive and heavy as with moisture, strangely built.
*
i am with a friend whose identity i can no longer recall. i have my walking stick and we are going down a dirt road beneath a corridor of trees, thick forest on both sides, but not foreboding. it is cool and we are in mottled shadows. when we reach the point where the dirt becomes pavement i announce "Now we are moving back into the Old Testament!". we are pilgrims on a biblical path.
a car approaches behind us, an older model, off-white. we step aside to let it pass. up ahead we find one car and then another, both broken down, roadsters. ostentatious is the word that occurs to me in the dream. a family of arabs or gypsies (darker skin, eclectic clothing, character "types", a carnivale feel) is sitting around. the other car has stopped and the family inside offers to take them along. we pass by a vanagon; through the open door i see a dark-skinned man and a woman on a blanket, half-dressed, making love. they watch the procession without shame or much interest.
now we are in a natural gallery of brown stone. there must be windows high up on the left wall to let in light. my friend is gone and i'm wearing the robes of a monk. choral music in the air like the composition of orlande lassus. on the right a temple hewn into the stone.
i cannot describe it very well. the entrance is an opening between a screen of pillars that are perhaps more of a grating since they do not reach all the way to the floor or ceiling. organic, antonio gaudi. i approach the entrance and can see inside cots and tall beds with white sheets, placed at random. couples on them making love in many positions. again their ethnicity seems to be eastern. one man is entering a woman from behind and his friend, also male, puts his hands on his hips, guiding his movements. another couple rock slowly in missionary position. an older woman very thin, mid-60s, moves between the beds wearing only a light skirt. all of the couples are intensely quiet, so that beyond some relaxed breathing the main sound is the choir, unseen, and the complete effect is extremely calming.
there are red-robed monks in attendance, going from bed to bed, or assisting those not engaged in sexual acts. lighting candles. there is a shrine or altar against the far well. it too seems to be partly organic but it involved a statue, perhaps a virgin mary or perhaps a kannon. draped with flowers, painted gentle colors. this is a temple shrine but also a resting point for the pilgrims.
now the rest of the procession passes along. the daughters from the two families, one white one darker skinned, walk side by side, the former in red robes, the latter in white. the gypsy son is excited by the temple and won't stop talking, slips between the bars, bounces around and makes lewd comments. an attendant dressed in blue comes out. he looks like s.z. sakall. flutters his hands in consternation and tries to shoo the boy away. the father of the family from the off-white car resembles harrison ford from his indiana jones days. he makes a comment to the gypsy father along the lines of 'shouldn't you get a better handle on your son there?' so it seems that the one family were itinerants or gypsy pilgrims and harrison ford's family cast in the mold of something like doc brass or the quests/race bannon.
when the girls walk by me i say 'notice which of those people are actually praying to the shrine'. it is the only thing i say in this part of the dream. i am very attracted to them but am not part of either family group. i brush my hand against that of the white daughter, to impart a message. a sudden breeze and sound of closing or opening. she does not react but as she walks away i hear her voice in my head saying 'i am arguing with you'.
a desert mountain range, sky turning brown, dark rifts opening and out of these come angels, in the form of razor-like birds almost too thin to see, and manta rays but with the consistency of fabric and strange patterns on their skin, unpleasant color combinations of dark greens golds and purples. they are hostile. later it is deep night and we are in the backyard of a large empty house. trees, a pool, and fireflies. we are moving the bodies of fallen angels but cannot see them. still the sense that they are massive and heavy as with moisture, strangely built.
i am with a friend whose identity i can no longer recall. i have my walking stick and we are going down a dirt road beneath a corridor of trees, thick forest on both sides, but not foreboding. it is cool and we are in mottled shadows. when we reach the point where the dirt becomes pavement i announce "Now we are moving back into the Old Testament!". we are pilgrims on a biblical path.
a car approaches behind us, an older model, off-white. we step aside to let it pass. up ahead we find one car and then another, both broken down, roadsters. ostentatious is the word that occurs to me in the dream. a family of arabs or gypsies (darker skin, eclectic clothing, character "types", a carnivale feel) is sitting around. the other car has stopped and the family inside offers to take them along. we pass by a vanagon; through the open door i see a dark-skinned man and a woman on a blanket, half-dressed, making love. they watch the procession without shame or much interest.
now we are in a natural gallery of brown stone. there must be windows high up on the left wall to let in light. my friend is gone and i'm wearing the robes of a monk. choral music in the air like the composition of orlande lassus. on the right a temple hewn into the stone.
i cannot describe it very well. the entrance is an opening between a screen of pillars that are perhaps more of a grating since they do not reach all the way to the floor or ceiling. organic, antonio gaudi. i approach the entrance and can see inside cots and tall beds with white sheets, placed at random. couples on them making love in many positions. again their ethnicity seems to be eastern. one man is entering a woman from behind and his friend, also male, puts his hands on his hips, guiding his movements. another couple rock slowly in missionary position. an older woman very thin, mid-60s, moves between the beds wearing only a light skirt. all of the couples are intensely quiet, so that beyond some relaxed breathing the main sound is the choir, unseen, and the complete effect is extremely calming.
there are red-robed monks in attendance, going from bed to bed, or assisting those not engaged in sexual acts. lighting candles. there is a shrine or altar against the far well. it too seems to be partly organic but it involved a statue, perhaps a virgin mary or perhaps a kannon. draped with flowers, painted gentle colors. this is a temple shrine but also a resting point for the pilgrims.
now the rest of the procession passes along. the daughters from the two families, one white one darker skinned, walk side by side, the former in red robes, the latter in white. the gypsy son is excited by the temple and won't stop talking, slips between the bars, bounces around and makes lewd comments. an attendant dressed in blue comes out. he looks like s.z. sakall. flutters his hands in consternation and tries to shoo the boy away. the father of the family from the off-white car resembles harrison ford from his indiana jones days. he makes a comment to the gypsy father along the lines of 'shouldn't you get a better handle on your son there?' so it seems that the one family were itinerants or gypsy pilgrims and harrison ford's family cast in the mold of something like doc brass or the quests/race bannon.
when the girls walk by me i say 'notice which of those people are actually praying to the shrine'. it is the only thing i say in this part of the dream. i am very attracted to them but am not part of either family group. i brush my hand against that of the white daughter, to impart a message. a sudden breeze and sound of closing or opening. she does not react but as she walks away i hear her voice in my head saying 'i am arguing with you'.
20.6.09
always quieter before & after a rain
always quieter before & after a rain "the lonely one who died less lonely"
straighter than not
walking the side of the road in the dark, ranting about a clock radio "had to get out of here". ma would you promise me one thing? promise me you won't do that again, you coulda got hit by a car. won't be any coming out of this, not for her not for us, understand better the old man wandering the mist in amarcord. retching twenty hours out of the day, bringing up nothing but that rough sound, daily enemas for god knows what purpose. to get old in such a way
to be so like a child oncemore
what were then quirks and eccentricities become now dangerous. mind your mind, keep your eye clean.
idea that once i get away i will be coming out new, a chance to begin right this t ime. no more anger blackness or sloth. but have i changed enough within for that to? what changes do i recognize in myself over the past three years. what conscious, what subconscious. a wider breadth of knowledge, a looser manner, something of a larger awareness. but still the old pettiness, still the old clinging, still the desperate need for the female nod. and then the subsequent rejection. better serve me as images and signifiers than persons. she is not she, she is that thing upon which i can impress. boy that can enjoy invis-ibil-ity.
reduced to a single initial
a name is a name is a name.
no sociability outside the internet and even on it something of a falling off. no desire to compete anymore, to vie for that sort of patronage. that favor. need money: for: rent, food, medication, books, poss. tuition. w/o books i would not have made it even this far. w/o j/o. these volumes i covet.
acceptance of or rejection of the personal "i" in writing
depending on tradition or school?
"watching from the train window
i am moved beyond it in a dream"
all the letters i wrote. photos exchanged. tacked to a wall or a corkboard, glossy faces to sustain me each day. out there they wait and wish me well. i used to write many letters. i found it some of the easiest writing i'd ever done. usually it didnt even matter to whom i wrote, though i preferred girls. i just liked writing them and getting them. preparing the envelope especially pleased me. i dont get many letters anymore, or any, at all.
she lifts her skirts to reveal the subtle metaphysics of Heraclitus.
a mind undone by solitude, loosened in the middle and drifting gently apart from the edges outward.
he remembers yet his old desires
It was a good century for the song.
straighter than not
walking the side of the road in the dark, ranting about a clock radio "had to get out of here". ma would you promise me one thing? promise me you won't do that again, you coulda got hit by a car. won't be any coming out of this, not for her not for us, understand better the old man wandering the mist in amarcord. retching twenty hours out of the day, bringing up nothing but that rough sound, daily enemas for god knows what purpose. to get old in such a way
to be so like a child oncemore
what were then quirks and eccentricities become now dangerous. mind your mind, keep your eye clean.
idea that once i get away i will be coming out new, a chance to begin right this t ime. no more anger blackness or sloth. but have i changed enough within for that to? what changes do i recognize in myself over the past three years. what conscious, what subconscious. a wider breadth of knowledge, a looser manner, something of a larger awareness. but still the old pettiness, still the old clinging, still the desperate need for the female nod. and then the subsequent rejection. better serve me as images and signifiers than persons. she is not she, she is that thing upon which i can impress. boy that can enjoy invis-ibil-ity.
reduced to a single initial
a name is a name is a name.
no sociability outside the internet and even on it something of a falling off. no desire to compete anymore, to vie for that sort of patronage. that favor. need money: for: rent, food, medication, books, poss. tuition. w/o books i would not have made it even this far. w/o j/o. these volumes i covet.
acceptance of or rejection of the personal "i" in writing
depending on tradition or school?
"watching from the train window
i am moved beyond it in a dream"
all the letters i wrote. photos exchanged. tacked to a wall or a corkboard, glossy faces to sustain me each day. out there they wait and wish me well. i used to write many letters. i found it some of the easiest writing i'd ever done. usually it didnt even matter to whom i wrote, though i preferred girls. i just liked writing them and getting them. preparing the envelope especially pleased me. i dont get many letters anymore, or any, at all.
she lifts her skirts to reveal the subtle metaphysics of Heraclitus.
a mind undone by solitude, loosened in the middle and drifting gently apart from the edges outward.
he remembers yet his old desires
It was a good century for the song.
13.6.09
To Remember
1. create a more solid sense of time and place. setting.
2. diffuse allusions. making less obvious precursors, inspirations, and referents.
3. symbols, language, and images established in opening dream and first story must pay off as rest unfolds. bathhouse in particular has great significance. location never directly visited only referred to in past from viewpoint of present. as well descent into subaqueous setting. water is sexual and death. deep mystery unable to be fully expressed or comprehended. the alphabelle harem.
4. creation of emotional connection to characters to bring along reader to the point where prose loses its intentional opacity. travelogue as narrator enters remove from homeland dialect and incomprehensible style dissipate, easier to grasp immediately but at sacrifice of oneiric qualities, wonder at the mundane that borders on glossolalia.
5. travelogue, collection of anecdotes (death of midget, angel of the woods, visitation at the arcades, visit to the Place by the Pier), confessional, uncongealed theosophic exploration.
all leading to center of universe = flooded city = cosmic mountain = mountain in form of massive cathedral which is place where gods imagined/born. after that point? ends with pursuit and no resolution
poems that are two parallel columns or perhaps situated vertically, horizontally, upside down etc all in combination. typography as means to control eye travel and pace of reader or to say reader's pace. excited by possibility but would not want to fall into gimmick. also lack of knowledge, absolute no idea how to do this in Word for example
but still excitement freedom from conventional punctuation, esp. left justified text, so many ellipses to indicate gentle swell and fall
wanting to read and see wahwt B. read and saw (French authors, French 'cinema' etc) not so much out of self-improvement perhaps partly to be interested in what she was interested in but mainly out of sense of competition
having
to keep up w/. everyone else in my apprehension of culture...to say that I'd fallen behind and so often do not discover things on my own (or am not conscious of it) but am told watch this or read this (Godard, Pound< others) / / not an idea man, but when given an idea can def run with it, self-image not a creative man I sit and am idle so many days but if someone says Do this then I can do it w some burst of originality hwever..will not happen on its own
what was most exciting of all; encountering this girl who was already established intellctually, had a grounding totally foreign to my own mind and able to articulate . . . . so that I was able to sit at the feet for once and request knowledge, but only exciting in a girl, in a fellow 20=something moribund no rare thing to find
2. diffuse allusions. making less obvious precursors, inspirations, and referents.
3. symbols, language, and images established in opening dream and first story must pay off as rest unfolds. bathhouse in particular has great significance. location never directly visited only referred to in past from viewpoint of present. as well descent into subaqueous setting. water is sexual and death. deep mystery unable to be fully expressed or comprehended. the alphabelle harem.
4. creation of emotional connection to characters to bring along reader to the point where prose loses its intentional opacity. travelogue as narrator enters remove from homeland dialect and incomprehensible style dissipate, easier to grasp immediately but at sacrifice of oneiric qualities, wonder at the mundane that borders on glossolalia.
5. travelogue, collection of anecdotes (death of midget, angel of the woods, visitation at the arcades, visit to the Place by the Pier), confessional, uncongealed theosophic exploration.
all leading to center of universe = flooded city = cosmic mountain = mountain in form of massive cathedral which is place where gods imagined/born. after that point? ends with pursuit and no resolution
poems that are two parallel columns or perhaps situated vertically, horizontally, upside down etc all in combination. typography as means to control eye travel and pace of reader or to say reader's pace. excited by possibility but would not want to fall into gimmick. also lack of knowledge, absolute no idea how to do this in Word for example
but still excitement freedom from conventional punctuation, esp. left justified text, so many ellipses to indicate gentle swell and fall
wanting to read and see wahwt B. read and saw (French authors, French 'cinema' etc) not so much out of self-improvement perhaps partly to be interested in what she was interested in but mainly out of sense of competition
having
to keep up w/. everyone else in my apprehension of culture...to say that I'd fallen behind and so often do not discover things on my own (or am not conscious of it) but am told watch this or read this (Godard, Pound< others) / / not an idea man, but when given an idea can def run with it, self-image not a creative man I sit and am idle so many days but if someone says Do this then I can do it w some burst of originality hwever..will not happen on its own
what was most exciting of all; encountering this girl who was already established intellctually, had a grounding totally foreign to my own mind and able to articulate . . . . so that I was able to sit at the feet for once and request knowledge, but only exciting in a girl, in a fellow 20=something moribund no rare thing to find
24.4.09
afternoon nap dream
upright black plastic casket adjacent to driveway replaces willow tree of waking world. it contains charred skeleton of my aunt peggy suspended from a hook. shreds of clothing still cling to bones. it speaks to me. disappearing around the corner a priest, member of society that prays to one of seven hills surrounding Golgotha.
11.3.09
I Am the Arm, and I sound like this
Last night's dream:
Sitting on the floor of my room with my mom looking up at the TV, watching Twin Peaks. Dale Cooper in a small brightly lit room with light blue cinderblock walls and a cot. The Man From Another Place is on the cot. He is dying. He speaks to Cooper in his backwards talk but I can't remember what he says. His proportions are grotesquely exaggerated so that his head is bulbous and his hands are extremely tiny and delicate, translucent skin. They act with actions separate from the rest of his body.
The Man motions for Cooper to come closer and Cooper gently takes him in his arms. A silver caul is spreading over the Man's face. He motions again and says something, speaking normally, and Cooper leans closer to hear him. My vision blurs and my eyes hurt. Rest of dream interspersed with flashes of strange gala in the maritime room of the Museum of Natural History, but white, sterile, people in formal dress passing in quiet murmur with slow movements between models of jellyfish and eels in glass display pillars. The Man deliberately opens his mouth abnormally wide and makes a horrible noise. It is his death noise. It won't stop. Neither Cooper nor the Man move but the noise grows. There is an electric and manifold quality in it. Three voices screaming at once. It is terrifying.
Woke at past 4 AM with tears streaming down my face. Lay in bed with the lights on, reading Wallace Stevens with the radio tuned to a station playing the Chipmunks version of "Witch Doctor". Read and reread "The Place of the Solitaries" because the words refused to stay in my mind.
Other dreams:
I am standing in my bathroom in front of the mirror when the silhouette of a figure in trenchcoat and hat runs in and jabs a rasp into my spine. Sudden sharp pain. I run after him down the stairs, passing a young man and woman kneeling on the landing in conversation. In the furnace room I find the silhouette hanging from the window in the form of a pattern cut from a swath of felt.
Preparing a summer buffet in the garage with my parents. A fantastic storm outside. Some sort of catastrophe, and standing in dining room watching winds and clouds come over the treeline, the house shaking. Then in a fenced in yard in the city watching creatures flying through the sky. They are the spirits of tornadoes. I say there is no choice but to go through the fence, though everyone is afraid of what we will find. Serpents and a mass of panicked people. Catastrophic weather visited upon the city. We are in a park square in daylight, people milling around, shocked. Rumors and uncertainty. A black man shouting that a friend of a friend knows it was terrorists and he was shooting them in his backyard with a shotgun and all us niggas should shoot terrorists. Then a young woman watching news report on her cellphone. We gather around. Something about rubble being used to reinforce foundations as a cheap fix, and that now failing. Then the pavements and streets start to crack and fall away. My mother and sister taken. I survive by grabbing onto a wire hanging from a bridge above.
Nighttime. Martial law now. A radio station broadcasting from a shack, the owners let me sleep in the backroom. I wake up to fires in the streets, muggy summer heat, again crowds of people with nothing to do. My father arguing with two policemen. He had asked them to watch his bicycle and truck while we slept and both are now missing. The cops do not care.
Dream light on plot but strong sensations, vivid impressions of the frustration and uncertainty of a mass of people confronted with emergency and catastrophe. The individuals tired of the ranting black man and growing close to violence. The heat, sweat, and body smells. The imposition of authority from outside forces.
Sitting on the floor of my room with my mom looking up at the TV, watching Twin Peaks. Dale Cooper in a small brightly lit room with light blue cinderblock walls and a cot. The Man From Another Place is on the cot. He is dying. He speaks to Cooper in his backwards talk but I can't remember what he says. His proportions are grotesquely exaggerated so that his head is bulbous and his hands are extremely tiny and delicate, translucent skin. They act with actions separate from the rest of his body.
The Man motions for Cooper to come closer and Cooper gently takes him in his arms. A silver caul is spreading over the Man's face. He motions again and says something, speaking normally, and Cooper leans closer to hear him. My vision blurs and my eyes hurt. Rest of dream interspersed with flashes of strange gala in the maritime room of the Museum of Natural History, but white, sterile, people in formal dress passing in quiet murmur with slow movements between models of jellyfish and eels in glass display pillars. The Man deliberately opens his mouth abnormally wide and makes a horrible noise. It is his death noise. It won't stop. Neither Cooper nor the Man move but the noise grows. There is an electric and manifold quality in it. Three voices screaming at once. It is terrifying.
Woke at past 4 AM with tears streaming down my face. Lay in bed with the lights on, reading Wallace Stevens with the radio tuned to a station playing the Chipmunks version of "Witch Doctor". Read and reread "The Place of the Solitaries" because the words refused to stay in my mind.
Other dreams:
I am standing in my bathroom in front of the mirror when the silhouette of a figure in trenchcoat and hat runs in and jabs a rasp into my spine. Sudden sharp pain. I run after him down the stairs, passing a young man and woman kneeling on the landing in conversation. In the furnace room I find the silhouette hanging from the window in the form of a pattern cut from a swath of felt.
Preparing a summer buffet in the garage with my parents. A fantastic storm outside. Some sort of catastrophe, and standing in dining room watching winds and clouds come over the treeline, the house shaking. Then in a fenced in yard in the city watching creatures flying through the sky. They are the spirits of tornadoes. I say there is no choice but to go through the fence, though everyone is afraid of what we will find. Serpents and a mass of panicked people. Catastrophic weather visited upon the city. We are in a park square in daylight, people milling around, shocked. Rumors and uncertainty. A black man shouting that a friend of a friend knows it was terrorists and he was shooting them in his backyard with a shotgun and all us niggas should shoot terrorists. Then a young woman watching news report on her cellphone. We gather around. Something about rubble being used to reinforce foundations as a cheap fix, and that now failing. Then the pavements and streets start to crack and fall away. My mother and sister taken. I survive by grabbing onto a wire hanging from a bridge above.
Nighttime. Martial law now. A radio station broadcasting from a shack, the owners let me sleep in the backroom. I wake up to fires in the streets, muggy summer heat, again crowds of people with nothing to do. My father arguing with two policemen. He had asked them to watch his bicycle and truck while we slept and both are now missing. The cops do not care.
Dream light on plot but strong sensations, vivid impressions of the frustration and uncertainty of a mass of people confronted with emergency and catastrophe. The individuals tired of the ranting black man and growing close to violence. The heat, sweat, and body smells. The imposition of authority from outside forces.
27.2.09
Angel dream
From the basement window seeing a blizzard approach. I take my mother and many girls I know in a truck to attempt escape. We make a stopover late at night at a small building out in a swampy cypress forest. Need for food and water. From the outside it appears to be a convenience store but inside it is a sort of arcade with prize machines. We are shuttled in through the glass entrance gate as part of a tour group disembarking a bus. One member of the group is an obese man in a hospital gown. On his back he carries the corpse of a thin sharp-featured black man.
Inside the arcade it is cramped, velvet ropes guide us along a path. The impresario, a short greasy bald man in a shabby green suit, gives each of us a token and leads us from machine to machine. My token is a foam rubber zero. The obese hospital patient touches it for me, to give it his luck. At a machine in the corner I win a handful of toy snakes.
The tone of the dream shifts. The corpse of the black man begins to burn with a white light but is not consumed. It rises in the air, limbs stretched taut and wide. The obese man falls to his knees. He is possessed. He preaches in a long stream of delirium but I cannot remember the words, which frightened me. Screams come from the air. I am trying to tell my mother I'm sorry to have brought her there but she can't hear. The black man's eyes are all white with tiny black pupils and they are staring at me. No irises.
Then I am in the parking lot and it is morning. The people walking by, most of them black, have white paint across their faces to identify themselves as witnesses to the visitation. Back in the truck I try to explain to someone what happened. I pull a small notebook out of my pocket. In it are moving sketches of people from the arcade. They are all in attitudes of tension and fear and above them are wiry figures, angels, sense of the angels being pulled from their bodies and it is a painful process. All I can think to say to the person is that it was a moment of extreme terror and extreme joy, occurring simultaneously within. Dream ends with us driving at night through some sort of power plant where flames shoot from a labyrinth of pipes and silent men move about in safety suits.
Following dream was about the cathedral again. I witness the wedding of a girl very dear to me to a man I dislike. I go mad and cause a scene, screaming obscenities. Can vividly remember shouting CUNT CUNT at her family over and over again. In his office a kind priest offers me advice. Again I cannot remember it. He hands me a large bible. On the top half of the page is Scripture, on the lower half commentary and preparatory questions.
Then presented with possible futures. In one I enter a forest grove. Trees so towering and closegrown in a circle do not know how I got in. The light of it has a green quality. Quaint cottage on a ridge above idyllic pond. The girl and her husband are there dressed as knight and his lady. Wagnerian opera.
In the other future I advance through the cathedral into a small dining room. Narrow windows high above like in the Medici chapel. Heavy wooden cupboards, ornate ornamentation. On the table are carefully placed chessboards. All of them abandoned midgame. I walk up to the table and drink from a glass of richly yellow wine. The next room is large and would be an open space if not for tall stacks of books making a labyrinth through it. I encounter three men, assassins, and a fourth man whom I expect to help me. Instead he kills the three assassins and then immediately turns on me. I don't feel the bullets enter but I look down at the bullet holes and watch the blood run out. He leaves me bleeding on the floor.
Inside the arcade it is cramped, velvet ropes guide us along a path. The impresario, a short greasy bald man in a shabby green suit, gives each of us a token and leads us from machine to machine. My token is a foam rubber zero. The obese hospital patient touches it for me, to give it his luck. At a machine in the corner I win a handful of toy snakes.
The tone of the dream shifts. The corpse of the black man begins to burn with a white light but is not consumed. It rises in the air, limbs stretched taut and wide. The obese man falls to his knees. He is possessed. He preaches in a long stream of delirium but I cannot remember the words, which frightened me. Screams come from the air. I am trying to tell my mother I'm sorry to have brought her there but she can't hear. The black man's eyes are all white with tiny black pupils and they are staring at me. No irises.
Then I am in the parking lot and it is morning. The people walking by, most of them black, have white paint across their faces to identify themselves as witnesses to the visitation. Back in the truck I try to explain to someone what happened. I pull a small notebook out of my pocket. In it are moving sketches of people from the arcade. They are all in attitudes of tension and fear and above them are wiry figures, angels, sense of the angels being pulled from their bodies and it is a painful process. All I can think to say to the person is that it was a moment of extreme terror and extreme joy, occurring simultaneously within. Dream ends with us driving at night through some sort of power plant where flames shoot from a labyrinth of pipes and silent men move about in safety suits.
Following dream was about the cathedral again. I witness the wedding of a girl very dear to me to a man I dislike. I go mad and cause a scene, screaming obscenities. Can vividly remember shouting CUNT CUNT at her family over and over again. In his office a kind priest offers me advice. Again I cannot remember it. He hands me a large bible. On the top half of the page is Scripture, on the lower half commentary and preparatory questions.
Then presented with possible futures. In one I enter a forest grove. Trees so towering and closegrown in a circle do not know how I got in. The light of it has a green quality. Quaint cottage on a ridge above idyllic pond. The girl and her husband are there dressed as knight and his lady. Wagnerian opera.
In the other future I advance through the cathedral into a small dining room. Narrow windows high above like in the Medici chapel. Heavy wooden cupboards, ornate ornamentation. On the table are carefully placed chessboards. All of them abandoned midgame. I walk up to the table and drink from a glass of richly yellow wine. The next room is large and would be an open space if not for tall stacks of books making a labyrinth through it. I encounter three men, assassins, and a fourth man whom I expect to help me. Instead he kills the three assassins and then immediately turns on me. I don't feel the bullets enter but I look down at the bullet holes and watch the blood run out. He leaves me bleeding on the floor.
26.1.09
I keep meaning to finish/revise this some day
I go into the vagina automat. You drop a coin in the slot and a panel on the wall slides open revealing a clear plastic square behind which an anonymous young woman is spreading her legs, showing you up close her perfectly formed labia majora. It's the year 30xx. My name? Gideon Moore, PCI.
Just me up in my office with the moon in the sky looking like a bullet hole in a velvet rose. Got a missing person case: H. Nomon, stepped into the variegate crowds and became a whisper. Can't even find a trace of him on psychotransmission. It'll be a real wicket turn, but give me the whiff and ten to sure I'll bring you the man in flesh before chromodawn. Computer, dossier on H. Nomon.
>>A man like any other. His face was not so much a face as it was a collection of answers to questions asked by others' eyes. Lived alone, loved a lamb, laughed a little.
Enhance.
>>But oh to pluck forth the pearl burning in his heart! To waken the silence asleep in his blood! That then was to stir up a beast with a crystal smile. That then was folly.
Enhance.
>>They speak of it quietly, gathered in shuddering circles beneath the lamplight. And no two can agree. His image was never captured on camera directly, as if its brazen solidness offended the circuitry itself. What is a known certitude? Only that he'll oft take an hour in arm and waltz it in circles away to cold oblivion.
Enhance.
>>Beep boop. I'm sorry Gideon. That's all DataPub5 has on him.
Been run through a marmle filter. Means I'll be hitting the streets again.
>>Would it help to talk about your mother?
My mother? She was an all right piece of work, for a woman. Never knew what hit her after the Crash though. Wish they made her model again. Only the Etruscan artisans had such an understanding of curved lines and negative space. But they're gone now.
>>And your father?
Nix on my old man.
>>Understood. However if you like to make your rod bigger than God's, please click here.
Bard Muhammed's Shisha Cafe is away in the old slaughteryards district. Get there by the Arkangel El if you can spare the change. I can. A blue and smoky brick building folded up in some back-alley always wet with fat strands of rain. Bard's an anarchoperv and a Neo-Arabian to boot but the fellah's on the level when he's not chewing pixie's pussyhairs. Sometimes he touches me for some credits. I don't begrudge him that. Sometimes he touches me for a cheap thrill. That don't phase me neither.
Evening Bard, I say. I'll take some tea, I say. The drinking kind.
"Ah Mr. Moore, always the pleasure to see you. Try the Pai Mu Tan, I synthesize it fresh this morning. Stirred with stimstim stick especial for you."
Thanks. Tea is hot, steeped for precisely three minutes two point eight seconds, served in an iron pot shaped like a fat woman's ladyparts. Sublime artistry. I need info, Bard. What do you know about H. Nomon?
"Ah effendi, you mean the Man Who Weeps. A strange person, known by all of Bard's friends, yes. But it is far too early to speak of this. Let us commiserate instead, Mr. Moore."
A light goes on across the way and from a high window the shadow of a man begins to cry through his trumpet. He's telling a story lonesome and about a woman, a story I already know because it's been written on the back of my eyelids since before my first tumble in the sweating jungles of love. The man pauses to breathe then tells the story again, louder, and when it finally ends it's just him and his trumpet and all that's left of the woman is a question mark of smoke drawing its fingers through the sapphire curtain of rain. Bard Muhammed's well-fed voice sidles its way between the dark metallic notes. He's speaking about the infinite vault of the heavens, the night putting on its cloak that is not ceaseless because it never had a beginning from which to cease. He's telling me about his boyhood with the blue nomads flaying apostates on the shifting sands beneath the shells of abandoned refineries. He says my name and tells me that in that place there was no patholopolis to obscure the sky with its perpetual lights so that he could see clearly the Follower and the crown of the Swan and the long caravan of camels passing beneath Orion's foot, figures unwitnessed by anyone here in Chicago Alpha. And then something else he says I don't understand about the speed of light and that we only see in reality the ghosts of the stars, perhaps eons dead, afterimages caught in time's smaragdine cashbox, is this not so effendi?
When I come up out of the dream Bard has my pinkie halfway up his nostril and a deft paw going for my gizmo. Room's got a stink like damp flour and yeast.
-Take a soak, wise guy. I still need to know about H. Nomon.
"Apologies effendi. A man has needs. I can help you to find info if you like."
-Tell me more about 'to find info'.
"That mirror in the rear wall is a holographogram. Give it the correct password and enter the Secret Area where is Johnny Fiveaces. He is a man with answers for you. But wait Mr. Moore. I just get in new shipment of vat-grown Miranda constructs, highest quality, most delicate ilia. Care to sample? In the future hebephilia is legal. It is encouraged. A man has needs."
-No time for love, fat man.
Password for the mirror: What time is the electric fair? You ever walk through a mercury jellyfish? Then you know what it's like to walk through a mirror.
The backroom is small and dark. Wet. Heavy mechanical breath coming from the exposed vents above my head. Thick trails of honey staining the walls. A vintage American jukebox is in the far corner, dimly flickering reds and purples in smooth cylindrical neon. It rasps the name "Anna Karina, Anna Karina" over and over. Johnny Fiveaces has his chair propped against the wall, one leg resting on a small round wood table. He's wearing slickshades and smoking an oldstyle swaggerette. The bright orange scarf around his neck is out of place, even for a temporal vagrant. A tough customer, but I'm a jasper what knows how to make the hard sell.
I cross the room, lean forward on the table, let him see the Getsiv-model stubnose pistol strapped to my side. Johnny Fiveaces. I hear tell you're the poor sap that came loose from his own timeline. Sounds a raw deal to me.
He takes a drag on the swaggerette, lets it out in my face. "Tell me something I don't know, kid. Say, you got weird eyes. Spheres--"
The color of cat's breath. Yeah, I know. Got 'em custom made. I also hear tell you keep the Ace of Time in your backpocket. You got your name on account of that. Suppose you wish you'd folded now.
"S'pose I do. S'pose you tell me why you're here before I give you a straight boot to your yarbles."
Cut the jawing, Fiveaces. You got a mouth as big as your nose and you open either again I'm liable to bust 'em both. Now I got a platinum chit here says you'll help me find a missing person.
That gets his attention. He scratches his goatee and takes a quick snort from a mug I didn't even know he was holding. "Who're you looking for?"
Nomon.
"Heh. Should be easy to find then."
Just me up in my office with the moon in the sky looking like a bullet hole in a velvet rose. Got a missing person case: H. Nomon, stepped into the variegate crowds and became a whisper. Can't even find a trace of him on psychotransmission. It'll be a real wicket turn, but give me the whiff and ten to sure I'll bring you the man in flesh before chromodawn. Computer, dossier on H. Nomon.
>>A man like any other. His face was not so much a face as it was a collection of answers to questions asked by others' eyes. Lived alone, loved a lamb, laughed a little.
Enhance.
>>But oh to pluck forth the pearl burning in his heart! To waken the silence asleep in his blood! That then was to stir up a beast with a crystal smile. That then was folly.
Enhance.
>>They speak of it quietly, gathered in shuddering circles beneath the lamplight. And no two can agree. His image was never captured on camera directly, as if its brazen solidness offended the circuitry itself. What is a known certitude? Only that he'll oft take an hour in arm and waltz it in circles away to cold oblivion.
Enhance.
>>Beep boop. I'm sorry Gideon. That's all DataPub5 has on him.
Been run through a marmle filter. Means I'll be hitting the streets again.
>>Would it help to talk about your mother?
My mother? She was an all right piece of work, for a woman. Never knew what hit her after the Crash though. Wish they made her model again. Only the Etruscan artisans had such an understanding of curved lines and negative space. But they're gone now.
>>And your father?
Nix on my old man.
>>Understood. However if you like to make your rod bigger than God's, please click here.
Bard Muhammed's Shisha Cafe is away in the old slaughteryards district. Get there by the Arkangel El if you can spare the change. I can. A blue and smoky brick building folded up in some back-alley always wet with fat strands of rain. Bard's an anarchoperv and a Neo-Arabian to boot but the fellah's on the level when he's not chewing pixie's pussyhairs. Sometimes he touches me for some credits. I don't begrudge him that. Sometimes he touches me for a cheap thrill. That don't phase me neither.
Evening Bard, I say. I'll take some tea, I say. The drinking kind.
"Ah Mr. Moore, always the pleasure to see you. Try the Pai Mu Tan, I synthesize it fresh this morning. Stirred with stimstim stick especial for you."
Thanks. Tea is hot, steeped for precisely three minutes two point eight seconds, served in an iron pot shaped like a fat woman's ladyparts. Sublime artistry. I need info, Bard. What do you know about H. Nomon?
"Ah effendi, you mean the Man Who Weeps. A strange person, known by all of Bard's friends, yes. But it is far too early to speak of this. Let us commiserate instead, Mr. Moore."
A light goes on across the way and from a high window the shadow of a man begins to cry through his trumpet. He's telling a story lonesome and about a woman, a story I already know because it's been written on the back of my eyelids since before my first tumble in the sweating jungles of love. The man pauses to breathe then tells the story again, louder, and when it finally ends it's just him and his trumpet and all that's left of the woman is a question mark of smoke drawing its fingers through the sapphire curtain of rain. Bard Muhammed's well-fed voice sidles its way between the dark metallic notes. He's speaking about the infinite vault of the heavens, the night putting on its cloak that is not ceaseless because it never had a beginning from which to cease. He's telling me about his boyhood with the blue nomads flaying apostates on the shifting sands beneath the shells of abandoned refineries. He says my name and tells me that in that place there was no patholopolis to obscure the sky with its perpetual lights so that he could see clearly the Follower and the crown of the Swan and the long caravan of camels passing beneath Orion's foot, figures unwitnessed by anyone here in Chicago Alpha. And then something else he says I don't understand about the speed of light and that we only see in reality the ghosts of the stars, perhaps eons dead, afterimages caught in time's smaragdine cashbox, is this not so effendi?
When I come up out of the dream Bard has my pinkie halfway up his nostril and a deft paw going for my gizmo. Room's got a stink like damp flour and yeast.
-Take a soak, wise guy. I still need to know about H. Nomon.
"Apologies effendi. A man has needs. I can help you to find info if you like."
-Tell me more about 'to find info'.
"That mirror in the rear wall is a holographogram. Give it the correct password and enter the Secret Area where is Johnny Fiveaces. He is a man with answers for you. But wait Mr. Moore. I just get in new shipment of vat-grown Miranda constructs, highest quality, most delicate ilia. Care to sample? In the future hebephilia is legal. It is encouraged. A man has needs."
-No time for love, fat man.
Password for the mirror: What time is the electric fair? You ever walk through a mercury jellyfish? Then you know what it's like to walk through a mirror.
The backroom is small and dark. Wet. Heavy mechanical breath coming from the exposed vents above my head. Thick trails of honey staining the walls. A vintage American jukebox is in the far corner, dimly flickering reds and purples in smooth cylindrical neon. It rasps the name "Anna Karina, Anna Karina" over and over. Johnny Fiveaces has his chair propped against the wall, one leg resting on a small round wood table. He's wearing slickshades and smoking an oldstyle swaggerette. The bright orange scarf around his neck is out of place, even for a temporal vagrant. A tough customer, but I'm a jasper what knows how to make the hard sell.
I cross the room, lean forward on the table, let him see the Getsiv-model stubnose pistol strapped to my side. Johnny Fiveaces. I hear tell you're the poor sap that came loose from his own timeline. Sounds a raw deal to me.
He takes a drag on the swaggerette, lets it out in my face. "Tell me something I don't know, kid. Say, you got weird eyes. Spheres--"
The color of cat's breath. Yeah, I know. Got 'em custom made. I also hear tell you keep the Ace of Time in your backpocket. You got your name on account of that. Suppose you wish you'd folded now.
"S'pose I do. S'pose you tell me why you're here before I give you a straight boot to your yarbles."
Cut the jawing, Fiveaces. You got a mouth as big as your nose and you open either again I'm liable to bust 'em both. Now I got a platinum chit here says you'll help me find a missing person.
That gets his attention. He scratches his goatee and takes a quick snort from a mug I didn't even know he was holding. "Who're you looking for?"
Nomon.
"Heh. Should be easy to find then."
24.1.09
Jugs of Paisano Wine Stacked Against the Far Concrete Wall
Yesterday I left the house for the first time since Christmas. Mother drove me to the liquor store. I bought a bottle of Balvenie Doublewood 12 year old. She bought a bottle of Bacardi Rum. While sitting in the car waiting for her and my sister to cash a check in Shop Rite I saw a middle-aged man in a blue Chelsea jersey (number 11, Ryan Giggs). That was boss to see.
Today was a listless day. Reheated a bowl of the mushroom & barley soup I made Thursday night and toasted (reluctantly) an Elios frozen pizza. With these I took the scotch straight, and a second time cut with filtered water.
Last night for my sister here before she goes back to college. Requested eggplant parmesan as a special dinner. While Mother made that I lit the kindling that dad had left prepared for me in the woodstove. He came home late with pizza and wings, offered it to me, and talked to no one else, this being the third night in a row for that or thereabouts.
Joking as much as I can and making Mother and my sister laugh but they can see the desperation behind it when I'm not careful, and sometimes the rage comes out, that force I can feel physically coming up through my chest. If I moved out would not know where to go or how I would get there, past three weeks temperature in high teens and left knee in great pain at times. Could perhaps live on disability for some while but have not yet applied. Could perhaps. A mental note to consider it. Otherwise? Death in a garbage heap where no one would find. Sleeping pills. The quietest, gentlest way. "Death by water". Words of Vimalakirti, sick because the world is sick. Ehhhhh.
Today was a listless day. Reheated a bowl of the mushroom & barley soup I made Thursday night and toasted (reluctantly) an Elios frozen pizza. With these I took the scotch straight, and a second time cut with filtered water.
Last night for my sister here before she goes back to college. Requested eggplant parmesan as a special dinner. While Mother made that I lit the kindling that dad had left prepared for me in the woodstove. He came home late with pizza and wings, offered it to me, and talked to no one else, this being the third night in a row for that or thereabouts.
Joking as much as I can and making Mother and my sister laugh but they can see the desperation behind it when I'm not careful, and sometimes the rage comes out, that force I can feel physically coming up through my chest. If I moved out would not know where to go or how I would get there, past three weeks temperature in high teens and left knee in great pain at times. Could perhaps live on disability for some while but have not yet applied. Could perhaps. A mental note to consider it. Otherwise? Death in a garbage heap where no one would find. Sleeping pills. The quietest, gentlest way. "Death by water". Words of Vimalakirti, sick because the world is sick. Ehhhhh.
22.1.09
I was in an attic too
Dream: in a dark room, only light coming from monitor, talking to BL on a screen (poss. indication of webcam). She is naked. Her room likewise dark, body frontlit by soft blue electronic light. Boxes, clutter, and old toys behind her. Rafters, slanted roof. A window? She relates to me story of her drive on a paved road going up through a forest. As she speaks I see it. Two cars drag racing further along. They collide. Fireball and improbable physics of cars flipping endlessly. A beautiful spectacle. When she is done talking I feel ashamed and inferior. Last dream before morning.
Many dreams of BL lately. I am sorry I was not a better friend to her. But as for the others I am not sorry. Harder and harder to hide my contempt lately. Trashgoblin. Traaaaaash GOBLIN!
Many dreams of BL lately. I am sorry I was not a better friend to her. But as for the others I am not sorry. Harder and harder to hide my contempt lately. Trashgoblin. Traaaaaash GOBLIN!
16.1.09
My posting bathysphere
for a nominal fee my bent and broken form, grown very much like a hoop, will discreetly command your erotic adventures from my subterranean bathysphere as i am fed nutrichum and slurry through various tubes and void my excretions into various other tubes, tiny sponges dipped in anodyne swabbing the puckered whorls of my pale skin, awash in throbbing glow of an oldstlye monitor . . . it is the perfect experience . . . now tell her you are so into her tattoos . . . ask her precisely how she styles the thatch of her pubic area . . . lean in . . . brush that strand of hair back over her eyes . . . yessssssss . . .
9.12.08
it's not quite what we're looking for
New Dawn Fades took only 13 days to reject my Gideon Moore piece. Guess it wasn't punk enough for them . . . but they'll be sorry once my particular brand of ironic cybernoir really takes off . . . yessir
30.10.08
repetitions
mostly an experiment in style imitating the repetition allusions and accumulations of David Markson's books, the later ones. incls. lines from Paris Transition 5 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Between Myself and Death by Kenneth Rexroth which has that one good line but the rest I'm indifferent toward, sorry.
--
For five days the cat was dying and to get away from it I went to the store with my mother and sister. At the store I could not let on that my cat was dying. It was college shopping. We looked at bins of pencil holders, at wastebaskets, at kitchenware, at furniture, at linens and all through it I thought about my cat dying. We didn't talk about it. We did what people do when they shop, which was to browse and make small comments and act very interested in the things on the shelves. I only mentioned it once, in the pet care section, I said Make sure you get a new can of treats. I was thinking of Neko. When Cleo died I wanted her to take her cat treats with her and so we'd need a fresh can for Neko. Practicalities.
No one there knew my cat was dying. It seemed strange to me that I could walk through the store with such an immense feeling in my head, and in my heart this tightening, and no one knew. I try to keep that in mind now, when I am at places and people annoy me. Maybe this or that person is acting the way they do because they have a cat at home and the cat is dying. Everybody carrying something with them that they can't let on about. I try to think of this and understand people through it. It doesn't always work but it can be a help. Some people are inherently assholes, but for some, it is the cat.
-------
Oh give off this moody brooding!
-------
So many people who were important to me who are now silent. The cold hand fallen between us. But still a swelling of affection. My great doubts, their great doubts, even in the midst of our meanness take the layers away and they have their doubts and their fears and their desires just as I do. I don't hate any of them. I do not understand and I do not agree but I do not hate. The great swell of affection that comes at night in the small cold room, in the dark, that says May you be well. May you deal with your doubts in the best way. May you come through it eventually.
-------
Compassion dwells in my heart. But it is deep in there and rises only on a shambles of a balls of a paternoster.
-------
The moon in the sky like a bullethole in a velvet rose.
-------
K___ very fine, S_____ very fine, M____ very fine, all very fine and excellent people, all very excellent, all very fine.
-------
You could fit a whole person between us, he said.
-------
In my backyard: 1 Trembling Aspen, 2 Black Oaks, 1 Hearty Catalpa, 1 White Spruce, 3 Scrub Pines. Others as yet undetermined.
The leaves of the hearty catalpa are six inches in length and broad, shaped like hearts. Its seed pods are long, brown, and leathery. They seem slick to the touch but leave no residue on the skin. The needles of the pines grow in paired bunches whereas the needles of the spruce grow singularly. On windy days it is said the leaves of the trembling aspen resemble half-dollars.
-------
Good days and bad days. Days neither good nor bad. Always a change. At times the energy coming through and that manic outward push. For love. For love. At times drawing inward and my eye turning, regarding the inexpressible place behind my inner shadow.
-------
I am sorry for many of the things I have said.
-------
She died down in the basement with her head hanging at an angle off the pillow, her whiskers matted to her cheek, yellow bile dripping from her mouth staining the concrete. She had already stiffened. I gentled the body, cleaned it, felt the stillness beneath the fur as I had with the dog, and made sure they buried her with proper provisions for the journey.
She died alone because I was too afraid to go into the back room as her spasms worsened. I was afraid of death. I wish I had not let her die alone but I also accept that my fear was normal and I understand why I acted as I did.
A good cat.
-------
I put your naked body
Between myself alone and death . . .
-------
D____ a very fine person, M___ a very fine person, B__ a very fine person, all very fine people, all excellent people.
-------
The spot on my jawline where the hair grows in a swirl.
-------
The shale cliff that overhangs Lake Champlain and the knotted black roots of pines that show through. How much cliff will remain in ten years? In twenty? Fifty years from now the cabins will have gone, taken by the waters.
Lying on the couch, the clock ticking midnight and later, hearing through the porch screen the waters touching the rocks and again the rocks and again the water, until it and sleep became one flow in my brain and I was overcome.
-------
For two years I have lived at home. It is good and bad, it is neither good nor bad. I have time now, at least, for the tiniest of things. It can all go by. It can all change. When I have time.
-------
The stiffness of my knees in the early morning. In the late night, the tightness of my legs, the right one dragging slightly as I go to bed.
-------
And the whole city sleeping drifts
through white space
like a lost dirigible
unconscious of
the immense mystery.
-------
You ever seen the neon rain slanting down between the quicksilver skyscrapers of Chicago Alpha like the tears of some burning indigo angel?
Course you ain't.
-------
They called me an asshole and they were right.
-------
M____ again very fine, D____ and S_____ and K___ all very good all very fine people.
-------
There is compassion in my heart. For every act of mine that wounds, there is also the capacity for an act that will bring comfort.
-------
unconscious of the immense mystery
-------
An erection for every man! thereby his hat to hang.
------
Each of us is given sorrows and given blessings. The unknown sorrows of others. I have a fear that I am boring. I have a fear of dying. It is the same. For months at a time I am motivated by my own mortality. Fears and sorrows. People I talked to who first revealed their doubts and then hid them, after I had spoken enough. People and their doubts, everyone and their doubts. Girls. I am sorry that girls. I did not consider enough.
------
Wolf's doing the mostly ghostly strut baby, five inches of air tween me and Baba Urf.
------
Discovering that the French word for "Jew", juif, is also slang for "pimp".
------
According to Revell's translation of Guillame Apollinaire at least.
-------
In the afternoon we sat on the bed and watched through the window a storm coming. A taste of metal in the air beneath the rapidly thinning pressure. Highly anticipated by her, these storms I cared little for. It came quickly over the slate rooftops and lashed the trees to green froth and then was gone, leaving us still on the bed, very small and that dry space ever between us.
-------
To take these personal details and make them into universals. That is key.
-------
So many times embarrassed myself writing poems to girls, for girls, about girls. Girls, young girls, girls I covet, girl-besotted I, girls deserving better, girls islands of soft twilight in my winter-thwarted sea.
-------
Winter-thwarted.
-------
And If I Were Ever to Fall in Love Again?
-------
Whales & Babylon
-------
Well, she said, there's just a bit of skin you work on. Oh I said. Oh so that's how it works.
-------
Recurring dreams of floods and the Glass Office. Old high school with the Bauhaus designs grotesquely exaggerated, the main office a cube of glass divided into segments and cubicles, the fluorescent lights stretching away into the night in infinite reflection, as in Edward Hopper's Automat.
In the backyard a flood and the sky turning purple and unreal. A black man in a white robe smears honey on my forehead. Suddenly, the buzzing of insects.
-------
Girls. Best wishes, sincerely. All very fine people, all very important people. To me.
-------
Your naked body myself alone.
-------
To die a death free of fear.
-------
A death unafraid.
-------
Compassion in the heart. The capacity for comfort.
-------
Cold hands, cold feet, poor circulation. Pulling a sock on my right foot like pulling a sock over a block of wood.
-------
Sitting at my desk, thinking of the past, I felt pity for myself as for another person. I wanted to take the younger me and hold him and tell him what was important and what he could let go. My hands another's hands. My thoughts another's thoughts. Deep in meditation extend compassion to yourself first of all, and then to others. To yourself, to your friends,and then finally to your enemies.
-------
Have I become Boring? If so? Dead and Dying.
-------
the immense mystery. your naked body between myself alone and death. the indigo angel.
-------
You mean the Man who Weeps. He said you'd be through here, lookin' for him. He's crossed the Waters. He said you'd be lookin' for him. Also said you wouldn't catch him. That's what he said.
-------
Fit a whole other person between us, best wishes, never meant to wound. In each person a doubt. In each heart, compassion.
-------
Her whiskers matted to her cheek. On the pillow I said it was ok. Good cat, I said.
-------
I am sorry.
-------
The immense mystery.
-------
May you be well.
May you deal with your doubts in the best way.
May you come through it eventually.
May
all very fine
all very excellent
all very important
your naked body between myself and death
May you be well.
--
For five days the cat was dying and to get away from it I went to the store with my mother and sister. At the store I could not let on that my cat was dying. It was college shopping. We looked at bins of pencil holders, at wastebaskets, at kitchenware, at furniture, at linens and all through it I thought about my cat dying. We didn't talk about it. We did what people do when they shop, which was to browse and make small comments and act very interested in the things on the shelves. I only mentioned it once, in the pet care section, I said Make sure you get a new can of treats. I was thinking of Neko. When Cleo died I wanted her to take her cat treats with her and so we'd need a fresh can for Neko. Practicalities.
No one there knew my cat was dying. It seemed strange to me that I could walk through the store with such an immense feeling in my head, and in my heart this tightening, and no one knew. I try to keep that in mind now, when I am at places and people annoy me. Maybe this or that person is acting the way they do because they have a cat at home and the cat is dying. Everybody carrying something with them that they can't let on about. I try to think of this and understand people through it. It doesn't always work but it can be a help. Some people are inherently assholes, but for some, it is the cat.
-------
Oh give off this moody brooding!
-------
So many people who were important to me who are now silent. The cold hand fallen between us. But still a swelling of affection. My great doubts, their great doubts, even in the midst of our meanness take the layers away and they have their doubts and their fears and their desires just as I do. I don't hate any of them. I do not understand and I do not agree but I do not hate. The great swell of affection that comes at night in the small cold room, in the dark, that says May you be well. May you deal with your doubts in the best way. May you come through it eventually.
-------
Compassion dwells in my heart. But it is deep in there and rises only on a shambles of a balls of a paternoster.
-------
The moon in the sky like a bullethole in a velvet rose.
-------
K___ very fine, S_____ very fine, M____ very fine, all very fine and excellent people, all very excellent, all very fine.
-------
You could fit a whole person between us, he said.
-------
In my backyard: 1 Trembling Aspen, 2 Black Oaks, 1 Hearty Catalpa, 1 White Spruce, 3 Scrub Pines. Others as yet undetermined.
The leaves of the hearty catalpa are six inches in length and broad, shaped like hearts. Its seed pods are long, brown, and leathery. They seem slick to the touch but leave no residue on the skin. The needles of the pines grow in paired bunches whereas the needles of the spruce grow singularly. On windy days it is said the leaves of the trembling aspen resemble half-dollars.
-------
Good days and bad days. Days neither good nor bad. Always a change. At times the energy coming through and that manic outward push. For love. For love. At times drawing inward and my eye turning, regarding the inexpressible place behind my inner shadow.
-------
I am sorry for many of the things I have said.
-------
She died down in the basement with her head hanging at an angle off the pillow, her whiskers matted to her cheek, yellow bile dripping from her mouth staining the concrete. She had already stiffened. I gentled the body, cleaned it, felt the stillness beneath the fur as I had with the dog, and made sure they buried her with proper provisions for the journey.
She died alone because I was too afraid to go into the back room as her spasms worsened. I was afraid of death. I wish I had not let her die alone but I also accept that my fear was normal and I understand why I acted as I did.
A good cat.
-------
I put your naked body
Between myself alone and death . . .
-------
D____ a very fine person, M___ a very fine person, B__ a very fine person, all very fine people, all excellent people.
-------
The spot on my jawline where the hair grows in a swirl.
-------
The shale cliff that overhangs Lake Champlain and the knotted black roots of pines that show through. How much cliff will remain in ten years? In twenty? Fifty years from now the cabins will have gone, taken by the waters.
Lying on the couch, the clock ticking midnight and later, hearing through the porch screen the waters touching the rocks and again the rocks and again the water, until it and sleep became one flow in my brain and I was overcome.
-------
For two years I have lived at home. It is good and bad, it is neither good nor bad. I have time now, at least, for the tiniest of things. It can all go by. It can all change. When I have time.
-------
The stiffness of my knees in the early morning. In the late night, the tightness of my legs, the right one dragging slightly as I go to bed.
-------
And the whole city sleeping drifts
through white space
like a lost dirigible
unconscious of
the immense mystery.
-------
You ever seen the neon rain slanting down between the quicksilver skyscrapers of Chicago Alpha like the tears of some burning indigo angel?
Course you ain't.
-------
They called me an asshole and they were right.
-------
M____ again very fine, D____ and S_____ and K___ all very good all very fine people.
-------
There is compassion in my heart. For every act of mine that wounds, there is also the capacity for an act that will bring comfort.
-------
unconscious of the immense mystery
-------
An erection for every man! thereby his hat to hang.
------
Each of us is given sorrows and given blessings. The unknown sorrows of others. I have a fear that I am boring. I have a fear of dying. It is the same. For months at a time I am motivated by my own mortality. Fears and sorrows. People I talked to who first revealed their doubts and then hid them, after I had spoken enough. People and their doubts, everyone and their doubts. Girls. I am sorry that girls. I did not consider enough.
------
Wolf's doing the mostly ghostly strut baby, five inches of air tween me and Baba Urf.
------
Discovering that the French word for "Jew", juif, is also slang for "pimp".
------
According to Revell's translation of Guillame Apollinaire at least.
-------
In the afternoon we sat on the bed and watched through the window a storm coming. A taste of metal in the air beneath the rapidly thinning pressure. Highly anticipated by her, these storms I cared little for. It came quickly over the slate rooftops and lashed the trees to green froth and then was gone, leaving us still on the bed, very small and that dry space ever between us.
-------
To take these personal details and make them into universals. That is key.
-------
So many times embarrassed myself writing poems to girls, for girls, about girls. Girls, young girls, girls I covet, girl-besotted I, girls deserving better, girls islands of soft twilight in my winter-thwarted sea.
-------
Winter-thwarted.
-------
And If I Were Ever to Fall in Love Again?
-------
Whales & Babylon
-------
Well, she said, there's just a bit of skin you work on. Oh I said. Oh so that's how it works.
-------
Recurring dreams of floods and the Glass Office. Old high school with the Bauhaus designs grotesquely exaggerated, the main office a cube of glass divided into segments and cubicles, the fluorescent lights stretching away into the night in infinite reflection, as in Edward Hopper's Automat.
In the backyard a flood and the sky turning purple and unreal. A black man in a white robe smears honey on my forehead. Suddenly, the buzzing of insects.
-------
Girls. Best wishes, sincerely. All very fine people, all very important people. To me.
-------
Your naked body myself alone.
-------
To die a death free of fear.
-------
A death unafraid.
-------
Compassion in the heart. The capacity for comfort.
-------
Cold hands, cold feet, poor circulation. Pulling a sock on my right foot like pulling a sock over a block of wood.
-------
Sitting at my desk, thinking of the past, I felt pity for myself as for another person. I wanted to take the younger me and hold him and tell him what was important and what he could let go. My hands another's hands. My thoughts another's thoughts. Deep in meditation extend compassion to yourself first of all, and then to others. To yourself, to your friends,and then finally to your enemies.
-------
Have I become Boring? If so? Dead and Dying.
-------
the immense mystery. your naked body between myself alone and death. the indigo angel.
-------
You mean the Man who Weeps. He said you'd be through here, lookin' for him. He's crossed the Waters. He said you'd be lookin' for him. Also said you wouldn't catch him. That's what he said.
-------
Fit a whole other person between us, best wishes, never meant to wound. In each person a doubt. In each heart, compassion.
-------
Her whiskers matted to her cheek. On the pillow I said it was ok. Good cat, I said.
-------
I am sorry.
-------
The immense mystery.
-------
May you be well.
May you deal with your doubts in the best way.
May you come through it eventually.
May
all very fine
all very excellent
all very important
your naked body between myself and death
May you be well.
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