You said breaking the egg was like an electric shock.
There were roosters—it had been fertilized.
You said you didn’t look, you just cleaned it up.
Month: March 2019
Nostalgia for You
I was different then
weight and luster
like cellophane stretched
and crudely
coated neon
everything was happening
I believed
farther away in space
in time in sense
how far along the line?
bending over
left
the accounting
but how?
like a fluid, maybe
pressure and absence
sure
scars
carry water
stacked and
sorted
unstacked
and sorted again
we were dragging
a year behind us
we were prepared
to help
these were the games
our own
signals delicate
and interlacing
—
Thank you Billy.
Tollbooth by Bud Smith
Tollbooth by Bud Smith
“Fuck the past and all of the chains it wrapped around my heart and the webs the spiders spun around me while I was idle. Fuck what the werewolf moon did to my brain as I laid in wait for it to rise again so that I could head oblong towards oblivion. Fuck all the yawns of suburbia, the myths, the legends—the folklore of eternal life. Instead, war cry into the wind, we’re all gonna die. There’s no excuse for not kicking up the icing on birthday cakes while dark angels traced my life in doomed flight. Fuck the future, it meant nothing. I say bomb blasts to anybody who denies me. I say: I’m ripped apart down my spinal column anyway, I’m a thousand shards of ribs, I’m wayward planets thrown out of orbit—lost of magic. I’m on my way down.
Timing it just right, I released the videotape from my fingertips. It exploded against the side of the tollbooth: streams of film marked a black passage behind me, shards of plastic landed in the basket, loops of magnetic tape and sticker decal rapped against the toll window. I screamed in the face of some poor substitute girl. She lost her breath, falling over in tears.
I was four miles up the highway by the time she closed the booth, walked into the building, told Larry she needed to go home. She couldn’t explain what it was she’d seen; it was too horrible.”
[Dear bottled water]
Dear bottled water,
you bring me life
so expensively.
It hurts to think
of the great holes
filled with empty
shells of you.
Tallulah
They say this mountain was born
when thrust sheets broke
against this line.
Tri-State (II)
I set a story in this skylight’s frame.
Winter. Instead of yard,
forest pricked
by deer, twins in blue.
I omitted the wall’s
new oozy purple,
how the mud thrashed
the block’s dead end,
how the creek swallowed
the triangle called “dog yard”
from which the deer were said
to have emerged.
Dream of a Father
with a line from Kathy Acker
You wouldn’t have a child who couldn’t swim. You were dead-set,
damned sure of this. Until I left home I thought you simply chose
states of being, this one of them—
You shaved your beard completely, finally, in Massachusetts.
You drove off a bridge in a storm and held your pet rabbit up until
help arrived in Massachusetts.
You held the cage up, and when it flooded, the rabbit.
You taught me to touch the cold gem of Massachusetts in my mind
to make sure I still had it, like a coin in my pocket.
My idea of you was so sparse and childish it turned out
to be a good estimation.
Because he’s alone, a sailor’s always telling himself who he is.
Serial Experiments Lain
I’m late to this, but
here’s some crazymaking late night TV
Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual
I think back to this article more often than I care to admit, especially this part:
Perhaps you’ll be a dilettante: You’ll love what you think about and you’ll think hard about it, but you’ll be easily bored and won’t think about anything for long. You’ll read many things and (perhaps) write many, but you’ll read and write about disparate topics, and once you’ve read for a while about something, and perhaps written about it, you’ll move on to something else. Clever people—quick studies—are often like this. They have properly intellectual gifts, but they lack the patience for attention’s long, slow gaze, and so their intellectual life coruscates, sparking here and there like a firefly on the porch, but illuminating nothing for long. Some of the people you’ve read and delighted in have something of this about them. It’s partly true of Augustine and Newman, for example, and of Sontag.
I’d like to warn you against this tendency. It’s not that there’s anything deeply wrong with it. Suggestive and stimulating work can be done by dilettantes, and, as the label suggests, they tend to be true lovers of what they think about, even if they don’t think about it for long. Neither is there any sharp and bright line between the work of dilettantes and that of intellectuals properly speaking; the categories shade into one another, and it’s usually possible to find, even in the work of the most dilettantish, threads that make a single fabric. It’s not going to be easy to say when an intellectual becomes a dilettante or a dilettante an intellectual. There are, however, clear cases here, too, and the extent to which you embrace dilettantism is just the extent to which you won’t do serious intellectual work.
It’s a pretty Catholic take, sure, but it makes an argument for picking a field of study and sticking to it in a way I’ve found useful. I reword the last line to myself like so: “The extent to which you embrace [other stuff] is just the extent to which you won’t do [poetry].” I just went a month and a half without writing a single new poem and even though I got work done on other projects, including this blog, I wasn’t doing the work I’m committed to, and I did feel inattentive and distracted. I don’t take myself too seriously as a “poet” or “intellectual” but I return to this article periodically to remind myself what the habits of a thinking person are.
from “Messenger” by Simone White
gruesome Nosferatu spreads its claw over the light, its spine curves
that wave, misshapen jealous curled Saturday
my synths, piteously, not yet messenger
these our works, “now” being merciless
being crushed as a matter of criticism into nonspecific talk
of waves, the little irresponsible pedals
Miss Forceful Wants You 