February 2012
24 posts
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/02/26/magazin... →
“Before all of this, I wanted to live with my daughter in Fukushima. Twenty years ago, we made a promise that we would live together. It’s difficult to give up on everything.” - Tomoko Ujiie
redemption.
Remember you must love yourself before you can truly love someone else / now I’m the guy that knows strippers by their real names / you still think he’s SOFT / well he’s killing them softly / Kayla / some things need to be said / I’ll wait until tomorrow / maybe you’ll feel better, then maybe we’ll be better / I’m going to get so drunk that I pass out, forget your face / I’ve been making a list of...
the wedding dance.
take hold of these arms, craft the promises i make into solid gold after hours comfort. in the battle of head versus heart, well, Sweetheart, i do believe you have won me over. your mother will cry tears of joy as your temporary father, alive for the afternoon, will be unable to say what he truly needs to say. the father-daughter dance has been scrapped for the occasion - there’s no need...
an excerpt from a different time.
“And so there it is around me, a vivid rainbow tapestry of tears streaming out from the soon to be spent weary dried up tear ducts of some lost men women children hidden behind the indomitable brick curtain that keeps them in and us out. I want to tell them to stop, to take their sadness and stuff it back into their biological beings because it is fanning out like a horrific street map...
why i skip my high school reunions.
Because the geeks and jocks were set in stone, I, ground between. Because the girls I ate lunch with are married now, most out of spite —because the ones I spurned are still alone. Because I took up smoking at nineteen, late, and just now quit—because, since then, I’ve grown into and out of something they’ve never known. Because at the play, backstage, on opening night she conjured out of...
keeping things whole.
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole. - Mark Strand
where do we belong?
Hate me, try to break me apart, but I will still be here, standing. A history of escape attempts and eventual fall, slices and zigzags this stuff matters in this game I’m playing. She feels an affinity with the wall.
Arnoldo usually wears a goofy grin on his smooth round face construction bank four times longer now the crowd was listless, weeping openly and chanting, “We are one people!”
...
writer to writer.
On Heaven: “To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up...
“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the...”
– Milan Kundera
paris in black & white.
“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine and died where I had a room on the top floor...
four thirty.
The Kubler-Ross Model: Five stages of grief. Hot Pink Wanderlust Warrior. Bukowski flarf, pages on the floor, Google search a line. Edit Fever Dream, too monstrous too urgent. Flarf Anis Mojgani? Edit the existing. Feedback feedback feedback this world of words is endless, ripe rich ready for the taking.
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Edit: Amalgamation.
This also means that I have 35 babies to edit cut paste move...
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose or if...
“Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you...”
– Charles Bukowski
before the song ends.
I am writing this because today in poetry class we learnt about the construction of the identity of the poet vs. the identity of the speaker rhythm line breaks punctuation placement of ideas within the nooks and crannies of stanzas beat beats we listened to Drake Kanye Eminem and Sarah Jones who once stood in front of a microphone and spat our her heart your revolution will not happen between...
endangered species.
Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world can’t...
what you get when you extricate a from b and skip...
The guise of happiness, of a quiet and calm sense of resolution, is not something that I can slip on with ease. Anger is easy, I have done anger for the past eleven years of my life and it is with this anger that I have carved out my identity in the word. I write because the words speak easy when there is too much pain for frangible body parts to take on, I dance because it is in moving that I...
notes from red & black.
From now on, Wednesday afternoons will be spent in this quiet corner of campus that’s as far away as you can get without actually leaving the Wesleyan bubble. My schedule’s worked out in a way that classes end around midday on Wednesdays and I have Thursdays completely free. Quite glorious if I do say so myself, and work’s always made easier with a ginormous plastic cup of iced...
January 2012
7 posts
spaces.
1.
In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.
2.
Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She...
a room of our own.
http://www.theselby.com/
earth mother bone.
the compartmentalization of thoughts and feelings is a sensation that has stood the test of time: since the age of the dinosaurs
(when triceratops fed on felt heart matter and stegosaurus called the land its own) we have held on to the concept of solitude // solitas and how there is a body and half a mind to represent the person i was way back when. you exist as a part of my left...
ten things i know.
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice...
December 2011
13 posts
continuum.
In 2012, I will finally allow myself to pursue happiness, regardless of who or what I have to leave behind as I begin to make this life my own. I will build myself a home, multiple homes, in the most beautiful pockets and hideaway holes of this volatile breathing delicate sleeping planet. I will laugh on a shoulder of gold, sink into the silence and remember to forever remain in a state of quiet...
frost.
Kodak Gold 200 film pilfered from my grandfather over the summer. Expiration date: Sometime in the eighties or nineties, most probably. A mere eight shots out of 36 were spat out of the developer’s as visually legible prints, but they encompass the freak October snowstorm/Thanksgiving 2011 in Schenectady/balcony evenings, and for that I find them beautiful.
“It does not...
http://usedfurniturereview.com/2011/11/30/five-poem... →
chapter two.
“Tereza was therefore born of a situation which brutally reveals the irreconcilable duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience.
A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that...
be not inhospitable to strangers // lest they be...
Shakespeare and Company 37 Rue de la Bûcherie 75005 Paris, France
George Whitman, Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon, Is Dead at 98
sink or swim.
the nature of the quiet (slow turning wrap around silence) is that its delicate first impression should not faze your glassy eyes your heavy head heavy bones heavy body worn from months of wear in sinking into the soft side of the deep morning dew remember what we used to say about birth: in fighting for life i will throw off my armour and follow you streamside, i will trip over sheets...
i never had to hold you by the edges like i do...
The suitcase has been packed, Christmas tree watered (oh how I would love to cart one home with me, they don’t make them like this near the equator and I find that extremely disheartening), carry on stuffed with raspberries and dried mangoes, passport safely tucked away. I am going to finish up Super Sad True Love Story and start on 1984 because you can’t read Murakami without having...
milos.
let us take a sack of spray paint and spray paint over the paintings let us dance through Paris kiss in the shadow of the Louvre crawl inside its windows scrawl manifestos over the canvases write Morse code on the sculptures roll a sleeping bag on the floor to sleep inside of tell one another a story by flashlight unearth everything from before bury each other inside the other feed grapes to the...
notes from another december.
“Good morning New York City. It is nearly one in the afternoon and I am three kg heavier than when I first arrived - this is a problem. There’s something incredibly poetic about long and lonesome train journeys and beautiful boys sitting at Union Station with knitting needles and the leftovers from a Subway sandwich. I am going home in a couple of days I feel amazing and pleasantly aimless...
epilogue.
Teasing apart your day in the face of death, is not, I repeat is not an easy thing to do.
If I had a heart of stone, like I often say that I do, all this all wear all stray hope would graze my back skim the surface without peering into my insides telling me that I have been strong for such a long time, I have almost forgotten what it feels like to lie heavy in the arms of another.
It...
notes of a hallelujah.
Reading Nabokov makes me think that there is an absolute plethora of amazing literature out there that I must sink my hands elbows feet knees soul into before it is too late. I am reminded of the beauty of madness, how I am always drawn to authors who write in a slightly confusing way, with an air of derangement to their already off-kilter complexes.
The poem itself doesn’t exactly...
song.
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is love. Who can deny? In dreams it touches the body, in thought constructs a miracle, in imagination anguishes till born in human - looks out of the heart burning with purity - for the burden of life is love, but we carry the weight wearily, ...
November 2011
13 posts
sky is womb.
Schenectady, New York. This is the place that gets left behind in the wake of Rustbelt ingenues and General Electric entrepreneurs after they decide that they’ve milked this place for all it has to offer, pack up their lives, move away. I am told that we are three steps away from the rich section of town and ten paces shy of the ghetto. This disparity would seem all the more poignant if I...
closer.
come closer. come into this. come closer. you are quite the beauty. if no one has ever told you that before know that now. you are quite the beauty. there is joy in how your mouth dances with your teeth. your mouth is a sign of how sacred your life truly is. come into this. true of heart come into this. you are true of heart. come closer. come closer. know that whatever God prays to He asked it to...
an exercise in levels of uncertainty.
when i was seven the breathing came easy, spiraling out in waves and stages of quiet humming, longing without the rust or the wear of years at twenty, i speak in riddles of drunken perception at three past midnight, and beneath these layers of guilt i carry within me a soldier with a heart that has yet to be born i sit on pavements spitting out clementine seeds as i cup my hands to your chest,...
for those who can ride in an airplane for the...
I’m 30 years old and I’m trying to figure out most days what being a man means.
I don’t drink fight or love but these days I find myself wanting to do all three, and I don’t really have a favorite color anymore but I did when I was a kid, and back then that color was blue. And back then I wanted to be an astronaut, I wanted to be an architect, an artist, a secret agent, a ranger for the World...
birth or a quiet death.
Here in this disparate abyss, it can be difficult for an old man to get enough breath in him without feeling like a fish flapping around on the damp Atlantic seashore, discombobulated and ever so out of place. There are days the walls take on a menacing quality and the deeper I go the more they seem to be closing in on me, and all I can do is to rub my thumb and index finger together furiously...
lonely hearts always beating secondary songs of...
I have been running on a curious mixture of a devil may care attitude and the inescapable innate need to see this week through, punctuated by five hour long nighttime rendezvouses with caffeine in its various elemental forms and three hour long sleep cycles. Out of everything and everyone I crave, I miss the words most of all. I have lost sight of the beauty of words. Swoon. Hollow. Semblance....