Empire Wilderness

2005-01-24T20:31:00.000-05:00

coat of arms

2005-01-06T15:09:00.000-05:00

I hereby disavow myself from this nonsense. adieu.

The Abstract of the Abstract

2005-01-06T02:30:00.000-05:00

"He represents nothing, imitates nothing, does not have to conform to any prior referent with the aim of achieving adequation or verisimilitude. One can here foresee an objection: since the mime imitates nothing, reproduces nothing, opens up in its origin the very thing he is tracing out, presenting or producing, he must be the very movement of truth. Not, of course, truth in the form of adequation between the representation and the present of the thing itself, or between imitator and imitated, but truth as the present unveiling of the present... but this is not the case.... We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing: faced, so to speak, with the double that couples no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least, that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference... this speculum reflects no reality: it produces mere "reality-effects"... in this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh."

El Muchacho de La Mancha

2005-01-04T17:32:00.000-05:00

hola mi amigo
Originally uploaded by adamjfitz.

For Hans Carossa

2005-01-03T23:37:00.000-05:00

by Rainer Marie Rilke

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.

Self-Portrait, 2005

2005-01-03T17:27:00.000-05:00

Dürer?
Originally uploaded by adamjfitz.

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1906
by Rainer Marie Rilke

The stamina of an old, long-noble race
in the eyebrows' heavy arches. In the mild
blue eyes, the solemn anguish of a child
and, here and there, humility - not a fool's,
but feminine: the look of one who serves.
The mouth quite ordinary, large and straight,
composed, yet not unwilling to speak out
when necessary. The forehead still naive,
most comfortable in shadows, looking down.

This, as a whole, just hazily forseen -
never, in any joy or suffering,
collected for a firm accomplishment;
and yet, as though, from far off, with scattered Things,
a serious, true work were being planned.

Joe Weil Gallery

2005-01-03T01:44:00.000-05:00

Spurs

2005-01-02T16:37:00.000-05:00

A beautiful season of no feeling at all. Neuter, denuded. Wonderfully free of obligations, obsessions. The manic fringe is loosened. The winds bounce as they do. My kingdom of courtesans and jesters regenerate in the form of supple hours of solitude, occasioned with books or mirrors. No oppression of otherness. No endurance of melancholy or heat-strokes of paranoid hypertension. Questions have clotted their blood. My confessions, if disagreeable or seductive, are merely the better part of whimsy. I am self-delightful and an instrument of whatever elements. Delirium is merely a blue affectation of January twilight, with white-dims and open expanses of blue porcelain cloudless space. I am free to hop on beat. Even my wrists are grins.

Aww

2004-12-30T03:37:00.000-05:00

...
Originally uploaded by adamjfitz.

O o o that Shakespearean Pastiche (for K.G. & the City of Chicago)

2004-12-29T05:22:00.000-05:00

Cleopatra -
Lamentably thou has the yoke of decision before thee, noble bride. You, Queen, with skin perplexed as dubious gold enfold upon an emperor's robe. Lead to thy lode, thoughts. Quicken thy vain treasure and make thy compass heart thy hazard's measure. Take not to billows blows or meet with unmanaged ailment the silvery proscriptions as such waves beat. Salute Chicago with fierce disdain and prattling sneeze as gods their errand arrow-boys. Grapple with allegiance to your awe-stuff. Constrain no blemish of a question's push. Leave the leaky kingdom of inquiry to the kisses of unworthy place. I here bequeath thee a more noble race than ever pressed with Rome, or gem of woman held, abuse not your consterning brow, amplify the viscious tissue of thy paltry liver. Descry moderation with the bland savors of a heart which on itself has fed from famished idleness. You are the god of eels and grapes enough. Let down the savage fever of your enfranched mood its fiery radiance, mock it not with borrowed thunder or bastard light. You are bondman to no being but a pleasure's whip. Crack into thy masonry of dreams. Build upon the ransomed sinews of your teeth a game for jests and hours. Perform no surgery of chronicling the night with tardy portents. Heave-ho, heave-ho mighty Queen with messengers of mien more muscle than unchidden boys, puffed ruffians and personal combats as such we waste on tomorrow soldiers. You will fight yourself, surrender to the imperium you hear as your command, forbid no fellow but the shadow of your period and duty, which be to service self-appointment. Consider in your rumored reach the growl and marrow of thyself. Disposition is not a charlatan of geopraphy, nor is the world so round as not to flatter us with luring chuckles, armorist interludes, wars to-day, royal occupations that nestle in but the jist of unfit transports. O season thy harp with a harem's leisure and restrict what wonts as you are oft to choose. Let the galleys of your mornings' jots, gentle adieus and greetings be fair circus to a mother's gallow or a father's rope. Hang joy's bounty to an entertainment befitting of beheading: these preening minutes, villains of the earth and unsupple in their berth. The overplus is best for fools. And to the mauls and surly hares that doughty-handed crack thy heart, clamp upon the spilling vessels of thy blood, release as yet a cry that eclipses snares that beds make out of nightingales. Take to thy fair sheets a triumph no less than harnesses to rude oxen. You attired congruity of light and light's sister-kin. You handmaiden nerve and jaw, who sups on what men owe in great capacity to targets by jolly marches. O a king is no mankind without the court and shrewd crew of days, embattled afternoons. So feed the fangled thoughts their spur of clock and noon. In thy own gesture of torrential mastery, disponge this melancholy chalk that traces out the fretting, plays pomp to deadly woes unholy in their begetting. Demurely wake the sleepers that are your fancy'd stride. You may not recover yet. But preparations adjoin the city as hills are glass some say the industry of stars cut out. Endeavour then this advantage: let force be met with whimsy. Blossom thy shaky spanielness. All forth, bespeckled with barks, sweets, discandied sweets and melting souls, you will circle no pledge of fast home or loose district but a guilement of eros, heart and loss. May those infernal plebians strike their monster-like. Shouts are no great spouts to kneel within. A roman boy is but a shield of riven words. The boar of Thessaly will bear me out. Emboss your womaned items with a currency as does the clam. With white teeth snarling in the monuments of thy teeth, set upon the piteous greatness that is thrust upon you as for some men they are born or achieved. Bring you to me no less in parting now than in the dead returning. O, prithee, come!

sincerely
your Anthony

The Library (Incomplete)

2004-12-28T14:59:00.000-05:00

Poetry

The Portable Dante, Dante Alighieri, trans. Mark Musa
And the Stars Were Shining, John Ashbery
Chinese Whispers, John Ashbery
Girls on the Run, John Ashbery
Houseboat Days, John Ashbery
Selected Poems, John Ashbery
Selected Prose, John Ashbery
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashbery
Your Name Here, John Ashbery
Complete Poems, William Blake
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson
Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon
O My Land My Friends: Selected Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Langdon Hammer
Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson
Emily Dickinson's Letters, Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson
The Complete Poems and Plays, T.S. Eliot
Selected Letters, John Keats
The Complete Plays, Christopher Marlowe
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Paradise Lost & Other Poems, John Milton
Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Marie Rilke, Rainer Marie Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell
Selected Essays, Ezra Pound
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare
Complete Poems, Percy Shelley
Collected Poems and Prose, Wallace Stevens
Selected Poems, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Collected Poems, Walt Whitman
Collected Poems, W.B. Yeats

Fiction, etc.

Three Novels, Samuel Beckett
Collected Prose Works, Jorge Louis Borges
Labryinths, Jorge Louis Borges
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
The Immoralist, André Gide
The Castle, Franz Kafka
The Trial, Franz Kafka
Dubliners, James Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Ulysses, James Joyce
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev

Philosophy, etc.

The Instant of My Death / Demeure, Maurice Blanchot and Jaques Derrida
The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot
Dissemination, Jacques Derrida
Margins of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida
Of Spirit, Jacques Derrida
The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida
Spurs, Jacques Derrida
D'Alembert's Dream / Rameau's Nephew, Denis Diderot
Basic Philosophy, Martin Heidegger
A Kierkegaard Anthology, Soren Kierkegaard, ed. Robert Bretall
The Birth of Tragedy / Geneaology of Morals by Frederich Nietzsche
Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Miscellaneous

Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom
The Western Canon, Harold Bloom
Yeats, Harold Bloom

The Interview

2004-12-27T13:42:00.000-05:00

As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a professional soccer player. And he admitted to being an inveterate viewer of television, watching everything from news to soap operas. "I am critical of what I'm watching," said Mr. Derrida with mock pride. "I deconstruct all the time."

Trifle

2004-12-26T23:27:00.000-05:00

Purporting
like an earth,
a berth of gash
and gush comes
from the honey-pear.
Spins its pale sphere
of crunch with mellow
emerald touch, a chew
as soluble as air. Its
sweet commerce flows.
Its citizens are tastes.
Supple as a waiting
mouth is hollow. And
then a form of lick. A
glaze of shine upon
the lip. With thoughts
of pears to follow.

Self-Portrait With My Precious Pretties

2004-12-26T18:05:00.000-05:00

God With Creation
Originally uploaded by adamjfitz.

"For me, my thoughts are my prostitutes."

Over 200 Dollars Worth of Books to Illustrate the Same Thing

2004-12-26T17:31:00.000-05:00

Today I woke late. I had been waking early. But not today. Today I woke late.

I ate three sunny-side eggs today, this afternoon, for breakfast and spoke to Joe about orgiastic mysteries and Christianity as egg-yokes broke their boundaries. What a tasty mess.

Then I went online when everyone was out the house and had myself some naughty fun and let the volume up and drawers down. I felt like a stowaway European bird in a numb region, an antiquated Midwestern town.

Later I went to the large mass-consumer book store that people usher in and out of isles into, out of, like a lazy carousel. It felt swell. Rousseau, Beckett, Gide and heck, I can't remember it, Ashbery, Merrill, Dante, a few other pals, I also can't remember well, but heck, forget it. Anne Carson. Funny little tale to tell: there was this small little girl who I went to high school with in her bundled-up red jacket that passed me in the poetry aisle and said her perfunctory salutation, turned back around and walked away. I stalked after her and rambled on about remember us having a class - thinking she was the girl I took a class with Freshman year in college, but no, no, I the inveterate memory-buster fucked myself, and what else, I couldn't stop embarrassing myself. As I said, I thought she was the girl I had dreamt about two nights ago from Freshman Year of College English class, but she was some Junior Year High School English class - and she could tell I was talking maddeningly and crazily and I think when she left she had a crazy. So I snooped around more. Teasing myself with what and what-not to get and thinking of a slender volume of Basho for a friend or a tender collection of a Russian poetess' for someone else and there were other things for other friends to buy but I decided against that or it.

I listened to Messian on the way home and smoked a cigarette while reading John Ashbery's Selected Prose and his parenthetical statement "the portentousness that mars Crane's poetry...". I felt upset. Hurt.

I came home, read some more of the same, smoked a cigarette and wrote this. A secret purpose here but soon it will be irrelevant. A tidal wave hit Asia. Worst one in forty years. Reggie White died of a heart attack at such an early age, right after Christmas. Sad, no?

Either / Or

2004-12-26T13:32:00.000-05:00

Love loves secrecy—an engagement is a revelation; it loves silence—an engagement is a public notice; it loves a whisper—an engagement is a public proclamation from the housetops; and yet an engagement, with my Cordelia's help, may be an excellent an excellent trick for deceiving the enemies. On a dark night there is nothing more dangerous to other ships than hanging out a lantern, which is more deceptive than the darkness.
Thy Johannes.

A Thing or Two

2004-12-26T01:44:00.000-05:00

PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-'n'-roll route?

DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

PLAYBOY: And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?

DYLAN: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.

Holding Hands: Heidegger & Hart Crane

2004-12-23T13:57:00.000-05:00

From "What Calls for Thinking?":

We are trying to learn thinking. Perhaps, thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a "handicraft." The hand is something altogether peculiar. But the hand's essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ that can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all the grasping organs - paws, claws, or fangs - different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can handily achieve works of handicraft.

But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes - and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further. But the hand's gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity pecisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think - not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its work carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man's simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if from time to time it would be accomplished properly.

* * *

Episode of Hands

The unexpected interest made him flush.
Suddenly he seemed to forget the pain, —
Consented, — and held out
One finger from the others.

The gash was bleeding, and a shaft of sun
That glittered in and out among the wheels,
Fell lightly, warmly, down into the wound.

And as the fingers of the factory owner's son,
That knew a grip for books and tennis
As well as one for iron and leather, —
As his taut, spare fingers wound the gauze
Around the thick bed of the wound,
His own hands seemed to him
Like wings of butterflies
Flickering in the sunlight over summer fields.

The knots and notches, — many in the wide
Deep hand that lay in his, — seemed beautiful.
They were like the marks of wild ponies' play, —
Bunches of new green breaking a hard turf.

And factory sounds and factory thoughts
Were banished from him by that larger, quieter hand
That lay in his with the sun upon it.
And as the bandage knot was tightened
The two men smiled into each other's eyes.

El Captain

2004-12-22T11:31:00.000-05:00

12-22-04_1123
Originally uploaded by adamjfitz.

My Christmas Sombrero

2004-12-22T11:12:00.000-05:00

12-22-04_1056
Originally uploaded by adamjfitz.

Someone Seeking Anonymous

2004-12-22T01:26:00.000-05:00

Dear Anonymous,

Come rescue me. It's been cold here in the sundry laundry room. I'm dirtied, sullied, sunken. Wash me with some voice, caress me like only the distance of a letter could. I know you love no-one, Anon, the delicate style of a bird's hollow bone. But, bright thing, sad thing, though nothing is as great as a beauty that disdains us, exempt your exceptions, crawl forward, draw forth a silver breath or two, from the gala of your mirrors, dream me back my spine.

Sincerely,
Someone

*

Anonymous,

I fool myself into thinking your coming. I even saw you lengthwise in the sunlight under the doorway today, the thin peel of lime when the mornings tinge into afternoons, and the shadows still linger from sleeping hours. I'm such a musical cadaver of well-wishing, anyhow. I dreamt I was a court stenographer last night, responsible for reading back all the sensations of your face. Of telling the jury what pattern of crystal you would be in a Japanese Warlord's tea-set. I foreswore you as an electrical advertisement. My grandfather was singing du-whop, I almost asked him to du-whop for you.

I want you like a velvet ribbon, a satin antique. My mother's childhood nurse was married in saffron. My uncle's twin brother wants to open a monastery of eternal vespers (or is it matins?) I've lost all sense in my triceps. You needn't bother with the guilt wrapping. There's a table in the station wagon.

Mind calling? Phoning? Pretend me a letter. Or keep confusing yourself in the dizzying mirror of strangers' faces, it's sweet of you, at least. I've so much nickels overstuffing my under garment drawers. Save me a plenty.

Someone

*

Anonymous,

I despise you of course. Now everyone with black hair and green eyes is ruined. All the carnival stunts you taught me, bah! Take the trapeze home. You can marshal the fevers of your eccentric shoulders back into whatever arabesque alabaster jar you brought them from. I don't want your stinking breath. Or the honey of your reading hands.

If you understand anything, stay where you are. Useless to hear me. Drown in a sonnet. I want to crack an oar, rend fissures or rocks and let loam bleed some evil sense of spores, milkweeds, gnarled tufts.

The giraffe is the loneliest animal to photograph. You figure it out. There is no communication here. I've opened silver umbrellas, and you fall in the sweep. I don't want titular hay. I don't need knapsacks of timothy or copecks of apology. Argue yourself.

S

*

Anonymous,

I'm waiting on the illusion of responding to return. Response. Responsibility.

Why did my eyes get designated the abandoned ponds? Don't tell me, you never were interested in the forest anyway.

...

*

Anonymous,

After a period of weeks, I couldn't help reflecting on myself, and the soreness of my fake-leathery sentiments. I want powders, bright ones for you. Cobalt, azure, lemon pie, and soda creme and a wafting faint pencil to trace the bone structures of your neck into my mind permanently. Here's a ladybug. Here's a lollypop. You can forgive a summersault and wreckage tumble with extremism right? Sap is frost, in the Orient. I can only grant mercy papers, or let the earrings pour in short bursts of diaphanous champagne.

Take my wrist as ransom. Many abbreviations I undo. Your a sweet thing, and I'd love to lean on the idea of you, further or nearer, whenever. You can't know how torn up I am, Anonymous, and if you'd just consent - one slight appearance - one word, it would mean so much for the folders. The geometry. The cactus is despairing at me.

So you've been an iceberg to me. Penguins are adorable Christians. I nearly sold my mother's maudlin tangerines to get this letter at you. A whole relay station is praying for the tummy party of your forthcoming.

Pleasantly, sadly, gladly,
Someone (your Someone)

**

Anonymous,

You've left me bereft. The mission bells are not going to rearrange themselves. Must we resort to goose ganders and ponderous fudge? I've rented this we for only a few more weeks, then I'm broke. The slim pocket bleeds.

May is a tumorous month. You should sow barley or tender handshakes. You have such lovely hands. The Third Holy Emperor of China once declared war on one of his own provinces you know when he heard it reported to him that a local regent joked "My mistress has hands to rival any concubine".

I present no saber. Have you not heard the crying of the pearls? Sopping silvers. Chew on a grey-green sea puddle for a while, you'll discover the situation here. We are parted. Segments of reels stored in warehouses across time zones, postal particularities, these damnable mishaps can't re-shape entirely.

But what good is space if you're not going to write something in it? Love is graffiti and taboo. Parcels, stock tickers, carousels: these aren't tears, marrow, blood. They're bits, share some? Shred some?

I bequeath you my typewriter ribbon nonetheless. Illusions in red was our swan song though we never white. So bowdlerize, pulverize, let me have at you. I'm a teenage rain. Torrents articulate the Amazon, and Cambodia can't nearly be peach season yet. But there are orange groves to reconsider. Place spots, ersatz recipes. The unfamiliar pampers, scents, freshens - now, stowaway, please?

Awaiting,
Someone

*

Anonymous,

This is the last letter I write you. I dare to wonder if I've sent a single thing to you. My hopes are still as a word, and the rabbit grin is thinning. We lost our tropics to the neighbors last Sunday.

Mother is in a tear. You have nylon, you have skirts. Improper boyishness. But the kerosene is there, like a harmonica in a glint of wood-pine, the breezes are lacquered. I have built a mourning gazebo. Something tells me you have one of those forget-me-not memories - but your album's a residuum of never-been. Unfortunate.

Tin tin goes the sizzle of sausage. Frying pans decline me, too. I can't be petty if I'm pretty. Felt, smoke and a penny for your thoughts.

I'll make the rodeo happen. Don't mind me.

Someone

A postcard:

Anonymous: see you down the road. take care you wreck-loose. brittle peas plea. when i return, what's waiting for me?

Quote

2004-12-21T23:15:00.000-05:00

One of the feelings of the old folk milieu was that you were a part of a very elite, special group of people that was outside and downtrodden. You felt like you were part of a different community, a more secretive one…That’s been destroyed. I don’t know what destroyed it. Some people say that it’s still there. I hope it is…I hope it is. I know, in my mind, I’m still a member of a secret community. I might be the only one, you know?

The Trout Quintet by Frank O'Hara

2004-12-20T21:21:00.000-05:00

Okay let's go swimming
I don't want to
well then don't
I want some peanut butter
I want some cream soda

last night the moon seemed to say something
it said "eat"
I said there's nothing
it mentioned plankton
but it had all drifted away

do you think the sand
kills stones
(keep rippling)
no I don't think that
I'm still rippling

well who ever said anything's
done at Radio City Music Hall
except the bolero
but who's ever seen it
who asked

you will think the light
comes from somewhere else
but it comes from the floor
otherwise you wouldn't see it
you're always looking down

after the swim I sat
and rubbed the sand into my crotch
I want to go
to Spain
where the olive trees

Derrida

2004-12-20T04:23:00.000-05:00

Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun

Edict

2004-12-19T19:06:00.000-05:00

It is not enough that people can be subject to the tyranny of our monster-feelings. They should want to, too.

a poem by Rilke

2004-12-19T19:03:00.000-05:00

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,-
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening...

ahem

2004-12-19T18:30:00.000-05:00

tonight I think of K curdling affections with one hand at the spatula while the other spins the dark thread into my head supplanting the recipe of name feeling it in the bone longing longingly along not for someone for one some one one K theres okay i dont feel okay i feel for K the capital das Kapital creme of some sunny day i didnt have yet the bonny beauty of fleece soft memories the snapshot trifles the doorways sidewalks short walks up this staircase into that well or railing for a hand here please a bit of daystaring yawn and light lingers grass patches tire tumbles smokes for mouths but nonethelittle grinning varieties of the lips curling pleasantly curtailed unseeingly unseemly so much seemingly this way that way anyway lips are lips K and the short bump the flange trapdoor trapeze of the nose a hitch thimble ridge you can see it shaped like a cobblers hat or a squatting thumb id like the vacany hotel in the rapacity eyeland please a flashy or lashy comforter mattress of tressy lids younglids no grumbles here no o K with the middle meet middle the waist like a ring a tariffe doubledealing but idle but mediocre but not youngest so you not oldest so oddest butty briefy and we can march a promenade in the exterior of cheeks parade a dimple raise that flag there friendly you are given over give cover here's the pubescent socery usory sensory coughfall and quiet sighing exhaling piffering piddling get a breathout breathless squintlook and shirkshrug let K grapple the hoops shoulders unevening shapes goofy holy Kringly Kedly K K K K K K mathemtical imaginary I is lesser than manmoth tampering o sumptuous tempter a bit scrambled here's the filmy silver and we grant hands too

That Nice Irish Man

2004-12-19T18:15:00.000-05:00

You should see the run of Beckett. Sentencing call it. Not many legs but much lift, his going-ons. Watch thoughts lift. Can drift, twist. Or scamper. Legitimate in discrete chunks. Ifilly phosphory. Perfiduous as concrete. Sometimes. "But there he goes!" Peddling quite nicely along.

Salvages (I)

2004-12-19T04:19:00.000-05:00

With what affinity and resignation I meditate, and write on this word: recovery: the act, process, duration, or an instance of recovering. A return to a normal condition. Something gained or restored in recovering. The act of obtaining usable substances from unusable sources. But also: the rising price of an asset. For exampe, following an extended decline in the price of precious metals, investor expectations of future inflation may generate recoveries in gold and silver prices. Or: increased economic activity during a business cycle, resulting in growth in the gross domestic product. And there are even more specialized designs: the obtaining, getting back, or vindication of a right or property by judgment or decree; especially: the obtaining of damages; an amount awarded by or collected as a result of a judgment or decree. Finally, return to original state, gradual healing (through rest) after sicking or injury, and the act of regaining or saving something lost (or in danger of becoming lost). Yet with in the word recovery there are other lurking, visual signs with potent weight.

There is of course, recover, in the satorial sense: to cover anew: re-cover an armchair. Or even the rare connotation of scientific inquiry, as in the use of the Christian Science Monitor, "watching the comet since it was first recovered - first spotted since its 1910 visit," this is, to say, to bring under observation again.

And there is cove, cover, over, very. Without delineating these definitions here, now, at this instant, I place them openly before hand, and credit them their labyrinth of associations, inflections, moods - but also their precisest meanings, their literal, concrete ones.

Recovery, has also different connotative registers. There are recovery expeditions and drug recoveries, or kidney surgery recoveries. A necklace or a love. Memory is at once a process of recovery, and certainly, language, has its implication towards recovery, not only a distilling from the sensation-flux something ordered, finite, worded, but marking, drawing into visibility whatever may have been concealed, private not only between a community or an individual but to an individual's self. Recovery.

To call to mind the passage of recovery, or the recoverable, is also to accept, if not at least question, the idea of the unrecoverable. And beyond the idea, a reality, realities where nothing can be recovered. Not just a thing, but nothing. The total losses that refute even partial recovery. This is a long, evasive way of discussing death, or any loss that effects ends we cannot disrupt; interruptions that are final like death. Death's abrupt, and death is always abrupt no matter how determined it is for each of us, even we posit the courage to reconcile ourselves with it before the event, or dare set ourselves to the task afterwards.

I have such a task, an event. A particular, dear recovery-process that is my meditation on this word that has kept me coming towards its simultaneous rich meanings and bare, stripped consequences. July 6th, 2004. This is also an unrecoverable date. As a poet, I declare myself absolutely on the side of words. As a human, a friend and lover of other people, I have no expectations for language, and that is part of this process too. To talk of the death of a friend, of a human being, someone who was - someone who I now must talk, interminably, in terms of "was," in a sense of time that is invariably before. I am inclined to agree with the philosopher who said that the death of the friend is also a death of ourselves, not merely in the intimations of one's end but a responsible and sober offering: we are other people, too. That in the mingling experience of life we are entangled with others, into others, and they are inscribed into our very being and thinking, and we are rarely aware of what to degree this is a conscious internal building. Perhaps for this reason the unexpected news that a friend has died is a shock immediately to ourselves, to that portion that begins to feel foreign and isolated, what we took too easily in a divide of interior and exterior. He or she is he or she, I am I. Death also makes our loves naked, whatever else it conceals. It is a hurtful time for the soul, and an ugly violence upon the mind - but also, it seems to me, upon the body. We have not lost a sensation for color or the ability to taste a certain flavor. We are, in fact, deprived of hundreds of cross-related sensations that singularly exist in another person. (And I had to begin by speaking in this cold, sterile manner, for it is of course, another reality of death and dying, our drama with the dead, this inhuman undertaking.)

This event, distinct, once. And continuing. But in my recovery, or the attempt to recover the dead friend, like Gilgamesh who scours the earth for a remedy or herb, a plant or magic, speaking to whatever wise man exists and traversing any climate for the secret to returning, recovering, I cannot begin with death nor surely will I end with it - though these words are prompted, and inseparable from its happening.

In one way, I wish I could push all I have said so far away, to forget that it has been said. I wish to relish not in anything loyal to thinking or meant to be written. I am no longer interested, even, in wisdom, whether it be spiritual or otherwise. I am loyal only to the friend, the living friend that is always, the living friend, in the affections of our heart and the reaches of our memory. A friend who still lives, beyond whatever one feels or remembers, as themself, because the hidden is no more illusion than the revealed. I am thinking here, now, without words; the many feelings and experiences, stitched and spiralling within me, of my friend whom I loved, and continue to love dearly.

He is sacred, and no death can undo him, no grief can diminish him. I see Chris sitting as his desk with a surmise of composure, with his back turned to me but knowing he is listening. Knowing, to know Christopher, is a lesson in almost scientific scrutiny. He is facing away from you, and he stares at his computer or he is watching television, or he is driving his car or he is on his telephone, even, but his hearing never leaves him. Everything runs the risk of his attention, because he is not showful or ostentatious. Something much more mature than the vigorous youth of his face exists within him. One of his many rare, incomparable gifts, attention.

And I begin thinking on him, how wonderfully sly and duplicitous almost, this virtue was in him. I begin to talk of him as he was, with a sense of attention I borrow and credit to his name. A great book teaches you how to read it. So, too, with people, with everyone - constantly telling us, directing us how to hear them, how to see them, how to know them. And if people are mysteries, as they are, we become aware it is not because we see only their bodies but not their minds. No, even the mystery of another person is exposed to us, visible and malleable as objects are.

Chris' voice is soothing and assured. It is his spirit. It can peak with anger, or flit up and down in a shrieking giggle. It can change into a mock-manical laugh that almost seems complete with grin and moustache. Chris' hands are delicate and tan, they are hands of intelligence, of precision. His face is beautiful, like a Roman sculpting, with the sharp angles - a fine symmetry of line and proportion. And his eyes, like tamed furnaces, cannot be limited by description. His lips are expressive, coy or playful, calm or perturbed. Chris is, in fact, a revelation of what it means to be a physical person, how gestures and inflections are saturated with meaning and personality, how surface leads to interior, unearths it. I am mindful of him now, I am under a false pretense that he is present here in words, but glad and smirking affectionately to the way he still evades in death as he evaded in life, a person of immediacy, full of soul because he was alive, so very alive, living, but a challenge, not easily graspable, or so his stare intimates.

I cannot talk about him long without the dissatifaction of what I've said outweighing the vengeful urge to keep writing, to 'get at' him. But the more that is said directly, the more I will fail. The more I will be disinterested in saying too much, because whatever is captured onto a page does not reflect the reality of my experience. And we must be on guard from the precepts, and sneaking hands of speaking anything, because it will attempt to show us what has seized and let us forget yet-unspoken, or worse, the unspeakable.

For now, I rest my effort. Temporarily, nothing can be recovered. But certain sketches, like an architect's elaborate fancy await my passion for words, await, too, my transformed passion for Chris. A walk along a street in the summer night, briefly, darting between cars and sidewalk, with Chris in front of me and turning around, returning eye to eye briefly, with his knowing, foreknowing, exacting glance, leading me forward, silent and signalling.

Recovery is habitual, ongoing. So it is. So I open my hand.

December

2004-12-18T11:49:00.000-05:00

In the cold clear morning, the stark blue light. In the stark blue light, air minces bird chatter. In the mince of bird chatter, the shuffling joints inside the still house. Inside the still house, a waking sleeper. In the waking sleeper, thoughts of smoke, books, screens and the scrambling fragments of dreams. In the fragments of dreams, a face - neither long ago or soon to come; the sharp, brown eyes weighty with sense. In the sharp brown eyes, the sting and puncture of eventual dates - births and deaths, memories of summer evenings and a neighborhood wood. In a neighborhood wood, ancestors and collars, something like a preface towards the south of Boston - a July cast over in a low-thick fog, inconstant misting, a road along a channel of slated green-grey waves. In the turnings of the road, the record books and yesterday photographs stacked beside forget-me-not flowers, cream envelopes and casual invitations, slipped with printed cursive scripts. In a cursive script, a single name. In a single name, the span of times and family angles and kitchen tables, Zodiacs and parishes, arguments and arrivals, sinuous chords and a long-distance call, pamphlets, graduations, circumcisions, ties, pillow and coverlet, all that constitutes someone else's life, birthday feasts and a rendezvous, that might never have occurred: a red cap or a German shepherd, blossoms and Christmases, all laid over in suns or naps, waking. In a cold, clear morning.

Sentiment

2004-12-17T02:07:00.000-05:00

How it hurts to be unwanted.

Momma turned to papa, said just because.

2004-12-12T16:57:00.000-05:00

Because papa said to, momma just turned.
Just momma papa turned because said to.
Because momma turned to papa, said Just.
Momma "Just" to Papa "Because" turned 'Said.'
Said turned to because, momma just papa!
Because turned papa just, said momma.
To just said momma, papa turned because?

Flourish

2004-12-12T16:32:00.000-05:00

My hands these hands are harbors here thronged for dampened things and fragrant songs, the vegetation of soft waves and wrinkled palms tossing like a rent sail relinquished to a calm, like a crate that cannot graze the surf and soon its frail meats spill. Pearls and turf...

My hands these hands are harbors here along opals that trenchent sea-tides wronged. Opened to what wreckage and bliss-beaten, these fingers unfold slowly mist and hint at prayer as pure as marrow. Unlit, they tumble forth dreaming alcohol and arrows.

My hands these hands are harbors here like urns which gesture grace or knots that turn into doomed slipstreams no fragile compass crosses. Clasp them: where each tremoring vein glosses in silk or ruddy pools (enriched with stores I do not understand - gain or losses, tombs and touches), these silver hands for yours.

The Rhododendron

2004-11-27T21:17:00.000-05:00

The rhododendron owes an ode this year
from last summer's sere, deciduous blooms.
White-tapering-softs off, broke off and blear,
crust with rugulose and rust. Light was doom.
And the trusses, like sunwrung welted wax,
collapsed under flat, greenflapped bush stubs, grasping
the dark soil so some turmoil could ask:
What here is more than shrub? When time's ellapsed
do pretty bracts and campanulate leaves
act as no more than once bright companions
to a mind that loves life, although life leaves?
Yet beyond any animate reunions
of the dead, nothing can retract the grief,
nor fond white rondures that rang in the leaf.

2004-11-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

That, How, To

2004-11-22T05:41:00.000-05:00

1.
That I am undisclosed yet read entirely.

That I am believed but not by words.

2.
How we dream for the intimacy from all whom we are closest to coming from a stranger we haven't yet met.

How my sentiments can only be shared by people not even born yet, but are meant specifically, exactly, for You: of name, with face.

3.
To be pitied, as only great men are.

To wake into our desires, not from them.

Thoughts, unthoughts

2004-11-21T08:11:00.000-05:00

*
Today was a fine day of rain, dark premonitions, crowds and unfulfillment. Most people live each day to be filled with something. I've never reached beyond the idea of it, myself. Personally, it's best to be empty in your "soul" or "heart" but have plenty of mental legerity, that way, you can constantly take on or push off anything you are thinking of to any surrounding you occupy.

*
As others write to tell of themselves, I write to have one. Only through the persuasions of words, do I say "I."

*
The impossibility to lose our illusions: how much we vie for them at the expense of happiness, reality or otherness. I don't want a person anymore than I want to be happy. Motives are the finesse of a literary mind (acting) in action. Nothing could be more absurd than the idea that people behave based upon a formula that is visible, in fact, it is the invisibility of other people that bothers us most. That a correspondence does not exist merely because we desired something, let's say the flesh of someone's face, and it did not come responsively as our fingers wavering from the spasm of tendons in the forearm... that's the crisis. We're in a disjointed world, where the most attractive organs are external, useful to the extent we are not allowed to see how much our sufficiency is within, metaphysical (which is to say, senseless, sans immediacy). Or so I lie.

When I love, it is a function of a pool before eyes. And so to the degree other people are themselves, chaotic liquid rippling (willed with desires irrelevant because they aren't my own) — I hate them. One of the true disappointments in life are people believing that decisions are made for reasons or impulses, for that matter too. Reasons and impulses follow a mode of living, of deciding through the unknown.

*
Nothing bothers me more than the precious, antiquated, stuffed style of everything I say. Yet everything I've said has been for the purpose of creating a sensation. Annoyance, like romance or any ambition, has always been my most palpable phenomenon of feeling.

*
Don't forget, now, is an exact moment. White, sterile light through beige curtains. With my belly and chest to the bed, face couched in Chris' blanket, his pillow, the plastic keys clinking; a couple on the adjacent bed, comatose. Eight or eight o'five, a.m.? Contained music born in time. The unopened cover of Augustine's Confessions upside-down next to me. This suffices for a "life"?

*
Dreams, inversion: the masturbator is the great icon of the artist. And not because of how cheap the pleasure comes, but how marvelously its integrations manifest a single effect... imagination embodies.

*
The blood-ghost of K, for now. The one to come? Something ever more about to be, he said.

What can I say?

2004-11-19T05:23:00.000-05:00

I'm lonely as all hell and it feels like I've fallen on hard-nails luck. I can imagine no saving grace. Everyone's either into someone else, nothing, or dead. I want to hear something by piano. I want to shoot the piano player. I need some fix, some drug, some chance or peace, gift or scrap, so badly. I'm down on my knees, ready as all Hell to get fired up for the idea of God, or something — random coincidence of a malevolent universe to drag me up, saddle me onto the High Horse, good times, a laugh without a sigh. Need something. My eyes have become needle-ends. There's something missing and no one's gonna bring it, and I don't care, I need empty hands brought before me badly. Fuck. I dream at the idea of locking myself in a room, of white walls with soothing inaudible-mostly music, reading Kafka's diaries, letting forgetfulness fill me like a sieve.

Believe me, the garden is stone, dry, of rocks, with exasperated ache, bitter and alone.

Send my roots rain!

I clench my teeth. Wait this out or not.

Querulously

2004-11-14T10:43:00.000-05:00

searching the arches...

and yet a Book

Some Write to Speak, I Write to Be Spoken to

2004-11-13T18:14:00.000-05:00

Waking up amidst the retreat of daylight, five o'clock Saturday early evening. From my window, I see the snow bracelet's the hillside, tree limbs, the angles and ledges of all the buildings. This is the underground world. The impossibility of a journal for a man who knows no self: which is to say a man without style. Style is the semblance of image for the page as mirror (willed as it is). I continue to read the letters of our dear sir, across the gulf (of the Atlantic, of Eternity) – Monsieur Mallarmé. How curious his letters are, that display a personality as assurably affectionate and precise as a small piece of green felt one finds beneath a chess piece. To read a poet's letters is to find one's questions already answered.

My desire at the moment is abated. Hopefully, tonight will proceed properly, which is to say, sociality will yield inebriation, inebriation will yield an imaginative cohesion, and together with mood and deliberate sensation, I will not surrender into the throes of longing for something other than what is before me. Is there anything before me?

The ascetic mindset is surely deplorable. But how imploring it is to pose, especially in prose, where most often the greatest writers turn, retreat, enfold where we did not think to restrain, or say opposite of what seemed imminent, et cetera.

I dream of a Ledean body... Another wild series of dreams, including nudity, beaches, rocky points & insidious grinning.

Torture is the rendering of absolute tensions as I understand it. Torture for me, however, is the tedium of no absolute tensions. Dead-weights. To be decidedly anything is to be too readily dead.

Invariably, whatever hour I wake up tomorrow, and I have always regarded my waking hours as the holiest hours of a person to himself, blank, clean, silent and uncomplicated by the false appearences of exterior transitions, today will have been something quite obsolete. Quite quietly yesterday awaits us. Let a memory of sulphur burn on though. May something happen, may the world entice me. May arms open with snares. May smiles provide the door and means to open it.

May my head swill like an oozy river of bronze lost in the elaborate conches of a pure vanilla shell.

Valéry, take me onto the plight of your wings, skirt, guide, gild and enwrap me wherever your spirit tends.

Mr. Blah sends his affectionate regards.

...

Good Friday

2004-11-12T18:25:00.000-05:00

Tears. But the expectancy of tongues, too.

Nonsense

2004-11-11T14:29:00.000-05:00

A day of heavens, tortures. Awaking from a more pleasant & bizarre carnivalesque dream than usual, I rushed to class. Today was the first of Hart Crane, my chief joy of the written Word. But before I indulge onward: the dream.

(illustriated)

It was an odd mixture, that began with a Dostoevskian blend. Cast as some sort of Rogozhin-type, I am in a dorm room pacing back and forth, full of spleen and rebuke with a known and current (non)friend of mine. The usual disputes are up in the air, between me and her. Her friends litter around the doorway and watch us argue. No screaming occurs, but it might as well have happened. I can remember vaguely a long lamp with a thin metallic neck that stretches and droop as if a plant. She lists all her complaints, going on about my indifference and signaling it as the true sign of my monstrous nature, or some sorts. I shrug, vexed not at her but at the yoke of the situation. Some final-like words are said.

It is at this moment or before this moment that K. arrives. Dressed memorably somehow (though the specificity of the distinction escapes me, the exact sensation that there was something distinct to the clothes remains), he waltzes in and out like a mindless feather, half-enjoying my overblown need for his presence, the other half just breezing by and away. The sense that I have let him leave due to my own failure to communicate my desparate wantonness of him, this I remember. So the girls giggle at me and I storm out, into a mixture of streets/rooms/science-fiction-like corridors where truly strange creatures/persons gather. It seems the event was a halloween ball, and I was hoping to take K. with me.

Entering into this large room where a party of sorts transpires, I recognize two mild acquaintences from real-life. They are pleased and happy to see me, they also represent I take it the types of person in my life that do not know (fully) of the nature of my sexuality (which should include myself, in all honesty). I need, desparately though, to find K. — where is he? An obtusely-shaped leprachaun man in stylish dark greens and blacks, checkered across his jacket, hat and truncated pants, approaches. He seems to be a dear friend of mine. Some information is exchanged about K., I think, but nothing happens; the dream ends with my friend C. waking me up for class.

The poetry class lifts my soul. I leave class dizzy at not only the crisp alacrity of the november air, sun, but totally entranched with the unanchored azure galleons of the sky, total in its pure blue, and ferried with dozens of hundred eyebrow-shaped clouds, that sit lethargically, majestically, across the heavens. No one in the square of milling people notices, but I forgive them for themselves: the day is too grand, the sky is palpable to my eye, I am overcharged.

I return to my room, to hope to work somewhat on my poetry, but more so to relax, recoup from my exhaustion from the previous sleep-drived night, I drift into a doze with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and D. of course, filtering me in and out of conscious, my phone thumping, but nothing stirs me: I am wonderfully relaxed and egg-shell impervious to things... I remember nothing of my dreams from that two-hour nap, but awake, late to my Thesis appointment.

E. and I discuss life, poetry and the mandate of my thesis for a while. But most importantly Chris (...). Groans, shrugs and grins are exchanged, duly. His presence is soothing as always. His meticulous coilings of speculation, though entirely preposterous and uncentral at times, are like a great pillow for and of the Intellect: not for sleep, but for comfort.

I escort him to the bus, mindful as ever that he will leave, and the second he does, I will feel his absence and yearn for him tremendously moreso. E., a singular miracle of my brief life so far, not a father-figure, but a father, in the truest spiritual sense.

Philosophy class, dinner, The Idiot — the dark's fallen again and I've only been up for several hours. I return with C. to her current and my former (/current) residency. K. eventually shows up. Looking more like me in a precocious black sports jacket, or at least more like my ideal male posturer, bearer of "the cool" (I suppose). I succumb foolishly to the idea of calling him over to where I'm loafing on the couch. He sits before me, his animal-gaze as pubescent, rich and holy as ever (and he's obviously drowsy, yet this only adds to the erotically latent liebestod-look). I ask him to pretend I am on my death-bed, at least giving me the imaginary idea of him clasping onto my tired, extended hand — that's all I need from romance, afterall — but he banters "Leave me the book" (The Iidiot). Oh, I am the idiot. Why I pick the persons I do to have these enormous, or in this case, gigantically "unenormous" amours for, is shit-stupid. Can he realize how much his body-spirit is a sacrement for me? How much calm and tumult rinses together in just looking at him. His face, his wonderfully viscious face: like rocks with weeds, breeze, saline troughs. And his mawled hands, which I tease him for often, and am infinitely with affection for. But enough idolatry, inward and free as I feel it to be. The evening ends with yawns and a firmer, more realized sense that this Unrequitedness will not spell elevation, or poetry-making restraint: it is a red-herring that unfortunately hurts. Hurts because I do like him for him, and am not afraid to say to the degree of Much. But it will fade, surely, soon. Something else will hurdle itself into my life, or I'll force things to become dramaturgically oppressive between us. (This is what I tell myself when the spleen proceeds upon the scene of Obsession, at least).

Sabatogue is the only curtain for love's one-acts. The narrator and Albertine at the railway...

Amazingly, the world (especially its occupants) has no concern with the nature of my desires, nor inkling towards how serious, and sacredly pitiful I find the lode to be. Nor if they could care, would they. Nor would I ultimately want them to. Odd I can't ever come upon a person, "wrong one" or not, that doesn't mind testing the waters with me. I must sniff out (or produce) the phermone of doomed-beginnings masterfully well. "You bet on a horse, it ran the wrong way."

2004-11-09T00:05:00.000-05:00

2004-11-09T00:04:00.000-05:00

DAME & DAMON

2004-11-08T01:54:00.000-05:00

CHRISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

WILD with the vegetable madness of my delight, the sonorous fleece blowing, the metal crimblers, the tinsel sex, the distilled, unforeclosed, the lamb bleat, the robin-sack of feathers, the wild elephant horn, the muscle of the bull-thigh, the spewing-amber thicket, the blessed mars of thorn, freshet, the irascible pulp, vigor, sweetness of doom, LOAM AND TENDON, all my crazy heather-grass, tufts, gnarls, aprocots and salamander slitheriness: HELL BOY, HELL! Horned, purloining, ritual of flesh etheral confolding on the emerald-bright, the looming heel and sackiest plumb and plume of the cheek, ruddier-ruddiest, the testicle and clipped-lark wing, the azure whispers of november light, the sleep-lacked, the avowal, sonnet, crushed seed and caterpillar-pump, get thy grief-groins blissful, blowing... Incommensurable charge, trumpet of the spine, recoil and hiss of the betwixting... busses buttressing... cards, slips, receipts, bottles, ivies, peninks, wrappers, shiefs, canvasses, screens, the ardent carpet, the crepuscular pillow, the bed the cloth, the umber tumbling bark, the skygalleons and marshy grin-gropings, HISS HISS wires coupling, now's the irised rite of, tender wheelbarrow thunder come, pausing tensile nimble onslaught of, hankering cream-laid papery fold of, form, flaked, BARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRK stitch of ass-clench Gathering twitter, pies of July, barbeque surrender PARISIAN PLUNDERING! all my cards arighting lands lands lands vanilla ants ponder

come the summer
summery declivity sprouts
august pamphlets for París!
THOUSANDS SWIMMING
sun clots
boardwalk daydreams
whirl-kiss SHUTTLE-STUFFING!
sensuous rilly pages blowing
curdled ear-conch poisonous raspy
I come from China to Peru
fuschia, dahlia, buttercup and hymen

Breast-blossoms milk hiccups
velvet sunderings
Blood EVISCERATION
surge cough clack crumble
pink shirt folded undies
cucumber dander

Bridge flanks
Honey suckling
Plum jargony fever

Time trembling
RePITshinsplints

cow dung climbing

these these yeses yeses
eyes thises an for to buts
yet afters under
betweens towardings

CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRUNCH

-November 3rd

2004-11-04T01:25:00.000-05:00

How absently a world is tossed away.

-November 2nd

2004-11-03T03:58:00.000-05:00

Woke earlier than usual. Read sections of Beyond Good and Evil: maxims and interludes quiveringly perceptive. Especially this: "Want to make him interested in you? Pretend to be embarrassed in his presence-". This mysterious fragment, which could be taken as nothing more than disdain for coyness, or a mild championing of it in order to display the interplay of human vanity, fickleness as the truest coconspirators of Love/Desire, but no... so much 'beyond' wisdom or maxim is there, of my history, of lies and tangled perceptions, both erroneous and hopeful of romantic experience (and perhaps a subtle rebuke of God).

Spoke to C. over the computer. Distant as always. The dead-leaf echo of a formidable friendship. Ruined. But still bright in its twilight, its lustrous ability to confuse hate and love, spleen and tenderness.

A large walk in the miasmal-mist weather we continue to be (non)-treated with yields me a sense of total lightness, immunity from gravity or dimensionality, volume, roundedness. My gait, spry; eating, emptying; time, paused and social dynamics, asleep. Downtown in the city, where you never meet a single soul.

Between the two K.s a range of compulsions, half-analyzed urgencies. I tremble for presence, and am distrusting of it. Fed I will become drowsy, too hungry and I will turn lucidity into a madness of desire, paranoia.

A true sense of physical, psychical explosion when with K. I want to push him, grab him, hit him, somehow encounter him with or mock at least forcefulness. His wide, rapacious eyes - much more knowing than he could ever admit or care to be. His stolid lips like sedentary rock, sitting too long in the untimeliness of earth.

A font determines my desire to write.

A city can no more be judged for the quality of its library than a library can be judged for how many people visit it. Yet a person is both qualities of interior and numerics of degrees: we read others best when we discover whether or not they can be roamed into, whether separate corners even to themselves lurk...

Is sleepfulness a matter of never being awake or never separating the two? Or is sleepfulness the lacking element. Too infrequently the body sinks into stone. Always a fever threatens me, a rush in my breath, a sense that my joints, tips of my flesh, limbs and body must rise, twitch, wretch into a spasm.

I dream of Nietzsche's intellectual savagery. Neither refined nor brute, where he is too thin he stings the most, and where he could be assumed of saying nothing, his width charms and wins you like a winking Falstaff.

No sense of the One to Come. No progression in self-analysis. For the first time, the grand, flopping illusion of me projecting myself seems inverted.

I haven't moved.

I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine

2004-10-31T19:03:00.000-05:00

Every Grain of Sand

2004-10-31T17:19:00.000-05:00

Girl From the North Country

2004-10-31T16:53:00.000-05:00

Complaints of an Icarus by Baudelaire

2004-10-31T16:46:00.000-05:00

Caresses

2004-10-29T15:46:00.000-05:00

after Ferdinand Knopff

 Incessantly our Oedipus
 With cipher stare
 And lips of hushed angelicus
 Salutes the mauve valley
 And dissolving panoply
 Of dust and dirt
 (Dried and drenched
 In sallow sky and bolder-rust),
 Secludes the undeciphered scripts
 Of blaring cypress
 Bocaged about his head and body—
 A royal nimbus,
 (Symbol of that second matrimony),
 Eludes the scalped rocks
 Where a few sonorous weeds combust
 And rise, where pillars pair
 And spar against voluptuous desert airs—
 Ah, Oedipus, our sackcloth king
 And sceptered arm
 With proud blue orb
 And perked wings high, azured. 

 Assuredly, Oedipus,
 You have welcomed her furred flank
 And iridescent honeyed form
 Splotched as if a myriad-sea of eyes,
 The secret corpses she collects
 That disc and dot her muscled canvas
 Out toward her maculate akimbo tail
 That swells like a grin, erect
 Into the air by each and every hair, sects
 Of beige and brown, amber, black and pearl. 

 And yet arresting as her caress is,
 From the lenient iodines of her mouth
 To the pulsant eyelids of her drowsy sleep,
 She cannot keep you, no, Oedipus,
 Desire has no trophy but itself
 Though your torso leans, pale and clear,
 As if her alabaster souvenir,
 Though your shoulder tips,
 (Magnificent motion of stagnance)
 Like her trembling haunches
 Staunched and couched in leaps, hoits,
 Or her agile paw that wraps
 Across your relaxed waist, loitering
 In a calm only the awful, keen
 And imperious may know—
 No, Oedipus, her glossy embassy
 And supple tyranny holds
 Only the assurances and dreams
 A lavish zero dreams, yes, pure
And tempting,
But who are so awake
And seen and heard
What no man has yet heard or saw,
Have nothing but a womanly embrace
To fear, not a leopard nor a leopard's claw.

 O, do not turn your cryptic jaw yet, King,
 As your eyes, or hers,
 Search for the other she may annul
 Among the somnambulist landscape
 Of hollow siroccos as warm as her,
 As you sieve sideways,
A bit without word, transfixed, lulled.

Hillside Misadventures

2004-10-28T16:56:00.000-05:00

Boo

2004-10-28T04:31:00.000-05:00

The Note

2004-10-28T04:05:00.000-05:00

He walked in and she wasn't there.
He waited but she didn't come.
He sat at the table and told himself he wasn't hungry.
He waited.
He went into the fridge, and found plenty.
He didn't take anything, and so he sat back down.
He waited but she still wouldn't come.
He thought of her as never coming.
He thought of her as never wanting to come.
He thought of her as never coming, never wanting to come, coming but not wanting to, never coming but wanting, but never could he think of her coming and wanting to come.
He thought while he was thinking she would never come, she might come.
She still wasn't there.
He told himself if he could think of anything else, purely, she might come (though he secretly agreed below the volume of the rest of his thinking she would not).
He told himself he was tricking himself, to think she would come.
He told himself because he was trying to trick himself, or fate, or both, she wasn't going to come.
He thought if only what he had thought could surely be the reason why she wasn't going to come, he would hate only himself.
He told himself his thoughts were mad, and had nothing to do with her.
He didn't listen to himself.
He looked at the clock, time had past, considerably, she wasn't coming.
"When are you going to come?" he spoke to the space, thinking he needed to speak in order to coax her to come, or by speaking he would accept the inevitable, or that when she came he would at least have something to say that had existed, that he had come to the point of asking aloud if she would come.
She didn't come.
He played with a glass.
He watched himself in a spoon.
He made noise with the glass and the spoon.
Feeling angry, or joy, or something he couldn't describe, nor cared to, he decided he would break the glass or throw the spoon if she didn't come soon.
Maybe he would throw the glass then throw the spoon, or maybe together or maybe use them as instruments against the other.
He thought if he disrupted anything, physically, she would never come.
He remembered if she said she would surely come, wanted to come, or surely wanted to come but wouldn't.
He tried not to remember too much, or think too much about what he could remember, because he couldn't trust any thought mediated by reflective thinking.
She would come, he thought.
She would come and he would laugh and he might even tell her about all this nonsense and she would laugh, they would laugh, and he would be a different person laughing at himself, his old self, and not laughing with pity or pride, but the stinging glory of relief when relief is too remote to ever imagine.
He laughed.
He turned in his seat.
"You're too late."
If I leave now, and she doesn't come, then I won't have to suffer with her absence, or rather, I won't have to suffer with the expectancy of her presence, he said to himself.
But he thought if he left she would definitely come, or rather, she definitely would not, be he would never know, and she would never know he had been waiting, and how hurt he had been to be waiting for so long, but as soon as she comes I'll forget my anger, grief, anxiety — the large part of me that exists will no longer exist, and she won't be meeting me so much as my joy that she's here, he thought.
So what if she doesn't come, at least I have someone to wait for.
She won't come but she might.
He waited and she didn't come.
He threw the spoon off the table, the spoon bounced and the silence afterwards got him only angrier.
He pushed the glass off the table, whimsically.
The glass fell and tipped over but didn't break.
He felt the glass was the meaning of everything.
He imagined if she came he would walk up and leave the second she arrived and never say a word and not even look at her once, pretend she was no one, was nothing, was not even a presence, and no matter how hard she tried to stop him, or how long she followed him, he would never address her, and finally he would feel easy again.
He felt guilty.
He knew he was too himself.
"Come on, come on."
He looked at the clock.
She didn't come.
He collected the spoon, picked up the glass, placed them back on the table, got something from the fridge, ate it, and after never looking at the clock once, looked at it again and wished he could cry.
She would enter.
She would enter and he would sit, still: enraged yet content.
She would put her stuff down nonchalantly and ask him how he was.
No, she would say first, "Sorry for being late," and he would nod.
She would come, she had to.
He looked at the clock.
He needed to go for a walk.
He paced around the room.
He looked out a few windows.
He checked the phone.
He changed his shoes, and his shirt, and sat on the bed.
He sat on the bed and switched his shoes to the ones he was wearing again and looked at the small clock near his bed.
He got up to leave and went through the door.
He came back in.
He got a pen but it was empty, so he grabbed another pen, then wrote on the back of an envelope, leaving it on the table, then left.
'Sara, right back.'

A Brief Glimpse of Infinity

2004-10-28T03:37:00.000-05:00

Desire, desire. Desire is like a rotting bell. Musical peels. The honeyed cancer. The droning of thought, the obsession of conditionals. Desire is the history of the future, and the unexpectedness of the past. It is the flagrancy of virtue, and yet the triumph of malice, hate, the equivalence of bitter-blooming seeds, compacting reason and madness, above the impossible. It kills, redeems. Looms and harbors. In the Other, the sacred crashes into all perversity, pleasure and maligned goodwills. It is the fiction of nature, and the spontaneity of repetition, again and again and again. From the glimmer or glance of a face, to the unwritten of the revealed, in the positing of a deft gesture, gaze, look, unsinuated stare, it compasses all seas and rewrites all maps, unnecessarily, instantaneous. It creates a hoop and hook for every end, termination. It cannot stop but where it begins, forever frustrated, doom-determined. Desire, he, she, it; its paradises it loses, its treasures sinks, its oceans drinks and its land devours. It is the feeding string of empty lining. Bottomlessness for a perch.

October 18th.

2004-10-18T20:25:00.000-05:00

—Deserted of beloved, a space of home, a recognizable medium, or the urge to work on my Requiems, I find my self the orphan of myself most. The weather suffers the similar condition of my prose. Its verbs, denuded, spryless. The mangled syntax, abbrievated development of a successful cognition, the tendency towards gross excess... A stolid, stiff, wooden sense at all times. Prepositional cluttery. I long to stride, to perform some knowable gait with Words even in these personal & stale reflections.

My hygiene deteriorates almost as much as my spelling. I can succumb to the illusion this is a grand stage of chrysalis, yet neither the spirit of my person or the crafting of speech, phrasing, etc — manifest a warmth of tissue. I must rid myself of the computer, but my penmanship is crippled. My typing, spasmodic. My thoughts rearrange themselves without the egoistic excitement I expect their frenzy to bring.

I continue to read however. The Idiot. Kafka's diaries. I dream of the perfect poem to be written. Scraps, fragments, failed attempts at letter writing crowd me. I have failed to guard my solitude.

I feel like an inchoate, intractable block of base marble. All that emerges are half-furnished, partially chiseled elbows. Elbows.

How long will the stuff of my strained (or already decayed) friendships sustain me?

Questioning the Word

2004-10-18T12:17:00.000-05:00

1. Is language an essence of the human?
1a. Can language, as essential component of the human, convey — unconceal — "reproduce" essence?
1b. Can language, as a non-essential component of the human, convey — unconceal — "reproduce" essence?

2. To what degree is Heidegger's essential understanding of philosophy, infiltrated by a (non) essential history, origin, provocation & interrogation of Language?
2a. In what sense is that philosophical project extra-linguistic?
2b. Is that project extra-linguistic?

On Friendship: a building — other before self as skeleton underground foundation — from that point up: pleasantry, usefulness, moral benefit (empyrean); friendship is borne by instants, instants of mutual love (other before self) , in which the act of mutual love has created the promise and potentially of a continued, totally enduring friendship — as an instant Friendship does not require the span of Time or the reflection of memory to "establish" its legitimacy; yet a Friendship, through a progression of Time or Memory (after Death, when the Other annuls this bound, even when both annul this bound) persists, inactive in its mutuality but always with the promise of its recommencement — Death does not change friendship, it can progress beyond, within, sustaining the unsustainable: the Other's Death; friendship does not require knowledge of friendship, reflexive for the Self or reciprocally through the Other ...

& yet, Myshkin!

The Sunday Morning of Saturday Morning

2004-10-16T12:14:00.000-05:00

The same reminds one of the same. She had the smallest build and body of any girl I had ever met my age. She wasn't. She wasn't even my age, but older. A small girl's body though, with such tiny shoulders, spanning the small of her chest; a concealed sorta eyesight, a child's flame for a stare that moves up and down, as if it did some guilty thing. As if we were all implied. Her hair's wrapped. Her wrists are apologetic. A cough. Needle and thread. The facile shred of a cheap fabric string. Her cat graces. Her lies, swallowing the little-bundled top of her up. Tender, moist, gray and singing with a small murmur of the throat. Amy.

Proverb

2004-10-15T16:28:00.000-05:00

A pillar is critical of gravity.

The One to Come

2004-10-15T16:11:00.000-05:00

"I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."

*
Let a book begin where the repentance of a kiss does. May it, treelike, oxygenate more than must needs the air it lacks. A windy country of the clouds. Bright as inevitable sap. Indestructible and double as the turtle's dome. The pages must be pages, and they must be precious as their sensuous weight. The phrasing, which is the bone and code of style, should bark belatedly, as to be read across Time. It must foresee the reader. It must be a gate in both directions, and to repeat: inevitability. If we could lose ourselves in entirely new dimensions, sequences, paths, unthought-of journeys, scour shadow worlds but also stumble through those as familiar as briar and thorn, bush and trunk for the first time, if after all our many years and digestions, if we were to arrive at a place not unlike the frontiers of thinking, where the edge of our perceiving was stripped and burnt, fallow but resurrected, dazzling in the shock of light anew, fresh, pained, alive, if after the formidable mountain and highway and terrible lonesome walking and resting, the cuts, aches, bruises and other acts of love a traveller subjects the body to until their body is the manifestation of trekking in flesh, then, long after this time, if we sat in a place closest to the one we would forever be seeking yet found somebody waiting for us, smiling, knowing, there would be no need for speech then. Undoubtedly, presence of being would be a whole new relation between the terms "enough" or "not enough". Yet who will expect physical presence with me? Who will imagine the trauma real, palpable and excruciating of that journeying? Ah, the book! The book.

*
The future of writing will not be achieved writing. It will be the writing of achieving. For thousands of years we have separated awe and striving, as if a Sun were docile, beautifully impotent and idle. So far, the history of masterpieces have been a history of finished things: which is to say a history of miraculous, enchanted, perfect structures and mystical (and by extension mythical, mysterious) solutions for thinking, being, language, time and pity squeezed from the human organs of speech and writing. We rely on the marble rendered, total in its gift and insight. No one would stare at a partial marble without some other mandate preceding the purpose of the art, because no one wants to be remembered of the magic of stone, the patience of the stone-sculptor, it must be inevitable, no? The writing to come will be more like dough. And this means it will be of human interest to see the manifestation of mental, almost "synaptic" development. To see genius as a process of verb. To see an ardor of becoming. Of will, not gift. To see a self erect perfection in words from only impoverished graces. A slow, long, almost pitiless "exhaltation."After the magic has ended, and those few magicians of the word are unaware, dead, the tricks will be performed by men who will invent what they do as the act occurs...

A long period of failures. A whole era longer than all eras so far of forgetting: the leveling out of small and large, great and poor until only the weak and curious are controlling this single spectrum of the psychic arts. The future writing will be synonmous to watching toddlers walk, enjoyable for that sake too. Thought and style will be revealed for what they are, constructions of time and love. It is for this purpose that failed writers, mere competency and unformed spirits of words are the holiest of forerunners and will be seen with greater glory once the new period has commenced. Broken grammars, replete un-thinking, the blessed sauces of mediocrity, the foppery of ramblings. Our gods have always been dead. But what will we do when one becomes them because he remained himself? The remains that are full, heavy and changing.

I must keep as I am and write.

*
—What time is? asked the clerk mindlessly without his head raising from his book. The dim of the windows showed on his desk. His empty cup was set aside his reach. All around his desk was a buzzing silence. Absence.
—What time is it! he barked, waiting for whoever was around him to speak. He read on.

The Super-Abridged Cliff Notes for Every Human Being I've Met at Boston College Part I

2004-09-22T00:47:00.000-05:00

John Anderson:

What do you think of Robert Pinsky?

Ceilidh Orr:

not exactly

Robert Chibka:

Ya?

Paul Dougherty:

Oh. Hmm. Yes.

Thomas Epstein:

As you know

Rob Herritt:

typo

Katie Johansen:

kawala sex

Hannah Nolan-Spohn:

"take care of yourself"

Ryan Miller:

Firstly, two points.

Paul Mariani:

Oh! Really?

Joe Spece:

Baby

Ana Ruth:

Hel-lo.

Jazzy Bus Driver:

I'll tell ya man

Nazi O'Neil Lady:

!

Kaelin Grant:

not so much

Meredith Grant:

oh dude sorry

Bachir Karam:

yo man im out

Abby Hanlon:

oh interesting

JC:

haha

Paul Newmark:

I would like to think so

Kevin Newmark:

(hand gesturing eye squint)

Kyle Storm:

fuck fuck fucking fuck

Dr. Hecht:

seizure

Isabel:

?

Erin Donnelly:

STOP

Steve Sunderland:

whatever

Mark O'Connor:

Yes, of course, you see that's interesting for three reasons...

Dr. Howe:

Well yes.

Suzanne Matson:

One, two, three, four, five

Amy Tyner:

(pouts)

Simone Kearney:

What should I do?

Joe LaRocca:

I hate you

Mike Brady:

That's not funny