word

drunk knitting is not as easy as one might think it would be, esp. with very gnarley yarn ...

not so summer reading

The Will to Technology

tradition

Wing of a Roller, 1512
Albrecht Durer
watercolor and gouache on vellum

A Call to Arms

or, Oms ...

Rise up! Rise Up! Young
Young, still so young
One
of many

That thought you'd be
some where/one
else
Bigger, Stronger, Faster more
Believable by Now ...

YOUr'e time has come
Ready, Go Steady
Bang away on your father's gun
all thoughts dreams he had
(wished) realized in you

Fight to re/claim
that that was never
yours
that which never
really manifested itself

beyond an ancestor's grave

today The Room, tomorrow The Response

by Mark Strand


The Room

It is an old story, the way it happens
sometimes in winter, sometimes not.
The listener falls to sleep,
the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open

and into his room the misfortunes come --
death by daybreak, death by nightfall,
their wooden wings bruising the air,
their shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.

There is a need for surprise endings;
the green field where cows burn like newsprint,
where the farmer sits and stares,
where nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough.

UM, blogger dot com ...

Can we exchange a few words here?

Why, oh why, did you design (or acquire) and implement a spell check feature that does not recognize the word "blog" in its dictionary??!



um. yeah. thought so.


i guess we are all just as confused.

love is a short name

for dismissal, of the many things that require attention,
responsibility

such as

doing the dishes
filing your bills, your nails
cataloging years of birthday cards received
and boxing the funny/sentimental/thiswillworkforsomeoccassion hallmark greetings picked up along the way that haven't received a receiver (yet)
Ex-said-er-rah!
...

oh, and there's that little thing
the tape always running in the background, composing the static of the day:

what are you still doing here, my love?
my sweet, sweet sweet Misses/d Opportunity
...your lungs have finally grown (time to leave Intensive Care)
time has come and time has passed and time will keep coming and when will "keep" finally be
the last stitch unstitched, the one keeping your lips closed from shouting to yourself

love is the short name
Attention! to the call -

(early beginners, late bloomers, one, too, and all)

subtitles

wings of desire:

"What is wrong with peace...



that its inspiration does not endure...



and that it is almost
untellable?"

-------------------




this (above), after reading this.


Have we embarked?

they do what they say ...

check it (out) --- added to the gtown library (yikes! how official! has it really already been over a year? well, looks like they got their dates mixed up - publication date is really 2005, but who's counting?)

maybe pittsburg

could use some revisiting:

http://collectedworks.blogspot.com/2005/01/for-indecisive-or-perhaps-honest.html


again, i found myself - twice now in the last week - referring to this salad, a little yang for your yin.

UnderLines ("But what do the dead say?")

i've always been obsessed with Other People's Underlines...I have spent minutes that were actually hours, pouring over library shelves and the musty (but cozy) smelling rows of printed matter in used book stores, combing through book after book - titles I've read and titles I haven't - to discover what little marks have been made, what symbols others employ to show importance or ready a contention with the author ... i could go on and on about the histories that have yet to be written from an anthropological study of underlines ...

but instead, i am going to share one, the only one in this title, and one of the very few i have ever found in any books once formerly owned by my mother ...

(in red link, underlined)

"You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time."

(and a red 'X', just after the closing of the above quoted paragraph)

"But what do the dead say?"

(from Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun

another cup half empty/half full

"What you do to others you really do to yourself. So when you do good to others, you're doing good to yourself. Alternatively, when you do bad to others, you're doing bad to yourself. So in thinking of others, think of yourself, for to love and do right by others is to love and do right to your own self." - Leela James

balance

"Sometimes the work of art about an event precedes the event in time."

Mark Strand's translation of a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade:

SOUVENIR OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

Clara strolled in the garden with the children.
The sky was green over the grass,
the water was golden under the bridges,
other elements were blue and rose and orange,
a policeman smiled, bicycles passed,
a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird,
the whole world—Germany, China—
All was quiet around Clara.

The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden.
Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.
What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.
Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley,
waiting for letters slow to arrive,
not always being able to wear a new dress. But
she strolled in the garden, in the morning!
They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!

if

re/member

(no subject, no object, no past, no future)

monthly quota

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-- Robert Frost

this is me

half-cooked, half-raw

no surprise

an artist quoted on a starbucks cup:

"In an age when pictures have become more eloquent than words, schools are still programmed to reduce the child's immersive interaction with the visual world to the practical poverty of the alphabet. Visual literacy should become a pedagogical priority in order to prepare our children to function within the increasingly visual complexity of our environment." - Vik Muniz

oh those young kids

don't trust anyone over thirty

what an anthem.

in retrospect, what a waste of toothpaste and disposable cameras. oh wait
maybe that's my generation.


ambition will get you somewhere online
your little plot of sand in the dune of time

but wait for the wave

no one will cry for your castle

because they always already remember

it was never always never there.

Forthcoming

"To the mosquitoes that I hope will die here: A Memoir of the Times We Never Spent.”

i don't miss your pleasure anymore

or, it has been a long time, the brain can't keep track of it all...Or, I am stuck on you(r scent).

"The salient feature in this case is odour. Rats, mice and voles recognise each other by smell. Christie Fowler and her colleagues at Florida State University have found that exposure to the opposite sex generates new nerve cells in the brains of prairie voles—in particular in areas important to olfactory memory. Could it be that prairie voles form an olfactory “image” of their partners—the rodent equivalent of remembering a personality—and this becomes linked with pleasure?"

or some guy's explanation

------
The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

- Emily Dickinson


---

we all knew that was coming.

there are fewer things

still, when did a minute become so long?

now that we control what time used to dictate
tell me why so little is given
without the expectation of gain

(addition addiction)
(addiction addition)
(add)
(ad)
(add)
(added)
the new
minimalization (Fine Living) is living in forced
waves of the microserfs,
a steady
supply of square one
plus
its own negative
(
addition

now is a good time for this one again

From the Long Sad Party
Mark Strand



Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its
white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two
candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had
noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the
stars,
how small they were, how far away.

fair

well? perhaps.

this site has been draining itself
dry for months now

it's just plain silly how very true
that the more you open
the more you leave exposed,
out your control,
the more that flows,
flows from you
you alone


so let's put on this act
the one that we've rehersed
to the point that the lines we recite
become wrinkles
on an exhausted face


so many things are just plain over.
now.

gushing is the last one would expect

and i was preoccupied, changing my name,
creating a fictional address
just so i could buy porn online

what little chariot of wild horses
would come bearing down upon
this stick frozen by time and the chill of a lake?

i, for one, was not sticking around
to find out



the scene always reveals itself in the past tense
and the arches of feet ache for the miles of rocky
dust ahead

sometimes a shoulder stand is better
than a head stand.

today is a good day for this one, a still life

by William Carlos Williams



so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.



---------

(pay attention to the ordinary, the small things

the quotidian.)

the cold water is always so warm

and it takes more than a minute
to register the command:
"cold, drinkable water now, dammit!"

expectations are not always so accommodating
to instantaneous need

even after years, or just a few weeks
we are still waiting
for the right response
("right" of course being the demand of intent
we attempted to create)

...influence only goes so far...

hiccups are oh-so-symbolic
if you want them to be

the most over-looked,

under-rated condiment EVER is

horseradish.


and that's all there is to say about that.

a time for the new?

i was thinking about starting up a new blog space, a new manila folder to contain writings of a different kind, a new space to carve out in my mind, an online portal into a separate section of thought.

this has nothing to do with the new year.


to quote a band that i referred to in an email to friends last year upon the changing of the calendar..."so this is the new year/and i don't feel any different."

that does not apply in this situation. a new year, with all of its culturally imbued metaphors of change, growth, and progress, can certainly begin at any time. i prefer to make my "resolutions" well in advance of any particular time change. besides, my "new life," or whatever, began a long time ago. fuck forget january first. the conventional symbolism of that day, like many named holidays, is just another day to colonize with commercial messages and PR campaigns. pessimistic? sure, why not. i'm a big fan of the alice in wonderland tea party song that goes something like, "a very merry un-birthday to you, to you..."

funny, those Washington Sports Club ads with the "desperate" RESOLVE text and imagery, nevermind the sad appropriation of tracy chapman's from-the-pit-of-heart-and-head anthem...

if you're going to do it, do it. the word "try" should not be a part of anyone's vocabulary.


and about that other blog...it may be in the not-so-collected works.