Breakfast BBC

Comings and meetings with somebody new
Though he expected the coming, and met it anyway
With only a soft oh of recognition and no surprise,
Grounded by a hotel-roomed newsflash
Of the violence he had hoped never to see,
Although, from Belfast to Baghdad,
There are always more than two sides
To this loose hand-me-down war.

He looked down on the string of moving lights,
His eye-gleam only a glowscreen reflection,
Was reminded of the shining path--

Truthfully, it's a bit shadier than the name lets on
Not exactly bright and transparent
Like that stubbornly delicate Europa Hotel
(how can anyone defend himself?)
And if you set yourself up to unveil a hypocrisy
Then you at least acknowledge its sliver of reality,
Barely a splinter, mind you, but nettling nonetheless
In English, French, or Arabic acerbic.

For you and I can't afford our fantasies here
Not that the culture was quite real in the first place,
Making motion pictures, but not a life.

He turned away, turned it off, and decided
Not to leave breadcrumbs in the nautilus spiral
Not wanting to waste his continental practicality,
Shifting back into quizzical adoration
Deserved of grown-up talk, gradually less pervasive
In the much-fabled teen spirit of attraction
Helped along by technological know-how
That will soon be scuttled, and outlive itself.

So to hell with the eggs and toast and bacon
And their greasy speculation,
Collecting keen on a neutral stretch of stomach.

Metempsychosis

Allergy is a modern
Plague. We've come to
Reject our environment, the
Same as it's rejecting
Us. Take your five
senses and invert them;
Begin with taste and
Smell until they saturate
Your new impoverished sexuality,
Sinking through embedded texts.
Sickness arrives in Ceylon
In a launder-faded dress,
Assuring you otherwise with
Her perfumed manifesto, a
Steamed narcotic envelope that
Hides a woman's reality,
When she mistakenly waves
At the deceptively familiar
Figure in the crowd,
Realizes the horror of
Being buried alive in
Her own backyard, feels
The stinging folly of
Wanting to spare the
Necessity of evolutionary pain,
Searches fruitlessly through silly
And serious headlines in
A soggy newspaper, the
Ink spidering away from
The heart, oscillating between
Synapses in the slowest
Game of call and
Response, pausing at the
Chance of a meal.
Enameled embarrassment wrapped and
Sewn in newspaper drippings,
A funeral's dead opposite
Gives a moving speech,
Hands tracing, memorizing the
Sadness of a face,
Foreheads touching, more intimate
Than the kiss goodbye
Bringing the beginning of
A colder new year.

Low Paper Lanterns

Opiate-numbed and whiskey-colored in late afternoon,
Light followed its nose to the floorboards,
Wishing it had lungs to puncture with the shattered glass
(that morning it had broken the window,
needing a breath of fresh air).
Later, in the evening, it stumbled among gay men and
Angels on a smoky porch, unsure of itself, slinking
From cigarette smoulders to low paper lanterns,
Teasing the resident snake charmer as he closed
His eyes, bending to blind the piano-player into finding
Clearer notes before it slipped, satisfied with the change,
Into sleep and out of view.

Eavan

We blot the pages of our own new dictionary
With guttural vows still in our throats,
Delighted when we discover accidental rhymes,
Protean through the lengthening hours,
Loosened by the nozzle.

In a story about drunken magicians,
No rabbits are left innocent in the hedgerow:
I am the real Cynara;
I jump while she dangles, and I am jealous
Of the price of the whore's breakfast.

Prostitutes and socialists clog the veins,
Bonded by a cold mimicry
And the familiar nausea that fades with sleep
At the third coming of the father-figure,
When the lies creep softer than lullabyes,
Spreading warmer than the pooling sheets.

No one sings about the suburbs anymore--
Blame settles on the delay in light
Displaced from astronomy to television sets
(it never arrived in time to fully sway);
The myths were born before we needed them.

Now the nicknames are relatively harmless,
Only dangerous in the mouths of
Ex-lovers and schoolgirls
Restless for a quick game of crucifixion--
A scar is a sign of healing, after all.

Dig

Like his father before him (but not like me),
The archeologist digs for a bitter history
And lets it scab
Over skin and bread and spirits,
All broken for the sake of talk.
The slightest filament sparking for a moment
When he notices that there are never
Just two people
Lying together in a bed--
Between their bodies and beneath their weight
Are all the ones that came before,
And all the ones that didn't.
This absence in the crowd isn't seen
So much as it is felt,
Passing quietly among the breathing,
Only made noticeable
When you want to fill it:
The intimate revenge of replacement.

Arguing abortion to avoid the things that matter,
With more ceremony than the common funeral
(a little grim, with thicker veils)--
I don't want rhetoric;
I want something to drink.
We can afford our separate discourses,
And let politics and ink
Shove themselves
Underneath our fingernails.
Childhoods cleaned and pressed,
Rehung on wire hangers,
Still a little damp,
Just slightly more faded than the day before,
When a mere boy imitating the powerful
With the cruelty of youth
Comes full circle,
Returning with determination,
Ordering another round,
Building a disposable country,
Choosing a dull phrase, but an apt one
To name a subculture of salmon-catchers.

Reprimands for normalcy
While the irregulars kill compromise
Through little assassinations,
Leaving twisted little starlings
At the bottom of the stair,
But no clear enemy,
No identifiable body for bullets and blame.
As much a crime
As Yeats rewriting himself as Oisin,
Wanting more than acquiescence,
Craving the only woman like a drug:
Her toxicity soothed his nightmares
But left him empty
With nothing to fight but the waves
When nothing else would fight back,
When the body is too unreliable
To feel any temperature
Anywhere except the feet:
He could always count on them
To be cold.

Thursday Track

Out of the goodness of my wallet and the guilt of my heart. It was only through talking politics and the physics of ice cream (versus those of frozen yogurt) with one of the crazies on the train did I realize that I was one of them. Shark Week antics: what would Sylvia think? My planner is filled with observations and second thoughts instead of appointments and dinner plans; I don't need to keep a diary. Stephen is of the garden variety, but still prefers mice to meal worms (a most discerning palate for a snake). Through certain windows, light from a single street lamp shines linear and softly crosses, much like how it looks through the momentary blur of tears before the blink. As a people, we tend to undervalue the wrists...all major joints, for that matter. Blonde flops masquerading as bangs deserve to be regarded with nothing more than suspicion. Uneven blinds fixed by concentration. Alice in Wonderland. Umbrellas. Vultures. Fourth of July. National Geographic. Wrapping paper. Flannel blankets. Styrofoam. Microwaves. The Devil. Kangaroos. Nancy. Puberty. Carpeted stairways. Wax-coated leaves. Libraries like cemeteries. Grandmothers and grass. Fireworks. Fear. Coffee tables. Small pox and theme parks. Regret. Paul McCartney. Turtles. Murals. Show-offs. Curls. Harvey Danger. Jimmy Stewart. Sepia-tone rivers churning up more than just sediment.

A Man Without A Country

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

--Kurt Vonnegut
11 November 1922 - 11 April 2007

Tango

There's a dalmatian named Freeway
Laying in the neighbors' yard
With a coat like our vision
And not half as determined as he once was
To cross the street
Across all that pavement
Into another world—
But that decision was made months ago.
He'll gladly lie in the gutters
Of either curbed hemisphere
Before he'll ever come back.

Torsos Are Fun

This is what I did instead of writing or studying for finals. Because, you know, I have time to waste not being productive.


And another. Why not?

I suppose this means that ennui can encourage creativity, even if it isn't so much creativity as it is apathy that happened to have some charcoal laying around.

Quam singulari

Validation seeps in the time
between sex and sobriety
as you commit murder in the bedroom.

You've shattered your idol
but you keep the pieces
tethered around your neck,
feminine, more than ornamental.

Even more laughable
is your American pragmatism
when you take your pills
to help you sleep
to help you face
your illegal truths,

But insomnia is as good an inspiration
as love or pain or chewing nails
or pinned shoulders.

Protestant words
silence Catholic frescos
as jaundice fades through childhood
to paint by a higher number,
preferring to play along the edges
but remaining unenclosed ourselves.

Blasphemous stick figures
idle in anxious gallows,
hanging in endless debate
between good or lesser good
in kidnapping
and touching neighborly conduct,
crane their broken necks to watch
as the curtain is pulled
across the water-filled doorframe like
ducks on a string.

Good morning, angels,
did you learn to sleep last night?
Trace the patterns
In the birdbath frost,
more fundamental than physics
or little girls.

Wedding Pictures

We have built a civilization of spectacle
Heralded by a fanfare of fragmentation.
Lo and Behold--
Baby Jesus cries over spilt milk
Harder than any martyr should.
The tourists weep with him
As if collective empathy is important
And not ideologically suspect.
Against what does the sun rise beside nighttime
And all its little indiscretions?
It has no cause,
No reason to remember.
The name is a placeholder, empty
On subways and at dinner parties,
In wedding pictures,
Among shopping lists for self-improvement,
Drawn in the margins.
In Gold we trust--a symptom
Of industrialized prophets
And appropriation of southern seas.
When it is no longer history,
The deception will lie in the footnotes
And fabricated stains will be the only trace.
Biographies of men are burned with the rest
And Roman buildings turn crepuscular
Like reality running too far down a linear street,
Where the church is surprisingly warm,
Until you realize:
It was the religion that was cold.
Sitting down to breakfast,
Everything seems in perfect accord
As generations sigh and disappear.

Leave the Light On

Are we still living in a noir world, with evil, nameless, yet altogether human intent? We are aware that secrets are withheld, and that trust is, at this point, futile--but we still clutch to and structure relationships in the most banal and profound ways. We still live in ultimate suspicion--of appearances, of conventional wisdom, of everything we were once told was right until it fucked us over for the inevitable last time...this is when we live in nostalgia for the calm before disillusionment tapped us on the shoulder and blasted a bullet in our skulls when we turned around without a thought to duck. Power eclipses reason, and conspiracy with impunity follows us home, masking its footsteps in the echoes of our own. But now danger is inside our homes as well as threatening it from outside the door and through the windows; it has settled in and become domestic, washing dishes in the clogged kitchen sink and languishing on the sofa with its feet on the cushions.

I'm Hot-Blooded, Check It and See

The average adult has a circulating blood volume of approximately 70 ml / kg of ideal body weight. Thus the average 70 kg male has approximately 5000 ml, or 5 liters of circulating blood). The loss of one liter in an adult, or about half a liter in a child, is considered to be very dangerous. Loss of 10-15% of total blood volume can be endured before significant risk. To recover such a loss, the human body generates blood at a rate of about 2 liters per week.

I have about 3.5 liters. This means I would be able to survive losing about a third to a half of a liter (no wonder I was so debilitated when donating a pint). This subsequently means that I should be careful not to bleed a lot, or give blood again anytime soon.

Just a note to self.

Symposium Split

I.
We are sons and daughters on paper and in confession
Naked as children, clothed as whores
You are adored by the women they become--
You love them, in your way.
Laughing in small kitchens disguises the burn
It's almost Spring, I think:
Bodies ripe and splitting
Strings cutting fingertips
Photos traded as communal property--
Touch the paper like you touched me.
You staked your claim, but lately wind frays the flag
Do what you can with tongues obscene with foreign anguish.

II.
Held up, held close
Cut by the same gentle hands and words
Cupped and pooling reflections
Trickling through fingers held too tightly
So tightly that the wounds are no more
Than hints of lines through blurred eyelashes
Held closed until tendons are cut
And muscles slacken
On the count of three:
Rock, paper, scissors--
Steady, tiger.
Hold your breath
Hold me
Until your two-by-fours
Smash my skull from behind
On three:
I won't watch
But I'll expect it.
Come up slowly,
Find a better balance,
Choose one sickness
Over another.
Hide it
To keep it safe.

III.
Paranoia propels whatever you fear into manifestation
In letters of recommendation for human relations
Two-week notices, pink slips, plane tickets
Frailty amuses at first with its shallow breathing
I hold no subject
Delirium was the thing we were after
Backing away as an approach, we take a shine to it
As the culmination of a theme.
Feel the platelets moving over the tongue
And into focus
Claiming arbitrary achievement--
It's still an object, still pretty in a lace dress.
One vertebra,
Then two,
Then four,
Climbing, straightening
Exponentially numb,
Rather stiffly,
Definitely not comfortably.

IV.
Look at me, look at me
Watch me
Are you watching?
Squinting only shields so much
Why a muffin on the radio
Why sunburns
Why attention paid in glances
(not that any form of currency is tangible,
too much of a fetish)?
I remember--the leather in your shoes,
The curl of fingers,
The stirring of your coffee,
Forgetting it on the bench,
Feigning intention.
We've all done it
But what have you done
That makes it different?
Does it hurt?
When you touch it,
Do you hurt?
Does it change
The way you move,
The way you look,
The way you fill your lungs,
Detouring through ribs?
He's been staring for an hour;
There's nothing can be done.

V.
Evening is now an agent of change,
A catalyst without urgency,
Blindly displacing another kind of synthesis,
Hovering between learning and knowing
(A small theft tends to garner the most affection).
Life in a second language;
Decoding anagrams, splitting the atom:
Do both, and live a lie.
Controversy is good for the blood
It bends the joints and presses flesh--
A testimonial collapse of trust.
We are parallels of paragrams,
One word embedded in the other
In your bed.
Autoerotic relationships produce bastards
And mainstream playthings,
More generous than you might at first think.

Wesley Willis Saw Things So Much More Clearly

It's nothing new, but it never ends, either: Political ideals are sold in favor of commerce. The machinery of self-interest operates quite smoothly--our very own weapon of mass destruction, defamation, disillusion. Avarice overthrows continents with necessary agency and welcome ruin. Highwaymen claim a position of exemption from corruption and disinterest, especially dishonor-- for who still would not die for his friend? Soldiers are required to do this, but what of politicians and roommates and parents? The profit-motive corrodes the foundations of our childhood homes and gives way to an implicit cannibalism. Everyone speaks, sure; all incorporate, somewhere in their structure, the voice of reform, or at least the promise that a project of reform is possible. But amidst the incessant chatter, words are swallowed by the noise of too many; they please our taste by abusing it, and it seems we no longer have a last political refuge. Total, rotating irony and our paradigms of revolution give no stable place on which to stand for something different.

For Good or For Bad, I'm Back (Signature Drink)

Signature Drink

One word is merely an echo of another, slow in meaning and variation
Statement falsified by apathy, domesticity suspend
Intangibility of stockbrokers and sound
Gray branches come to conquer--any city can exist in sound and linger until stale
Acoustic choices nestle in disappointment but only after research
No keys in pockets: the wind chimes are just fucking with you,
the joke seems inadequate and tired
The box doesn't work anymore so ignore it in favor of spatial relationships
Think superficially, please, now it's only resemblance
Selection disseminates pain later than sooner
and the waiting in the delay is a transparent illusion
of stasis and enrapture--jeans manufacturers comfort psychiatric complications
by calling it the flux of sex appeal.
Grammatical structure can be so earnest.
Pointing to disappointing, to seeing: come what may,
what will, what shouldn't
Postulation in terms of indexicality, you're not fooling anyone except yourself
Too smart to lack substance and find self-defense in contraception
Pick a euphamism and stick to it, establish a rhetoric and a clever name,
Accept a place and PIN--it may not mean anything, but it means something to me:
I can pretend.
If bad poetry is written by good people,
good poetry wrought by and wielding sin/infamy/slander
Here's the prime meridian, dual mediocrity and misconception
and miscarriage, crumpled and nudged farther away from actual acknowledgment
from me and you and everyone in the adjoining room.
Play footsie with the girl in ribbons and tattoos
with baseball gloves quiet in a winter closet, and sex a makeshift shelter
Send me mixed signals and long-distance calls for show of conscience
I'll invite the devil from the details and join her at the bar
as soon as we decide to switch on the laugh track
Automatic writing is still a degree of calculation, after all.
Pre-emptive fortification of facades already underway
Fissures spreading and, told they were beautiful and worth the price of admission,
I bettered my opinion of them.
But veins will be pulled and spun into a sheet
To cover them for ten months or longer
While we're gone I'll call it sabbatical and pretend that I agree, if only for my sake
I was only ever on the periphery before I was drawn in--
the guilt is in taking the blow if it is not you that is taken.

Top Ten Thoughts of the Hour

1. In Paradise Lost, it's the fallen angel that gets all the best lines. Some days, I might trip more than usual. The question is: Why do those stumbling blocks look so good to me?

2. The joy felt at finally acheiving what you desire is just an ordinary moment of exultation. Nothing special.

3. Every stranger has a story. Is it careless of us not to know? One person's story seems more significant than another only because of proximity. Even though there is not a human responsibility to make contact with everyone, it still seems to matter, somehow.

4. It is considered a psychological affliction if one lacks the blinders necessary to be blasé. Luckily, mine are in fine working order.

5. My professor said, "There's something magical in my pocket, and I need to get ahold of it." I snorted into my coffee, and am therefore a pervert.

6. Accent has everything to do with reading T.S. Eliot.

7. I really, really, really like cheese. Massages are delicious, but cheese is divine.

8. I think I may even have a favorite cheese.

9. There is something beautiful about the crescent of color lingering in the bottom of a wine glass at the end of a really good evening conversation.

10. It's smoked gouda. Definitely, smoked gouda.

Eavesdropping is Fun

Someone walking behind me today talked of courage at facing death of those around you, of not turning away from that which we are reluctant to realize. He called courage the absence of fear, but I disagree. Rather, I suppose courage is being afraid but going on in spite of this: this fear that at the death of someone we love, that person's individual something--inexpressible but particular to that person alone--is absolutely and irretrievably lost. However, what makes sense to me may in fact be completely wrong to another, and that's where electronic journaling comes in handy. So there.

The Age of What the Hell Did I Just Read

I have had about enough of Edith Wharton and her damn Age of Innocence. I like Ethan Fromme and all that well enough, but for any combination of reasons, I cannot abide this book. So what does anyone do about it, but write a parody?

Here's a little excerpt of my disdainful mockery:

Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe, mother of Mr. Martin Shubrookery was an introverted woman who shrank from social gatherings, but nonetheless liked to be well-informed of its comings and goings. Her aged comrade Mr. Clayton Rhys-Honeybourne Jefford-Scott applied to the investigation of his friends’ affairs the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist; and his sister, Mrs. Daphne Brackenbury-Aldwinckle, who lived with him, and was entertained by all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother, brought home bits of minor gossip that filled out usefully the gaps in his picture.

Therefore, whenever anything transpired that Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick- Stainthorpe wanted to know about, she asked Mr. Clayton Rhys-Honeybourne Jefford-Scott to dine; and as she honoured few people with her invitations, and as she and her daughter Zoë were an excellent audience, Mr. Clayton Rhys-Honeybourne Jefford-Scott usually attended himself instead of sending his sister, Mrs. Daphne Brackenbury-Aldwinckle. If he could have dictated all the conditions, he would have selected the evenings when Mr. Martin Shubrookery was out; not because the young man was uncongenial to him (the two got on capitally at their club) but because the old anecdotist sometimes felt, on Mr. Martin Shubrookery’s part, a tendency to weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never showed.

Mr. Clayton Rhys-Honeybourne Jefford-Scott, if perfection had been attainable on earth, would also have asked that Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe’s food should be a little better. But then New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the Shubrookery -van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure.

You couldn’t have everything, after all. If you dined with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe you could converse about Alpine panorama and opera overtures. Therefore when a sociable summons arrived from Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe, Mr. Clayton Rhys-Honeybourne Jefford-Scott, who was a devoted eclectic, would usually articulate to his sister: “I’ve been a little gouty since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts’—it will do me good to diet at Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe’s.”

Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe, who had long been a widow, resided with her son and daughter in South-West Seventy-fourth Avenue. An upper level was dedicated to Mr. Martin Shubrookery, and the two women squeezed themselves into narrower quarters below. In an unclouded harmonization of tastes and interests they cultivated various shrubs, made macramé lace and wool embroidery, collected American revolutionary ostrich sculptures, subscribed to eight psychological journals, and read Shakespeare.

Mrs. and Miss Sedgewick-Stainthorpe were both immense enthusiasts of scenery. It was what they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad; considering architecture and painting as subjects for men (the most superior creation on God’s good earth). Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe had been born a Shubrookery, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters, were both, as people said, “true Shubrookery’s”; lofty, pastel, and slightly round-shouldered, with protracted proboscises, saccharine smiles and a kind of floppy peculiarity. Their physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly eventual obesity had not stretched Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe’s black brocade, while Miss Sedgewick-Stainthorpe’s brown and purple ribbons hung, as the years sped on, increasingly slackly on her virgin frame.

Mentally, the likeness between them, as Mr. Martin Shubrookery was aware, was less complete than their identical mannerisms often made it appear. The extensive tradition of habituating together in mutually dependent intimacy had given them the same vocabulary, and the same habit of beginning their phrases “Mother thinks” or “Zoë thinks,” according as one or the other wished to advance an opinion of her own. But in reality, while Mrs. Margaret Sedgewick-Stainthorpe’s serene unimaginativeness lay in repose rather effortlessly in the conventional and familiar, Zoë was subject to musings and aberrations of fancy welling up from springs of suppressed romance, as she had many beaus, including the roguish Willoughby Norrington-Oxley and the striking Nigel Fitzpatrick Barrington-Rothwell-Simms.


And on, and on, and so forth, and such. Sweet Jesus God, make it stop.

Oh my. I believe I have broken my thumb. Alas, for I shall now be unable to execute the Five-Point-Palm-Exploding-Heart Technique.