negative wingspan

blogging elsewhere for awhile

2011-09-19T04:49:00.001-07:00

HERE.

dear little girl

2011-09-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

don't you know what you're made of? yes: lucre, spite, every thin night.

dear red queen as a child

2011-09-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

off to bed... off to bed... off with you now... off to your bed

dear sisyphus

2011-09-13T04:02:00.000-07:00

that looks heavy. It's not heavy, it's my boulder.

Dear Brownings

2011-08-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

Love does not make itself available to the abacus.

Dear Keek

2011-08-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

How have you learned lumbering, that wooden way?
Your trunk is showing.

Dear Anon.

2011-08-08T11:54:00.000-07:00

Though clearly muddled, I am glad you are
filled with humor and wish in fact your bile
more bilious. I might then feel something—
an acidity beyond dismissal. I do
work out my pretense with little leg lifts
as befits a woman incapable of rendering edible
the ineffable. You strike me as a consumer.

7.11.2011

2011-07-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

What is the arc, the angle of my bent light?

Do I send it out or wait for my receipt from the brown van?

Will he notice when I forget how to sign my name?

This amnesia is a product of the small boxes inside rather than of the larger ones he has in the back.

He never tells me his name anymore. It used to be Bruce, or Walter.

I can have my entire life delivered.

These boxes contain, for an example, my husband: prescriptions, a shirt he can’t bother to try on, books no longer in the bookstore, a torso.

If I send him to his colleagues, will they recognize him?

Despite myself, I would not do that.

I have the decency bred from production of children, the internalizing of all those public ideas which remained blessedly outside until I was already overfull. And then.

Now they skirt me on the way to ice cream, the park, the pub.

I call after them “warm coat,” “vegetables,” “kindness.”

What is it to be illuminated? Is it to find oneself scrawled on by monks with a penchant for fart jokes? Is it to contain knowledge no one seeks out?

I unscrew myself from the socket, wear a bathrobe all day long, try to remember my old imprint.

a third beginning

2011-06-19T08:06:00.001-07:00

Baseball was over. All arenas housing. Not long after, bombs fell. Ash rained. Someone woke up under snow and a thousand years had passed. A thaw, maybe aliens. Here was a diamond. Here were books or videos: history of a game. The sticks fascinated-- the distance-traveled, the arc of rebounding spheres. The dugout required a certain relationship to patience, civilization. They practiced. The world was summer evening, each pitch a true love: nothing outside interfered with the game's perfection. A thousand years. Someone woke up, this time inside the game. Not long after, tears fell. Diamonds roiled beneath ash--it was a history of shame: blunt objects, dysfunction, the art of unfounded fears. Foundational ones. A thousand more years and someone dug out—beyond arena, into nature. It took practice, but nothing interfered. The world was a green evening. If only summer would last all day. Continue under the lights.

dancepiece: spamashup

2011-06-10T09:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Friend, I --for

his direction as regards this
mission-- have to thank God.

God it is who wants me.
I am Director of Operations.

I am here--
byseeking your advice.

Your services will be paid, you will be a partner, if
you and your words are acceptable. I know you maybe

wondering how I got your contact. I am
not risky for futures. I know it is advisable

to invest in foreign land and secretly wait.
My condition, having become so critical,

for security purposes, due to interception,
shall not accept or acknowledge calls. Out

to a Christian sister who assisted me
I reached, in order to utilize wealth.

Should you be of interest further, I would
prefer you to reach me soon and finally.

After that I shall provide you
with more contact. The way I am

going, even the consulate doesn't know
the regard. I intend to contact you.

It has been revealed that you can make
judicious resources for purposes currently.

I am sending you mail from my bed.
My husband in the hospital earned

a large undisclosed sum but died.
I am due soon. Also, my infertility

resulted from a medical God.
I believe in reasons for you

to contact my lawyer, for my lack
of heirs, everything; he will inform

on you. Please you must reach
to him. For greater fulfillment

of my last wish,
please deliver the rest

to You who are
Blessed. My most

warm sincerity, Helen.

dancepiece: expo

2011-05-27T14:04:00.001-07:00

and then the woman silences you and in the tiny
window gives you a better chance at moving

dancepiece: membrane

2011-05-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

Not interested in selling
what he does is permanent
and you are a/skin/g

for words--not actual art

dancepiece: phrase

2011-04-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

would that each poem were
an antidote to a world...

grown hopeful with poison

dancepiece: monk

2011-04-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

she wishes she
cd pray without cease: and goes

to create a liturgy

dancepiece: candy

2011-04-24T15:09:00.000-07:00

for Easter
I'll give you candy, commitment

for your sins
I'll candy too, and crucifixion

for all that's
candied, I'll twirl on hill, golgothic

I'll eat, in proof:
all manner of confection, ash

on Easter I spin
unorthodoxy no less moving

for the color of its lipstick
or egg

dancepiece: justice

2011-04-19T09:06:00.001-07:00

the hipster un-hipped
un-zipped from but carrying

baggage or revolver.
was the world over? I don't

know him anymore to ask.

for that girl

2011-04-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

with the way about her I have only this to say:
I commend you. I commit you to me, I issue

you to my memory and charge, and I recommend you
highly, so highly I am Everest or a chasm -- a trench

inverted out of the Atlantic just to say how
I with fixation need speak of you. It is possible

I have my verbs wrong since I am not you, who
etymologically speaking, know. I just cannot say

enough about the way you have of making me
want to sing praise to hallelujah you, also ponder

on the things you do and have been loved for--to love you
right alongside everyone who has it so down, so right about

your deserving body of work, the whole
body of it, fallopian to fallacy, follicle to folio.

for those guys

2011-04-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

whom I don't want anymore to worry about.
I won't worry about you and you will be able
to tell that by the way I am not worrying.

You will be able to look into my eyes if
that were something you could do, and see
that they are not focused on your jeans

fitting or being too skinny or the state of
higher education in your apartment. I am
not the kind of woman who is kind of

like a mother but also like a girlfriend only
funnier. I am not that funny and you can
tell this by me admitting it so flatly I must

be hoping. I have curves and these mean
something where they used to be and one
of the other unfunny things about me is

I'm old, almost fifty by which I mean okay
thirty-eight. I never told you you ought to
care because that would clash with you know

--The Giving Tree--and what I've learned
from other guys like you I've stopped giving
even a shit about, or reading their poems.

dancepiece: inertia

2011-04-07T05:42:00.000-07:00

bodies tumbleweeded
one, a few, the sound
of drift

one direction this wind
fuels, each crossing
of body

lessens a body, each
use has limbs more
strewn

numbers continue past
possible, minutes then
dozens

of minutes, these are non-
identical em-bodys :
illusives

after each crossing each
dancer must shoot self
against

wind behind other
curtains upstream
to keep

the idea of endless
drift respiring by forces
unseen

purpose-- to seem to
have none thusly cool
sweats

dancepiece: lovepoem

2011-04-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

dancer1 lies facedown
there is no other

dancepiece: amplification

2011-04-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

two figures lean in as
in whispering

but no whispering, feet shifting
toeheeltoeheal-- the non-secret

moves across stage
in centipede, in

the organic machinism of
a foreign brain dis-

persed throughout its segments
in thickish blood or a patriotism

which admits its fearful nature
then rolls further inward

inaugurating a self-admiration in
spiraling, awe-filled earnest

gurl, the urth

2011-04-04T07:13:00.000-07:00

We all know what to
do: till them. Mine

them. Farm them. Watch
them writhe. Catch it on

film, the recurrent
tsunamis. This eleven-

year-old dressed
didn't she? like a hurri-

cane, quake-make up.
All over America

we prayed she would
not reach too far

inland, the upper floors.

napowrimo2

2011-04-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

not a plus an inroad
or delta I cannot

move you away
from that wall

I struggle with space
out there ungraphed

this thought like
a fallen egg opens

napowrimo1

2011-04-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

tops of feet asleep, a hotelroomfloor
air like silt, rich and flavored
flowers, a metallic production, so many
factories must produce this excessive

amount of... I am afraid, crouch, carpet
hurts, the outside too temperate
to bear after the raw march after all
the indecision, and then, all the deciding

1.15.2011: 3inaroom

2011-01-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

The lights are on, for chrissakes--turn them out.
Cover yourself.
No, not you, I'm painting you.
Sure it's cold, it makes you more pronounced.

1.10.11

2011-01-10T17:48:00.000-08:00

My brother gave me a heavendress to wear. It is a gift.

It isn’t enough to look at it.

Repeat over I am not wrong and over. Again.

We have been discussing first divisions.

And reconsiderations.

And recurrent dreams about splintering coffins and the nature of the horizon.

Once, he was filled with doubt.

Doubt is my double and doppleganger also called Mistress also Insomnia.

Capital I.

We are two.

Flickery she and I take turns neglecting the light. We anti-watchmen.

She wants to wear my heavendress in organdy.

It is wool. I insist.

She feels scratchy. My brother says, accept her. I. is not wrong, I am supposed to say.

But, he says, remember there is no supposed to.

My brother is infuriating like the helmeted greenman on The Flintstones, Mork on Happy Days. At least I know the aliens on X Files were real, not simple intertextuality, the name we give to mind-wounds or -candy in excess.

What if I bleed on my heavendress?

Then it is red.

And if I rip it?

It is already rags, my brother says, more beautiful than the skins of angels.

Is that what you wear? I ask.

It is what we are both wearing now.

1.7.2010

2011-01-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

Beautiful day. Snow making all shrubbery pussywillows. Lovely composer, lovely new bookstore. Lovely coffee/novel-writing place. Lovely insom(a)niacal ugliness slipping away. Lovely camera with lovely blur. Lovely loveliness.

1.6.2011

2011-01-06T20:10:00.000-08:00

Insomnia again. I am thinking that she is not my friend so much as we are dark sisters. That she walks beside me in the daylight like a shadow, and at night--that she lays atop me, lit with moon and greedy for Sleep--fooling him into penetrating her instead of me. But this is her voices talking... and they are mean.

I've been thinking about meanness today, unthinking meanness. The type that almost always causes regret. I always tell my boys that they are to be smart, strong, beautiful, and kind. And that first among these is kind.

Many small kindnesses are important to me, and their recent absences in my world disturbing. Among other things, I believe that walking down the street without seeing others on the pavement is philosophically unsound, that eating the last piece of pie without offering to share it is unsound, that saying you didn't like a birthday present someone gave to you (even if it is truthful) is unsound--not because these self-inclinings aren't perfectly natural, but because they neglect the act of consideration. A type of listening.

Considering the world starts with the empathetic imagining of other people (because we are so like). Only as we get better and better at considering (how our actions, speech, and finally, our thoughts tend to ripple beyond us in ways we cannot--like with children--predict or control) does this verb have the potential to reach all the way back through the earth and to the bodies of light from which the word itself was wrought.

con :: with / sider :: the stars

So I tell my boys to be kind. And I try to model it. It is, of course, impossible to know but sometimes it is difficult to even imagine another person's thoughts and feelings, especially when, for whatever reason, they are lashing out at us or at our shadowselves--but I believe deeply that these others are our halfsisters, our kind. And that finding another so opaque and still attempting this type of imagining can create much. Love, for instance. Growth. To imagine we are both beside and within others. That we are somehow both each other's siblings and also one another's children.

I'll probably erase this tomorrow, as further ravings and ravages of Insomnia. But for now, there it is.

1.5.2011

2011-01-05T11:45:00.001-08:00

Time is a quality of movement.

This is a statement that has been haunting me for some years. It has turned up in at least three poems I have written (if long prosepoetic series can also be called poetry), and I think I believe it. “Showing up in poems,” is perhaps the tertiary definition of haunt.

But what does it mean—Time is a quality of movement?

I am not certain I have the answer to that, if by the answer, you mean a single answer and for that answer to be complete. And by you, I mean you but also the some-one asking questions in my head as it spills itself upon the page—an inner four-year old I’d guess, forced to guess. Neither of you should be insulted to share the address, meant as a gesture of intimacy.

Time and space are a continuum. This I know from Star Trek and its warp drive. I think I have warp drive. A desire to contort experience with speed—to jump from one planet to another as stars become rivers. Of course, stars are rivers. The star I see is a river of light running directly to my retina. The same star for you is a different river. Just like people.

Time is a quality of movement

is somewhat demonstrable. Writers sitting on their asses, as I am currently on my ass, sometimes lose time, or experience time in a way infuriating to those around them. And this, I propose, is because they have un-synched (but not severed) their mind from their body. You can un-synch mind from body in many ways, but reading and writing are two notable ones. The mind feels active like firecrackers or popcorn. The body is not active although it may tense as if it were about to be active, straining to maintain that useful sense of potential energy as it goes through the micro-movements of pen on paper or fingers on keyboard.

At this juncture I will offer a note towards my body: I use mainly, almost exclusively, three fingers to type. Two index fingers and the middle finger of my right hand. This arrangement means that my left hand rarely moves as it pecks out letters from the left third of the keyboard, but the right hand (and indeed, the forearm) dances across the space as my eyes flicker across the alphabetical choices. Because my hands are not efficient, I must use my vision—not to hunt, but to calibrate the position of the keyboard in relation to the fingers that should be more capable of independent action by now. I type more slowly than most writers. My hands never keep time with my mind--they force my mind to endlessly stutter over passages that at first were fluid while the rest of my body hovers behind in a self-imposed paralysis. Often, an entire leg falls-to-sleeping from the waist down. Usually, the right leg, which I sometimes fold beneath my ass in imitation of the bones of a birdwing, unused.

Many writers take up yoga—to counteract the effects of bad writing postures but also to re-synch their several experiences of time.

Such re-synching, or healing, can be done with purposeful movement. I have been told. And I feel better after yoga, but my mind is the same gallery of unruly children, popcorn, and fireworks it has always been. Ask Insomnia. My friend will answer you truthfully.

12.31.2010

2011-01-05T08:19:00.001-08:00

Sent Bishop and Danny to see Cirque's Dralion last night. I believe it magicked them as I desired it to. Took down decorations this morning, met a lady on facebook who is searching for the "elegant quail"-- a rare species. Tomorrow is (obv) a new year with more wondrous things than I have dreamt of in my philosophy.

Here's to them.

12.30.2010

2011-01-05T08:18:00.001-08:00

Skipped yesterday. My brothers were briefly here. Went to see Gogol Bordello at the Electric Factory. I made them carrot soup and put sheets on the futons. This morning I took them to Eastern State Penitentiary--a tour in the terrible cold.

The blue day made the prison beautiful. When I've been through before it has been magnificent but not as beautiful. The decay today was pretty. Our cold made us less attuned to the presence of those before. To their misery.

I didn't know until today that the plumbing and the heating conduits were situated side-by-side. Hot sewage beneath cold cells. The place (1823-1971) is notable for its brief experiment with solitary confinement (until 1913). The tour guide said the jury was out on utter solitary, and that the many many suicides "just came with the territory."

What we let be normal.

12.28.2010

2011-01-04T03:41:00.001-08:00

Insomnia. Such that it is actually 12.29, but I won't write that until I wake (after I sleep). It is my act of defiance. Reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. I remember being told by a short story writer how much he hated her. Too smart, I believe was the criticism, too pleased with encyclopedic detail. For awhile I felt guilty about loving her books. I don't anymore. She and Neal Stephenson write books I devour. Like meals. Filling books. Whole grain, sprouted, chewy bread and meat and cheesebooks. Wine-filled.

If I can sneak the least bit of their completion of their worlds into my own work, I will feel lucky.

I want to sleep to make tomorrow a novel day. New, and novel-composing. I want to not be as I just read on-line about insomnia "heckled by my own brain." An Italian family died of chronic insomnia... is dying, it is a curse. Theirs, like mad-cow and kuru, is a prion disease. Danny might be interested in such.

I'll try again now.

12.27.2010

2011-01-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

Snow today. And a fierce desire to write in a hundred places. I will shovel. I will take the boys out and we will get cold and we will come in for cocoa. And then read, and then write.

I am copying some correspondence into a notebook. By hand.

A fierce desire to write by hand, and on computer, yes. A hundred different ways to write. Upon the insides of the skull.

I am split. Why not write the split?

12.26.2010

2011-01-03T13:20:00.000-08:00

Watched Everything is Illuminated. Never read it. Thinking about the switch in narrative focus-- the sleight of hand. This is not about who you believe it to be about. Ever. History is not owned, it owns us. The ring is why they are there. Why Frodo exists, even when Frodo is Jonathan Safran Foer, minor character in the movie made from his novel.

And in the darkness bind them.

Also watched Coraline today, which scares Koen more than Lord of the Rings. Women-spiders. Poetry as a cord across the chasm, spanning it.

Also poetry wraps and devours its prey: content? knowing? as in, knowing what you are watching, thinking you understand what is before you.

Today read that early artists (cave-early) played the duck-rabbit trick with a bison-mammoth (placement of the eyes). I couldn't see it myself. Bait-and-switch. Is the possibility of recalibration of our understanding one of our best attributes? Our will to con-fusion? Ambivalence.

I hope so.

translation of a babycut carrot

2010-10-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

Shaved, I've heard. A big carrot cut to look younger.
There are realbaby carrots, but we don't buy them.

What do you suppose is wasted when a big carrot
with a dead spot is cut to make a cuter carrot?

Big carrots like that used to rot. Now--ugly carrots
are merely severed. Self-twinned, brightly naked-ed.

I miss the horizontals that made crooked carrots
difficult to peel, fissures dark with identity: "I am

root." These new shiny runts, these carrot shards,
deny connection to the earth, insisting they've been

shat straight out the infant ass of heaven. Known no
dirt. Heaven's crap's crap, I say, even in skinny neon glo.

translation of a screw

2010-10-23T15:26:00.000-07:00

103. air “screw” Ms. B f.38v.

“...then said screw will find
its [female] in air...” Not ground.
She's uncomposed of earth.

Is wood, perhaps, or wind.
Could “be [of] young fir” found.
Having fiber, small of girth.

Skin like cheesecloth, “for the trial
—use thin paper.” Escape of breath
Must be denied her. Starch her.

Must go at least a mile.
“...be sure the force is rapid.” Wet.
“If not, waste no more time.” Discharge.

Without a center, this “instrument...
has little worth.” Inside her, a man
“...from the waist down” must be free.

Be free, then. Calculate the scent
and thickness of the air. Abandon.
Mount, and ride, her wingless body.

translation of a button

2010-10-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

I, I, I, I.
Fasten is a child-habit.
I fasten my child
to me. More I.

Lunge of bone, white
of eye. Dark thread X
and X the doll pupils.
Learn X means dead

soon, or blind. Drunk
man passed on subway
grate clutches a bag like
it has anima. His

army coat is undone
and why is he sleeping
there. The hand in my
hand unfastens, points.

I start to explain what
has no sense when I's
go all X. The child I
in habit I pull tight.

2010-10-17T18:00:00.000-07:00

Nap. The ideal open source. Here, the interwebs span synapse and erotic time. Time in bed in the day is always erotic. Alone, my skin feels alive under cool sheets, alive like eating. Eating like the salt in the mouth when you've been rolled by a rogue wave. The nap makes me think of chamber music. The viola, in particular, opens the pores. A small continent of music in the planetary bed. I drift, and reconfigure my topographies. I am parts, and the parts I am move through ecological eons. My knee, a himalaya--my neck a land bridge soon submerged by melting glacier. Dream during naps is less advisable. The lines I draw in daysleep contour horror, and personal apocalypse. My paranoic asteroid kills all species of me, reproducing in white sheet, redreaming themselves, and leaves instead a cardboard box I keep forgetting to mail, and forget again to.

2010-10-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

It just so happens that I'm lying. I have a good relationship with lying--it is always there. Lying in wait, lying on the schoolbus, lying in the vestibule. Most places you are, you can lie. I lie about my parents, actually I don't. I never speak of them because they are alive. When people are alive you mustn't speak of them. Ears will burst into flame on the sides of the head. Charred cartilege has a smell not unlike burnt plastic. If you've ever melted tupperware on the stove, well then, you have some idea of what I'm talking about. Lying is also crucial. It can make every difference. And it can make those differences disappear. If you want to be post-anything it is really the only way to go. To lie is mostly to omit. When you add, that's fiction, or fabrication--it's productive. A lie is an in-depth investment in denial, which has negative properties, is good for losing weight or a friendship. I have noticed how difficult it can be to get rid of friendships, how some linger well past their expiration dates, attached to the inner arm by gristle-y strands. And some just go poof. Lying is a way to control the outcome of acquaintanceship. I have also farted, had children, and drank too much. I have also been cheerful, overshared, and been emotionally available. Lying is the most stable horse in my stable. I ride lying through Fairmount Park on pleasant Sundays with my lover before we climb down to have sex in the grass. Where faeries lie until smooshed.

2010-10-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

The body is not your body. It is
a body not unlike the body of a god.
It has those characteristics--that uniform
immensity--an unfathomability--real
freakin' rotund, but also fluid. Perhaps
the body is ballish, like a sun
flaming out. It won't be gone
in your aeon, but it is possible to
conceive a future where body is
by-product, sloughed off the soul
like the skin off an orange. If I told
you instead: soul is a property, like
color, nothing more--a reddish,
or a mauve... if I proved such... i' faith,
I think it'd loosen your rind. Roll over.

Open the earth

2010-10-06T17:09:00.000-07:00

and find strangers. Open
the net and find sex or
other problems. Invite world
inside and you must deal
with them, the world, and they
have sources and estuaries
and hives and plots. I am
trying to open a conversation
when I find bricks. I am as open
as I can be without vivisection.
Honesty is a sore. I am sorry
if you didn't like the invitation.
Sorry you are not one for
compliments. I cannot build
with bricks. I am a spider.

2010-09-29T17:26:00.000-07:00

If, when the moon is half, you say
"the moon is half," that is a lie the eyes
have told and now you have repeated.

If, when the moon is half, you say "I know no
stargazer, no star-gadgetry, so to me the moon is
half," you may be phenomenological but still

not honest. But if you say " never is the moon
how I want it," and still manage to love it less than
full in its cups ever halving--know you are new.

Cranial Ghazal

2010-09-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

What a muse is: (the milliner’s wife had a head
in precisely the shape of perfect): it can be a head.

The gambler, less valuables, rummaging for an end,
a body part anted in order to play on, bet a head.

A student prostitutes to raise rent and children. Off
herself? Perhaps--if life’s a habit given up to get ahead.

A mother labors nine hours for her stillbirth. She insists
on a photograph: her hands cup the blue, the infant head.

God: I look out, some parts look earth, I make them earth.
Some parts scream ocean—ocean. It’s not art if you think ahead.

A child, come to cheer the executioner, stoops to save a thing
from the crowd’s malevolent shuffle. It is not a head.

2010-09-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

Do you know where your ankle is?

It is eight fifteen.

Above your foot is the neck of your foot.

Where is the head of your foot?

Where are your foot's nether regions?

In hell?

This part, I've been told, was once admired for its elegant narrowing.

For its precariousness below a slope of calf.

My ankle holds, though it was once shredded.

Some man sewed it together like a seamstress.

I'll call him Lila.

I can be wounded and I can heal and be wounded again.

Watch me jump.

Up.

Down.

Self-hagiography 4

2010-09-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

As St. Elspeth I spat fire and carpet tacks; everything around me got singed and stabled.

The flowers I often tried
to scoop were ash, pinned
to dry grass. I lied

and told my mother
there were never none to cull.
My hair, worn down for her

soon fried and fell, a burnt
scent meant I was left alone
to pick a cause, learn

a pity not my own plight.
I wrote poetry I didn't show.
The ditties were all slight

and lost moments after
they were writ, the fire--
belittling spit, tacks sure

and brutal. The pages
fixed up on my walls, charred--
killed and installed by rage

I never knew (now know)
I felt--stuck to the faces
of my melted world so

I would understand
nothing I made would keep
but would stay, orphaned

by my slack mouth.
I vowed silence in youth
and since, I owe it my outs.

: to listen is a cool cloth,
things come undone and fall like
fall leaves down and to truth

(a seed flame can bloom).

under

2010-09-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

I was a slide of sting, the wasps
caught under the dixie
cup made it jump. I caught two.

That summer colds opened
my throat to a new series of raw
and my head bricked up like Poe.

In Philadelphia any long walk
includes the contemplation of beauty
in the halo of decay.

Train, train, pomegranate.
Septa to the underworld never
includes a map back.

Just, just the abdominal seeds.

2010-09-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

All the choice parts were wrapped in butcher paper.
I'd expected newsprint, so that was a nice disguise.
We pretended while we were eating that we were not.
I trust no one more than I trust the man who cuts
my flesh. One time, dancing in a swing hall, one
of my partners told me I didn't know California from
Harlem. The thing about others is how they derive
flaw from data, wallflower or no. Nicer to be tabled
with you, feigning consumption of not a thing, raw.

2010-09-13T18:28:00.000-07:00

If I knew the odd, I'd resistor.
There are a thousand plates, some conductive, all chipped.
Do you believe you can charge anything at all at this distance?
By which distance I mean the space between your pupils.
One of them has written a better novel.
Than you, digitally.
If he dies tonight, that is one less of me that there is, one less than five.
Breaking the circuit.
If you die tomorrow, the rest of us can remain atheists.
But if you are only very sick, some one, I do not know which
one, will probably begin to pray to the machine.
Later, I will not ever pray, but I may fast because now
I slow. I damn damn, I mean analog, slow. I mean, damn.

2010-09-12T05:56:00.000-07:00

The rain pulls down the sky until the sky is
right here, staring me in the head. I accuse
the interloper. I say this is my brain, and the sky
licks its wound like a cancer survivor. What
we have in common, the sky and me, is a habit
of marrying melodrama to indelicacy. They've
cancelled all soccer games, futbal even, until
the cosmos admits to self-creation by hoax.

2010-09-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

The sill is angry.

The hope that I will stand up and fly through the pane has been with us both for years.

Today, my window sill capitulated, recognizing in me failure.

I can't say I'm surprised. What is stirring is the loyalty.

The way still my sill holds up the books and thick candles, my buttons in a mason jar, all the small favorites.

How the sill continues in the face of me: this is something I can choose to consider heroic.

2010-09-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

The first day begins inside a bag
of ice. Transparency within transparency.
Matter that melts or lasts aeons.

Why doesn't more water escape from the atmosphere?

I want to believe that opening
is a continuing theme, a way to play
jazz without getting bored, without coming

to the hole at the center of the world.

But what I want I have been taught
is mostly irrelevant and certainly rude. What
do you want to do? a pleasant host asks

the children of her parents' playdates.

Together, they steal out onto the porch
to suck on the cold cubes with the indentations
suspending the beers and the softdrinks

and the afternoon, opaque and interminable.

2010-09-05T18:40:00.000-07:00

It is the nature of saying it is the nature of things to be wrong.

2010-09-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

error rose binary utter mange
woods melt asweep

a teaching moment

2010-09-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

To teach is to each his t. His t
crossed or doting eye blinded
by a teacher who makes him ache
for each cheat he has not mastered, each
charm not stammered, each master yet
uncharmed by his mastery, his style, wit
and his teachability, how able he is
to be like his teacher, liked by
his teacher, blinded like her-- cross
and dotty as if each teacher were
always the one, each student ever
golden, -faced and ruled and all day
adream in all the mean ways he measures up.

countdown 2344

2010-08-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

St. Ipolyta chained herself to the sea turtles
St. Grale drank the water
St. Shutin became many things: look for him above the shifted poles
St. Thorax believed air should be free
St. Funicula ordered the interwebs and, in so doing, gained a schizophrenic nature that, is is said, became her
St Puria took in countless prostitots and taught them, instead, how to manufacture
St. Treddth lived on in the hearts of her followers after preemptively donating as many parts as she could-- a century later she was forgiven by the church her black market forays and, worse, her limblessness
St. Child ate space, his negative architecture becoming new-style mausoleums, which collapse in consideration of the living

birthdays

2010-08-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

are about pain, but we don't mention it.

Fear neither.

Birth stories fade or become mythic, which is to say, the mother absent.

My husband and brother were born today, years ago.

They have not the same names. Mother neither. They are different people.

Birthdays make us confront the obvious: as in, time passes.

No other two men remind me more of who I am.

I was in a Printing house in Hell

2010-08-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

My alphabet is not the only alphabet.
One has to always imagine everything not only backward, but unrelieved.
To change a punctuation mark is to extinguish a star.
The smell of ink is the smell of amber.

I am that mosquito.

Today

2010-08-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

I am wondering about changes in direction. My life has been a zig-zag, but between two fixed linearities. What would happen if I abandoned them? I wonder about the third term, the flower missing, the phantom I have created by this endless back and forth. Can one move toward that instead of toward the realities around which my that hovers?

Self-hagiography #2

2010-08-24T16:41:00.000-07:00

As Szabo, I slowed down to a speed so incremental, every alteration I made shortened the hemline of God

The children in the village came to watch me not move.
They were earnest with earnest fingers, and I did not begrudge them the bruises.
It is because looking and touching are the same to such children in a town where nothing happens.
I was the thing that happened least in my chair near the well.
One might suppose that I stank, but my metabolism was glacial in a time when such a pace was, if not respected, left alone.
To piss took me a week, and that just an inkling of what I could produce but never did, not at once.
The parents of the children thought I was a fool and could not remember the day I arrived or if I were someone's cousin.
Always we are someone's cousins.
The day I became something else was the day the two town drunks, brothers, came to beat me.
It took an hour or two, the beating.
I could tell time by their eventual exhaustion, how when they finally passed out beside me, their sweat looked as if a rainfall.
Although there were often pre-dawn rainfalls in the town, that morning there had not been.
I lay in contortion between the brothers, my chair overturned some distance away, when the town woke.
And between them not a scratch, despite the drunkenness, despite the desperation to elicit something from me I could not give.
No one offered me a mirror. After the doctor tended me as he could, I was set back upon my chair.
Healing was for me like everything else, but sometimes I was brought broth and a straw by one of the brothers' wives. She did not say it, but I knew her name -- Magda.
Dying came after the brothers' children had grown, and their children.
By the time the brothers' remaining grandsons (there had been a crib-death, three fevers, two lost to a far war, and a not-right one skulked to the city -- such is some of the information imparted from household to household in hushed words near a well)... by the time these four men carried me still seated in my chair out of the square and into the cemetery, a few of my broken ribs had knitted, but incorrectly.
Over decades, I had listened to them whispering night and noon but mostly night to the others, "go on... together now."
Their botched unity was the more excruciating, but who was I to complain to such diligent bones?
They had their work, and I mine.

Self-hagiography #1

2010-08-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

Ipolyta, chained to infant sea-turtles upon the incident of their hatching, grows despondent on her deathbed

I wish I had not sewn myself
to the animals I wanted to save.
Because it killed them, my belief
in the faces of their tiny deaths
becomes an item of miracle, proof
posthumous at my beatification.
They are mine by fault and final

ordinance. I remember the pulse
of eggs in the late sun, the vital
push. Beaky mouths rent what had until
protected—only then to strive impossibly
toward surf. To have them take me
impossibly with them, to have them
quarter me, make me chum, impossibly

to have them--I caught them.
But first, myself. With fishhooks
I pierced the sides of an emaciated
form like a seam, then bound the hooks
to silver chain, then chain to other
hooks--these I sent swiftly into
the brave fumblers. They have no

shoulders for yoking, only divots of
regret where I punctured what was not yet...
what was too yielding. Thus tethered, they
began the dyings, diminishing tugs I felt
at my barely bloodied edges. My unspreading
was their first, last constellation: as their
fingerling-heads lolled onto sand, I lay

before them as before God now—goliath of fastening.

2010-06-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

salt is intensity I lick my hand, teeth are
the ends of me grinding down the black-
speck sand, the birds here are angrier
sun is angrier, my skin here not my skin
as it is elsewhere but rawer and more
clearly a form of prophylaxis, where is
the barrier to keep water separate from
my harm I burn to ask a meaning gull

there are no meaning gulls or tomorrows

bloomsday

2010-06-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

Journal-writing and I are at
odds. A day in the life is just
not that interesting nor true.
Don't you live elsewhere?
I do. I wish I lived here. I wish
I were a hero with a thumb
big enough to plug the spill.
I'd be that unpretty and immobile
to do that. Not like the woman
who wants to weigh the most
but, yes, like. A little like.

2010-06-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

One sentence is death, but there are others.

2010-05-20T04:39:00.000-07:00

the day ahead barrels
child to walk hair all bed
it is coming! the bird on deck
not an omen but the insect
beaked says a thing beyond
twitching which it does even
after -- already it may be
a dead one -- the sun has not
through the rowhouse row
bloomed nothing wants today to
instead a still air and cool
complains of for once the oncoming
warm nnnnnn if sidewalk film
roll'd backward feet'd up-fly
the hill pull unfalling limbs torso
tumbling atop sheets forbidding
to begin me collecting all day (end
so I forget like reversal) shards
until in they are tuck'd again -- in

2010-05-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

If the walk was about the perfection
of walking, she failed

If, however, it was about foot falling
one beyond the other, about

how the lack of balance in life can get
you somewhere, why then

she was a god.

2010-05-14T09:09:00.001-07:00

On stage, she performed salt. She parched
her audience, their faces she sucked into them-

selves, faces becoming removals of faces,
reductions of faces, faces minus.

Ixet performed salt and kept a mental
notebook: she listed eyes bulging, puckering

lips, craters of cheek, eventually total
liplessness. She catalogued teeth as they

were revealed--canine and front, over and
underbites. Most teeth did not meet

the way she had expected. Ixet noted this
as she was becoming, molecularly, salt.

She extracted, from those who had paid
to see her, their water, and found dessication

endlessly various and boring. The skeletal
reactions to her work felt vaguely critical. Salt

did not lend itself to empathetic response nor
to community. Ixet had studiously investigated

salt's history, yes, but to what fact had she
tethered her imagination? She knew : salt

is a corrosive. As the flesh around her
withered, she became dilute, less there

on the stage, more present in the humid
air. By taking she was lost to theater, lost

inside theater. But salt took heart--the bodies
of her audience would last and last. Here was

the jerky of her mistaken poetics, the Jesus.

merry unbirthday

2010-05-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Ixet is a pretty girl with napkins.
What happens, she asks, when one is left
behind one's life?
She watches another, littler girl in a coffeeshop.
She is too young for coffee.
The woman she is with has bought her candy.
No girl is ever, ever too young for candy.

The apartment building on the corner has bars.
They are attractive bars, high end bars.
They are Frank Lloyd Wright bars.
Ixet thinks, for a Frank Lloyd Wright imprisonment?

She doesn't fit--Ixet.
She has too many limbs aching
in too many directions.
She would quarter herself if she had
that kind of horsepower. Instead
she takes long walks but insists she is no flaneur.
No, Ixet's leisure is not that type of leisure.
Ixet's isolation is not so hip and idiotic.
Ixet is merely paralyzed, and refuses
to view it as a plus.

4.12

2010-04-12T10:59:00.001-07:00

possumbly
I'm hiding head
beside the rode, beady-eyed
flashy too, tale
of rat-so-pink (a lipstick
color?) I want you
to find me pathetic
and then run
me down and then feel
something (maybe badly)

4.9

2010-04-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

I mistook you.
Someone I knew.
It was a long--
something got
to be amiss.

4.8

2010-04-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

The full past is this:
One story is about avoiding death. Another
about a tree. One prophet saw fire.
Another received pain in the opposite hand
as the word. There were wars. There
was the thing called evolution and the heart was
revealed not to be the mind and the body
has proved replaceable. Hurt is instituted rather
than experienced and the disavowal of
torture comes and goes in waves as it is
performed by others. People always danced
and then they flew: now the thumbspan is a wing.
It is all of it perhaps the wrong way round
or else there should be a term for what
comes next that is not future. That word
is about making when the past is clearly
a spear--the most rudimentary of our
weapons of trajectory.

4.7

2010-04-07T15:42:00.000-07:00

My art is a cult. I enter
and am tithed, forfeit.
I offer my other life
to history, I disown
my other life-- a harlot,
charlatan. Pale. If it cannot
surround me in a drowning
it is no longer welcome. We
have known each other
and now that ends. I sever
all ties beyond this
house. I should meet
the eye at the window. I
will not, and there it is.

4.6

2010-04-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

If I respond
that means you made a promise

Or were a promise
I expect to be filled with glory

on the final day when
I lift up my shirt

and so many plastic rosaries
flicker cheap paint across my ribcage

and its capture.
Did you take a photo with

your phone? I expect
no less anymore

my privacies are those
slow moments when the party

is just at its end but yet
not and you avert

your technologies and do
something human like

take my hand and say
I've always liked the way you

and I converse, the way
your shoulders lean in listening

and how you get so
hyped you spit.

That's the kind of friend I need
right now. A noticer.

4.5

2010-04-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

a fool follows the moon
to school. an owl hoots.
the wool snood the fool
hoods o'er her head
colors her aloof. solo.

alone, totes a broom
to the roof and is woozy
from a look down. she spooks
at zoos. now the rooks
flood her, and good. the broom's

no use. she spoons the soup
of hitchcock. spooled, she is
loosened, unhooked, doomed.
they loot her face for eyes. the orbits
ooze. black with blood, she droops.

who looks for a fool
to drown in birds? whose
horror shown here?
no one's. the fool's.

4.3

2010-04-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

eggs of love.
the clarity of spheres
oblonged by gravity

are droplets
protected, pearls
of the hen-body.

Anybody can make
eggs, break them over
a fire, eye the yellow

eye, gobble them
at midnight for
the protein rush--

more difficult
the hennybodies'
scent. Truck-packed

their caged reek
a kind of voice against
my love.

4.2 just call me angel

2010-04-02T06:12:00.000-07:00

and I'll sock you. Or carve
you against my

incarnation with wings that etch
the sky like boughs. I am

terrible. The rest of my host
function as a mafia. Lately

discussing the arsenal. This
millennium smaller might

be the thing: biologicals
have the appeal of seeming in-

effability. Can you comprehend
how I would favor video

games packed with old
fashioned carnage? Well

done. This world sadly, palely
imprints eternity. Biblical

proportion--to approach celestial
displeasure by measurable

experiential means--
it's just a beginning.

4.1 Call me boy

2010-04-01T07:02:00.000-07:00

or do not. Don't call
or not boy. I'll pull down
your tower and tackle
and tickle you until
you cry. That's facts.
If you can't say it or not
to me because I'm black
or breasted and you
think that makes words
enemies, you're not all
right. Boy's a floating thing
I want tied to my wrist
in pink ribbon, a lighter
noun than man, object
or person or a place
I could pass through or
beside maybe. Call me boy
and I'll maintain myself
on the skin of the ocean--
my chain, an inconsequential
reminder below the dogma
of the channel.

2010-02-27T11:42:00.000-08:00

Overtures to Eden.

Eden, your fruit!
How your animals exist.
Barely believable we're in the middle of...
A desert. Milton.
Good on you, rid of those losers.
When do you get off?-- I'll take
you somewhere nice.

2010-01-18T15:08:00.001-08:00

my eighth pass at them. they never ever. I can't even find them in the thickets so I mow and burn. the clean slope of scalp. the heads of hill. do you wish I had yours under my microscope to jettison your demons? looking kills. it kills like the sun. I love the sun, the way it rises without rancor and goes about the day. underneath the sun, anything I do is just a job, just a manifestation. underneath the sun, the vermin look like vermin, and do not sound as their remembered cries do once the sun is underground. as human.

when I am in crux

2010-01-17T11:55:00.000-08:00

it looks a little like a dental dam. I have a split-hoof and a harpy. My name has been my name for as long as George, but no one can bear to notice. Yesterday, a soup and a soup and a soup and a librarian. I hope you are not too jealous of the architecture we discussed, and the farmland beside the penitentiary. My children were good eggs. Half of my children. Do not ask me if the tooth fairy is real. Until I have lost all of mine I can't be sure.

2010-01-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

You can have it for free. An earlobe. It costs so little pain apparently. A tug and swish flick of the butterfly knife. The balisong. And I'll staunch it with cotton balls bunched and taped with duct tape. I'll be snowbeard on the left. My left so I can still hear right. I'll Van Gogh. Are you my whore?

Boxing Day Poem

2009-12-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

Christmas brought me pestilence
and in the delousing I found, I
confess it, a primate pleasure.

It is sweet time spent
in childhood hair--its rows
of finitude. All ends.

Nitpick is not without its
recompense. Comb-scoured scalps
can make of new years open

fields. In one--petite beasts
who lurk, cling, and feed are sure.
Among them, I am animal again.

2009-11-24T15:21:00.000-08:00

Gorky is at the Philadelphia museum. I may or may not be going to China. I have a What is poetry? assignment. What is Nighttime? Are dreams made of clay? Poppies? Black porcelain?

mikku #12: tinman

2009-11-17T17:59:00.000-08:00

the rain problem--to
suffer by avoiding tears
with an umbrella

mikku #11: tinman

2009-11-17T17:55:00.000-08:00

was it heart he missed
or god not in the clanking
space? bending was hard.

mikku #10: tinman

2009-11-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

swallowed no coin, of
a non-comic medium--
no steel, un-alloyed

mikku #9: tinman

2009-11-17T17:47:00.000-08:00

the first cyborg I
ever loved was trying to
"limit exposure"

mikku #8: tinman

2009-11-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

what is answered? not
axed. what has the axe done? what
have you with an axe?

mikku #7: tinman

2009-11-17T17:40:00.000-08:00

distance is tonic.
a balm note at symphony
close: a seattling

mikku #6: tinman

2009-11-17T17:37:00.001-08:00

there. His monkey hand
finds one horizon and shows
how to move across

mikku #5: tinman

2009-11-17T17:34:00.000-08:00

negotiation
is a knot tightened until
rope-- lets itself go

mikku #4: tinman

2009-11-17T17:31:00.000-08:00

cleansed, lights pore through my
throat and down another night
alley. I vomit end.

mikku #3: tinman

2009-11-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

She is a she. He
is a she in his many
open shames. Seams rust.

mikku #2: tinman

2009-11-17T15:05:00.000-08:00

he creaks: this is his
rift between a project of
body and body

mikku #1: tinman

2009-11-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

Integration: feel-
ingly, my brain sparks inside
its tin cylinder

2009-11-14T06:12:00.000-08:00

Grace observed, the table stretches.
I am at the yawning end thinking
of pie. That what is sweet
rots, the bloom of pumpkin
into rum blots thought if thought
were ink. But to write is not to eat.

Who is thanksgiving? Whose
dinner was provided in trust and prior
to subsequent slaughter? I am pilgrim
wandering through family members who
won't last until spring, choosing a guest

to hunt down later in the year.

big bertha

2009-11-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

is a dominatrix
not a mammy
see her riding crop
her magic wand
her satin knickers

she is a superhero
always a double-life
sometimes a double
wife, unfulfilled

her brain is ticker-tape

what she wants is
what you cannot want
a casket full of
snakes, a feather
in her cap like macaroni

on big bertha

2009-11-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

here is a family
mother father babygirl
mother has on red things you cannot see
father is a raper
babygirl a ditz a ditz a ditz
and here is a machine

was daddy bad before he fed
the monster coins? was I always so easy?
one thing I do know: mom had on those
skivvies before we ever met

the nickleodeon

2009-10-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

One waits for results. One wonders is love dead. One's positive she deserves this, whatever this is, because no matter what, this is comprised of the same as shit. Shit has always defined her. Remember owl offal. How that was the fluffy place one first understood "offensive," smelling, forward, but also much-informed by the life studied. One studies life. One marries someone who studies life by killing it. Art is regularly destruction. The idea, death, makes vivid. One says of course but certain events heighten this: birth, tests, taking a crap, blood. It is so so ordinary. One wonders about the ordinary as the road to god. One hates driving. The violence of projecting oneself into the world so fast, so mindlessly, so trusting in laws and the normalcy of what is par. One is not par. One is so far from par that the idea of making par is excruciating. One can't do fifty-five, button her coat, bathe her children. One has been removed from these, will re-enter these. But why? One hopes not only to persevere, but to draw a readable life. White lines, an immense lawn, stones. One believes in the road if not to god, and not to god, than to others, an other, one other-- one. One waits for this too. Results not just results. Proof.

overheard

2009-10-20T04:09:00.000-07:00

To scrub the soul: Ego-Friendly Wish Detergent

2009-10-14T07:48:00.000-07:00

I oxen free the door. It is my brain. Through it--birth. No one comes close. And then I swing myself like a monkey around the apartment, happy to be like a monkey. All the childen of my brain are lifeless and should be until I breathe. I go over and touch one by one, set them up along the fireplace like puppets, think, think of tossing them in. I relent. There is no fire. They seem hungry for life in that they do not seem hungry. They are made of words. They are made of things. They are air. I command them. Spin I say, and they do not. I command them, hop. I am a kind master not to beat them into poems. A kind monkey. Why do they not realize? I toss one into the soot to teach it. I will be a teacher of my its, and not a master. I am, I like to be, kind.