January 2012
6 posts
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What to Tell Your Boss When He Asks You What He...
…that what you feel you really need is a year to sit and think?
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“Then a couple made remarks that sounded like questions, and a man in the dark...”
– Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
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Resolution
My metaphor is becoming
& in my transience I’ve gone viral.
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Sit loose, my friends: we’re ancient beings, all of us set in amber weaving through the conversations spiraling above us, ghosts like gnats that hollow the air around the buzz & light, casting our shadows on all the un- suspecting below, the sigh of death unnoticed & rightly so.
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When I say...
December 2011
14 posts
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This beating heart won’t stop; ancillary madness—
a caged animal determined to gallup.
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“…and the weird fever that runs behind our blogs.”
– Duckbeater
In correspondence to you all, to the surprisingly large number of attendees to my somewhat daily milieu, there is a tremendous amount unsaid on any given entry to the public. What is lost is sometimes found in the direct correspondence that we send one another, the purposively forced...
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In the democratic capitalist technopoly,... →
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“…I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it,...”
– Matthew Zapruder
If I had to describe these days, this is how I would put it.
How about you?
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Inside Voice
My inside voice swallows.
It moves in sine waves— I think in math, my metaphor, transparent & ghostlike sashaying across the spreading grass: a field that hides the rushes— knurls of feather & kick; colored earth, flecked stone, flexed against instinct, perhaps as numbers do, ancient & unbending, waiting for me to speak their name.
My inside voice shudders,
cries calumny! &...
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Money Time
Supposedly, time is money: money will you buy you time assuming you have money
to spend, as well as time to wait while your money grows. However, time
spent waiting can be like money misspent—it’s often time wasted, even if money
is made, a kind of time not worth spending, so money isn’t necessarily time.
Maybe time is money if you make with your time something else that...
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“I take pleasure only in coming near to people. What avails any conversation but...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
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a bright wall in a dark room.: Keanu Reeves Week:... →
My unnecessarily dense and slightly overwrought piece on Point Break. The winter does this to me.
brightwalldarkroom:
by Edward Montgomery
“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophical wreck.”
- Immanuel Kant
The ocean only seems overt.
Though Heraclitus has been immortalized contemplating the quiet flux and power of a river over time,...
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December
the routine settles like snow yet to fall— crystal potential, unknown but heavy in the sky.
November 2011
23 posts
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Multi-Tasking
“Martens…Yes, sir…they’re of the weasel variety…well, in the winter they climb into your car when you get home, to capture the warmth, you see, and when they find wires they start to chew on them…of course we can fix the wires, but we can’t fix the martens. You’re gonna have to do something about the martens if you don’t want this to happen again. Uh-huh…uh-huh…okay.”
Outside it was snowing...
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Yelping With Cormac →
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Leaving the Empty Room
The door had a double lock, and the joke was on me. You might call it protection against self, this joke, and it wasn’t very funny: I kept the door locked in order to think twice. The room itself: knickknacks, chairs, and a couch, the normal accoutrements. And yet it was an empty room, if you know what I mean. I had a ticket in my head: Anytime, it said, another joke. How I wished I had a...
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A Soldier's Arabic
This is a strange new kind of war where you learn just as much as you are able to believe. - Ernest Hemingway
The word for love, habib, is written from right to left, starting where we would end it and ending where we might begin.
Where we would end a war another might take as a beginning, or as an echo of history, recited again.
Speak the word for death, maut, and you will hear the cursives of...
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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination. A capital Negation destroyed him in his tenement … … … … … … … … … … It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud: The assassin flash and rumble … He was denied. Phantoms, what have you left? What underground? What place in which to be is not enough To be? You go, poor phantoms,...
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The Crippled Girl, The Rose
It was as if a flower bloomed as if Its muttering root and stem had suddenly spoken,
Uttering on the air of a poem of summer, The rose the utterance of its root and stem.
Thus her beautiful face, the crippled girl’s, Was like the poem spoken by her body—
The richness of that face!—most generous In what it keeps, giving in its having.
The rose reserves the sweetness that it...
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Drive (2011) →
A piece I did for BWDR - I hope you’ll read it.
brightwalldarkroom:
“THERE’S A HUNDRED THOUSAND STREETS IN THIS CITY.”
by Edward Montgomery
Step one for this essay is the communal recitation of our postmodernist plight:
“Nothing is simple these days. Little is whole. We are part technology, part broken-family, part digital, part unknowable, and…
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“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase:...”
– Henri Frederic Amiel, philosopher and writer (1821-1881)
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and now it is late.
the Autumn sits heavy outside my door, aching in remembrance pumpkins given way to rot, ideas and imaginations, entire worlds of our creation longing in their subtle existence for moments where they stay forever lit, always flickering, faces that are not our own & a solemn embrace, just a step beyond a song where we hum the lyrics to each other, gathered hunched before a...
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“One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of...”
– Christian Wiman, Poetry
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“A newspaper reporter once asked Heartfield, “Your protagonist dies twice...”
– Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
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October 2011
18 posts
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November approaches;
another year on its last legs.
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On the Term of Exile
No need to drive a nail into the wall To hang your hat on; When you come in, just drop it on the chair No guest has sat on.
Don’t worry about watering the flowers— In fact, don’t plant them. You will have gone back home before they bloom, And who will want them?
If mastering the language is too hard, Only be patient; The telegram imploring your return Won’t need...
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“It is never just present tense. It’s always also about the past tense. Origins.”
– Gay Talese (via theparisreview)
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pony up, paddle-daddies—
shrug the sweat from your shoulders; anchor eddies; spin in PTSD.
we’ve got chaos, got power, burning like a child’s shout for all that’s not yet— we’ve settled scores with half-moon smiles.
nestle in, canted dancers:
as if you asked for a different fate.