aaaa

"A Leaf", Bronislaw Maj

2011-12-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:
it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls
on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one
admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,
followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among the other leaves, no one saw what I did. I am
the only one.

Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks

2011-11-10T01:38:00.001-08:00

A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets. Everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.

"playing with fire", Evie Shockley

2011-10-03T18:01:00.001-07:00

something is always burning, passion,
                        pride, envy, desire, the internal organs
        going chokingly up in smoke, as some-
                thing outside the body exerts a pull
that drags us like a match across sand-
                        paper. something is always burning,
        london, paris, detroit, l.a., the neighbor-

                hoods no one outside seems to see until
they're backlit by flames, when the out-
                        siders, peering through dense, acrid,
        black-&-orange-rimmed fumes, mis-
                take their dark reflections for savages
altogether alien. how hot are the london
                        riots for west end pearls? how hot in tot-

        tenham? if one bead of cream rolls down
        one precious neck, heads will roll in brix-
ton: the science of sociology. the mark
                        duggan principle of cause and effect:
        under conditions of sufficient pressure—
                measured roughly in years + lead ÷ £s—
black blood is highly combustible.

"My father waiting for his 14-year-old daughter to come home"

2011-04-17T20:53:00.001-07:00

the moon staggered
on the commonplace white
carpet. she came from a dream

sleep-waltzed into parked cars
jaundiced from the second hour,
its half-light.

her nose had bled
because you did not teach her
the way a body can hold

weight - the transference.
you watched for her through glass
imagined her skin crisp with stink

and heat, hooked
like a peking duck, swiveling,
browned, the feet fragile

fat drip and crackle
resembling icicles
or tears

"El Desdichado", Gérard de Nerval. Trans. William Rees.

2011-02-02T15:53:00.000-08:00

I am the shadow-man, the widower, the unconsoled, the Prince ofAquitaine dispossessed of his tower: my only star is dead, -- and my star-decked lute bears the black Sun of Melancholy.

In the darkness of the tomb, you who consoled me,restore me Posilipo and the Italian sea, the flower that so pleased my stricken heart, and the arbour where the vine joins with the rose.

Am I Eros or Apollo? ... Lusignan or Biron? My forehead is still red from the kiss of the queen; I have dreamed in the cave where the siren swims ...

And twice victorious I have crossed Acheron: rendering in turn on Orpheus' lyre the sighs of the saint and the fairy's cries.

(an alternate translation by Richard Sieburth can be read here)

"Holy Sonnet XIV", John Donne

2011-01-30T12:42:00.000-08:00

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd towne, to another due,

Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine,

But am betroth'd unto your enemie:

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot againe,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Ravel's "Bolero" choreographed by Maurice Bejart and performed by Sylvie Guillem with the Tokyo Ballet

2011-01-25T02:08:00.000-08:00

"The Sea is History", Derek Walcott

2010-12-15T01:41:00.000-08:00

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges' choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves' progress,
and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.

an unfinished adaptation of sorts (of Akhmatova in my last post)

2010-11-24T17:37:00.000-08:00

"Everything's the same it's just more of the same"

-TFUL282

snow scattered and flailing

at the glass. the bulge of memory
and the paling season,
of no matter. there are
no doors. I have not changed

but He came to me -
strange, and with such
light hands. and when
I let him, mouthed, "men,
how they touch you, tell me
how you touch men"

oh--
if he called me to Hell, i
would wholly heed
and i know his delight
is tense and hungry

a Knowing: that there is
nothing that he needs; that i can refuse him
nothing.

"The Guest" by Anna Akhmatova. Trans.Carl R. Proffer

2010-11-24T17:31:00.000-08:00

All as before: against the dining-room windows
Beats the scattered windswept snow,
And I have not changed either,
But a man came to me.

I asked: "What do you want?"
He replied: "To be with you in Hell."
I laughed: "Oh, you'll foredoom
Us both to disaster."

But lifting his dry hand
He lightly touched the flowers:
"Tell me how men kiss you,
Tell me how you kiss men."

And his lusterless eyes
Did not move from my ring.
Not a single muscle quivered
On his radiantly evil face.

Oh, I know: his delight
Is the tense and passionate knowledge
That he needs nothing,
That I can refuse him nothing.

2010-11-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

i was not taught
weight

"Some kiss we want", Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks

2010-10-29T01:51:00.000-07:00

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

"how now was before tonight"

2010-10-17T16:47:00.000-07:00

3.

A week after tonight, he sings in a language he does not know.

Darling’s tomatoes have all gone to rot. The tomatoes and the radicchio, wet cavities, black and white with mold. Flies like a fur. Four potatoes left on the table with a single yellow band around each of them. "Organic." Bananas blackened into havens for the red-eyed fruit flies. On change, Darling thinks, I do not know the shape.

The Warm yawns.

the hot springs at ojai

2010-10-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

pool thick, sulphur and boulder
and she in mannequin poise, tips
of shoulder light mooned for
the boys to lick
their lips. a nude study of
which i am only an other
and a fool to rake the floor
with fingers and hair

he is a boy tonight
and she is a full moon and i
am lacking
as i climb the rock stair
his silver ring blackened
on my finger still pale because
i grew in the shade of a greater
a more fair

Rumi

2010-09-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

Drink the wine that moves you

night

2010-09-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

From "Seven Phallic Poems", Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. John J.L. Mood

2010-07-07T12:44:00.000-07:00

V

How the too ample space has weakened you and me
Superfluity recollects itself suddenly.
Now wormwood and absinthe trickle through silent
sieves of kisses of bitter essence.

How much we are--from my body
a new tree raises its abundant crown
and mounts toward you: but what's it to be
without the summer which hovers in your womb.
Are you, am I, the one each so greatly delights?

Who can say, while we dwindle. Perhaps a column
of rapture stands in the chamber room,
sustains the vault, and more slowly subsides.

November, 1915

correspondences/a reply to--/back-and-forth

2010-06-29T00:17:00.000-07:00

"dejaré crecer mis cabellos"/"I'll let my hair grow"

-Lorca

it is easy to recall your syllable now

when I did not dare to before--

to linger where my angles almost seem to

merge, sift themselves into corners, uncertain--

to pray to your shadow, the shadow whose silence

wafts between age and its absence, whose silence

belongs to no one in particular. the flesh

is not unhappy here, though

I've dreamt you into myself

lately. let the limbs fold and sway

with you in the ways that you move me,

unmoving.

I knew how to forget, before

I dared not to.

Yes.

"sometimes i am alive because with", cummings

2010-06-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

sometimes i am alive because with
me her alert treelike body sleeps
which i will feel slowly sharpening
becoming distinct with love slowly,
who in my shoulder sinks sweetly teeth
until we shall attain the Springsmelling
intense large togethercoloured instant

the moment pleasantly frightful

when,her mouth suddenly rising,wholly
begins with mine fiercely to fool
(and from my thighs which shrug and pant
a murdering rain leapingly reaches the
upward singular deepest flower which she
carries in a gesture of her hips)

drafts of parting/first draft/a draft for all seasons

2010-06-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

stark – nothing
has kneeled between space
to slit it ajar since. 
the feel, severed, still rests
its limbs, lax on the eye
of last night's shove. it
laps at nothing. a creak
lashed through the unsound
as an ally in the uneven hour.
and the sound skin howled
thick with taste

but the irisness is static
and the down is static braille
and the bound, unturned, taxes its
own lingering. when did you
cross-stitch yourself into the vine—
soft as a melted beam, severe
as contained heat? in the din, we are no match

 to be lit, no mind to be sound,
because the rust sweetens itself with smell
because the fingers' plunge strayed
 like a blind sketch. oh
how the human body folds
in on itself, crumples
like a clean sheet of paper.
how the hands beat
as if salmon on a crest
of a spark

"Dance Piece", Ben Belitt

2010-05-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

...at the still point, there the dance is.
—T. S. Eliot

The errand into the maze,
Emblem, the heel's blow upon space,
Speak of the need and order the dancer’s will.
But the dance is still.

For a surmise of rest, over the flight of the dial,
Between shock of the fall, shock of repose,
The flesh in its time delivered itself to the trial,
And rose.

Suffrance: the lapse, the pause,
Were the will of the dance—
The movement-to-be, charmed from the shifts of the chance,
Intent on its cause.

And the terrible gift
Of the gaze, blind on its zenith, the wreath
Of the throat, the body's unwearied uplift,
Unmaking and making its death,

Were ripeness, and theme for return:
Were rest, in the durance of matter:
The sleep of the musing Begetter
And the poise in the urn.

dead/automatic in-between mallarmean mean/apex of no sex

2010-05-13T23:42:00.000-07:00

we ventured into halves
because the birthright bled

bright, slid into boil.
i donned skin like yours—-
let slip the thin twin with its oil;
mine. your fingers veered into
the double yawn, yellow
with ash, a curling cat
to strip the scales of night,
pierce the wet navel of the room
-—and so i ran
down your hands in rivulets of sap
to slacken

slicken the sense
of nothingness

parentheses/end of april

2010-05-03T01:55:00.000-07:00

alone for the first time in months, tonight. i think of the room of quilts from your childhood, the room of soft metals, the room of the skin of a wild animal, the room of embroidered windows of spherical flowers and your roundness in rooms

open eye unending, incense ash on a stair full of holes

and your room has shed
and your room must shed
and your room of warm wood where we basked in the azure in the house without blindness

is barren

april in one part

2010-05-03T01:44:00.000-07:00

wind-flanked
lashing gray april
two treetops bend

"Corona", Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger

2010-05-01T10:59:00.001-07:00

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people
look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.

It is time.

waiting for daughter

2010-04-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

the moon staggered
on the commonplace white
carpet. she came from a dream

sleep-waltzed into parked cars
jaundiced from the second hour,
its half-light.

her nose had bled
because you did not teach her
the way a body can hold

weight - the transference.
you watched her through glass
her skin crisp with stink

and heat, hooked
like a peking duck, swiveling,
browned, the feet fragile

fat drip and crackle
resembling icicles
or tears

Confession (II), Ho Xuan Huong. Trans. from Vietnamese by John Balaban

2010-04-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

Confession (II)

Before dawn, the watch drum rumbles.
Lonely pink face among mountains and streams

addled but alert with a cup of fragrant wine
as the moon sets, just a sliver not yet full.

Moss seems to creep across the earth's face.
Stony peaks pierce the belly of the clouds.

Sick with sadness, spring passes, spring returns.
A bit of love shared, just the littlest bit.

from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Aime Cesaire. Trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith

2010-04-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I woul say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

what is now proved was once only imagin'd

2010-04-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

Louise Louise - Orange Juice

there's no such thing as black orchids/spring photon

2010-03-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

but now things hurl into mirrors

2010-03-21T19:47:00.000-07:00

"Anguish", Stephane Mallarme. Trans. Marc Widershien

2010-03-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

I do not come to make your flesh less proud tonight, O beast
In whom the sins of a race take root, nor to stir up
In the hive of your hair a sorrowful storm
By the incurable ennui which my kiss pours out:

I ask of your bed the heavy dreamless sleep
Hovering under the drapes innocent of regret,
And which you after your black lies can taste
You who in your nothingness knows more than the dead.

For the Vice, gnawing at my sensibilities
Has branded me like you with its sterility,
But whereas your breast of stone hides

A heart which the tooth of no crime can pierce,
I flee, pale, exhausted, haunted by my shroud,
Fearing death while I lie alone.

"In Prague", Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger

2010-03-16T22:50:00.000-07:00

That half-death,
suckled big with our life,
lay around us, true as an ashen image--

we too
still drank, soul-crossed, two daggers,
sewn on to stones of the sky, born of word blood
in the night bed,

bigger and bigger
we grew interlaced, there was
no longer a name for
that which drove us (one of how mny
and thirty
was my life shadow
that climbed the delusory steps towards you?),

a tower
the halved one built for himself into where,
a Hradshin
made of pure gold-makers' No,

bone-Hebrew
ground into sperm
ran through the hourglass
through which we swam, two dreams now, chiming
against time, in the squares.

this is your brain on drugs/automatic/it's always snowing in california

2010-03-07T23:21:00.000-08:00

"upon the endless breast of whiteness stretching and carousing all but the doves, he had never seen the snow and i see facesin mountaintops and lines of sailorsrickety and blind, the aimal wanes the gongue that bites and all is young and still inn faithless dew. satur’s never a dull kink in the plane withholding teeth, the slip of the gumbefore thhe bitter bite of restlessness and spades

you sleep through the fivees and weep

for bees for stars for atlases for deepness for the soft
for amber for leather for gold for books, all of them read"

"Passage", Hart Crane.

2010-03-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.

Sulking, sanctioning the sun,
My memory I left in a ravine,—
Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat,
Aprons rocks, congregates pears
In moonlit bushels
And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.

Dangerously the summer burned
(I had joined the entrainments of the wind).
The shadows of boulders lengthened my back:
In the bronze gongs of my cheeks
The rain dried without odour.

"It is not long, it is not long;
See where the red and black
Vine-sanctioned valleys—": but the wind
Died speaking through the ages that you know
And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man!
So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke
Compiles a too well known biography.

The evening was a spear in the ravine
That throve through very oak. And had I walked
The dozen particular decimals of time?
Touching an open laurel, I found
A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.

"Why are you back here—smiling an iron coffin?"
"To argue with the laurel," I replied:
"Am justified in transience, fleeing
Under the constant wonder of your eyes—."

He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies
Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss.
A serpent swam a vertex to the sun
—On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed.
What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches?
Memory, committed to the page, had broke.

ennui/exile/exact

2010-03-01T14:23:00.001-08:00

"Void, son of the Void, of what do you complain?"

-Cazalis/Lahor

Excerpt from pt. 4 of "I'm Here", Roethke

2010-02-27T10:50:00.001-08:00

Look at the far trees at the end of the garden.
The flat branch of that hemlock holds the last of the sun,
Rocking it, like a sun-struck pond,
In a light wind.

          I prefer the still joy:
          The wasp drinking at the edge of my cup;
          The snake lifting its head;
          A snail's music.

until you were orphaned by the sirens

2010-02-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

II.

i cast the helix's thick recital
blooming aloud
like a stone into the mouth

separated the arches of myself
so you could breathe in this place without hum

this place where you vacillate like a tarnished veil
knit yourself into the foliage
of your mother's milk

without a prick of blood to cloud your sap

.
.
.

parallel horizontal/severed from the teat

2010-02-22T13:21:00.000-08:00

And what do I do with you --
you without a prick of blood to cloud your sap?

"Être", Eluard. Trans. Gilbert Bowen

2010-02-22T12:10:00.000-08:00

My brow a surrendered flag
I drag you by the hands when I am lonely
In cold streets
Dark rooms
Crying want

I will not let them go
Your intricate light hands
Born in the darkened mirror of my own

All else is perfect
All else is vainer still
Than life

Dig the earth under your shadow

A sheet of water near your breasts
Where I can sink
Like a stone

"Cielo Vivo", Lorca. Trans. Ben Belitt

2010-02-19T11:25:00.000-08:00

I cannot complain
if all that I wanted eludes me.
In the sapless world of the stone and the void of the insect
I shall not envision a duel of sun with the creatures of festering flesh.

I go into genesis' landscape
of rumblings, collisions, and waters
that drench all the newly-born,
and shun all surfaces,
to understand rightly my target-convergence in joy
when passion is mingled with dust and I rise upon air.

There the eye's dissolution cannot enter, like frost,
nor the bleating of shade-trees laid waste by the worm.
The genius of form weaves the web of a single relation:
passion's unaltering gaze toward the still-to-be-born.

See, you cannot advance though the swarm of corollas
lest a current of air melt the sweets of your teeth,
or touch with your love the fugitive frond of the fern
in your consummate terror of ivory.

Under roots, in the pith of the air, there
the truth of all dubious circumstance closes.
The swimmer of nickel is trapped in the filmiest ripple
with the flocks of the night-grazing cows, rosy-footed, like girls.

I cannot complain
if all that I wanted eludes me;
I go into genesis' landscape of dews and pulsations
to understand rightly my target-convergence in joy
when passion is mingled with dust and I rise upon air.

Fresh elevations forever, on the river-bed's hollow,
over volleys of wind and boats banked in the shallows,
where, uncertain, through stopped and unyielding eternity--
through love without sunrise--I reel to the end. O visible love!

Eden Mills, Vermont, August 24, 1929

"...non est aequum, velle solum de melle meo gustare, et non de felle"/melancholy sanguine/renounce your purpose

2010-02-17T16:59:00.000-08:00

"It is not fair to wish to taste only of my honey, and not the gall."

-Blessed Margarita

taken from Voices of Light, Einhorn's opera/oratorio companion to The Passion of Joan of Arc

semi-automatic/stoned

2010-02-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

"strange supposition evolved into strata
i wanted to be a picture but then when i became a picture i was a mammoth moth infisculating several notions and nodes

if and when the timing calls for a bell i want to make sure the status is severed. well wrought. candid.

there is a stack and there is wax but the naming suffers intent but the dreamer’s animal wanes and slackens relief and doors open but names creak silence

a lake dry separated companion into and around weaving through and braiding separation

caliing for all interpretations of mirror youth and frost rose of glass glass rose if when a time goes down, i want to know your name

the leather hangs, sags, weighed with a feat to match the skeleton of scarves

bodily rejection emasculates wisdom though i looked at those lines and could not tell from thenail in the wall to the plastic hanging from my bedside and shoes all lined he presses thumb on chin to force a smile

dense eggs hang

semiotic all

"Your Childhood in Menton", Lorca. Trans. Ben Belitt

2010-02-15T17:51:00.000-08:00

Yes, your childhood, a fable for fountains now.
-JORGE GUILLEN

Yes, your childhood, a fable for fountains now.
The train and the lady who overflows heaven.
Your solitude, shy in hotels,
and your pure mask, in another sign.
It is the childhood of ocean and silence
where oracular glasses are broken;
your hard-bitten ignorance, where before
was my torso defined by a flame.
Love's pattern I gave you, Apollonian man,
the nightingale's rage, in a cry,
yet, pasture of ruin, you grew lean
on the brief and equivocal fantasies.
Yesterday's brightness, antagonist, mind,
chance's notations and omens.
Your waist of irresolute sand
heeded only the footpaths that found no way upward.
Mine then to pursue you in corners,
your spirit's lukewarmness, that cannot construe you, still lacking you,
with the grief of a hobbled Apollo
by whose power I shatter the mask that you bear.
Here, lion, here, indignation of heaven,
come and crop grass on my cheekbones;
here, you blue horse of my mania,
you nebula's pulse-beat, you minute-hand,
it is mine to seek out the scorpion's stone
and the skirts of your little-girl mother,
midnight's lament and the raveling cloths
that moonlight unbinds on the brows of the dead.
Yes, your childhood, a fable for fountains now.
O alien spirit, from the void of my veins,
it is mine to pursue you, so slight and so rootless.
Beloved forever, and never beloved, love!
For indeed I desire it! Love--leave me in peace!
do not stop up in my mouth, you who seek
Saturnalian wheat in the snow,
or unsex the created of heaven,
anatomy's groves and dispensaries.
Love! Love! A childhood of ocean!
Your spirit's lukewarmness, that cannot construe you, still lacking you.
Love! Love! A running of deer
through an infinite bosom of whiteness.
And your childhood, beloved, your childhood.
The train and the lady who overflows heaven.
Not you, nor myself, nor the wind, nor the leaves.
Yes, your childhood, now fable for fountains.

For jenny, since I could not paste the URL into a comment

2010-02-12T19:02:00.000-08:00

What a man.

your daddy was young

2010-02-11T00:56:00.000-08:00

II.

though your balance, like a heavenly body
pierces the tender pitch

i let it – let it shred the face from the cloth
strip the bird from its tongue

weave the blood from the curls
while i wake to older skin

excavate your body with my hands of a child
as severe evenings often find their curve
deep in the sap of the spine

a portion piece/apportioned piece

2010-02-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

I.

for the drafts of parting
between parallels
warmed space

recalled cogs that lift, echo inward
below Windows, rapt
chanting for no self, though a herd dangles

your severe evenings
amid awnings of difference

for the drafts of parting

2010-02-08T15:38:00.001-08:00

III.

my hands are salmon
beating bodies on the crest of it

my plummeting bleat

2010-01-30T01:27:00.000-08:00

.

when did the shape of august wane?

//

revisited, revision for ever revising/"is that better?"

2010-01-28T01:13:00.000-08:00

coming to Instructor in the rain

without hands, He coiled me
around center bone
as though i had come to slurp

but i came - while the chandeliers quivered
shed their young
out of sound and weight

(they scamper upon impact
and lose tongue
swaying low like ash
into godless corners)

where we sat. where He instructed
to chew with front teeth
the vessel, the mouthpiece of slack

instructed to swallow whole
the leaky bit
in the slot that did not spite
and make sure that i could not walk

but rather lean into doors
that He had left unlocked

(that was there - with irisness repeating
odd divisions
of mother root, of our kind)

there - my syllable waits for the hours to multiply
in the wet casings of their sex

waits for the impatient footsteps of the crow
to deem me this much closer to certain death

television

2010-01-27T09:46:00.001-08:00

"Your language looks like a virus"
-Jordan Urbanovich

a: "I'm Echo"
a: "No, I'm Echo"
a: "...I'm the pool"

lower

2010-01-16T23:34:00.000-08:00

I.

still no matter
nor object made abject

in the i of thine. the weight, though
, is sidesteps. the weight is bone-white

blank sheets, stacked thirty-eight feet high.
i told you about them. the broken jaw

in my chest wades like a heavenly body
that knows not none nor non

"Your Childhood In Menton", Lorca. Trans. Greg Simon

2010-01-11T16:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains.
-JORGE GUILLEN

Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Your shy loneliness in hotels
and your pure mask of another sign.
The sea's childhood and your silence
where the crystals of wisdom shattered.
Your rigid ignorance where
my torso was circumscribed by fire.
What I gave you, Apollonian man, was the standard of love,
fits of tears with an estranged nightingale.
But ruin fed upon you, you whittled yourself to nothing
for the sake of fleeting, aimless dreams.
Thoughts before you, yesterday's light,
traces and signs of what might be...
Your waist of restless sand
follows only trails that do not climb.
But in every corner I must look for your warm soul
that is without you and doesn't understand you,
with the sorrow of Apollo stopped in his tracks,
the sorrow with which I shattered your mask.
It's there, lion, there, sky's fury,
where I'll let you graze on my cheeks;
there, blue horse of my insanity,
pulse of the nebula and hand that counts the minutes.
There I'll look for the scorpions' stones
and the clothes of the girl who was your mother,
midnight tears and torn cloth
that wiped moonlight from the temples of the dead man.
Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains.
Strange soul, tiny and adrift, ripped
from the empty space of my veins--I must look until I find you.
The same love as ever, but never the same!
Yes, I do love! Love! Leave me alone, all of you.
And don't try to cover my mouth, you who seek
the wheat of Saturn in snowfields,
or castrate animals on behalf of a sky,
anatomy's clinic and jungle.
Love, love, love. The sea's childhood.
Your warm soul that is without you and doesn't understand you.
Love, love, the flight of the doe
through the endless breast of whiteness.
And your childhood, love, your childhood.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Not you, not me, not the air, not the leaves.
Yes, your childhood: now a fable of fountains.

scribblings from 12/30

2010-01-02T20:53:00.000-08:00

coerced into capitalized space where i
suspend and expunge the you that remains
capt/wield er/or

i squat, ape-like - breaststroking through
mirrors that misinterpret my blushing almond axis
a crouch or simpering rust. strange

that i wake now, amid a toast
to the rim of the wake, waking nothing
but the regurgitate of leather sacs

but the eye of your fat needle weeping
thick milk for the world. but you set fire
to two trees for their sap. i lie

i am not here. you were my age
when i was born, waiting for my repetition
or something like my

(unaged wine, of skin rather than shadow
because - too Non to bend into your ellipses
swerving into halfway walls that

lean and constrict)

from the hand-sized/declare/finality

2009-12-17T13:31:00.000-08:00

2. (12/16/09
nearly midnight)
the cat does not stop crying
oh woman, halfway woman
astringent figure, you think you busy?
you think you bu--? you think you moon you
Not. you halfway hatched pyramid shutter
you soften the beams, they spark
for you, you eggshell oyster
all pop work soundspeak all textureless
mash. at fourteen i knew.
dry spell--you lift at exhale, you
disperse at blow.
you catalog sensor, branded on
the haunches like a lunar eclipse -- as empty as
ff. saltless sea slosh in the racked crane.
you infinite thesaurus! the voice preferred over
the voice preferred. the voice heard over
the voice unheard. similarity sensed over
the sensor, saliva, tobacco leaf.
i suppose i am not alarming enough
for your spectral comeness.

1. (12/10/09
7:17pm)
several corners tend to alarm me
when i consider her
gravitational soundspeak, the smallness.
when all rye curdles and things shift
on their twofold temples, all tends
to sheep, all tends to grasp
in lines of sound. although the house
is still with quarreling figs that know only
how to lean, i expand and expend
all the same.

found spam

2009-12-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

phrase collage built from excerpts i collected from 16 different spam emails:

Where the early pumpkins blow
In a short while came swimmming up again
in the walls of houses, and every other object
in which it could be employed
I started to despise greyhounds and beagles
My sister suffered
A small box, a large canteen fitted
with silver plate
two turkish pistols and a saber
The bloodlike hue, moreover, was encouraged
not only in dress, but in general decorations
and there were candles burning
Thee Baby laughing in my arms

These find I graven on my heart
Where rocks were sudely heapd and rent
from the siege of ochakov
from depression
from hispaniol, from curassoo
after she broke

And there hasnt been anyone in the room except the lieutenant and yourselves
There was a light
A stirring in a brake of fern,
That is all I have to say
in that very bed
Of her own exceeding pleasure
Of sending rivals to the throne into the ground

(Sounded the Horn which they alone could sound!
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest)

Thou that art now the worlds fresh ornament--
Ill teach you to think
until mass is again daily said within these consecrated walls
until San Carlos of Carmelo is again
a worthier Carmel
and the praises of His Virgin Mother once more
are sung about this smiling valley
where the Christian Indian children
gathered the beautiful wild flowers of the blooming meadows
to adorn the hallowed shrines

From flower to flower let him fly
And faculty for storm and turbulence
Now thanks to Heaven that of its grace
If we who thus together roam
When they lie about our feet

didn't cha know

2009-12-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

daisy chain/ouroboros excerpt

2009-12-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

there are composers, there are moths
there is handwriting, geese, there is cloth
snipped eighteen hours after
the birth, the love that opens wells, that opens
throats, that hisses sinew
into the fruit of babes
sour. if only to take off
or urgent or piece or prime or
prune the thought of it

the bite is bitter red angles
sunning themselves
under the cuckolding rose
as night makes toasts to the latter midday--
as the moths that lie
under your skin
itch from the heat

how i hover
a succubus wading in the dank
of my own echo

but the rose is wet

but my wisdom teeth ache
but they tell me where to sit
but they always do

Echo and Narcissus

2009-12-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

"Keep your hands off," he cried, "and do not touch me!
I would die before I give you a chance at me."
"I give you a chance at me," and that was all
She ever said thereafter, spurned and hiding,
Ashamed, in the leafy forests, in lonely caverns.
But still her love clings to her and increases
And grows on suffering; she cannot sleep,
She frets and pines, becomes all gaunt and haggard,
Her body dries and shrivels till voice only
And bones remain, and then she is voice only
For the bones are turned to stone. She hides in woods
And no one sees her now along the mountains,
But all may hear her, for her voice is living."

erase una vez

2009-12-09T23:16:00.000-08:00

"Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock -- someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious, maddened commotion of the nurse-bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless, yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day's work, the final repose of death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs -- someone who observed these things after the initial astonishment had passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror"

to you/the virgin part 10

2009-12-02T20:10:00.000-08:00

i felt a funeral
in my chest
when you suckled
on my breast

motherfucker

they make noise

2009-12-02T10:14:00.000-08:00

8
marvela manco
is what the Virgin told me when i asked
if i could, if it was okay
to fuck you
because fainting i follow you and
fainting i rise above the mesa
where there's no spring no fall
no means no mediums to perfect bend
along perfect bone to bone, slip
sliding in the ever effervescent
lickety split always
splitting and spitting
and slitting itself open

3:33

2009-12-01T03:35:00.000-08:00

the third of
the three in the third
set of three
in the three
of the three
of the three
of the three

and the Muse sang.

ah, what a terrible, terrible sound

after a/the well/the block

2009-11-29T23:40:00.000-08:00

6
"you with your arms of seafoam
and tender salt
i watch you. i see your face
in every Body.
you are a blue and green sword
plunging, weeping, on the tip of your toes
crashing like a waltz—
crashing like a red, red waltz, alex
spread thick on my body
with the ashes of beatles and pills
and of mondays
chaperoned to the slaughter.
your tower leans
soft and severe;
that i may touch it
seems almost uncourtly--
i tell you
we are in the wake
of the monday of our lives
awaiting, awaiting
that we may dance drunk
on the edge of good
and buzz: busy with numbers
and letters falling
falling like cold
the cold that unfolds
and unfolds and..."
-i i i i i

that's how much fuck men

2009-11-19T23:04:00.000-08:00

"did it sprout legs and walk away?" -karl blau

2009-11-12T20:04:00.000-08:00

be soft be still be
monochromatic. i see the same
station, the same static stationary
faces keeping rhythm in
the tamest tempo
and again and again
i drive myself into
rainclouds
because being the the most
common denominator
is not enough.
we drive ourselves outward
asking, "how many more
until the stars--?" watching
butterflies in continual
kamikaze or churning the fall
into ash beneath our feet.
and to think i nearly
lost myself because i knew
i did not love you

god willing and the

2009-11-09T21:22:00.000-08:00

\
7

RELIGIOUS SIGHTINGS
MOTHER NATURE CRIES
IN MELTING GLACIER

1 being
little spoon
means being complete
-ly engulfed in
a swallow of tangles
like actually
swallowing and
tingling in
absconding spiral
post-tonsil
and i wonder if
you'll leak past
innard transparency
film into
telekinetic
tube territory?

why is this the best song ever

2009-11-08T17:56:00.000-08:00

okashi

2009-11-04T20:51:00.000-08:00

delightful things: citrus scent in the unisex bathroom at target. paul newman in an elizabethan collar.

ibore

2009-11-02T01:15:00.000-08:00

the blackest bird, the reddest sheet. serial monogamy in hard, hard holes, upright.

don't know what i want, don't know what i need, don't think i should be in and it happened so quickly and felt so good to begin with and i fold in so easily every time in the neatest of angles. right.

if i knew better ways to tell you about how empty i feel
i would

masturbatory scribble

2009-10-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

7 can tandem bikes have
three wheels? i think so

8 she doesn't even look at me

9i took a benadryl with the
wine on saturday to
slow the transference
dot com

10i can't do what
ten people tell me to do
so i guess
i'll remain the same
-otis redding

11"i know what you need"
-he

12"i feel weird"
-she not me

13is an ouroboros

wish i could whistle

2009-10-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

on the short ride to work this morning, k-earth played "year of the cat" and "sitting on the dock of the bay" in succession. that was when i knew it would be a good day

jamais vu

2009-10-20T16:36:00.000-07:00

calibri arial times new roman helvetica verdana

i don't think the word "arguably" has ever looked more bizarre

arugula?

black candy yeah

2009-10-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

y does my x have no y cog that
the milk myrrh
and your bacchante like clockwork stutter

"you're obliged to play, so renounce Reason if you value your life"

someone keeps checking out the films i want to watch in the library right before i do

dreamspeak

2009-10-16T10:44:00.001-07:00

I dreamt the line "but he felt oppressed by unending calamity", saved it, just googled it in quotes, and got to Jack London's The Call of the Wild out of hardly any results

0

2009-10-14T00:01:00.001-07:00

but what must i make of
the naked wires?

time to die, y'all/sociobiologically

2009-10-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

i just googled "time to die y'all" because that's what i'm thinking right now and i got only two results, both george clinton & the funkadelics lyrics to "biological speculation"

i hated "v", but locklin said it reminded him of early dylan thomas and liked my split atom line. sociobiological? awesome

what am i getting myself into

i wrote this song for the girl paris hilton

2009-10-05T10:25:00.000-07:00

should i be alarmed?

the language of opposing thumbs in loose orbit around each singular vertebra... and i've been sleeping better, falling asleep to vincent gallo's "when" for the past two days with smoke, soy, green tea, and aloe essence in my nostrils. found in translation? then i wake to elephant 6

from the director of el espiritu de la colmena

2009-10-03T10:09:00.000-07:00

in the middle of the night in a dark house somewhere in the world

2009-10-02T00:12:00.000-07:00

i'm falling

fit tit

2009-09-29T22:05:00.001-07:00

i couldn't tell today
if the man in the car behind mine
after i changed my shirt to the red one
then back to the tan one
yelled "if the kite fits"
or "you have nice tits"

epic

2009-09-29T01:09:00.000-07:00

i need to find out which of my neighbors plays epic soundtrack music every night or watches films this loud. it is 1:10am and the townhouse garage alley is all a-swept with the sounds of fucking lord of the rings or something

magic marker

2009-09-25T00:00:00.001-07:00

my mom asked me to make her a mix after our long dinner talk about phil elverum, the guy in my poetry class, and that france gall song about dolls that she grew up with in vietnam. i let her listen to nick drake's "place to be" and she told me she thinks he sounds like nina simone. what! but then again, she thought of montreal's "don't ask me to explain" was the beatles. i almost forgot how much i adore silly songs by kissing book

my mom's vietnamese name is thuy, pronounced "twee"

dgaf rabbit

2009-09-13T22:41:00.001-07:00

what i discovered when i googled "dgaf rabbit" on a whim:

http://home.pacbell.net/bettychu/2004allbreedbisris/lulu_1_(2).jpg

http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/aa11/JupiterFulgur/Pics/792px-englishangorarabbit.jpg

the last two are links because they must be viewed full size

gdiaz on a sunday night

2009-09-10T00:53:00.000-07:00

after over two years of longing -- sprung forth from the cut, the october night, the vertical blinds &the bloom the

obsession. he, a diary, canvas, blanched. the disarray of numbers &letters to get to him: 110N, 91E, 710N, 105E, 605N, I5. listening to sebadoh's "total peace". wine and cheese, terminator on the television with the volume nearly off. his spoiled poodles. he was talking about his audio class, about analog devices and first listens, about perfect moments, styluses. i didn't agree. to further his point, he suggested playing one of his favorite records for the first time-this time, the sanctioned point, the kodak moment, and man, i really don't like that band nor that album, but i read along with the lyrics(as he played side b first) and promptly picked up the message he was sending me through the scratch&groove

then contortions and fingers in mouths and i find myself realizing that i don't remember the last time i wanted him and i realize it must have been so long ago so what of this? couldn't sleep, fell into sleep, woke up around 6 or 7 feeling physically sick with fever chills or something, something, thinking, fuck, that experience not only figuratively but literally made me sick. i left soon after

so why do i now feel left

lol

2009-09-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

back from san diego

2009-08-27T11:50:00.000-07:00

walked out to the farthest end of the public shore with brett around one, standing on a concrete rectangle island in a sea of sharp shell sand and i felt so small, while all - in incredible vastness((i told him it felt like the ending of that one italian film, what was it? and before i could finish, he said don't even try to bait me and say how romantic the film was and i said what are you talking about! it was la strada and one of the most tragic ending scenes to a film i've ever seen) my night vision failing me in black and white polygons, a man sitting. or was it? walking towards the light, towards the point, turning to look behind into the deep, deep open V. we are on top of, we are on top of nothing, silly brett thinking he is wanted by all women, me falling asleep

eyes won't stay

maryland

2009-08-05T16:15:00.001-07:00

a room -stacks of filmy pulp. red scissors. buddha and a bruised peach. incense ash/ plastic flowers. and etext from g that makes real what felt surreal, a tired memory made conscious, more. then i think of how i wrote to him, persistent in '07 to no reply and i think of how he said he had "a wandering need to apologize to me" but didn't know why -and i think of how he signed a letter with "yours, g______"

you know, i never really learned how to juggle

?mg concerta

2009-07-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

the Great bend the blue feel the absence of. i have these words in my head now falling into awakeness where is steady sleep? a foreign bed, evaporated emission(2)/ cosmic technology? i Close my eyes and revolve around blank space, myself folding in on myself folding in on itself folding in on. now in figure eights! oh man

he says i feel so good he says i can feel the chemicals shifting synapse in my brain he say s i like it

i like it a lot i want another one i say no

i am melting cell, unconscious at 8am