February 2012
14 posts
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“ORANGES AND BLUES” (unused song lyric)
oranges and blues oranges and blues I’m up in my room with oranges and blues
everyone’s gone no answer from you so I sit up in my room with an orange and the blues
and then the oranges are gone… but I’ve still got the blues
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de-enunciation
(ah screw it, here’s one of the new ones I wrote on valentine’s day—hope u liiiike it)
* * * * *
I learned to wait, at first for you, and then for something else
how / now / can (or all of the above) I love you, if I make myself
so low, like clay pressed flat into an ashtray, built to hold whatever burns,
feel my heat escape into the concrete floor, along with my concern—for
I am...
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!!!
(GOOD NEWS EVERYONE: I spent yesterday in a pleasant haze that I believe is called “being in love with yourself”; it only got better once I received an email telling me that I’m a winner in the poetry competition I submitted to! apart from that, I got a shitload of writing done yesterday, some of which will probably turn out to be worth posting here; for now, though, I’m...
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blood letter #1
(BACKSTORY: one morning in early 2009, as I made my near-daily pilgrimage to the coffee shop, I found myself really really wanting to hear Neil Young’s “New Mama”; but I didn’t have the CD in my car, so I called in to my beloved local college radio station to request it. it was a good 20 minutes or so before the DJ got around to playing it, by which time I had almost...
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selected facebook ads
(BACKSTORY: I wrote these between february and august 2009. as the title suggests, all lines were culled from facebook advertisements. at the time, facebook believed that I was 90 years old, because I had lied to it about my birthday; this is probably the reason why so many of the ads were about impending death.
previously published in the UNC-Asheville lit mag, or so I’m told—I don’t...
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now lemme take a trip...
honoring my decision to abandon poetry (for now, at least!) by reposting some old favs over the week to come. HOPE U LIKE EM!
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no u
looking back without a glass the picture isn’t any clearer, any less confusing than its usual reversal
—just a little less of air and space between your face and what it sees
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oriony
outside my house no idiot I know which way the wind blows
in winter, I turn up my collar, walk on and ignore it
at other times reverse it (for the sake of symmetry, and keeping up appearance)
o my god(s), exertion, will to knowledge, its communication
today, for instance, reading milton, (near book four’s end, when He pulls out His scales)
I felt him judge and find me wanting: sadly,...
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an open (and impossible) request
… namely, a view of myself through the eyes of others
mostly just curious what impressions/images/opinions/??? ppl retain from any songs or poems of mine they may have liked, or not liked, or been annoyed by, or whatever
(thanks in advance!)
so uh…
TELL ME WHAT U THINK OF ME?
btw
first lines remind me, via a chain of highly-personal* and impossible-to-explain** associations, of this song I wrote last year. it’s for/about david foster wallace, although I never told anyone that before……..
* (… nah)
** (not really, just long and boring)
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honestly?
my love, you had a simple heart I stole parts from, to build my own
you taught me how to feel at home with love, with one another,
laid out in the open, growing sunburns, in the fading indian summer
nothing calls me back to now;
but all your shapes imprinted deep upon the furrows of my mind
like wrinkles in my trousers as I sleep, cradled in the old limbs of the hammock and the spring,
like...
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“short song about the entrance to...
January 2012
17 posts
7 tags
follow function
so I been messin’ around with these crazy things called ‘poetic forms’ lately and while it’s not the easiest thing in the world I can kind of see the point… despite appearances, the villanelle I posted the other day was actually my second attempt at that form—the first one didn’t quite pan out, altho I picked it back up today, made some changes, plugged in the...
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elemental villanelle
today the door is shut to all the ghosts and half-remembered dreams that, restless, stir like oceans in the hall
I cut and cure my words until they cover distances as great birds’ screams; today the door is shut to all.
my empire rises, others fall with switches thrown upon machines, that restless stir like oceans in the hall:
the percolating brew, the drawl of voices radiating and unseen...
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my dad built a banjo over the holidaze—I...
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death hymn to technology
thank you, technology, for our history together:
for the days when your far-reaching thunder lubricated my brain’s rusty furrows, when I lived in perpetual wonder;
before you sent your tum’rous forests clear across the centuries: great tangled nets of rods and cables growing up like rock formations underground and overnight and bursting to the surface, penetrating heart, lungs, hands...
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inspired by a sign
after he had died, his friends decided to adopt the bit of nameless highway he was killed in crossing
so that, in a sense, the big guy lived again—but
as a road: familiar, open, wide and low,
less than well-maintained, stretching out towards home
“Behold the birth of tragedy: when idiots come face to face with the vicissitudes...”
– Epictetus, Discourses II.16.31 (trans. Robert Dobbin)
Rap Industry Fan Fiction: The Game loses it. →
NEXT-LEVEL SHIT FOR YR READING PLEASER. RIFF GAME AIN’T READY FOR ME!!!
rapindustryfanfiction:
The Game couldn’t say exactly when he woke up; only that, sometime after the garbage trucks had come and gone, a new noise began to gnaw at his hangover. He tried to ignore it; but he knew he was fighting a losing battle…
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YOUR CASHIER WAS: SELF
driving home tonite thru my Quiet Suburban Neighborhood to the house where I Live With My Parents, I saw some young kids (9 years old? 12? WHO KNOWS ANYMORE) playing basketball in the driveway, one of whom, after I guess making a nice basket/maybe for no reason at all, just to show off, performs the ‘making it rain’ gesture, with a great deal of gusto and prolonged eye contact
and so...
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dear tumblr,
sorry I never update you anymore, I think maybe I’ve “moved on”—not forever, and not completely, but, well, these things happen. I’ll try to have a retrospective post or two up here before too long; in the meantime, you can follow me on twitter if yr into that sort of thing (currently livetweeting an epic cleaning project that will probably take the better...
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“A popular tradition warns against recounting dreams on an empty stomach. In this...”
– — from Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
(THANKS FOR CONVINCING ME TO LEAVE MY BED AND EAT BREAKFAST THIS MORNING, WALTER)
my top last.fm songs of the past 3 months
(posted without comment)
Okkervil River – Just Give Me Time The Mountain Goats – Genesis 30:3 The Mountain Goats – Hebrews 11:40 Smog – Ex-Con Okkervil River – Okkervil River Song Belle and Sebastian – I Could Be Dreaming Belle and Sebastian – I Don’t Love Anyone
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btw my song for today was a remix of the grillzy bear* song “merge”** by dntel, aka the guy from the postal services who isn’t ben gibbard—it is a lot more boring and less romantic than I remember. I was worried I would have to upload it to the internet [via it being ‘sort of obscure’] but nope, here it is on, of all places, myspace (?!) see for yrself, I dunno, I was...
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ACTUAL NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS
(with assessments of difficulty)
— listen to one (1) song every day that I love and have not heard in a while (shouldn’t be hard, my car is filled with forgotten-about CDs, I have a weird frozen-in-time-c.2007 version of my music collection on this old computer, the internet and radio exist, etc.)
— cover all of Fugazi’s 13 Songs (I already did one, that leaves me 12 months for the...
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“ON THE FAIRLY LIVELY GROUND OF MY LIFE I HAVE BUILT THIS HIGH LOOKOUT BUT FIND...”
– From James Merrill, ‘The Book of Ephraim’ (section Q)
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whole of the law
consequence:
a happening-in-time-with
needs one step out
-side the sights of
lived experience
perceive the years, laid out like territories
on our bodies
in our notebooks
thickly plastered over
in the deserts
seeking something
not unlike a child
worth moving on a little while for
December 2011
49 posts
2 tags
pure angst
return of old fantasies, long-dormant. imagine graphic injuries done to specific people, for the first time since my sister was an infant. back then I wondered what it meant that I should see so often in my mind’s eye her screaming head reduced to bloody rubble by a wall; now I know that these dead customers, their frozen gapes and chair-impaled eye-sockets, don’t mean a thing, really. at...
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“O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, / Lend me a little tobacco-shop, /...”
– From Ezra Pound, “The Lake Isle”
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“love song for petal” (sketch)
...
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btw
in case you were wondering here is the first solitude
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THE SECOND SOLITUDE
I woke on the frigid round grass of a clearing, dominated by a single towering pylon, wrought of iron, criss-crossed by supports and strewn with transformers—but not a wire leading to, nor trailing from its lone colossal form among the trees
no path out of the clearing I could see, but only tree that clung to tree with bony limbs, like lovers in a frost
until the wind’s direction changed, and,...
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arose
for a long time, I went to words lightly, slipping nimbly back and forth between ideas, feelings, imagos and things —what I mean to say is that I did not pay enough attention to what you always failed to mention
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on boxing day
O will she said we never reach an end, an end to images, this sick all-overness, this making of my mind a spiders’ nest, and life a wait for flies?
For my part, as casual as a wink/an insect’s wing/a breeze I pictured me a clearing where the trees bowed down like dead men,
come whoever may. I waited, I would realize later, not for love of bugs or anyone, but for the raising of the...
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“My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at...”
– Morton Feldman, as quoted by Alex Ross (via whenyrlivinginafascistdream)
hahaha this is great
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on christmas
as if by some miraculous and mutual agreement, all permitted all to witness one another’s happiness— not to say their smiles, necessarily; some did not smile, merely carried selves or loads a little lighter down the sidewalk to the parking lot
as if to say, the year was long, but this!—this, proud, we have maintained that from its place within our gardens holding forth, eternal...
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(COVER) — wild flag, “endless talk”
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(COVER) — modest mouse, “bankrupt on...
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blood letter opener
you put it all down in the shape of a pad
or a walk, or some rocks, or a post-office box
and you boil it down to the simple, the skeletal—the way that I discovered, just the other day, of washing grapes:
you move your hand in circles gently agitate and press and roll the grapes against the inside of the bowl
until the stems detach and float intact up to the surface like the bones of birds (but...
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seen from outside
the lamplight in the window of the room it is impossible to prove is empty —nevertheless, it is empty
-ing like a stomach, mind, but faster, the contents of the day from all their pouches do disclose the door in
-side this house, a forest or a labyrinth of memories:
this morning, driving north, sandwiched between pink clouds that streaked the sun and last evaporating blues of night, riding...
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christmas card,
or,
“I AM,” I SAID TO NO-ONE, “THERE”
It has grown too cold for deer; the ones around here have surely moved on, or else been devoured by the insatiable wolves of december. I fly down the roads recklessly, my uncapped hair screaming out into the night like a cat which has nearly lost its life. I will have to cut it soon.
Having all the day long felt the day escape me as a drink of wine held in...
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HUNGOVER COVERS: “okkervil river...
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