From 17f2ce8d651ed0635a6f005e9bf4555fc2bec22a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Case Duckworth Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2015 19:25:42 -0700 Subject: Move dedication before epigraph --- 100-lines.html | 3 ++- _template.html | 9 +++++---- about-the-author.html | 3 ++- amber-alert.html | 3 ++- and.html | 3 ++- angeltoabraham.html | 3 ++- apollo11.html | 3 ++- arspoetica.html | 3 ++- art.html | 3 ++- axe.html | 3 ++- big-dipper.html | 3 ++- boar.html | 3 ++- boy_bus.html | 3 ++- building.html | 3 ++- call-me-aural-pleasure.html | 3 ++- cereal.html | 3 ++- cold-wind.html | 3 ++- creation-myth.html | 3 ++- css/_common.css | 12 +++++++++++- deadman.html | 3 ++- death-zone.html | 3 ++- deathstrumpet.html | 3 ++- dream.html | 3 ++- early.html | 3 ++- elegyforanalternateself.html | 3 ++- epigraph.html | 3 ++- ex-machina.html | 3 ++- exasperated.html | 3 ++- father.html | 3 ++- feedingtheraven.html | 3 ++- finding-the-lion.html | 3 ++- fire.html | 3 ++- found-typewriter-poem.html | 3 ++- hands.html | 3 ++- hard-game.html | 3 ++- hardware.html | 3 ++- howithappened.html | 3 ++- howtoread.html | 3 ++- hymnal.html | 3 ++- i-am.html | 3 ++- i-think-its-you.html | 3 ++- i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html | 3 ++- in-bed.html | 3 ++- index.html | 3 ++- initial-conditions.html | 3 ++- ipsumlorem.html | 7 ++++--- january.html | 3 ++- joke.html | 3 ++- lappel-du-vide.html | 3 ++- largest-asteroid.html | 3 ++- last-bastion.html | 3 ++- last-passenger.html | 3 ++- leaf.html | 3 ++- leg.html | 3 ++- likingthings.html | 3 ++- listen.html | 3 ++- loremipsum.html | 7 ++++--- love-as-god.html | 3 ++- lovesong.html | 3 ++- man.html | 3 ++- moon-drowning.html | 3 ++- moongone.html | 3 ++- mountain.html | 3 ++- movingsideways.html | 3 ++- music-433.html | 3 ++- no-nothing.html | 3 ++- notes.html | 3 ++- nothing-is-ever-over.html | 3 ++- onformalpoetry.html | 3 ++- options.html | 3 ++- ouroboros_memory.html | 3 ++- paul.html | 3 ++- philosophy.html | 3 ++- phone.html | 3 ++- planks.html | 3 ++- plant.html | 3 ++- poetry-time.html | 3 ++- prelude.html | 3 ++- problems.html | 3 ++- proverbs.html | 3 ++- punch.html | 3 ++- purpose-dogs.html | 3 ++- question.html | 3 ++- real-writer.html | 3 ++- reports.html | 3 ++- riptide_memory.html | 3 ++- ronaldmcdonald.html | 3 ++- roughgloves.html | 3 ++- sapling.html | 3 ++- seasonal-affective-disorder.html | 3 ++- sense-of-it.html | 3 ++- serengeti.html | 3 ++- shed.html | 3 ++- shipwright.html | 3 ++- sixteenth-chapel.html | 7 ++++--- snow.html | 3 ++- something-simple.html | 3 ++- spittle.html | 3 ++- squirrel.html | 3 ++- stagnant.html | 3 ++- statements-frag.html | 3 ++- stayed-on-the-bus.html | 3 ++- stump.html | 3 ++- swansong-alt.html | 3 ++- swansong.html | 3 ++- swear.html | 3 ++- table_contents.html | 3 ++- tapestry.html | 3 ++- telemarketer.html | 3 ++- the-night-we-met.html | 3 ++- the-sea_the-beach.html | 3 ++- theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html | 3 ++- time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html | 3 ++- todaniel.html | 3 ++- toilet.html | 3 ++- toothpaste.html | 3 ++- treatise.html | 3 ++- underwear.html | 3 ++- wallpaper.html | 3 ++- weplayedthosegamestoo.html | 3 ++- when-im-sorry-i.html | 3 ++- window.html | 3 ++- words-meaning.html | 3 ++- worse-looking-over.html | 3 ++- writing.html | 3 ++- x-ray.html | 3 ++- yellow.html | 3 ++- 127 files changed, 272 insertions(+), 136 deletions(-) diff --git a/100-lines.html b/100-lines.html index 87860a2..5489db2 100644 --- a/100-lines.html +++ b/100-lines.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

100 lines

- + +

Whenever you call me friend
I fall down on my knees and cry
because I know it’s the only thing
never to happen before in this
life is something you can’t see
it’s a pillow under a hook shot
I want to tell you something anything
but you are there and I am here
we are trapped inside ourselves
and the distance is too far
you are something that I would tell
would be nothing before too long
you are not the finisher of dreams
you are the beginning of nightmares
or waking but I’m not sure which
this letter is for you in the future
it will lead you on the path
of goodness or of rightness or of
wrong people and right meanings
or the meaning will be hidden
or wrestling the demon I will have become
restless under the starlight
it’s too bright here to think
the negatives would be pitch black
darkness of a silver mine
there are no trees here
where have you been where are you now
I am no longer here or there
you are anywhere or are you
up in the clouds is a ghost
he is white and blue like a cloud
he paints with his teeth
he paints the rainbow before midnight
that you can see from your window
staring out under the sunlight
through the gauze curtains
over the high mountain far away
that is covered over with snow
past the rivers and forests
that lie awake under Orion
hunting the bull that runs forever
just out of his reach
pointing the way for the two of us
to join together in song or dance
or that other thing and sing
the Grinch down off Mount Crumpet
his heart breaking his chest
thumping with the beat
his little dog too running running
with the bull full of laughter and blood
he can’t see it anymore because it’s become him
we are trapped he says we are
trapped in ourselves it turns out
that all along it wasn’t you or me
but he and her or her and him or
he and he or she and she or they
even they tell us that nothing has happened
even they know that it’s a big joke
one more thing to know before the death
we are crying like crocodiles
before their loved ones’ coffins
we are bellowing with grief like buffalo
on a berth of wild oxen
we are wailing our clothes are in rags
we want we want we want
but never can we get
what is it
we don’t know what it is
but it’s something it’s anything
it’s too many people or not enough
it’s too few trees we need more
beavers to build riverdams we need
grapes too or plums from the ice box
or an ice box even would be nice
all I have is this cube isn’t that right
or is a sphere a cube a donut a coffee
cup your hands in mine yes that’s right
now bring the water to your face
clear and cool and
full of something
what is it wanting
or yearning
I can see in your eyes they’re clear now
they are as clear as a running stream
or the sky that’s clear right
or the water that is in the Bahamas
because I hear that’s clear
you’re as clear as the sound of a bell
you’re as clear as the braying of horses
you’re as clear as the glass in God’s eye
and I
I’m as dull as an ox plowing
through fields in his yoke
I’m as dull as clouded amber
I’m dull as you find me
tonight after dinner
I’m reading the crossword
you’re sitting beside me
you’re watching TV.

diff --git a/_template.html b/_template.html index ec2fe36..de6dabc 100644 --- a/_template.html +++ b/_template.html @@ -30,6 +30,11 @@ $for(include-before)$ $include-before$ $endfor$ $if(title)$

$title$

$endif$ $if(subtitle)$

$subtitle$

$endif$ + $if(dedication)$ + +
$dedication$
+ $endif$ + $if(epigraph.content)$
@@ -43,10 +48,6 @@ $for(include-before)$ $include-before$ $endfor$
$epigraph.attrib$
$endif$ $endif$ - $if(dedication)$ - -
$dedication$
- $endif$
diff --git a/about-the-author.html b/about-the-author.html index 89e353f..4c3696c 100644 --- a/about-the-author.html +++ b/about-the-author.html @@ -23,11 +23,12 @@

About the author

(not pictured)

+
The body that surrounds him is his, but his insides are not.
- +
diff --git a/amber-alert.html b/amber-alert.html index 4dcdf52..1f62762 100644 --- a/amber-alert.html +++ b/amber-alert.html @@ -23,11 +23,12 @@

AMBER alert

+
Apparently it does nothing.
- +
diff --git a/and.html b/and.html index fecf879..0f8af80 100644 --- a/and.html +++ b/and.html @@ -23,13 +23,14 @@

And

+

“What is your favorite word?”

“And. It is so hopeful.”
Margaret Atwood
- +

And you were there in the start of it all
and you folded your hands like little doves
that would fly away like an afterthought
and you turned to me the window light on your face
and you asked me something that I did not recognize
like a great throng of people who are not you
and I asked are we in a church
and you answered with the look on your face
of someone grieving something gone for years
but that they had been reminded of
by a catch in the light or in someone’s voice
and I think maybe it could have been mine
and I looked away thickly my head was in jelly
and I didn’t get an answer from you but I got one

diff --git a/angeltoabraham.html b/angeltoabraham.html index 6f5c806..e6c9934 100644 --- a/angeltoabraham.html +++ b/angeltoabraham.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The angel to Abraham

- + +

Abraham, Abraham, you are old and cannot hear:
what if you miss my small voice amongst the creaking
of your own grief, kill your son unknowing
of what he will be, and commit Israel to nothing?

diff --git a/apollo11.html b/apollo11.html index fc33350..9caf87c 100644 --- a/apollo11.html +++ b/apollo11.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site

- + +

So it’s the fucking moon. Big deal. As if
you haven’t seen it before, hanging in the sky
like a piece of rotten meat nailed to the wall,

diff --git a/arspoetica.html b/arspoetica.html index 9e21036..5365483 100644 --- a/arspoetica.html +++ b/arspoetica.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Ars poetica

- + +

What is poetry? Poetry is. Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry. Here is the problem: life is very big and complex. Human beings are neither. We are small, simple beings that don’t want to know all of the myriad interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all the hours of every day. We much prefer knowing only that which is just in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt. This is why many people are depressed.

diff --git a/art.html b/art.html index e2f2d7b..35d5ee7 100644 --- a/art.html +++ b/art.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Art

- + +

Paul was writing in his diary about art.

diff --git a/axe.html b/axe.html index 055bd00..8345f56 100644 --- a/axe.html +++ b/axe.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Axe

- + +

Paul took his axe and went out into the woods to chop trees. Or rather he went into the trees to chop wood. He wasn’t sure. Either way it helped him think. Last time he’d gone out, he’d had an idea for a shoe-insert company he could start called “Paul’s Bunyons.” He chuckled to himself as he shouldered his axe and went into the forest.

diff --git a/big-dipper.html b/big-dipper.html index 09ec7a9..6e9ad81 100644 --- a/big-dipper.html +++ b/big-dipper.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The Big Dipper

- + +

After searching for days or even months
I finally find it reclining lazily
above the peaks above the city as if to ask
Did you miss me? Yes very much I reply
and rush to embrace it but it smiles
and recoils and tells me No no you
have to try harder than that it says
I do not give myself up so easily

diff --git a/boar.html b/boar.html index 838dc8f..f441d92 100644 --- a/boar.html +++ b/boar.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The boar

- + +

Now the ticking clocks scare me.
The empty rooms, clock towers, belfries;
I am terrified by them all.

diff --git a/boy_bus.html b/boy_bus.html index 8323d10..a0c0044 100644 --- a/boy_bus.html +++ b/boy_bus.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Boy on the bus

- + +

When he said Bible I heard his southern accent
and he had a face I expect all pastors must have
a round open honest face
that will always be a boy’s face
though its owner may rightly call himself a man
near my age though I hardly call myself a man

diff --git a/building.html b/building.html index 50dac74..fb2be3a 100644 --- a/building.html +++ b/building.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Building

- + +

ART and CRAFT are only the inside and outside of the same building. The ceiling is—here he put his eraser to his bottom lip, thinking. He crossed out The ceiling is. The floor is reality and the ceiling is aspiration desire that which is desired. CRAFT is building a chair from wood. ART is using the wood as a substrate for an emotional message to a future person, the READER / VIEWER.

diff --git a/call-me-aural-pleasure.html b/call-me-aural-pleasure.html index 7d4a7f2..3d486c3 100644 --- a/call-me-aural-pleasure.html +++ b/call-me-aural-pleasure.html @@ -23,11 +23,12 @@

Call me

aural pleasure

+

compiled thru Facebook statuses of the author
- +

Like 40 as I challenge anyone to come too!
It’s like you’re the epitome of lame!
She’s all I am SOOOO CONFUSED
Aw yeah she got word from yarn.
—but technically it’s a pretty sweet, huh?

diff --git a/cereal.html b/cereal.html index cb08a1c..756138e 100644 --- a/cereal.html +++ b/cereal.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Cereal

- + +

He woke up after eleven and didn’t go outside all day, not even to his Writing Shack. What did he do?

diff --git a/cold-wind.html b/cold-wind.html index 618dc0c..eec8a10 100644 --- a/cold-wind.html +++ b/cold-wind.html @@ -23,8 +23,9 @@

Cold wind

- +
Justin
+
diff --git a/creation-myth.html b/creation-myth.html index 5bd31ef..5b799e6 100644 --- a/creation-myth.html +++ b/creation-myth.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Creation myth

- + +

So two hyperintelligent pandimensional beings
walk into a bar. One turns to the other and says,
“Did you remember to check the end state
of that simulation we were running?” The other
says, “No, I thought that you did?” To which
the first replies, “Oh shit, we missed it.
I suppose we must do all of this again. Barkeep,

diff --git a/css/_common.css b/css/_common.css index 0e06824..79919a8 100644 --- a/css/_common.css +++ b/css/_common.css @@ -64,6 +64,8 @@ h2 { /* Epigraph & Dedication */ .epigraph { text-align: right; + font-size: 10pt; + font-style: italic; } .epigraph p { margin: 0; @@ -71,6 +73,8 @@ h2 { .epigraph-attrib { text-align: right; margin-top: 0; + font-size: 10pt; + font-style: italic; } .epigraph-attrib:before { content: '– '; @@ -78,7 +82,7 @@ h2 { .dedication { font-style: italic; - text-align: right; + font-size: 10pt; } .dedication:before { content: 'for '; @@ -91,4 +95,10 @@ nav { margin: auto; text-align: center; } +nav .prevlink:before { + content: '« ' +} +nav .nextlink:after { + content: ' »' +} /* }}} */ diff --git a/deadman.html b/deadman.html index 52c45a9..49ca868 100644 --- a/deadman.html +++ b/deadman.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Dead man

- + +

A dead man finds his way into our hearts
simply by opening the door and walking in.
He pours himself a drink, speaks aimlessly
about hunting or some bats he saw
on the way over, wheeling around each other.
Look how they spin, he says, it’s like the
ripples atoms make as they hurl past each other
in the space between their bodies.
We mention the eels at the aquarium, how
their bodies knot while mating. The dead man
was a boyscout once, and tied a lot of knots.
His favorite was the one with the rabbit
and the hole, and the rabbit going in and out
and around the tree. The dead man liked it
because he liked to pretend that the rabbit
was running from a fox, and the rabbit
always ended up safe, back in his hole.

diff --git a/death-zone.html b/death-zone.html index 0eb42f8..c00ce66 100644 --- a/death-zone.html +++ b/death-zone.html @@ -23,12 +23,13 @@

The Death Zone

+
And my life became death.
Philip Gould
- +
diff --git a/deathstrumpet.html b/deathstrumpet.html index b45255e..31d9ec4 100644 --- a/deathstrumpet.html +++ b/deathstrumpet.html @@ -23,12 +23,13 @@

Death’s trumpet

+

So Death plays his little fucking trumpet. So what, says the boy.

Larry Levis
- +

He didn’t have any polish so he spit-shined the whole thing,
top to bottom. It gleamed like maybe a tomato on the vine
begging to be picked and thrown on some caprese. Death loved caprese.

diff --git a/dream.html b/dream.html index ac08fb4..d73b7a7 100644 --- a/dream.html +++ b/dream.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Dream

- + +

It had gotten cold. He went to lay down in bed with a pad and paper. He began to write. Although he hadn’t tried it much in bed before, he liked it mostly. His arm got tired journeying across the page like a series of switchbacks down the wall of the Grand Canyon. He wrote this down in the margin, for later:

diff --git a/early.html b/early.html index f0af4e0..095047d 100644 --- a/early.html +++ b/early.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Early

- + +

YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART ART MUST BE CREATED he sat on the couch at home while his mother watched TV and smoked. Dinner had been chicken and peas with milk and afterward Paul and his mother sat on opposite ends of the couch. At intervals she would look sideways at Paul writing. He pretended not to notice.

diff --git a/elegyforanalternateself.html b/elegyforanalternateself.html index 01e8023..934ae78 100644 --- a/elegyforanalternateself.html +++ b/elegyforanalternateself.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Elegy for an alternate self

- + +

Say there are no words. Say that we are conjoined
from birth, or better still, say we are myself.
—But I still talk to myself, I build my world
through language, so if we say there are no words
this is not enough. Say we are instead some animal,
or better yet, a plant, or a flagellum motoring
aimlessly around. (Say that humans are the only things
that reason. Say that we’re the only things that worry.)

diff --git a/epigraph.html b/epigraph.html index 6e026bf..3a0eddd 100644 --- a/epigraph.html +++ b/epigraph.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

epigraph

An epigraph

- + +

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers and queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

diff --git a/ex-machina.html b/ex-machina.html index d9640e7..3a9eb2f 100644 --- a/ex-machina.html +++ b/ex-machina.html @@ -23,11 +23,12 @@

Ex machina

+
with lines from National Geographic
- +

Bottom of the drink: they had
to go. The Coke machine, the snack
machine, the deep fryer. Hoisted

diff --git a/exasperated.html b/exasperated.html index c88b0c5..12b726b 100644 --- a/exasperated.html +++ b/exasperated.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Exasperated

- + +

I didn’t write this sestina yesterday.
It’s the first time I fell behind in my task
and hopefully, the only time it will.
This means that today I must write two
sestinas. If I don’t write them today, I
will have to write two later down the line.

diff --git a/father.html b/father.html index 2f4f439..a72d4f5 100644 --- a/father.html +++ b/father.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Father

- + +

“Is man the natural thing that makes unnatural things” he thought to himself as he looked out the kitchen window at the shed. He wondered who built the shed for the first time since he’d been going out there. “Mom who built the shed out back” he asked. “That was your father” she said.

diff --git a/feedingtheraven.html b/feedingtheraven.html index 18548cf..945560a 100644 --- a/feedingtheraven.html +++ b/feedingtheraven.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Feeding the raven

- + +

You never can tell just when Charlie Sheen will enter your life. For me, it was last Thursday. I was reading some translation of a Japanese translation of “The Raven” in which the Poe and the raven become friends. At one point the raven gets very sick and Poe feeds him at his bedside and nurses him back to health. The story was very heartwarming and sad at the same time and my tears were welling up when suddenly I heard a knock on my door.

diff --git a/finding-the-lion.html b/finding-the-lion.html index 751a742..1801d84 100644 --- a/finding-the-lion.html +++ b/finding-the-lion.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Finding the Lion

- + +

Tonight, as I look up, the stars
hide themselves in shame. There is no moon.
The sky is black, like my desk,

diff --git a/fire.html b/fire.html index 50108c2..9617286 100644 --- a/fire.html +++ b/fire.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Fire

- + +

His mother ran out of the house in her nightgown. “What the hell do you think you’re doing” she hollered as Paul watched the shed. “I’m burning the shed down” he said smiling “isn’t it warm?” “It’s warm enough out here without that burning down” she said “go get the hose and put this thing out.” “But Mom—” “Do it” she said in the tone of voice that meant Do it now. He went around the side of the house screwed the nozzle on grabbed the end of the hose pulled it around the house and waited for water to come out the end. When it did it was not in a very strong stream. “I don’t think this is going to work” Paul said to his mother. “God damn it I have to call the Fire Department” she said and went inside the house. The shed continued in its burning.

diff --git a/found-typewriter-poem.html b/found-typewriter-poem.html index bd84022..d77fd43 100644 --- a/found-typewriter-poem.html +++ b/found-typewriter-poem.html @@ -23,11 +23,12 @@

Look

a found typewriter poem

+

Is he older? I asked her. And I never got an answer, because at the moment she disappeared in a puff of smoke. I like to think nothing ever happened to her save that she went over to the spirit realm. I usually know better though.

- +

Look, I say—look here—
at this old place
where nothing changes.
Look at the people
who pass by. Look at
the trees. The flowers
full of wanting: look
how full they are with
color. Look how they mock
us, empty people who
must fill themselves
with changes—emptiness.

diff --git a/hands.html b/hands.html index 0f8756d..550a7e1 100644 --- a/hands.html +++ b/hands.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Hands

- + +

He looked down at his hands idly while he was typing. They were dry and cracked in places. He thought he might start bleeding so he went inside for some lotion.

diff --git a/hard-game.html b/hard-game.html index 5aaacad..f0967f5 100644 --- a/hard-game.html +++ b/hard-game.html @@ -23,8 +23,9 @@

A hard game

- +
Jim Henson
+
diff --git a/hardware.html b/hardware.html index f77bc27..cd34416 100644 --- a/hardware.html +++ b/hardware.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Hardware

- + +

His mother drove him to the Hardware Store on a Tuesday. “I’m glad to see you’ve taken my advice for once” she said. “What do you mean.” “Applying to work at the Hardware Store. I’m proud of you Paul.”

diff --git a/howithappened.html b/howithappened.html index f4703b7..02a1ceb 100644 --- a/howithappened.html +++ b/howithappened.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

How it happened

- + +

I was away on vacation when I heard—
someone sat at my desk while I was away.
They took my pen, while I was taking
surf lessons, and wrote the sun into the sky.
They pre-approved the earth and the waters,
and all of the living things, without even
having the decency to text me. It was not I
who was behind the phrase “creeping things.”
When I got back, of course I was pissed,
but it was already written into the policy.
I’m just saying: don’t blame me for Cain
killing Abel. That was a murder. I’m not a cop.
The Tower of Babel fell on its own. The ark
never saw a single drop of rain. I’m the drunk
sitting on the curb who just pissed his pants,
holding up a sign asking where I am.

diff --git a/howtoread.html b/howtoread.html index 7f7a9e7..a42edb0 100644 --- a/howtoread.html +++ b/howtoread.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

How to read this

- + +

This book is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be lived. Each of the poems contained herein have been written by a different person, with his own history, culture, and emotions. True, they are all related, but no more than any of us is related through our genetics, our shared planet, or our yearnings.

diff --git a/hymnal.html b/hymnal.html index d33dadb..b12cdde 100644 --- a/hymnal.html +++ b/hymnal.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Hymnal

- + +

It’s all jokes Paul wrote in what he was now calling his Hymnal. He had been writing non-stop all day, because he didn’t count pee- or cigarette- breaks. All art is an inside joke. The symbology involved must be—and here he put down his pen and held his head in his hands. He could never think of the word—he said often that he had no words. He opened to a new page in his Hymnal. On the top of it was written in bold script HYMN 386: JOKES.

diff --git a/i-am.html b/i-am.html index c2d56ad..6c1e630 100644 --- a/i-am.html +++ b/i-am.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

I am

- + +

I am a great pillar of white smoke.
I am Lot’s nameless wife encased in salt.
I am the wound on Christ’s back as he moans
with the pounding of a hammer on his wrist.
I am the nail that holds my house together.
It is a strong house, built on a good foundation.
In the winter, it is warm and crawling things
cannot get in. This house will never burn down.
It is the house that I built, with my body
and with my strength. I am the only one who lives
here. I am both father and mother to a race
of dust motes that worship me as a god. I have
monuments built daily in my honor in dark
corners around the house. I destroy all of them
before I go to bed, but in the morning
there are still more. I don’t think I know
where all of them are. I don’t think I can get
to all of them anymore. There are too many.

diff --git a/i-think-its-you.html b/i-think-its-you.html index c5ed4d5..180d07e 100644 --- a/i-think-its-you.html +++ b/i-think-its-you.html @@ -23,11 +23,12 @@

I think it’s you (but it’s not)

+
When you fall in love everyone looks the same.
- +

I thought I saw you walking
to the bus stop but it was only
a raven. His croaks sounded nothing
like your footsteps (as they pound
down the hallway toward my bedroom)
his wings looked nothing like your
legs (running on the wrong side
of the road away from my house)
I think the one resemblance was the eyes

diff --git a/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html b/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html index d902918..92b290d 100644 --- a/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html +++ b/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

I wanted to tell you something

- + +

I wanted to tell you something in order to
explain the way I feel about the Universe,
its workings, etc. But I couldn’t yesterday
—I’m sorry—I wanted only to ball
myself up and cry all day. It was the sixteenth
day in a row this happened to me, and to be

diff --git a/in-bed.html b/in-bed.html index 28ea00f..094e57b 100644 --- a/in-bed.html +++ b/in-bed.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

In bed

- + +

I

diff --git a/index.html b/index.html index dbddb42..eab14d4 100644 --- a/index.html +++ b/index.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Autocento of the breakfast table

- + +

Ideas are drool. They labor to create our buildings out of air

diff --git a/initial-conditions.html b/initial-conditions.html index dafc7f7..a03137f 100644 --- a/initial-conditions.html +++ b/initial-conditions.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Initial conditions

- + +

There is a theory which states the Universe
if it began with the same initial conditions
( same gravity same strong weak nuclear force same
size and shape ) would unfold in exactly
the way it has : with the same planets orbiting suns
same people making same mistakes : like this morning

diff --git a/ipsumlorem.html b/ipsumlorem.html index 4440a8d..f9b458a 100644 --- a/ipsumlorem.html +++ b/ipsumlorem.html @@ -23,14 +23,15 @@

Ipsum lorem

a test suite for the gods

+ +
you, dear Reader
+

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.
Cicero
- -
you, dear Reader
- +

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Vivamus at vulputate ligula, ac ullamcorper magna.
In in porta metus.
Curabitur iaculis faucibus posuere.
Nunc elementum libero vitae sapien auctor mollis.
Aenean eget tellus ac urna tincidunt vestibulum.
Vivamus eget orci nec purus mollis efficitur.
Pellentesque eu pharetra justo.

diff --git a/january.html b/january.html index 0ca1895..cbfab15 100644 --- a/january.html +++ b/january.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

January

- + +

January.
It’s cold, and I don’t like it.
I prefer warm weather,
although I like sweaters. They are the one
warm spot in an otherwise shitty season.
But fall is better sweater weather. So be patient,

diff --git a/joke.html b/joke.html index d00eb3b..b773c97 100644 --- a/joke.html +++ b/joke.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Joke

- + +

He wrote JOKES on the top of a page in his notebook. He had run out of notecards and hadn’t been able to convince his mother to go to the Office Supply Store for him. He left a space underneath it and wrote.

diff --git a/lappel-du-vide.html b/lappel-du-vide.html index 0d8fe0c..99dbe8c 100644 --- a/lappel-du-vide.html +++ b/lappel-du-vide.html @@ -23,12 +23,13 @@

L’appel du vide

+
You can never go home again.
Thomas Wolfe
- +

I. Walter

diff --git a/largest-asteroid.html b/largest-asteroid.html index d5e6f85..491183b 100644 --- a/largest-asteroid.html +++ b/largest-asteroid.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The largest asteroid in the asteroid belt

- + +

What secrets does it hold?
Can it tell us who kissed Sara
that night on the veranda, or
who Joey is really in love with?
We all know it isn’t Sara, we
mean look at them Christmas eve
and he’s staring whistfully
at the stars, or the largest
asteroid in the asteroid belt.
She’s staring at him, sure, but
she sees the twinkle in his eye
is not aimed in her direction.
The reflection of that reflection
will beam into space, lightyears
of space, dimming slowly each
second, until it dies out like
all of Sara’s hopes for something
resembling love in this life, real
love that takes hold of her by
the throat and refuses to let go,
love that makes men travel for her
and only for her, love that launches
space ships to that asteroid, the
largest in the asteroid belt, that
jewel of dead rock and ice, harboring
something that could’ve been life
and nothing that actually is.

diff --git a/last-bastion.html b/last-bastion.html index 1fe511c..a8178a6 100644 --- a/last-bastion.html +++ b/last-bastion.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Last bastion

- + +

Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle
down the cold and darkened highways of the heart.
They are the last personality left. They are the meek
who inherited the heart, what was left of it.
Without food to cook in new or exciting ways
nor audience to gasp and cackle, the chefs
of the heart quietly waste away while staring
doe-eyed into now-empty Safeway windows
checking under the dusty produce shelves
for something they pray the rats haven’t found yet.

diff --git a/last-passenger.html b/last-passenger.html index 04518cf..1c7b982 100644 --- a/last-passenger.html +++ b/last-passenger.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Last passenger

- + +

Memory works strangely, spooling its thread
over the nails of events barely related,
creating finally some picture, if we’re
lucky, of a life—but more likely, it knots
itself, catches on a nail or in our throats
that gasp, as it binds our necks, for air.

diff --git a/leaf.html b/leaf.html index 6cf2e13..a6ab804 100644 --- a/leaf.html +++ b/leaf.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Leaf

- + +

He shrugged the wood off his shoulder, letting it fall with a clog onto the earth floor of his Writing Shack. He exhaled looking out of the window. He hoped to see a bird fly by, maybe a blue jay or raven. No bird did. He inhaled. He exhaled again in a way that could only be classified as a sigh. He sat down at his writing desk. He began shuffling through what he’d written, trying to find some sort of pattern.

diff --git a/leg.html b/leg.html index 657fa51..e067e08 100644 --- a/leg.html +++ b/leg.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Leg

- + +

His first chair was a stool. It was an uneven wobbly stool that would not support even forty pounds. “So my first chair is a broken stool” he said after nearly breaking his tailbone on the dirt floor. “Maybe I should start again but this time only with legs.” He began again but this time only with legs. He built one leg, which means he cut a straight piece of wood down to four feet in length, whittled the bark off, and sanded it down smooth in what he was now calling his Woodworking Shack. He typed up a note on how to make chair legs.

diff --git a/likingthings.html b/likingthings.html index e744a61..edfec70 100644 --- a/likingthings.html +++ b/likingthings.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Liking Things

- + +

The definition of happiness is doing stuff that you really like. That stuff can be eating soup, going to the bathroom, walking the dog, playing Dungeons and Dragons; whatever keeps your mind off the fact that you’re so goddamn unhappy all the time. That, incidentally, is the definition of like: that feeling you get when you forget how miserable you are for just a little bit. Thus people like doing stuff they like all the time, as often as possible; because if they remember how horrible they really feel at not having a background to put themselves against, they will want to hurt themselves and those around them.

diff --git a/listen.html b/listen.html index c816b57..72e5d44 100644 --- a/listen.html +++ b/listen.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Listen

- + +

If you swallow hard enough
you’ll feel the stone
the one we all have waiting

diff --git a/loremipsum.html b/loremipsum.html index 2b70742..e46874f 100644 --- a/loremipsum.html +++ b/loremipsum.html @@ -23,14 +23,15 @@

Lorem ipsum

a test suite for the gods

+ +
you, dear Reader
+

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.
Cicero
- -
you, dear Reader
- +

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus at vulputate ligula, ac ullamcorper magna. In in porta metus. Curabitur iaculis faucibus posuere. Nunc elementum libero vitae sapien auctor mollis. Aenean eget tellus ac urna tincidunt vestibulum. Vivamus eget orci nec purus mollis efficitur. Pellentesque eu pharetra justo.

diff --git a/love-as-god.html b/love-as-god.html index da797a7..9f3f51f 100644 --- a/love-as-god.html +++ b/love-as-god.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Love as God

- + +

God is love, they say, but there is
no god. Therefore, how can there be love?
And if there is no love, how can there be God?
There are things in life, I suppose,
that are simply unanswerable mysteries
of existence. Maybe this God and love are one.

diff --git a/lovesong.html b/lovesong.html index ea978d3..602eb9c 100644 --- a/lovesong.html +++ b/lovesong.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Love Song

- + +

Walking along in the dark is a good way to begin a song. Walking home in the dark after a long day chasing criminals is another. Running away from an imagined evil is no way to begin a story.

diff --git a/man.html b/man.html index aec2fc9..0a82697 100644 --- a/man.html +++ b/man.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Man

- + +

THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES

diff --git a/moon-drowning.html b/moon-drowning.html index 0f75a52..4e8df27 100644 --- a/moon-drowning.html +++ b/moon-drowning.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The Moon is drowning

- + +

The moon is drowning the stars it pushes them
under into the darkness they cannot breathe
they are flailing the moon boasts to my shadow
how powerful is the moon how great its light

diff --git a/moongone.html b/moongone.html index ab0738d..cf84b9a 100644 --- a/moongone.html +++ b/moongone.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The moon is gone and in its place a mirror

- + +

The moon is gone and in its place a mirror. Looking at the night sky now yields nothing but the viewer’s own face as viewed from a million miles, surrounded by the landscape he is only vaguely aware of being surrounded by. He believes that he is alone, surrounded by desert and mountain, but behind him—he now sees it—someone is sneaking up on him. He spins around fast, but no one is there on Earth. He looks back up and they are yet closer in the night sky. Again he looks over his shoulder but there is nothing, not even a desert mouse. As he looks up again he realizes it’s a cloud above him, which due to optics has looked like someone else. The cloud blocks out the moon which is now a mirror, and the viewer is completely alone.

diff --git a/mountain.html b/mountain.html index d3e9aa5..9210a2c 100644 --- a/mountain.html +++ b/mountain.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The mountain

- + +

The other side of this mountain
is not the mountain. This side
is honey-golden, sticky-sweet,
full of phone conversations with mother.
The other side is a bell,
ringing in the church-steeple
the day mother died.

diff --git a/movingsideways.html b/movingsideways.html index 7abf8d7..ccfa89d 100644 --- a/movingsideways.html +++ b/movingsideways.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Moving Sideways

- + +

A dog moving sideways is sick; a man moving sideways is drunk. Thus if you want to be mindful of the movings of the universe sideways, become either drunk or sick. By doing this you remove yourself from the equation, and are able to observe, without being observed, the universe as it dances sideways drunkenly.

diff --git a/music-433.html b/music-433.html index 6844e0f..db66130 100644 --- a/music-433.html +++ b/music-433.html @@ -23,8 +23,9 @@

Something about all music being performances of 4'33" in places where other bands happen to be playing

- +
Randall
+
diff --git a/no-nothing.html b/no-nothing.html index b227aac..709be00 100644 --- a/no-nothing.html +++ b/no-nothing.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

No nothing

- + +

While swimming in the river
I saw underneath it a river
of stars. Only there was no
river: it was noon. You can
say the sun is a river; you
can argue the stars back it
like shirts behind a closet
door; you can say the earth
holds us up with its weight
or that it means well or it
means anything.
                There is no
closet, nor door; there are
no shirts hanging anywhere.
There is no false wall that
leads deep into the earth’s
bowels, growing warmer with
each step. Warmth as a con-
cept has ceased to make any
sense. In contraposition to
cold, it might, but cold as
well stepped out last night
and hasn’t returned.
                     Last I
heard, it went out swimming
and might’ve drowned. Trees
were the pallbearers at the
funeral, the train was long
and wailful, there was much
wailing and gnashing of all
teeth–though there were no
teeth, no train, no funeral
or prayer or trees at all–
nor a river underneath any-
thing. There was nothing to
be underneath anymore.
                       Look
around, and tell me you see
something. Look around, and
tell me something that I do
not know. I know, more than
anything, that the world is
always ending. Behind that,
there is nothing, save that
there is no nothing either.

diff --git a/notes.html b/notes.html index 9b76f47..b890f6b 100644 --- a/notes.html +++ b/notes.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Notes

- + +

Paul began typing on notecards. Somehow this felt right to his sensibilities. It was difficult to get the little cards into the typewriter. It was a pain to readjust the typewriter for regular paper when he wasn’t writing. He started typing everything on those little notecards: grocery lists, letters to his grandmother, even reports for work (which is what got him in trouble).

diff --git a/nothing-is-ever-over.html b/nothing-is-ever-over.html index 656ed03..022eced 100644 --- a/nothing-is-ever-over.html +++ b/nothing-is-ever-over.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Nothing is ever over

- + +

Nothing is ever over; nothing
is ever even begun. The foundation
hasn’t been laid; how can we hope
to put in the plumbing? The bed
is unmade, not even made; the wood
hasn’t been cleft from the tree;
the seed hasn’t been cast
out of water and growth and sun,
which itself hasn’t started shining.
The cock has never stopped crowing
because he never started. Peter
betrays us again and again with
silence. Christ wakes up at night,
choking from a bad dream, wrists
aching from a dreamt, torturous pain.

diff --git a/onformalpoetry.html b/onformalpoetry.html index 9abc4e8..efd1cb1 100644 --- a/onformalpoetry.html +++ b/onformalpoetry.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

On formal poetry

- + +

I think that I could write formal poems
exclusively, or at least inclusive
with all the other stuff I write
I guess. Of course, I’ve already written
a few, this one included, though “formal”
is maybe a stretch. Is blank verse a form?
What is form anyway? I picture old
women counting stitches on their knitting,
keeping iambs next to iambs in lines
as straight and sure as arrows. But my sock
is lumpy, poorly made: it’s beginning
to unravel. Stresses don’t line up. Syl-
lables forced to fit like McNugget molds.
That cliché on the arrow? I’m aware.
My prepositions too—God, where’s it stop?
The answer: never. I will never stop
writing poems, or hating what I write.

diff --git a/options.html b/options.html index c0b09e0..8ecacbc 100644 --- a/options.html +++ b/options.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Options

- + +

What did he do when he was in the woods? Where did he go? Was there always one spot, one clearing deep within the heart of them, that he would visit? Did he talk to the trees or only to himself? When he chopped down trees, did he leave them there to rot in the quiet or did he drag them out of the woods, behind his Shack, and dismember them? Did he use any for firewood, or did the pieces rot behind his Shack, forgotten? When was the last time he built any furniture? Did he get any better at building it or did he just quit at some point, let the desire to create fall behind him like a forgotten felled tree?

diff --git a/ouroboros_memory.html b/ouroboros_memory.html index 22e19f3..000ef27 100644 --- a/ouroboros_memory.html +++ b/ouroboros_memory.html @@ -23,12 +23,13 @@

Ouroboros of Memory

+

He used his body to remember his body, but in the end could only remember the string.
Jonathan Safran Foer
- +

He said at the beginning, “It’s like rolling yarn into a too-small ball. Sure, you can roll the memories around for a while, and maybe even use some of them. Eventually, though, you’ll wind them all the way out and you’ll be left with nothing but a small loop. You can tie this loop around your finger, and start wrapping your body, but this is an extension of the same problem. You’ll turn into a mummy of memory. There’ll be nothing left underneath but a dead body.

diff --git a/paul.html b/paul.html index fa93fb2..23ec1a2 100644 --- a/paul.html +++ b/paul.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Paul

- + +
diff --git a/philosophy.html b/philosophy.html index 22b972b..d264797 100644 --- a/philosophy.html +++ b/philosophy.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Philosophy

- + +

Importance is important. But meaning is meaningful. Here we are at the crux of the matter, for both meaning and importance are also human-formed. So it would seem that nothing is important or meaningful, if importance and meaning are of themselves only products of the fallible human intellect. But here is the great secret: so is the fallibility of the human intellect a mere product of the fallible human intellect. The question here arises: Is anything real, and not a mere invention of a mistaken human mind? By real of course I mean “that which is on its own terms,” that is, without any modification on the part of mankind by observing it. But such a thing is impossible to be known, for if it be known it has certainly been observed by someone, and so it is not on its own terms but on the terms of the observer. So it cannot be known if anything exists on its own terms, for it exists on its own terms we certainly will not know anything about it.

diff --git a/phone.html b/phone.html index 8f14f2c..2a5a3d5 100644 --- a/phone.html +++ b/phone.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Phone

- + +

“Hello Paul this is Jill Jill Noe remember me” the voice on the phone was a woman’s. He nodded into the receiver. “Hello” Jill asked again “hello?” Paul remembered that phones work by talking and said “Hello Jill.”

diff --git a/planks.html b/planks.html index 7c074b7..43746fa 100644 --- a/planks.html +++ b/planks.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Planks

- + +
diff --git a/plant.html b/plant.html index 4902d22..4937f39 100644 --- a/plant.html +++ b/plant.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Litany for a plant

- + +

I need a plant. I need a thing
to take care of. I need
a little green brownspotted
blackdirt growing
quietness. I need a sunlit
dawn knowing my name filtered
through a thin green window.
I need chlorophyll
working its magic on beams of
grassmade early morning dewdrop
sweetmaking green. I need
the dark earth sucking water
from a black crevice
its black magic churning
wormilled rockturned starblind
darkness and cold into
the opposite of dust. I need the heat
to blind me. I need the dumb making
to charge my coldened blood. I need
the dropturned leaves to turn again
their faces to the windblown sun.
I need millions of tiny years
summed up and burning out some unknown
new growth into the air. I need four
hundred feet of dark red gnarled wood
and needles glistening wetly on goldheaded
branches hoisting themselves
to the sky. I need ten strong men
to fail to bring you down. Old one
I need the peace that comes with knowing
something sacred holds still
in the world. I need your green tongues
of flame to lick at old wounds
stitching us together away from ourselves.
I need your brownbranching grasp
to keep me from drifting off
into unknowing terrible sleep. I need
to know the snake hanging
from your branches. I need to watch
the dropping of flesh massful
onto the ground from a height. I need
the gnawer at your root to strike
a vein to quicken old brown stone
to movement. I need jeweleyed venom
barking new greennesses into the bark.
I need a knocker of dark secrets hidden
in the dark bark hiding a smallstone
smoldering pearl in the knot. I need
that pearl held out in a hand like an offering.
I need the hand to be a plant’s hand.

diff --git a/poetry-time.html b/poetry-time.html index 78287f7..627affc 100644 --- a/poetry-time.html +++ b/poetry-time.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Something about the nature of poetry and time

- + +

I’m writing this now because I have to.
Not in some “my soul yearns for this and
I can’t help it” way, but in the way that this
moment is structured as such, that it is
crystallized this way, me writing this, and later
you reading it, now for you, later for me,

diff --git a/prelude.html b/prelude.html index ea4ba90..e675a3a 100644 --- a/prelude.html +++ b/prelude.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Prelude

- + +

Of course, there is a God. Of course, there is no God. Of course, what’s really important is that these aren’t important. No, they are; but not really important. All that’s important is the relative importance of non-important things. Shit. Never mind; let’s start over.

diff --git a/problems.html b/problems.html index dbe7d50..dc11154 100644 --- a/problems.html +++ b/problems.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Problems

- + +

The problem with people is this: we cannot be happy. No matter how hard or easy we try, it is not to be. It seems sometimes that, just as the dog was made for jumping in mud and sniffing out foxholes and having a good time all around, man was made for sadness, loneliness and heartache.

diff --git a/proverbs.html b/proverbs.html index 4fdd1de..1f18735 100644 --- a/proverbs.html +++ b/proverbs.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Proverbs

- + +

Nothing matters; everything is sacred. Everything matters; nothing is sacred.1 This is the only way we can move forward: by moving sideways. Life is a great big rugby game, and the entire field has to be run for a goal. The fact that the beginning two verses of this chapter have the same number of characters proves that they are a tautological pair, that is, they complete each other. Sometimes life seems like a dog wagging its tail, smiling up at you and wanting you to love it, just wanting that, simple simple love, oblivious to the fact that it just ran through your immaculately groomed flower garden and tracked all the mud in onto your freshly steamed carpet. Life is not life in a suburb. There are no rosebushes, groomed never. There is no carpet, steamed at any time. The dog looks at you wanting you to love it. It wants to know that you know that it’s there. It wants to be observed.2

diff --git a/punch.html b/punch.html index 35ca00e..5eec17f 100644 --- a/punch.html +++ b/punch.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Punch

- + +

When he finally got back to work he was surprised they threw him a party. WELCOME BACK PAUL! was written on a big banner across the back wall. Someone had ordered a confectioner’s-sugar cake with frosting flowers on the corners. It said the same thing as the banner. “Welcome back, Paul” said Jill as he was at the punch bowl. The cup was on the table as he ladled punch in with his right hand. His left was wrapped in gauze.

diff --git a/purpose-dogs.html b/purpose-dogs.html index 393f286..895ab76 100644 --- a/purpose-dogs.html +++ b/purpose-dogs.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The purpose of dogs

- + +

Okay, so as we said in the Prelude, there either is or isn’t a God. This has been one of the main past times of humanity, ever since … since the first man (or woman) climbed out of whatever slime or swamp he thumbed his way out of. What humanity has failed to realize is that an incredibly plausible third, and heretofore unknown, hypothesis also exists: There is a dog.

diff --git a/question.html b/question.html index b43829f..a379715 100644 --- a/question.html +++ b/question.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Question

- + +

“Do you have to say your thoughts out loud for them to mean anything” Paul asked Jill on his first coffee break at work. It was in the city and his mother told him she wouldn’t drive him so he’d had to take the bus. Number 3 he thought it was. He couldn’t quite remember. Jill said “Sorry what?” Paul realized that she hadn’t really noticed him there in the break room as he was hunched behind the refrigerator a little and she was busy pouring coffee and exactly two tablespoons of both milk and sugar into her mug before she put the coffee in. He decided to repeat the question.

diff --git a/real-writer.html b/real-writer.html index 80e31f6..b0f5e58 100644 --- a/real-writer.html +++ b/real-writer.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

A real writer

- + +

Sometimes I feel as though I am not a real writer.
I don’t smoke. I don’t wake up early but I don’t sleep
all day either. I find myself increasingly interested
in dumb luck. Chance: I’ve found two dimes in as many
days. Does this mean I’ve found twenty lucky pennies?
I want you to participate. You the reader. You,
the probabilistic god of my dreams. I’ve been having
strange dreams lately. I don’t remember them but
they leave impressions. A bare foot. A tunnel
of hair from her face to mine. A boat stranded
in a living-room. Something warm. Something like the sun
through my eyelids. A hand, with all its dead symbology.
My teeth have fallen out. No, you pulled them out
with your hands, threw them over your left shoulder
like salt, to wish away bad luck. I have something
to tell you: bad luck follows like a dog. It lets you
get ahead for a few days, a week, a year. You’ll see,
it’ll bite your sleeping face when you’re not looking.
I’ve been dreaming about the future, I know. In my dream
I am not a writer, I live in a place with rain. You
are sunning yourself as you read this, on a beach or
maybe a desert. Let me move in with you. I can cook
or clean or take care of your dog while you’re out.
I’ll never have to write again. I’ll watch television.
Do I want to become a writer? Tell me. Should I smoke?
I can sleep all day in your attic if you want, become
your god, lose my own, settle to the bottom of the bed
like a boat in a river, dream about nothing but furniture.

diff --git a/reports.html b/reports.html index 9d31f46..532e9d3 100644 --- a/reports.html +++ b/reports.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Reports

- + +

“Paul, you can’t turn in your reports on four-by-six notecards” Jill told him after he handed her his reports, typed carefully on twelve four-by-six notecards. He had spent the weekend

diff --git a/riptide_memory.html b/riptide_memory.html index 06fd2a8..9f7a675 100644 --- a/riptide_memory.html +++ b/riptide_memory.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Riptide of memory

- + +

Inside of my memory, the poem is another memory.
The air up here is thin, but the wind blows harder
than anywhere else I know. It threatens to rip
my body away, like an angel of death, to the stars.

diff --git a/ronaldmcdonald.html b/ronaldmcdonald.html index 5e6b878..a03bb81 100644 --- a/ronaldmcdonald.html +++ b/ronaldmcdonald.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Ronald McDonald

- + +

When Ronald McDonald takes off his striped shirt,
his coveralls, his painted face: when he no longer looks
like anyone or anything special, sitting next to women

diff --git a/roughgloves.html b/roughgloves.html index 9537dad..5ebee6d 100644 --- a/roughgloves.html +++ b/roughgloves.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Rough gloves

- + +

I lost my hands & knit replacement ones
from spiders’ threads, stronger than steel but soft
as lambs’ wool. Catching as they do on nails
& your collarbone, you don’t seem to like
their rough warm presence on your cheek or thigh.
I’ve asked you if you minded, you’ve said no
(your face a table laid with burnt meat, bread
so stale it could break a hand). Remember
your senile mother’s face above that table?
I’d say she got the meaning of that look.
You’d rather not be touched by these rough gloves,
the only way I have to knit a love
against whatever winters we may enter
like a silkworm in a spider’s blackened maw.

diff --git a/sapling.html b/sapling.html index 2eb234b..4abf682 100644 --- a/sapling.html +++ b/sapling.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Sapling

- + +

He chopped down a sapling pine tree and looked at his watch. From first chop to fall it had taken him eight minutes and something like twenty seconds. Maybe a little change. He leaned against another tree and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. He lifted it out of its box and fished in his other pocket for his lighter, failing to find it. He searched his other pockets. He came to the realization that he had forgotten it in his Shack (in confusion over his True Vocation, he’d resorted to calling it simply the Shack until he could figure it out). He sighed and put his hands in his pockets.

diff --git a/seasonal-affective-disorder.html b/seasonal-affective-disorder.html index 4b04512..6a14bec 100644 --- a/seasonal-affective-disorder.html +++ b/seasonal-affective-disorder.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Seasonal affective disorder

- + +

On your desk I set a tangerine:
a relic of a winter quickly passing.

diff --git a/sense-of-it.html b/sense-of-it.html index 2ecf777..a385d78 100644 --- a/sense-of-it.html +++ b/sense-of-it.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Sense of it

- + +

I only write poems on the bus anymore.
I sit far in the back to be alone.
I mark black things on white things in a black thing.
I try to make sense of it.

diff --git a/serengeti.html b/serengeti.html index 658f531..4779880 100644 --- a/serengeti.html +++ b/serengeti.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Serengeti

- + +

The self is a serengeti
a wide grassland with baobab trees
reaching their roots deep into earth
like a child into a clay pot
A wind blows there or seems to blow
if he holds it up to his ear the air shifts
like stones in a stream uncovering a crawfish
it finds another hiding place watching you
Its eyes are blacker than wind
on the serengeti they are the eyes of a predator
they are coming toward you or receding
a storm cloud builds on the horizon
Are you running toward the rain or away from it
Do you stand still and crouch hoping for silence

diff --git a/shed.html b/shed.html index 7b4345c..0e324e5 100644 --- a/shed.html +++ b/shed.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Shed

- + +

“What do you do all day in that shed out back” his mother asked one night while they ate dinner in front of the TV. “Write” he answered. “Write what” she asked in that way that means he’d better not say I don’t know. “I don’t know” he said.

diff --git a/shipwright.html b/shipwright.html index 8dd51cf..e30e962 100644 --- a/shipwright.html +++ b/shipwright.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The shipwright

- + +

He builds a ship as if it were the last thing
holding him together, as if, when he stops,
his body will fall onto the plate-glass water
and shatter into sand. To keep his morale up
he whistles and sings, but the wind whistles louder
and taunts him: Your ship will build itself
if you throw yourself into the sea; time
has a way of growing your beard for you.
Soon, you’ll find yourself on a rocking chair
on some porch made from your ship’s timbers.
The window behind you is made from a sail, thick
canvas, and no one inside will hear your calling
for milk or a chamberpot. Your children
will have all sailed to the New World and left you.
But he tries not to listen, continues to hammer
nail after nail into timber after timber,
but the wind finally blows him into the growling ocean
and the ship falls apart on its own.

diff --git a/sixteenth-chapel.html b/sixteenth-chapel.html index 3618d77..4c8f371 100644 --- a/sixteenth-chapel.html +++ b/sixteenth-chapel.html @@ -23,14 +23,15 @@

The Sixteenth Chapel

+ +
Max
+
Canadian High School!
David Letterman
- -
Max
- +

If Justin Bieber isn’t going for the sixteenth
chapel, I’m not either. I admit he is my role
model. He’s so current, so fresh and so new,
and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated.
Where is the love in those old paintings? All
I see is creation, judgment, and death—

diff --git a/snow.html b/snow.html index 04abe77..b0fd237 100644 --- a/snow.html +++ b/snow.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Snow

- + +

I don’t care if they burn he wrote on his last blank notecard. He’d have to go to the Office Supply Store tomorrow after work.

diff --git a/something-simple.html b/something-simple.html index d45f811..4de95ca 100644 --- a/something-simple.html +++ b/something-simple.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Let’s start with something simple

- + +

in mammals the ratio between bladder size
and urethra is such that it takes
all of them the same time to piss. Take
for example the fact that Fibonnacci
numbers show up everywhere. How can you
look at this at all of this all of
these facts and tell me to my face there
is no God? And yet there isn’t
you murmer quietly into my ear over
and over like a low tide sounding
its lonely waves on an abandoned beach.
The ocean that birthed us holds us
still. We are tied, you and I, together
in her arms. The moon, caring father,
looks down from a dispassionate sky.

diff --git a/spittle.html b/spittle.html index 3029140..6935838 100644 --- a/spittle.html +++ b/spittle.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Spittle

- + +

My body is attached to your body by a thin spittle of thought.
When you turn away from me, my thought is broken
and forms anew with something else. Ideas are drool.
Beauty has been slobbered over far too long. God
is a tidal wave of bodily fluid. Even the flea has some
vestigial wetness. We live in a world fleshy and dark,
and moist as a nostril. Is conciousness only a watery-eyed
romantic, crying softly into his shirt-sleeve? Is not reason
a square-jawed businessman with a briefcase full of memory?
I want to kiss the world to make it mine. I want to become
a Judas to reality, betray it with the wetness of emotion.

diff --git a/squirrel.html b/squirrel.html index f96343b..0d6a4af 100644 --- a/squirrel.html +++ b/squirrel.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The squirrel

- + +

He is so full in himself:
how far down the branch to run,
how long to jump, when to grab the air
and catch in it and turn, and land on branch
so gracefully it’s like dying, alone
and warm in a bed next to a summer window
and the birds singing. And on that branch there
is the squirrel dancing among the branches
and you think What if he fell? but he won’t
because he’s a squirrel and that’s what
they do, dance and never fall. It was erased
long ago from the squirrel, even
the possibility of falling was erased
from his being by the slow inexorable evolution
of squirrels, that is why all squirrels
are so full in themselves, full in who they are.

diff --git a/stagnant.html b/stagnant.html index 05d8c33..bf77168 100644 --- a/stagnant.html +++ b/stagnant.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Stagnant

- + +

“Riding the bus to work is a good way to think or to read” Paul thought to himself on the bus ride to work. His thoughts couldn’t become real to him because he didn’t want to look insane to everyone else on the bus. His thoughts came to him like someone yelling over a hard wind. He was trying to write them on his memory but the act of writing was easier and more immediate than that of listening. He was afraid that when he looked at his memory later he wouldn’t be able to read what was written.

diff --git a/statements-frag.html b/statements-frag.html index 5045cfb..af76d1a 100644 --- a/statements-frag.html +++ b/statements-frag.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Statements

a fragment

- + +

I. Eli

diff --git a/stayed-on-the-bus.html b/stayed-on-the-bus.html index 940c0dc..fb0c361 100644 --- a/stayed-on-the-bus.html +++ b/stayed-on-the-bus.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Stayed on the bus too long

- + +

It was a gamble
I lost—thought I could get closer
than the library, stayed
on past the admin building,
back down the hill to my beginning,
the driver’s second-to-last stop.
I have to walk now,
through the wind and sun, past
traffic moving merrily along
taking their own gambles
staying on or getting off
too soon.

diff --git a/stump.html b/stump.html index efbdec7..f8e98d4 100644 --- a/stump.html +++ b/stump.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Stump

- + +

He walked into the woods for the first time in months. It was a bright summer day but under the canopy of leaves it was cool and quiet and twilight. There was no sound but his footsteps, his breathing. Instead of an axe, his right hand clutched his notebook. His left was in his pocket. A pencil perched behind his ear.

diff --git a/swansong-alt.html b/swansong-alt.html index d74560f..bfeeef6 100644 --- a/swansong-alt.html +++ b/swansong-alt.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Swansong

alternate version

- + +

This poem is dry like chapped lips.
It is hard as teeth—hear the tapping?
It is the swan song of beauty, as all
swan songs are. Reading it, you are
puzzled, perhaps a little repulsed.
Swans do not have teeth, nor do they sing.
A honking over the cliff is all
they can do, and that they do
badly. You don’t know where I’m going.
You want to tell me, You are not you.
You are the air the swan walks on.
You are the fringe of the curtain
that separates me from you. I say
that you are no longer the temple,
that you have been through fire
and are now less than ash. You are
the subtraction of yourself from
the world, the air without a swan.
Together, we are each other. You
and I have both nothing and everything
at once, we own the world and nothing in it.

diff --git a/swansong.html b/swansong.html index 236da19..f9f4f33 100644 --- a/swansong.html +++ b/swansong.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Swan song

- + +

Swans fly overhead singing goodbye
to we walkers of the earth. You point
to them in formation, you tell me
you are not you. You are the air the swans
walk on as they journey like pilgrims
to a temple in the south. A curtain
there separates me from you, swans
from the air they fly through. I say
that you are no longer the temple,
that you have been through fire
and are now less than ash. You are
a mirror of me, the air without a swan.
Together, we are each other. You
and I have both nothing and everything
at once. We own the world and nothing in it.

diff --git a/swear.html b/swear.html index fd40dde..ccd0309 100644 --- a/swear.html +++ b/swear.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Swear

- + +
diff --git a/table_contents.html b/table_contents.html index ca244aa..608e9fa 100644 --- a/table_contents.html +++ b/table_contents.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Table of contents

- + +
diff --git a/tapestry.html b/tapestry.html index d43a7cc..2265c13 100644 --- a/tapestry.html +++ b/tapestry.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Tapestry

- + +

Apparently typewriters need ribbon. Apparently ribbon is incredibly hard to find anymore because no one uses typewriters. Apparently I am writing my hymns from now on. So he was back to calling his notes “hymns.” He looked up “hymns” in the dictionary. It said that a hymn was “an ode or song of praise or adoration.” Praise or adoration to what? he asked himself. He thought maybe furniture. There was still a lot of notfurniture in what he was again calling his Writing Shack.

diff --git a/telemarketer.html b/telemarketer.html index b07f983..b0a4aec 100644 --- a/telemarketer.html +++ b/telemarketer.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Telemarketer

- + +

It was one of those nameless gray buildings that could be seen from the street only if Larry craned his neck to almost vertical. He never had, of course, having heard when he first arrived in the city that only tourists unaccustomed to tall buildings did so. He’d never thought about it until he’d heard the social injunction against such a thing; it was now one of the things he thought about almost every day as he rode to and from work in gritty blue buses.

diff --git a/the-night-we-met.html b/the-night-we-met.html index 73e638d..cce7a0b 100644 --- a/the-night-we-met.html +++ b/the-night-we-met.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The night we met, I was out of my mind

or Lying in the dark

- + +

My head is full of fire, my tongue swollen,
pregnant with all the things I should’ve said
but didn’t. Last night, we met each other
in the dark, remember? You told me time was

diff --git a/the-sea_the-beach.html b/the-sea_the-beach.html index 5609ce2..6c66c63 100644 --- a/the-sea_the-beach.html +++ b/the-sea_the-beach.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The sea and the beach

- + +

Waiting for a reading to start
when there’s nobody coming anyway
is like waiting for the tide
to make some meaning of the beach.

diff --git a/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html b/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html index 41e9a4e..da4b99f 100644 --- a/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html +++ b/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

The ocean overflows with camels

- + +

We found your shirt deep in the dark water,
caught on the clothesline of sleeping pills.
Your head on the shore was streaming tears
like sleeves or the coronas of saints saved
from fire. The burning bush began crying
like a child who misses his mother. Traffic
slammed shut like an eye. God’s mean left hook
knocked us out, and we began swimming.
Bruises bloomed like algae on a lake.
Your father beat your chest and screamed
for someone to open a window. The air
stopped breathing. Fish clogged its gills.
Birds sang too loudly, trying to drown out
your father’s cries, but all their sweetness
was not enough. No polite noises will be made
anymore, he told us, clawing your breastbone.
He opened your heart to air again. Camels
flowed from you both like water from the rock.
God spoke up, but nobody listened to him.
We hung you up on the line to dry.

diff --git a/time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html b/time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html index d40dcdb..9599038 100644 --- a/time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html +++ b/time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Time looks up to the sky

- + +

I wish I’d kissed you when I had the chance.
Your face hovering there, so near to mine,
your mouth pursed—what word was it you pronounced?

diff --git a/todaniel.html b/todaniel.html index d6343be..7680236 100644 --- a/todaniel.html +++ b/todaniel.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

To Daniel

an elaboration of a previous comment

- + +

There are more modern ideals of beauty
than yours, young padowan. Jessica has
some assets, that I’ll give you easily,
but in my women I prefer pizzazz.

diff --git a/toilet.html b/toilet.html index f06c909..9533c1c 100644 --- a/toilet.html +++ b/toilet.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Toilet

- + +

Paul only did his reading on the toilet.

diff --git a/toothpaste.html b/toothpaste.html index 558a80f..eb0f9b5 100644 --- a/toothpaste.html +++ b/toothpaste.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Toothpaste

- + +

He couldn’t find a shirt to go to work in. They all had stains on them somewhere. He pulled out a vest to put on over the stains but somehow all of them were still visible. Most of them were unidentifiable but one he thought could have come from that peach he ate two weeks before. Another looked like toothpaste but he was paranoid it was something else.

diff --git a/treatise.html b/treatise.html index 5378924..fe8a252 100644 --- a/treatise.html +++ b/treatise.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Treatise

- + +
diff --git a/underwear.html b/underwear.html index e5ffa22..2035826 100644 --- a/underwear.html +++ b/underwear.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Underwear

- + +

He dropped the penny in the dryer, turned it on, and turned around. “What” he called upstairs, pretending not to hear his mother’s question over the noise of the dryer. He had heard her ask “Could you bring up my underwear from the dryer” but didn’t want to touch her underwear any more than he had to. “I don’t want to bring up your underwear” he said to himself, and walked back upstairs as his mother was calling down again for her underwear.

diff --git a/wallpaper.html b/wallpaper.html index 6c9db48..7beeff5 100644 --- a/wallpaper.html +++ b/wallpaper.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Wallpaper

- + +

He didn’t go back into the shed for a long time. His hatchet was in there, and his axe. He didn’t want to face them. His papers, he decided, could wait in the top drawer for a while before being looked at again. The pain medication made him loopy. He couldn’t think as well as he was used to, which wasn’t well to begin with. Even saying his thoughts out loud, it was as though they were on the TV in the next room. Someone was cheering. They had just won a car.

diff --git a/weplayedthosegamestoo.html b/weplayedthosegamestoo.html index b5da51a..861356d 100644 --- a/weplayedthosegamestoo.html +++ b/weplayedthosegamestoo.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

We played those games too

- + +

I saw two Eskimo girls playing a game
blowing on each other’s’ vocal chords to make music
on the tundra. I thought about how
once we played the same game
and the sounds blowing over the chords of our throats
was the same as a wind over frozen prairie.
We are the Eskimo girls who played
the game that night to keep ourselves warm.
I run my hands over my daughter’s
voicebox as she hums a song
about a seal and about killing the seal and about
skinning it and rendering the blubber
into clear oil to light lamps.
I remember you are my lamp. She remembers
you although you left before she arrived.
I can never tell her about you.
I will never be able to express that taste of your oil
as we pushed our throats together.
I will never be able to say how
we share this blemish like conjoined twins.
I will fail you always to remember you.

diff --git a/when-im-sorry-i.html b/when-im-sorry-i.html index 57e7379..a892bcb 100644 --- a/when-im-sorry-i.html +++ b/when-im-sorry-i.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

When I’m sorry I wash dishes

- + +

Your casserole dish takes the longest:
it has some baked-in crust from when you
cooked chicken last night. Washing it
allows me to think about this poem’s title
and the first few lines. Now that I’ve
written them down, I’ve forgotten the rest.

diff --git a/window.html b/window.html index 7e63be0..e9fd773 100644 --- a/window.html +++ b/window.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Window

- + +

HYMN 386: JOKES

diff --git a/words-meaning.html b/words-meaning.html index 8c803eb..766d277 100644 --- a/words-meaning.html +++ b/words-meaning.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Words and meaning

- + +

“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite,” Jack Gilbert opens his poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” In a similar vein, Hass’s “Meditation at Legunitas” states, “A word is elegy to what it signifies.” These poems get to the heart of language, and express the old duality of thought: by giving a word to an entity, it is both tethered and made meaningful.

diff --git a/worse-looking-over.html b/worse-looking-over.html index 6859104..1b96c72 100644 --- a/worse-looking-over.html +++ b/worse-looking-over.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Worse looking over

- + +

The radio is screaming the man
on the radio will not be quiet he is
pushed far into the background
while some NPR talkers murmur over
his screaming he lost something
very important. He says it over
and over but they do not listen
they think of their children at home
lying in bed dreaming sweet
childhood one of them is staying over
at a friend’s house they are staying
up late they never want it to be over
not like the man. His life on the radio
will be the only one he ever has
his life it is wasted he’s being spoken over
such pain is in his voice. I wish you
could hear it. It’s something never over.
Suffering everywhere always and over it
the same serene murmur of the comfortable
distracted or worse looking over
the shoulder and quietly looking away.

diff --git a/writing.html b/writing.html index 487b4bb..99c4ab2 100644 --- a/writing.html +++ b/writing.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Writing

- + +

He sat down at his writing desk and removed his new pen from its plastic wrapping. He remembered how to fill it from The View from Saturday, which he’d read as a kid. It had been one of his favorite books. He remembered the heart puzzle they completed, the origin of the word “posh,” and most of all his fourth-grade teacher Ms. (Mrs? He could never remember) Samovar. He smiled as he opened the lid on the ink well he’d just bought.

diff --git a/x-ray.html b/x-ray.html index 9c30f0d..ca43c29 100644 --- a/x-ray.html +++ b/x-ray.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

X-ray

- + +

While chopping a tree in the woods with his hatchet (a Christmas gift from his mother) a bird he’d never heard before cried out. He jerked his head up and to the right as the hatchet fell down and to the left. It cut deep into the back of his left hand. A low thud didn’t echo in the forest because all the needles and snow absorbed sound well the sound.

diff --git a/yellow.html b/yellow.html index 83c7cee..2333508 100644 --- a/yellow.html +++ b/yellow.html @@ -23,7 +23,8 @@

Yellow

- + +

He would enter data at work for fifty minutes and then go on break. He would walk down the hallway to the breakroom, which had a white refrigerator, a black microwave on a brown plyboard cart stocked with powdered creamer, sugar, and swizzle sticks, a dark red coffee maker, and yellow paint on the wall. He’d remember that somewhere he’d read an article about yellow walls being calming. “They use yellow in asylums” he’d say to himself.

-- cgit 1.4.1-21-gabe81