From 9a2e2a9c3e0396f956381b8ee4af80fe3e8cf652 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Case Duckworth Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2015 18:31:47 -0700 Subject: Add thing class to pieces in template; recompile --- 100-lines.html | 2 +- _template.html | 2 +- about-the-author.html | 2 +- amber-alert.html | 2 +- and.html | 2 +- angeltoabraham.html | 2 +- apollo11.html | 2 +- arspoetica.html | 2 +- art.html | 2 +- axe.html | 2 +- big-dipper.html | 2 +- boar.html | 2 +- boy_bus.html | 2 +- building.html | 2 +- call-me-aural-pleasure.html | 2 +- cereal.html | 2 +- cold-wind.html | 2 +- creation-myth.html | 2 +- deadman.html | 2 +- death-zone.html | 2 +- deathstrumpet.html | 2 +- dream.html | 2 +- early.html | 2 +- elegyforanalternateself.html | 2 +- epigraph.html | 2 +- ex-machina.html | 2 +- exasperated.html | 2 +- father.html | 2 +- feedingtheraven.html | 2 +- finding-the-lion.html | 2 +- fire.html | 2 +- found-typewriter-poem.html | 2 +- hands.html | 2 +- hard-game.html | 2 +- hardware.html | 2 +- howithappened.html | 2 +- howtoread.html | 2 +- hymnal.html | 2 +- i-am.html | 2 +- i-think-its-you.html | 2 +- i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html | 2 +- in-bed.html | 2 +- index.html | 2 +- initial-conditions.html | 2 +- january.html | 2 +- joke.html | 2 +- lappel-du-vide.html | 2 +- largest-asteroid.html | 2 +- last-bastion.html | 2 +- last-passenger.html | 2 +- leaf.html | 2 +- leg.html | 2 +- likingthings.html | 2 +- listen.html | 2 +- love-as-god.html | 2 +- lovesong.html | 2 +- man.html | 2 +- moon-drowning.html | 2 +- moongone.html | 2 +- mountain.html | 2 +- movingsideways.html | 2 +- music-433.html | 2 +- no-nothing.html | 2 +- notes.html | 2 +- nothing-is-ever-over.html | 2 +- onformalpoetry.html | 2 +- options.html | 2 +- ouroboros_memory.html | 2 +- paul.html | 2 +- philosophy.html | 2 +- phone.html | 2 +- planks.html | 2 +- plant.html | 2 +- poetry-time.html | 2 +- prelude.html | 2 +- problems.html | 2 +- proverbs.html | 2 +- punch.html | 2 +- purpose-dogs.html | 2 +- question.html | 2 +- real-writer.html | 2 +- reports.html | 2 +- riptide_memory.html | 2 +- ronaldmcdonald.html | 2 +- roughgloves.html | 2 +- sapling.html | 2 +- seasonal-affective-disorder.html | 2 +- sense-of-it.html | 2 +- serengeti.html | 2 +- shed.html | 2 +- shipwright.html | 2 +- sixteenth-chapel.html | 2 +- snow.html | 2 +- something-simple.html | 2 +- spittle.html | 2 +- squirrel.html | 2 +- stagnant.html | 2 +- statements-frag.html | 2 +- stayed-on-the-bus.html | 2 +- stump.html | 2 +- swansong-alt.html | 2 +- swansong.html | 2 +- swear.html | 2 +- table_contents.html | 2 +- tapestry.html | 2 +- telemarketer.html | 2 +- the-night-we-met.html | 2 +- the-sea_the-beach.html | 2 +- theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html | 2 +- time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html | 2 +- todaniel.html | 2 +- toilet.html | 2 +- toothpaste.html | 2 +- treatise.html | 2 +- underwear.html | 2 +- wallpaper.html | 2 +- weplayedthosegamestoo.html | 2 +- when-im-sorry-i.html | 2 +- window.html | 2 +- words-meaning.html | 2 +- worse-looking-over.html | 2 +- writing.html | 2 +- x-ray.html | 2 +- yellow.html | 2 +- 124 files changed, 124 insertions(+), 124 deletions(-) diff --git a/100-lines.html b/100-lines.html index 90f5b16..5218749 100644 --- a/100-lines.html +++ b/100-lines.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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 4d388ba..b662855 100644 --- a/_template.html +++ b/_template.html @@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ $for(include-before)$ $include-before$ $endfor$ $endif$ -
+
$body$
diff --git a/about-the-author.html b/about-the-author.html index 7a97b2a..b02e4f7 100644 --- a/about-the-author.html +++ b/about-the-author.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

-
+
diff --git a/amber-alert.html b/amber-alert.html index e420259..6cd474f 100644 --- a/amber-alert.html +++ b/amber-alert.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

-
+
Amber Hagerman
Amber Hagerman
diff --git a/and.html b/and.html index 28b1c2c..6c44cdf 100644 --- a/and.html +++ b/and.html @@ -32,7 +32,7 @@

-
+

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

I looked at the man in front of us with glasses
he was speaking and holding a book
and I didn’t understand him he was far away
and I could tell I was missing something important
and you nodded to yourself at something he said

diff --git a/angeltoabraham.html b/angeltoabraham.html index ed157fe..e57f469 100644 --- a/angeltoabraham.html +++ b/angeltoabraham.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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?

Abraham, you must know or hope that God
will not allow your son to die; you must know
that this is a test, but then why
are you so bent on Isaac’s destruction?
Look at your eyes; there is more than fear
there. I see in your eyes desperation,
a manic passion to do right by your God
whom you are not able to see or know.

Am I too late? I will try to stay
your old hands, the knife clenched
within them, intent on ending life.

diff --git a/apollo11.html b/apollo11.html index 41152b8..d4f76b9 100644 --- a/apollo11.html +++ b/apollo11.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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,

a maudlin love letter (the i’s dotted with hearts)
tacked to the sky’s door like ninety-eight theses.
Don’t stare at it like it means anything.

Don’t give it the chance to collect meaning
from your hand like an old pigeon. Don’t dare ascribe
it a will, or call it fickle, or think it has any say

diff --git a/arspoetica.html b/arspoetica.html index 43790e6..346ec74 100644 --- a/arspoetica.html +++ b/arspoetica.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe check on something else that isn’t staring us in the face so contemptibly. Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think. So we write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the mirror of our existence to see something else.

This is generally painful. To make it less painful, poetry compresses reality a lot to make it more consumable. It takes life, that seawater, and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the senselessness of life. Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make a delicious soup out of it. To make this soup, to decompress the poem into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower. A good reader will have this brainpower. A good poem will not require it.

diff --git a/art.html b/art.html index d8bf1b0..12d9c19 100644 --- a/art.html +++ b/art.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

Paul was writing in his diary about art.

This is my brain he wrote. This is my brain and all it contains. ‘I contain multitudes’ said Legion. I think it was Legion. The big heading he had written at the top of the page (ART it read, but only when looking at it from his point of view) sat cold and alone, neglected in the white space surrounding it. He noticed this presently (but not after he had written a little more about multitudes), paused, frowned, and began to write again.

ART stands alone at the top of a blank page he wrote. It follows itself in circles its own footprints in a circle around its own name. It leads nowhere but is present everywhere. It contains It contains multitudes. Every painting ever made is a painting of every other painting. Every song is a remix, a cover version. He crossed out the part about songs for getting off topic. He made a note to himself in the margin—Music is not ART.

diff --git a/axe.html b/axe.html index f3494e1..7f48450 100644 --- a/axe.html +++ b/axe.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

Deep into the woods he admired the organization of the trees. “They grow wherever they fall” he said “but still none is too close to another.” He sounded like Solomon to himself. He imagined he had a beard.

He walked for a long time in the shadows of the forest, in its coolness. It sounded like snow had fallen but it was still October. The first time the trees seemed to radiate out from him in straight lines he stopped and turned around four times. After he walked on he noticed it happened fairly often.

diff --git a/big-dipper.html b/big-dipper.html index f5631e7..b516daf 100644 --- a/big-dipper.html +++ b/big-dipper.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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

I try a different tack
I sing to it bring it flowers nightly
I compare its eyes to the morning dew
it has not seen the morning dew
I say its mouth is the sunset over mountains
it knows mountains but the sunset
is only a rumor from the Evening Star
I tell the Big Dipper that it moves
like a quiet river across the earth

Rivers I have seen says the Big Dipper
they sparkle in the light from my stars
Your stars like eyes I say and it smiles
No it says that is too easy
It turns its back
it walks home along the back of the mountain

diff --git a/boar.html b/boar.html index 1abb8de..c75cbce 100644 --- a/boar.html +++ b/boar.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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

I really used to enjoy going to church,
singing in the choir, listening to the sermon.
Now the chairs squeal like dying pigs—

It was the boar that did it.
Fifteen feet from me that night
in the grass, rooting for God
knows what, finding me instead.

diff --git a/boy_bus.html b/boy_bus.html index 3164050..822ad4b 100644 --- a/boy_bus.html +++ b/boy_bus.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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

I have seen this face before whether in life or a dream
I can’t tell
I might’ve seen him on the street once
twice who knows and his pastor’s moon face
reminds me of something
some distant light my life used to own

One night on my birthday the moon was so strong it cast shadows
I could see to the far hill and back it was all clear to me

diff --git a/building.html b/building.html index 4ce8455..d356abc 100644 --- a/building.html +++ b/building.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

The important thing is they are both made of wood. The important thing is they were both, at one point, alive natural things that grew and changed and pushed their way out of the dirt into the air. They formed buildings out of the air. They didn’t even try.

What separates us from them, the trees? We have to try. We must labor to create our ART, our buildings of air. We lay them out brick by brick, we build them up by disintegrating trees and forming them again into what they were before. Why must we do this? Are there any advantages to this human method?

diff --git a/call-me-aural-pleasure.html b/call-me-aural-pleasure.html index 2d7aa39..db31cf4 100644 --- a/call-me-aural-pleasure.html +++ b/call-me-aural-pleasure.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

-
+

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?

Dude we were going and delicate fragrance of arguments get based off of are not try
dropping glasses in such an emotional rollercoaster you
and yes, I’m cocky enough to do anything!
I am as good as Phineas and make another picture symphony
This is a modification of a young woman to try
groups disband after they get your Meacham stuff please let it
RJ Covino, own statuses that’ll be a great

MY OWN afterbirth can do that
I am 2 we can be KISSED ON THE page.
You know I’m not sure that
Ben & Jerry’s FTW
4/10 would not be able to vote, because I gotta do it
This is going to be sad about what
Rush Limbaugh comes forward with sunglasses but at least I wasn’t wearing a messenger bag or skinny jeans!
The cooler THAN Facebook
Wine is the best.
YES I was surprised at first, but the train one, definitely.
Also Valhalla is a dumbass…
But we can get based off of course, Jon.
We watched this
CELEBRATE FRANKSGIVING TOO!
That didn’t get started on that
FRANCIS OF VERULAM REASONED THUS WITH the courage to reply.
Anyone wanna watch out
I am cranky from Bro a good as a way to hijack my hand.
Afterbend was not to produce photographs.

diff --git a/cereal.html b/cereal.html index 7529312..184ed3c 100644 --- a/cereal.html +++ b/cereal.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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

He watched late morning cartoons meant for children too young to go to school. He ate bowls of cereal. He watched his mother play dominoes. He played dominoes with her for a little while until she was winning by such a margin it wasn’t fun for either of them. He went down to the basement to do his laundry. He pulled the chain for the light and it turned on like magic. “Electricity is like magic” he said to himself. He thought he would like to write that down but his Implements were in the Shack. He’d already built up so much momentum inside.

—Inertia? he thought. “What’s the difference between inertia and momentum” he asked himself as he hefted dirty clothes into the washer. “Maybe inertia is the momentum of not moving” he thought as he measured and poured the blue detergent into the drum. “Momentum is the inertia of moving forward through time” as he selected WARM-COLD on the dial and pulled it out to start the machine. “What do you think is the difference between inertia and momentum” he asked his mother when he opened the door at the top of the stairs.

diff --git a/cold-wind.html b/cold-wind.html index b36b592..feabdca 100644 --- a/cold-wind.html +++ b/cold-wind.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

-
+

Man of autumn, cold wind,
blow down the trees’ leaves.
Fire on the ground. The sky
perfect water, frost-cold,
rippled only by flocks
of black birds flying, gone.
Their brightness can blind
an uncareful watcher, work him
in a froth of hands, not-wings
that ache with the loss of flight.
A tear is flung faithfully
to the ocean of air, slipping in
slowly, is as gone as the birds.

diff --git a/creation-myth.html b/creation-myth.html index cbae9f6..cfc146f 100644 --- a/creation-myth.html +++ b/creation-myth.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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,

two beers please." The bartender nods in that way
that bartenders do, pours the two beers,
expertly, by the way, just so, and hands them
to the first hyperintelligent pandimensional being.
The second one pulls a few singles out of his
wallet, places them on the bar, and the pair
turn around and begin walking toward a table
in the middle of the mostly-empty bar. The bar-
tender picks up the money, fans it out, frowns,
and calls to his patrons’ backs: “Hey, this
isn’t enough!” The two turn around simultan-
eously, with parity, and stare at him. A beat.

One of them, the one without the beer, breaks
the silence by exclaiming, “Oh dear god, I’m
sorry! I didn’t know your prices went up since
last time. What do I owe you?” The bartender
says, “Oh, just another dollar-fifty.” The being
reaches in his back pocket, slides out his
wallet, looks in smiling, and frowns when he sees
it’s empty. He looks to the other and says,
“You got a buck-fifty I can borrow?”

diff --git a/deadman.html b/deadman.html index 97f02bb..7b1571c 100644 --- a/deadman.html +++ b/deadman.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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 7f577aa..5ec54a2 100644 --- a/death-zone.html +++ b/death-zone.html @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@

-
+
Philip Gould
Philip Gould
diff --git a/deathstrumpet.html b/deathstrumpet.html index 48ab013..e8103e5 100644 --- a/deathstrumpet.html +++ b/deathstrumpet.html @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@

-
+

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.

He stood up and put the horn to his lips, imagining
it was a woman he loved. He blushed as he realized
it was a terrible metaphor.
He practiced for six hours a day—what else to do?

Death looks at himself in the mirror as he plays.
The trumpet is suspended in midair. Damn vampire rules.
Death is always worried he might have missed a spot shaving
but he’ll never know unless a stranger is polite enough.
Not that he ever goes out or meets anyone.

diff --git a/dream.html b/dream.html index 53c7ffa..2f714d8 100644 --- a/dream.html +++ b/dream.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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:

Arm journeying across
the pg. like a
series of switch-
backs down the wall
of the Grand Canyon

His arm began to pain him. He adjusted his position in the bed. It didn’t help much with the pain. It still hurt as he wrote. He began to be distracted by his mother’s music playing in the next room.

diff --git a/early.html b/early.html index ea6f985..42c87d6 100644 --- a/early.html +++ b/early.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

ART = ARTIFICE he wrote. ARTIFICE MEANS UNNATURAL. ARTIFICE MEANS BUILT. TO BUILD MEANS TO FIND A PATTERN & FIND A PATTERN IS WHAT WE ARE GOOD AT. He thought about this while someone else won a car.

“Do you think humans are good at finding patterns because we are hunters” he asked his mother. She looked sideways at him and said “Sure Paul.” “Early on in our evolution we were hunters right? And to hunt we had to see the patterns in seemingly random events, like where the gazelle went each year” “Paul I’m trying to watch TV. If you’re going to write this stuff go do it in your room you’re distracting.” Paul got up and went to his room and lay down on his bed.

diff --git a/elegyforanalternateself.html b/elegyforanalternateself.html index 3fd1570..d1f126a 100644 --- a/elegyforanalternateself.html +++ b/elegyforanalternateself.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.)

Say that I am separate. To say there’s everything else
and then there’s me is wrong. Each thing is separate:
there is no whole in the world. Say this is both good
and bad, or rather, say there is no good or bad but only
being, more and more of it always added, none taken out
though it can be forgotten. Say that forgetting
is a function of our remembering. (Say that humans only
worry about separation. Say that only humans feel it.)

diff --git a/epigraph.html b/epigraph.html index 758257f..bf314e2 100644 --- a/epigraph.html +++ b/epigraph.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@

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 e326ec5..27f19d5 100644 --- a/ex-machina.html +++ b/ex-machina.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

-
+

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

and dragged through the halls
and out to the curb, they sat with
other trash beneath gray, forlorn

skies behind the elementary
school, wondering what their next
move would be. The Coke machine

diff --git a/exasperated.html b/exasperated.html index cfde6a7..b1ca43d 100644 --- a/exasperated.html +++ b/exasperated.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

Although I feel I’m slogging through each line
I think I’m doing better every day,
though maybe this is wishful thinking: I
showed my friend my just-completed task
two days ago (my God, was it two
entire days? I’ve no idea what I’ll

do after thirty-nine days. I think I’ll
feel like Inigo Montoya, who’d been in the line
of revenging for so long, he didn’t know what to
do with the rest of his life), and he deigned
to be polite, but I could tell the task
was hard for him. He told me finally that I

diff --git a/father.html b/father.html index 2736296..8494f7a 100644 --- a/father.html +++ b/father.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

“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.

His father. Paul had never met him. His mother had said when he was a kid that his father was caught by a riptide while swimming in the ocean. He hadn’t noticed what was happening until the land was a thin line on the horizon. He became exhausted swimming back and drowned. His body was found a week later by the coroner’s estimate. Paul never really believed this story because his mother’s face was sad in the wrong way when she told it.

She said he looked like his father but she also said all men look alike. Paul realized he’d been standing at the kitchen window for a long time looking out at the shed without realizing it. He went out to take an inventory of everything inside.

diff --git a/feedingtheraven.html b/feedingtheraven.html index c5b8339..c5db221 100644 --- a/feedingtheraven.html +++ b/feedingtheraven.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

I shuffled over, sniffling but managing to keep my cheeks dry to open it. Of course Charlie was beaming on the other side, with a bag of flowers and a grin like a dog’s. He bounded in the room without saying hello and threw the flowers in the sink, opened the refrigerator and started poking around. I said “It’s nice to see you too” and went to my room to get a camera, as well as a notebook for him to sign.

When I came back he was on the floor, hunched and groaning. I looked on the table to see a month-old half-gallon of milk—now cottage cheese—half-empty and dripping. The remnants were on his mouth, and at once I saw my chance to become Poe in this translation of a translation of a translation. I knelt next to Charlie, cradled his head in my lap. He looked up at me with a stare full of terror. I returned it levelly, making cooing noises at him until he calmed down.

diff --git a/finding-the-lion.html b/finding-the-lion.html index a0e353e..9341fb0 100644 --- a/finding-the-lion.html +++ b/finding-the-lion.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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

nothing like a raven. The streetlights
look on the scene disinterested.
They have their own small gossips of the dark.

I came here to find the Lion, old
friend, but he will not show his flanks, his
paws, his shoulders, his mane. I

diff --git a/fire.html b/fire.html index 5231666..eb50e7d 100644 --- a/fire.html +++ b/fire.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

After the Fire Department put out the fire one of the men said “Your mother says you set this building on fire. You know Arson is a major offense.” “I set it on fire” Paul said. “Why?” “Because ART wants to be random, it wants to be natural, but it isn’t. Humans create ART because we can’t help but see patterns in randomness. But we feel guilty about it.” The man nodded to another man in a blue uniform. “We want the ART to feel natural, to feel random, but we can’t stop seeing the patterns” as the man in blue walked over and put a hand on Paul’s shoulder “ART is unnatural by its very nature. I took my ART and gave it back to nature” as the man led him over to a black and white car and put him inside. He was saying something about Paul’s right. “No it’s my left that was hurt” said Paul “but it’s all better now.”

diff --git a/found-typewriter-poem.html b/found-typewriter-poem.html index bc627d6..f32942c 100644 --- a/found-typewriter-poem.html +++ b/found-typewriter-poem.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

-
+

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.

“There is nothing to be
but happy. There is no
sadness to fall down
like cherry petals.”

The trees don’t under-
stand: they are too
tall to see the germ
of discontent in us.

diff --git a/hands.html b/hands.html index f8b00d4..77dc2ea 100644 --- a/hands.html +++ b/hands.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

“Do we have any lotion” he asked his mother. “In the medicine cabinet” she said without looking up from the TV. He walked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. “I look strange” he said to himself “I look like a teenager.” He stared into his right eye, then his left. He saw nothing but his own reflection fish-eyed in his pupils. He opened the medicine cabinet.

Back in his Writing Shack, he started to type.

diff --git a/hard-game.html b/hard-game.html index f15a8be..4c36a02 100644 --- a/hard-game.html +++ b/hard-game.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

-
+

You think building Hoggle’s a hard game?
You know bunk. Writing a ghazal’s a hard game.

Let’s meet in a place where words & fabric play—
but not plastic words. (Boggle’s a hard game.)

A cookout where we can hash our differences
over steak, though making it sizzle’s a hard game.

diff --git a/hardware.html b/hardware.html index 884fc9f..a9da2c2 100644 --- a/hardware.html +++ b/hardware.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.”

“Oh right. Sure thing.” They pulled into the parking lot. “Just be a minute” he said as he opened the car door.

He walked under the door resplendent in its King William orange and white. He saw the towering rows of shelves like mountain ridges in Hell. He strolled among the fixtures, pipes, planks, sheets, plants (Why plants? he thought), switches. He realized he didn’t know the first thing about building furniture. “I don’t know the first thing” he muttered to himself “about building furniture. I know the last thing would be a couch or chair or stool but the first thing is a mystery.” He turned around and walked straight out of the store and to his mother’s car without looking up.

diff --git a/howithappened.html b/howithappened.html index 9c88609..a6c9fd0 100644 --- a/howithappened.html +++ b/howithappened.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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 34170b3..7fee2ad 100644 --- a/howtoread.html +++ b/howtoread.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

Fernando Pessoa wrote poems under four different identities—he called them heteronyms—that were known during his lifetime, though after his death over sixty have been found and catalogued. He called them heteronyms as opposed to pseudonyms because they were much more than names he wrote under. They were truly different writing selves, concerned with different ideas and writing with different styles: Alberto Caeiro wrote pastorals; Ricardo Reis wrote more formal odes; Álvaro de Campos wrote these long, Whitman-esque pieces (one to Whitman himself); and Pessoa’s own name was used for poems that are kind of similar to all the others. It seems as though Pessoa found it inefficient to try and write everything he wanted only in his own self; rather he parceled out the different pieces and developed them into full identities, at the cost of his own: “I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” de Campos said of him at one point, “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”

It’s not just Pessoa—I, strictly speaking, don’t exist, both as the specific me that writes this now and as the concept of selfhood, the ego. Heraclitus famously said that we can’t step into the same river twice, and the fact of the matter is that we can’t occupy the same self twice. It’s constantly changing and adapting to new stimuli from the environment, from other selves, from inside itself, and each time it forms anew into something that’s never existed before. The person I am beginning a poem is a separate being than the one I am finishing a poem, and part of it is the poem I’ve written has brought forth some other dish onto the great table that is myself.

diff --git a/hymnal.html b/hymnal.html index 4dbfac3..fe92b72 100644 --- a/hymnal.html +++ b/hymnal.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

Paul scowled. Who had written in his Hymnal? he wondered. He said it out loud a moment after: “Who has written in my Hymnal?” He realized he was alone in his Writing Shack, which was really a shed in the back of his mother’s garden. He wondered why he had to say his thoughts before they became real to him (if this was a habit or an inborn trait). He realized simultaneously that

    diff --git a/i-am.html b/i-am.html index 05a3f34..365d89e 100644 --- a/i-am.html +++ b/i-am.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 2a16939..fe01709 100644 --- a/i-think-its-you.html +++ b/i-think-its-you.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

    -
    +

    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

    But that’s too easy
    It’s just that I was thinking
    of you and a raven flew by
    (maybe it was a crow)

    diff --git a/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html b/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html index d2379e3..85962d5 100644 --- a/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html +++ b/i-wanted-to-tell-you-something.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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

    more than two weeks waiting to cry is,
    especially when, the whole time, I wasn’t able to,
    absolutely horrible. It was no sweet sixteen,
    I’ll tell you that much. Unless at yours, the Universe
    kept telling you to quit having such a ball
    and that you should have died, like, yesterday.

    At first, it feels like you’re winning—that yesterday
    you really were meant to die, but since you still are,
    you beat the system somehow. But the Universe bawls,
    “No, I meant you should’ve crawled into
    a hole and fucking died!” And then the Universe
    punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen

    diff --git a/in-bed.html b/in-bed.html index 18788cb..d66c23d 100644 --- a/in-bed.html +++ b/in-bed.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    I

    I hear the rats run
    in the walls like water
    through a tree. My blood

    thickens. As I dream
    the masturbation dream
    the shelf above my bed

    diff --git a/index.html b/index.html index 981d2ef..a60d2bc 100644 --- a/index.html +++ b/index.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

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

    diff --git a/initial-conditions.html b/initial-conditions.html index 5456b61..9d8ad45 100644 --- a/initial-conditions.html +++ b/initial-conditions.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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

    ( It’s actually past two but I will call it morning )
    while turning on the shower : I as the Universe
    intended ( although I was expecting the heat of suns )
    had the ice of inner space : those pre existing conditions
    before the Big Bang : the shower was almost exactly
    freezing for a split second : every day it’s the same :

    I turn on the tap hop in pull the knob have the same
    moment of utter panic then pain then a relaxing morning
    shower where I spend between five to ten ( I’m not sure exactly )
    minutes : I have good thoughts : this poem about the Universe
    for example : I had the idea while I was conditioning
    my hair : it came to me like accidentally looking at the sun :

    diff --git a/january.html b/january.html index 56642c6..3d2a327 100644 --- a/january.html +++ b/january.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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,

    patient,
    while waiting for the end of January.
    A change of season
    brings a change of mood along with it,
    although I never thought I’d be one
    to believe that SAD junk about effects of weather—

    weather!—
    on a person. Who becomes a patient
    just because of one
    month of snow? I did say of January:
    “It’s cold, and I don’t like it,”
    but I hardly think it’s fair, knocking whole seasons,

    diff --git a/joke.html b/joke.html index a1dd07a..3c4a850 100644 --- a/joke.html +++ b/joke.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    “Tell us a joke” the listeners say to the clown. They have gather together in the clearing because they have heard he would be there, and they have heard he knew very funny jokes that were also true. “Tell us a joke that is true” they say.

    The clown does not move from the stump. He doesn’t move at all. The listeners watch, gap-mouthed, as a butterfly lands on his hat. A breeze ruffles his coat and the butterfly flies away. Hours pass. The listeners grow impatient. Some begin yelling insults at the clown. Eventually, they begin to walk away into the woods.

    diff --git a/lappel-du-vide.html b/lappel-du-vide.html index 5aeb5ff..64de2d8 100644 --- a/lappel-du-vide.html +++ b/lappel-du-vide.html @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@

    -
    +

    I. Walter

    Walter rides the bus into work on Wednesday morning when he realizes, with the force and surprise of a rogue current, that he is in the home-for-death phase of life. That era in which the next time he goes under, to the fields of seaweed waving gently, the anemones slowly filtering seawater, it will most likely be for a death in the family.

    He is able to idly speculate on who it might be, and this surprises him. Not much does surprise him after these few months above the waves, because so many things did surprise him those first few months: the plants standing still, the quickness of the fluid these creatures walk in, the lack of pressure that still makes him feel so alone and cold—as if all of his life he had been in an embrace by the ocean, and now for some reason it’s pulled away from him, and it doesn’t love him anymore.

    diff --git a/largest-asteroid.html b/largest-asteroid.html index 7a19daa..2536f3d 100644 --- a/largest-asteroid.html +++ b/largest-asteroid.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 03968f9..dd67c96 100644 --- a/last-bastion.html +++ b/last-bastion.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    Years ago, the economy of the heart boomed
    and there was food everywhere. Produce
    piled high in pyramids of devotion, meat in
    gilded glass cases opulent under fluorescence,
    dairy which ran like the mythical river toward
    cereals hot and cold. Under it all, thrumming
    like great stone wheels on sand under a hot sun
    near a river where reeds sang in the wind
    the heart produced and gave reward for hard labor.

    No one knows when it all ended. No one can say
    if it was the heart that dried up or the heart’s supply.
    Either way, food of the heart became scarcer and scarcer.
    People began dying, not of starvation
    but of a certain facial expression that could only
    be described as desperation. Now
    all that are left are the celebrity chefs, last bastion
    of a once mighty empire of the heart
    are reduced to husks     blown dry by wind.

    diff --git a/last-passenger.html b/last-passenger.html index 5784faf..9e78663 100644 --- a/last-passenger.html +++ b/last-passenger.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    An example: today marks one hundred years
    since your namesake, the last living passenger
    pigeon, died in Cincinnati. It also marks
    a year since we last spoke. Although around
    the world, zoos mourn her loss, I’m done
    with you. I mourn no more your voice, the first
    sound I heard outside my body that reached
    into my throat and set me ringing. But that string—

    memory that feels sometimes more like a tide
    has yoked together, bound your voice to that bird,
    the frozen, stuffed, forgotten pigeon—my heart
    is too easy, but it must do—to blink, to flex
    its unused toes, slowly thaw to the wetness
    of beating wings, fly to me again, and alight,
    singing full-throated, on my broken shoulder.

    diff --git a/leaf.html b/leaf.html index 0fa659c..bfbab40 100644 --- a/leaf.html +++ b/leaf.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    “Each piece of paper—each leaf—” at this he smiled—“is like a tree in the forest.” He was writing as he thought aloud. “I, as the artist, as the writer, must select which to use, chop down those trees, bring them back to my shed and—and—” he frowned as he realized the only end to this metaphor was fire. He ran his fingers through his hair in a self-soothing gesture.

    “I need to build some furniture” he thought.

    diff --git a/leg.html b/leg.html index e67f9da..3c119a0 100644 --- a/leg.html +++ b/leg.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    MAKING CHAIR LEGS

    diff --git a/likingthings.html b/likingthings.html index 229ad8c..4e37972 100644 --- a/likingthings.html +++ b/likingthings.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    The funny thing is that something we people really like to do is hurt ourselves and those around us. We do this by thinking other people are more unhappy than we are. We convince themselves that we are truly happy, ecstatic even, while they merely plod around life half-heartedly, or, if they’re lucky, incorrectly. We take it upon ourselves (seeing as we are so happy, and can spare a little bit of happiness) to help them become happy as well. We fail to realize that the people will probably not appreciate our thinking that we’re better than they are somehow, for that is what we do even if we don’t mean it. We forget that we are also unhappy, and that we are just doing things we like in order to cheer ourselves up a little bit, which really means that this cheering is working; but there is such a thing as working too well. So in a sense what I’m doing here is cheering myself up by reminding you that you are unhappy; I’m trying to keep you honest in your unhappiness; and I admit this is usually called a dick move.

    In fact, the best way to overcome happy-hungering (this is the term as I dub it) is commit as many dick moves as possible, to keep people remembering that unhappiness abounds. If you see someone smiling like a little dog who knows it’s about to get pet or get a treat or go to the vet to donate doggy sperm, smile back. Grin toothily (a little too toothily for a little too long). Their smile will start to fade if you’re doing it right. Saunter to them, slide as if you’re an Olympic quality ice-skater, as if you’re a really good bowler who knows he’s playing against twelve year olds and’ll win by a hundred. Get really close. Far too close for what most people would call comfort. And remind them of how awful life can be: “I really like your shirt—really only children chained to looms can get that tight of a weave,” you can say, or “You’re not really going to recycle that coffee cup, are you?” They will probably get angry, but that’s what’s supposed to happen. By making dick moves, you can overcome what may be the biggest evil on this earth: Happy-Hungering.

    diff --git a/listen.html b/listen.html index cec1299..7c1d16e 100644 --- a/listen.html +++ b/listen.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

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

    Once I found the stone in
    the sea it kissed me as
    the sea pawed at my back

    diff --git a/love-as-god.html b/love-as-god.html index 6e5f363..0947bc6 100644 --- a/love-as-god.html +++ b/love-as-god.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    Maybe there are many loves, instead of one.
    The difference between what isn’t and what is
    could merely be one of scope. The mystery
    is how we speak only of one love—
    to act as though we know we are supposed
    to love only one other, or that one other and God.

    But supposing that one other is God?
    What then? Is the God-lover to walk alone,
    supported by God only when He feels He is supposed
    to support her? What kind of love is
    this? I would argue in fact this isn’t love,
    this one-set-of-footprints-in-the-sand mystery.

    diff --git a/lovesong.html b/lovesong.html index 3880f63..08c8206 100644 --- a/lovesong.html +++ b/lovesong.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    I am telling you this because you wanted to know what it’s like to tell something so beautiful everyone will cry. I am telling you because I want you to know what it is to keep everything inside of you. I am telling you.

    Can you see? Can you see into me and reach in your hand and pull me inside out, like an old shirt? Will you wear me until I unravel on your shoulders, will you cut me apart and use my skin to clean up the cola you spill on the floor when you’re drunk?

    diff --git a/man.html b/man.html index c273033..bda0e57 100644 --- a/man.html +++ b/man.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES

    THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES
    THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES
    diff --git a/moon-drowning.html b/moon-drowning.html index e9f8743..33d75ef 100644 --- a/moon-drowning.html +++ b/moon-drowning.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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

    My shadow nods and calls the moon father though
    it acknowledges also the existence of others
    headlights are like little moons father my shadow says
    they pass like waves in a dark ocean

    Father moon becomes angry and threatens
    I can maroon you shadow I can trap you in darkness
    your strength comes from my own the little moons
    are fleeting like foam on a darkened sea

    diff --git a/moongone.html b/moongone.html index 905fa0a..36dc22e 100644 --- a/moongone.html +++ b/moongone.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 aa04b28..98b90a4 100644 --- a/mountain.html +++ b/mountain.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    The other side of the mountain
    is not a mountain. It is a dark
    valley crossed by a river.
    There is a ferry at the bottom.

    This mountain is not a mountain.
    I walked to the top, but it turned
    and was only a shelf halfway up.
    I felt like an unused Bible
    sitting on a dusty pew.

    diff --git a/movingsideways.html b/movingsideways.html index cf0a877..2067129 100644 --- a/movingsideways.html +++ b/movingsideways.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    Shit wait. The problem is not that by observing you are observed (although quantum mechanics may disagree1), because obviously dogs don’t know we’re observing them when we watch them through cameras in their little yard while they play and eat and poop—who poops knowingly on camera? The problem is the actual act of observing that distorts the world into what we want it to be.

    What I want to know is this: Why is this necessarily a problem? The dog is made, by mankind, to frolic and poop and sniff and growl and dig. Why cannot the man be made to observe the world incorrectly around him, and worry about it? Men have always wandered about the earth; does it not make sense that also they should wonder in their minds what makes it all work?2 In fact this is the very center of the creative being: the ability to move sideways, to dance with reality and judge it as it judges you, much like teenagers at the junior prom.

    diff --git a/music-433.html b/music-433.html index a58e58f..285bfef 100644 --- a/music-433.html +++ b/music-433.html @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

    -
    +

    Silence lies underneath us all in the same way
    the Nile has a river underneath ten times as large
    (although this is an urban legend, apparently).

    So underneath truth or legend, flowing by
    the feel of their own silence, move the stars:
    silence lies underneath us all in the same way.

    John Cage, I think, understood this: the way
    that, in a silent room, one still hears the nerves
    (although this is an urban legend, apparently),

    diff --git a/no-nothing.html b/no-nothing.html index 7e32670..532eb50 100644 --- a/no-nothing.html +++ b/no-nothing.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    Nothing somehow still turns
    and flows past us, past all
    time and beyond it, a river
    returning, to its forgotten
    origins deep within itself.

    diff --git a/notes.html b/notes.html index 83e7eb5..750e082 100644 --- a/notes.html +++ b/notes.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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).

    But this was all later. For now he was writing his ideas, “notes” he now called them, something for him to combine later into something. He didn’t like to think about it. On this particular cold winter morning, he wrote

    diff --git a/nothing-is-ever-over.html b/nothing-is-ever-over.html index 8b5edb8..3383003 100644 --- a/nothing-is-ever-over.html +++ b/nothing-is-ever-over.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 e7d5e9c..db108bc 100644 --- a/onformalpoetry.html +++ b/onformalpoetry.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 5911c9d..8291a68 100644 --- a/options.html +++ b/options.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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?

    A tree fell in the forest: did it make a noise? Paul typed his thoughts on cards, or wrote them in a book: did anyone read it? If anyone did, was his life changed? For the better or the worse? Did he glance at the mess in the top drawer of his Writing Desk as he cleaned the Shack out long after Paul had quit using it? Did he put tools in there or leave it empty? What did he do with the desk? Did he add it to the pile of rotting wood out back, or did he chop it up for a bonfire with friends, or a cozy fire with his wife and children, or did he take it to the dump three miles away to rot there? Are these all the options?

    Did Paul ever think about any of this? Walking in the woods one afternoon after becoming frustrated with his writing, did he sit on a stump and cry? Did he wonder whether he should have made other choices? Did he consider quitting smoking?

    diff --git a/ouroboros_memory.html b/ouroboros_memory.html index c6bf319..b05567b 100644 --- a/ouroboros_memory.html +++ b/ouroboros_memory.html @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@

    -
    +

    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.

    “But what does it mean, To remember the body with the body? I imagine a creature made of memory, putting its feet in its mouth, turning into a ball. In this way, it could roll all around the landscape of its memory. I’ve tried explaining this to other people, but it doesn’t make any sense to them. The task of eating one’s feet is, to them, an unsolvable problem. They seem to forgotten that, as babies, they were able to make themselves into loops.

    “So I increase the count to two: two snakes eating each other’s tales, forming a loop. In this way they are able to put two heads on one body. This doubles the number of memories, which really only exacerbates the problem. It’s like trying to roll two different materials up into a ball. The people I tell this to don’t understand this either, they say using two animals makes sense to them. They say there must be different types of memory.

    diff --git a/paul.html b/paul.html index 5958f18..b230f03 100644 --- a/paul.html +++ b/paul.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    CONTENTS OF THE SHED

    diff --git a/philosophy.html b/philosophy.html index 1736c09..6704235 100644 --- a/philosophy.html +++ b/philosophy.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    By this it is possible to see that nothing is knowable without the mediating factor of our mind fucking up the “raw,” the “real” world. But by this time it would seem that this chapter is far far too philosophical, not to mention pretentious, so I must try again.

    diff --git a/phone.html b/phone.html index 0b97513..00607f2 100644 --- a/phone.html +++ b/phone.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    “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.”

    “Do you remember me” she asked “we were in school together? How have you been?” “Pretty well” said Paul “I’ve been writing and making furniture.” “Oh that’s nice” said the woman’s voice tinny in the phone “Listen I ran into your mother at the Supermarket the other day and she said you need a job. You still need one?” Paul had to tell the truth. His mother was watching him out of the corner of her eye as she was playing dominoes at the kitchen table. “Yes” he said sighing “Although woodworking takes up much of my time.”

    “OK” she laughed uncomortably “I actually have something you could do for me if you think you can get away from woodworking a bit. It’s just data entry really basic stuff entry-level.” “What’s it pay” he asked. “Minimum but there is room for movement.” “OK” he said. “Start on Monday okay?” “Sure” he said “bye” and the tin voice in the phone said “Goodbye Paul see you” by the time he put it back on the hook.

    diff --git a/planks.html b/planks.html index c0f815a..45de069 100644 --- a/planks.html +++ b/planks.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME

    diff --git a/plant.html b/plant.html index 390b2bc..9b0954a 100644 --- a/plant.html +++ b/plant.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    I need a plant. I need a growing
    growler groaning toward heat and air.
    I need a green thin stem surprisingly strong
    holding up the weight of a plain
    of fallow greennesses of creases and caresses
    of tiny worldmaking hardworking grandeur.
    I need a singer of life crying
    forward into old roads covered over
    by dead trees. I need the rasping of root
    in dirt. I need the unfurling of fiddleheads
    to sing forth a new symphony. I need
    fruits swelling large for the harvest.
    I need yellow light shining through white bark.
    I need juicecrush flowing waterlike
    through valleys percolating up
    through the ground. I need springs bubbling sap
    into cabins of wood fought for by labor.
    I need snow on the ground with shoots
    dotting the melting patches. I need two
    leaves on a thin stalk shivering
    in moonlight. I need robinsong warbling
    over the heads of small seeds sprouting
    to enliven their growth. I need rings
    of woody material widening to push
    the ground out of their way. I need
    new greennesses pushing out from
    the brown dark bark gnarled. I
    need the robin to build its songfilled
    nest in a branchcrotch. I need
    the fecundity of fungi on the branches.
    I need quiet of the sunlight shooting
    through thousands of branched leaves
    quivering. I need whisper at dawn.
    I need burrows underground foxholes.
    I need duff layers eaten through
    by worms. I need brooks murmuring
    through crooks of roots. I need small
    fish swimming in their schools at
    midnight. I need oldnesses giving way
    to youngnesses giving way to oldnesses.
    I need dapplegray yellowshot ashbark.
    I need the crunch of dead leaves underfoot.
    I need snowquiet deadbranch mourning.
    I need those purple mountains majesty.
    I need a walk between trees in the dark.
    I need that moment when stopping to rest
    it suddenly seems that all the weary
    forestroads in all their meandering come
    to rest their heads at my astonished
    feet, none of them needing more than me.

    diff --git a/poetry-time.html b/poetry-time.html index 7d53ee3..9c6ef78 100644 --- a/poetry-time.html +++ b/poetry-time.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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,

    and this tenuous connection mates me
    and you forever, combined with each other, two
    electrons momentarily entwined. Later,
    when I’m dead or far too famous for you, and
    you’re in school, reading my words because it is
    required reading, I want you to remember this

    connection we’ve always had, this
    spider’s thread hanging between you and me.
    Which of us is the spider and which is
    the fly still remains to be seen. To
    eat, perchance to fly: all of that and
    more. We can settle all of this later.

    diff --git a/prelude.html b/prelude.html index 7955273..57ffef9 100644 --- a/prelude.html +++ b/prelude.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 29211d5..7fda889 100644 --- a/problems.html +++ b/problems.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    Being the observant and judgmental people they are, people have for a long time tried to figure out why they aren’t happy. Some say it’s because we’re obviously doing something wrong. Some say it’s because we think too much. Some insist that it’s because other people have more stuff than we do. These people don’t have a clue any more than any of the rest of us. At least I don’t think they do, and that’s good enough for me.1 I think that the reason why people are unhappy (and this is a personal opinion) is that they realize on some level (for some it’s a pretty shallow level, others it’s way down there next to their love for women’s stockings2) that there is no background to put themselves against, no “big picture” to get painted into. This makes sense, because on one level, the level of everyday life, the level of observation, there is always a background—look in a pair of binoculars sometime. But on another level, that of … shit, wait. There are no other levels.3

    What’s more, people try to explain how to get happy again (although it’s doubtful they were ever happy in the first place—people are very good at fooling). Some say standing or [sitting in a building][] with a lot of other unhappy people helps. Some say that you can’t stop there; you also need to sing with those other unhappy people about how unhappy you are, and how you wish someone would come along and help you out, I guess by giving you money or something. I say all you really need to be happy is a good stiff drink.4

    diff --git a/proverbs.html b/proverbs.html index 33dc7c3..b44ad27 100644 --- a/proverbs.html +++ b/proverbs.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 dbe0113..f7ac6c2 100644 --- a/punch.html +++ b/punch.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    “Let me help you with that” said Jill. Paul had a strange feeling this had happened before. She took the ladle and their hands touched. She picked the cup up in her right hand and used her left to lift the spoon. “You know” she said “we were worried about you. When Jerry heard about your hand he said ‘There goes one of our best data entry men.’” “I still can’t really move my left hand” said Paul. “That’s alright you can take your time with the entry.” “I’m sorry.”

    “Sorry for what” she looked at his eyes. He imagined her seeing fisheye versions of herself in them. “I don’t know” he said because it was true. “It’s alright anyway” she said and placed the full punch cup in his right hand.

    diff --git a/purpose-dogs.html b/purpose-dogs.html index ec6de43..6c7bfe2 100644 --- a/purpose-dogs.html +++ b/purpose-dogs.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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.

    In fact, there are many dogs, and not only that. There are also many types of dogs; these are called breeds, and each breed was created by man in order to fulfill some use that man thought he needed. Some dogs are for chasing birds, and some are for chasing badgers. Some are for laying in your lap and being petted all day. Some dogs don’t seem to be really for anything, besides being fucking stupid and chewing up your one-of-a-kind collectible individually-numbered King Kong figurine from the Peter Jackson film. But the important thing is, (and here we go with important things again) all dogs have been bred by people for performing some certain function that we think is important.

    Note: Just because we think it’s important doesn’t mean it is important. But it might as well be, because what we as humans think is important is important. But be careful! Just because something’s important doesn’t mean it means anything, or that it actually makes anything happen. Even though just because something makes something else happen doesn’t mean it’s important. Shit. Let me start again.

    diff --git a/question.html b/question.html index 81fee78..2d2f821 100644 --- a/question.html +++ b/question.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    “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.

    “How do you think” he asked. “Like everyone else I guess” she said “I have a thought and if it’s important I write it down.” “Do you have to say them out loud for them to make sense?” “Are you asking if I talk to myself?” A pause. “I guess so” he said looking down. He had a feeling this was a bad thing. “Sometimes” she said and walked out of the break room. She didn’t understand the importance of his question. She popped her head back in a moment later and his heart leaped in his chest.

    “How’s your first day going so far” she asked. “Can you understand everything okay?” “Yes” he said “you were right it’s pretty basic.” “Good” she said. “Paul?” “Yes.” “Do you have to say all of your thoughts out loud to remember them?” He shook his head.

    diff --git a/real-writer.html b/real-writer.html index 5118495..d72313d 100644 --- a/real-writer.html +++ b/real-writer.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    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 fb19532..663ec82 100644 --- a/reports.html +++ b/reports.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
    +

    “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

    1. going to the Office Supply Store to buy notecards and typewriter ribbon (he found it surprisingly easily) after his first payday
      2. diff --git a/riptide_memory.html b/riptide_memory.html index c209025..d1e3636 100644 --- a/riptide_memory.html +++ b/riptide_memory.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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.

      In Arizona, I thought I would forget the rain,
      forget its sound on a roof like a hard wind, forget
      its smell like a far away ocean. Luckily for me
      it rains here. Luckily, because I forget too easily.

      In a dream, my father is caught by a riptide off-shore.
      He’s pulled far out, far enough that the shoreline’s
      a line in his memory on the horizon. I can see him
      swimming, hand over hand, pulling his small weight

      diff --git a/ronaldmcdonald.html b/ronaldmcdonald.html index 3c0fc18..d1b6529 100644 --- a/ronaldmcdonald.html +++ b/ronaldmcdonald.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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

      in bars or standing in the aisle at the grocery,
      is he no longer Ronald? Is he no longer happy to kick
      a soccer ball around with the kids in the park,

      is he suddenly unable to enjoy the french fries
      he gets for his fifty percent off? I’d like to think
      that he takes Ronald off like a shirt, hangs him

      diff --git a/roughgloves.html b/roughgloves.html index d83581b..16903a9 100644 --- a/roughgloves.html +++ b/roughgloves.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 0b482ea..ae7966e 100644 --- a/sapling.html +++ b/sapling.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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.

      “I wonder if trees are protective of their young” he said to himself, then wondered if why he had to think his thoughts out loud, then remembered he always did this, then remembered his conversation with Jill. He hoped she didn’t. He hoped that conversation was like the tree that fell in the forest with no one around. “I wonder if a thought said out loud isn’t heard by anyone, if it was made. I think maybe this is what Literature (big L) is all about, if it’s trying to make a connection because no idea matters unless it’s connected to something else, or to someone else. Maybe no wood matters unless it’s bound to another by upholstery nails. If ‘the devil is in the details,’ as they say (who are ‘they’ anyway?), the details are the connections? That doesn’t make sense. Details are details. Connections are connections.

      “Still, a neuron by itself means nothing. Put them all together though and connect them. You’ve got a brain.”

      diff --git a/seasonal-affective-disorder.html b/seasonal-affective-disorder.html index b8b38e2..50b7113 100644 --- a/seasonal-affective-disorder.html +++ b/seasonal-affective-disorder.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

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

      I’m reminded, fiercely, of a summer:
      I watched the cemetery grass on my stomach.

      You hate the wind blowing through buildings:
      the coldness of fire, blister of a mountain stream.

      diff --git a/sense-of-it.html b/sense-of-it.html index 873ec69..50a562a 100644 --- a/sense-of-it.html +++ b/sense-of-it.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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.

      Every time I see a plastic bag in the wind I think:
      This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
      Most of my life I relate to something on the TV:
      This is how I try to make sense of it.

      The Talking Heads song “Stop Making Sense”
      is about a girlfriend caught cheating and willed oblivion.
      The song’s real title is “Girlfriend is Better”
      but lying about it is a way I try to make sense of it.

      diff --git a/serengeti.html b/serengeti.html index 34b6934..7613a99 100644 --- a/serengeti.html +++ b/serengeti.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 2f7c353..35975a3 100644 --- a/shed.html +++ b/shed.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      “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.

      “Goddammit Paul” his mother said. “You’re wasting your life out in that shed. You need to go out and get—” “I chop down trees too” he said. “I make furniture out of them.” His mother’s face did a Hitchcock zoom as she considered this new information. “Is it any good” she asked, eyes narrowed.

      “It’s getting there” he answered. “I’m getting better every day.” “When is it going to be there” she asked. “When are you going to sell this furniture of yours?” “It’ll be a while” he answered.

      diff --git a/shipwright.html b/shipwright.html index feff16b..73382fe 100644 --- a/shipwright.html +++ b/shipwright.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 2ffddc9..83fb770 100644 --- a/sixteenth-chapel.html +++ b/sixteenth-chapel.html @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@

      -
      +

      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—

      and I don’t get the preoccupation with death.
      I’m about life! Ever since my sixteenth
      birthday, when me and my two sisters all
      nearly died when the car I was driving rolled
      into a creek. Even though I’ve forgotten the date,
      I think it keeps me thinking on the new,

      something Biebs would be proud of if he knew.
      I look at him, and see the opposite of death
      in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday
      he may be a father, and later host a Sweet Sixteen
      for his daughter (who I know he’ll buy a Rolls),
      death will never find him. Living will be all

      diff --git a/snow.html b/snow.html index 0e08a35..09c5c29 100644 --- a/snow.html +++ b/snow.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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.

      He looked at what he’d written. He’d been thinking about this for a while, felt the frustration build slowly like a thundercloud in the back of his mind. He thought he should write something else on the card, but everything he thought of seemed too confessional or too real compromising. He didn’t want anyone, not even the notecards, to know what he was thinking. He decided to try for more of an interview with the paper.

      Why? asked the notecard. Because there is nothing important on any of them he wrote back. What do you mean? You have some good stuff in that top drawer there. He looked in the top drawer. It was stuffed full of notecards in no organization. He could see bits and pieces of thoughts like leaves crunched underfoot in autumn. It will take so much organization he wrote.

      diff --git a/something-simple.html b/something-simple.html index ced8775..3838b16 100644 --- a/something-simple.html +++ b/something-simple.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 a886cd3..2eff3e3 100644 --- a/spittle.html +++ b/spittle.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 6fdcc0d..4302773 100644 --- a/squirrel.html +++ b/squirrel.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 a0e8bb4..acc05a6 100644 --- a/stagnant.html +++ b/stagnant.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      “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.

      “Thoughts are like the wind outside a moving bus” he thought “or rather the bus is a brain slamming into columns of stagnant air causing them to whistle past in a confusion of something.” He could barely hear the voice yelling to him over the wind. “Speak up” he thought to the voice, then remembered it was his own. He wished he’d remembered a book to read.

      He looked at his hands to pass the time. They were dry in the winter air that had seeped its way into the bus. He tried to figure out how many hours they would make it before cracking and bleeding. “Maybe three or four” he thought accidentally out loud. He looked around expecting stares from everyone on the seat. He was surprised that he was the only one on the bus.

      diff --git a/statements-frag.html b/statements-frag.html index 0614de8..6b7c178 100644 --- a/statements-frag.html +++ b/statements-frag.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@

      a fragment

      -
      +

      I. Eli

      “Can one truly describe an emotion?” Eli asked me over the walkie-talkie. He was in the bathroom, & had taken the walkie-talkie in with him absent-mindedly. I could hear sounds of his piss hitting the toilet water.

      “I can hear you peeing,” I said. He didn’t answer so I said in apology, “It’s okay. Humans are sexually dimorphic.” I was sitting on my blue baby blanket texting Jon, who was funny and amicable over the phone. He made a three-message joke about greedy lawyers and I would have been laughing if not for my embarrassment toward Eli. He finally came out of the bathroom and kept his eyes straight ahead, toward the wall calendar and not at me, as he passed through the family room into his bedroom, were he shut the door quietly. Presently I heard some muffled noise as he turned on his iPod. I guessed he didn’t feel like talking so I stayed on my blanket watching the Price is Right and texting Jon.

      diff --git a/stayed-on-the-bus.html b/stayed-on-the-bus.html index c51c0da..6861386 100644 --- a/stayed-on-the-bus.html +++ b/stayed-on-the-bus.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 0d5b4f7..38cbc98 100644 --- a/stump.html +++ b/stump.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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.

      He walked aimlessly until coming over a short rise he saw a stump. He recognized his handiwork in the way the stump made a kind of chair back—flat until the axe had gone through far enough, then a frayed edge like a torn page. Paul walked over to the stump and sat down.

      He looked up and tried to find a pattern in the placement of the trees. There was none. They grew randomly, beginning nowhere and ending in the same place. A squirrel ran down one and up another for no reason. He opened his notebook and took his pencil from his ear but could think of nothing to write.

      diff --git a/swansong-alt.html b/swansong-alt.html index 6a31e4c..80c752f 100644 --- a/swansong-alt.html +++ b/swansong-alt.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@

      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 769c6ea..5c65507 100644 --- a/swansong.html +++ b/swansong.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      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 9964549..bb76dc4 100644 --- a/swear.html +++ b/swear.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +

      EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME

      diff --git a/table_contents.html b/table_contents.html index e7086e8..490f2db 100644 --- a/table_contents.html +++ b/table_contents.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
      +
diff --git a/tapestry.html b/tapestry.html index a72fced..b7a261b 100644 --- a/tapestry.html +++ b/tapestry.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

The dictionary also had this to say about “hymn”: that it was possibly related to the old Greek word for “weave.” “Weave what” Paul wondered to himself. He wrote this down on a new notecard. Apparently “hymn” means weave somehow. Or it used to. Or its cousin did. What is it weaving? Who is it weaving for? I remember in school we talked about Odysseus and his wife Penelope, who wove a tapestry every day just to take it apart at night. I forget why.

Maybe she wove the tapestry for Odysseus. Maybe she wove it for herself. What did she weave it of? Memory, maybe? Or dream? I think these words make a kind of tapestry, or at least the thread it will be made of. I will weave a hymn to the gods of Literature, out of fiction. My furniture was a try at weaving, but I am shit at furniture. So writing it is again.

diff --git a/telemarketer.html b/telemarketer.html index d56c153..3603fc9 100644 --- a/telemarketer.html +++ b/telemarketer.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

Inside the building, the constant sound of recirculating dry air made Larry feel as though he were at some beach in hell, listening to the ocean, or more accurately at a gift shop in a landlocked state in hell listening to the ocean as represented by the sound a conch shell makes when he holds it up to his ear. The buzz of the fluorescent bulbs overhead sounded like the hot sun bearing down all day in this metaphor, a favorite of Larry’s.

His cubicle was made of that cheap, grayish-blue plywood that cubicles are made of; inside it, his computer sat on his desk as Larry liked to think an eagle perched on a mountainous crag much like the crag that was his desktop wallpaper. The walls were unadorned except for a few tacked-up papers in report covers explaining his script. When Larry made a call to a potential customer it always went the same way:

diff --git a/the-night-we-met.html b/the-night-we-met.html index b15caea..08f9113 100644 --- a/the-night-we-met.html +++ b/the-night-we-met.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@

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

pregnant with all things. I should’ve said
something, to draw you out from your place
in the dark. Remember, you told me time was
only an illusion, and memory was only

something to draw. You, out from your place,
I out from mine, that night, I believed in you.
Only illusion and memory were one, lying
down on your couch, through the night you drew

diff --git a/the-sea_the-beach.html b/the-sea_the-beach.html index cc664d7..da86316 100644 --- a/the-sea_the-beach.html +++ b/the-sea_the-beach.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

The sea doesn’t know or care
what the beach even is, let alone
its cares or its troubles, its
little nagging under-the-skin annoyances
that make the beach the beach.

Sandworms, for example, or those crabs
with big pincers on one side
but not the other. Those really get
the beach’s gander up, but the sea
doesn’t care. The sea

diff --git a/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html b/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html index 986d975..a784da4 100644 --- a/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html +++ b/theoceanoverflowswithcamels.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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 e0724b0..1b0c296 100644 --- a/time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html +++ b/time-looks-up-to-the-sky.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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?

When I think about you, something in my pants
tightens, and my thoughts run, and I realize
I should’ve kissed you when I had the chance.

I want that moment never to be past
like Keats’s lovers on the grecian urn:
his mouth pursed, her figure turned to pronounce

diff --git a/todaniel.html b/todaniel.html index 110e910..d628e64 100644 --- a/todaniel.html +++ b/todaniel.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@

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.

I don’t want to bring you down, or make you think
that your perfected woman isn’t so.
It’s just that, like Adam said, 2006
has come and gone. What did she do

in that year anyway? IMDB
has, surprisingly, none, though in ’05
she’s in four titles. Sin City
I’ve never seen, although from many I’ve

diff --git a/toilet.html b/toilet.html index b98b19e..8f71fe6 100644 --- a/toilet.html +++ b/toilet.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

Paul only did his reading on the toilet.

He read in a magazine that the universe as we know it is actually a hologram, a three-dimensional projection of a lower, two-dimensional, “realer” reality. The article said that this model explains things like quantum entanglement, what it called “spooky action at a distance.”

After he finished, he ran back out to his Writing Shack and hammered out a Treatise on Literature as Spooky Action. His mind was reeling. He typed out an entire notecard on the subject.

diff --git a/toothpaste.html b/toothpaste.html index 24aa6b9..eb0200b 100644 --- a/toothpaste.html +++ b/toothpaste.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

When he took the bus into work he couldn’t relax. He was paranoid everyone was staring at his stain and kept looking out the corners of his eyes to make sure they weren’t. They didn’t seem to be but they could also be looking away just as he looked at them. “The Observation Paradox” he muttered to himself.

Jill was the only one to notice the stain at work. She came around to his cubicle during a break because he dared not show his stain in the break room. “You have a stain on your shoulder” she said “it looks like toothpaste.” “Do I” he feigned ignorance but went red at the same time “I didn’t see that there this morning.” “How do you get toothpaste on your shoulder?” “I don’t know skills I guess” he said and she grinned. “You know vinegar will take that out” she said “although I think I like it. You should start a museum of shirt stains!” “I don’t have that many shirts with stains” he said frowning. “Yes you do” she said.

diff --git a/treatise.html b/treatise.html index 12652db..8d1216f 100644 --- a/treatise.html +++ b/treatise.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

TREATISE ON LITERATURE AS “SPOOKY ACTION FROM A DISTANCE”

diff --git a/underwear.html b/underwear.html index 4a684cf..44879fd 100644 --- a/underwear.html +++ b/underwear.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

“Did you get them” she asked when he opened the basement door to the kitchen. She was sitting at the table playing dominoes. “Get what” he asked. She peered at him and said “my underwear.”

“Oh I didn’t see them” he answered. He reflexively opened the refrigerator, reflexively bent down, reflexively tried to feign non-disappointment (appointment? he thought) at seeing the same disappointing empty pickle jar, old head of lettuce, crusty mayonnaise he’d seen already on the way down to switch his laundry over. “Paul” she said in that way that means Look at me. Paul looked at her.

diff --git a/wallpaper.html b/wallpaper.html index 1ec16bc..bc13cf5 100644 --- a/wallpaper.html +++ b/wallpaper.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

His mother came in with lunch on a tray. It was hot tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. “What have you been doing all day” she asked “you haven’t just been staring at the wall have you?” He had been staring at the wall most of the day. The wall without the window on it, with the woodgrain wallpaper. “No” he said. “What have you been doing then” she asked setting the tray down on his lap. He sat up and almost upset it, but she caught it before it spilled anything. “Composing in my head” he lied. “A novel of my experience.”

“Do you really think anyone will want to read about you” she asked and walked out of the room.

diff --git a/weplayedthosegamestoo.html b/weplayedthosegamestoo.html index f695fbd..5f3368a 100644 --- a/weplayedthosegamestoo.html +++ b/weplayedthosegamestoo.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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 1f099a1..60d4b94 100644 --- a/when-im-sorry-i.html +++ b/when-im-sorry-i.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

While scraping at something with my finger-
nail, I catch myself wondering again whether
you’ll thank me for washing your dishes.
I realize that this would defeat the point
of my gesture, that this has destroyed
all good thoughts I’ve had about saying

“I’m sorry.” This, this is the reason why
I am always apologizing: because I never
mean it, because there is always, in some
attic, a thought roaming that says, insists:
“I’ve done nothing wrong, and I deserve
all I can take, and more than that.”

diff --git a/window.html b/window.html index fb938fb..980ca01 100644 --- a/window.html +++ b/window.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

HYMN 386: JOKES

“Tell us a joke” everyone asks of the clown. He sits on a log and begins to think. Everyone waits gap-mouthed in anticipation. A slight breeze ruffles the clown’s coat, his pompom buttons, his bright red hair. His nose becomes redder in the cold. Hours pass. All but the most dedicated of joke listeners leave him to rot for all they may care.

The clown opens his mouth to speak but no words come out. A tear falls down his cheek, and another. He begins to sob. The last joke listener comes over to comfort him. She puts a hand on his shoulder. He looks up at her, red face, red nose, white lips, and says “Thank you.” He vanishes from the clearing. The last joke listener sits on the log and looks up at the sky. The moon is full. The world creaks on its axis.

diff --git a/words-meaning.html b/words-meaning.html index 2cb7b3c..d918b4e 100644 --- a/words-meaning.html +++ b/words-meaning.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

“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.

Words are the inevitable byproduct of an analytic mind. Humans are constantly classifying and reclassifying ideas, objects, animals, people, into ten thousand arbitrary categories. A favorite saying of mine is that “Everything is everything,” a tautology that I like, because it gets to the core of the human linguistic machine, and because every time I say it people think I’m being disingenuous. But what I mean by “everything is everything” is that there is a continuity to existence that works beyond, or rather underneath, our capacity to understand it through language. Language by definition compartmentalizes reality, sets this bit apart from that bit, sets up boundaries as to what is and is not a stone, a leaf, a door. Most of the time I think of language as limiting, as defining a thing as the inverse of everything is not.

In this way, “everything is everything” becomes “everything is nothing,” which is another thing I like to say and something that pisses people off. To me, infinity and zero are the same, two ways of looking at the same point on the circle—of numbers, of the universe, whatever. Maybe it’s because I wear an analogue watch, and so my view of time is cyclical, or maybe it’s some brain trauma I had in vitro, but whatever it is that’s how I see the world, because I’m working against the limitations that language sets upon us. I think that’s the role of the poet, or of any artist: to take the over-expansive experience of existing and to boil it down, boil and boil away until there is the ultimate concentrate at the center that is what the poem talks around, at, etc., but never of, because it is ultimately made of language and cannot get to it. A poem is getting as close as possible to the speed of light, to absolute zero, to God, while knowing that it can’t get all the way there, and never will. A poem is doing this and coming back and showing what happened as it happened. Exegesis is hard because a really good poem will be just that, it will be the most basic and best way to say what it’s saying, so attempts to say the same thing differently will fail. A poem is a kernel of existence. It is a description of the kernel. It is.

diff --git a/worse-looking-over.html b/worse-looking-over.html index f79b1f7..77e8d54 100644 --- a/worse-looking-over.html +++ b/worse-looking-over.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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 bfc5044..c63983e 100644 --- a/writing.html +++ b/writing.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

He dipped his pen in the inkwell, screwed the converter piston up, and watched as nothing entered the chamber. He screwed it back down and up again, while dipping the nib more deeply into the ink well. He watched as again nothing filled the capsule. He screwed it down a third time. His thumb knocked the inkwell over somehow by accident.

As he swore, stood up and away from the table, and went into the house proper for paper towels, he resolved to buy a typewriter.

diff --git a/x-ray.html b/x-ray.html index b65106b..a672c2f 100644 --- a/x-ray.html +++ b/x-ray.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

When he got back to the house his hand wrapped in the end of his shirt he still felt no pain. He called for his mother and found her watching TV in the main room. He stayed in the kitchen not wanting to get blood on the carpet. She turned around cigarette dangling from her open mouth said “Oh god what happened.”

She drove him to the hospital in the car. The radio stayed off the entire way. Paul wanted to turn it on but he didn’t want the desire not to annoy his mother was stronger. They drove in silence.

diff --git a/yellow.html b/yellow.html index 8ba619f..2d351a1 100644 --- a/yellow.html +++ b/yellow.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ -
+

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.

He would sit down at the round table covered in newspapers that took up the half of the room not occupied by the refrigerator, microwave, or counter with coffee pot and sink. He didn’t drink coffee but he would think about starting. He would shuffle the newspapers around on the table and see they were all the same ones as an hour ago. “Or technically fifty minutes ago” he would say to himself. Sometimes Jill would come in for a cup of coffee. She would always check that her lunch, which she brought each morning in a Tupperware container with a blue lid with her name written on it in black sharpie, was still there. Once he asked her why she checked.

“Why do you always check if your lunch is in the fridge” he asked. “I don’t” she said. “Oh I thought you did.” “I don’t think so.” “Why do you check at all?” “Once it was stolen out of the fridge and returned empty before I had a chance to eat my lunch” she said. “So you make sure it won’t happen again.” “No I’m waiting for the day that it does.”

-- cgit 1.4.1-21-gabe81