che elias say

i invented
the black
man
last night?

is that cool

Welcome in Anger

Dear Buddha,

as the ones over at the reality dealership
They say you are like the Hyundai,
and thought can spread its confusion of death
when pleasure is gnashing its nutrition
which is really our tongue.

Are you on FACEBOOK?
"It's not me,"
you Tweet
"I exist. more pleasant
than You..."

History's a total fleaskrieg.
IT-hospital.

FACEBOOK keeps more forgiving forgiving to see eyes that beautifully in strangeness and ambisexuality. clouds

the swedenborgian country drunk

Posted

Posted by that same shorts mysteriously about the hazards
Posted by shorts so past me
Posted by comments skin and of the fairy tale woods.
Posted by extra miss Schadenfreude
Posted by something LOUDLY about missed pregnancy
Posted by children's bedrooms knobs two centuries ago
Posted by remember dream mouth surgery
Posted by cheap astronaut manners
Posted by rakish ankle biting presidents of feeling
Posted by Swedes for fleaskrieg beleagured existence
Posted by IKEA now has a scary boyfriends catalogue
Posted by children pulling orchids from their cunts
Posted by Damien Hirst diamond skull used as disco ball

Clocks with Cocks Sonnet

Oh, our cometary will be like unto as a stain.
Walter Benjamin approaches the wireborder of the Commentary
Off-course witty God with ecstasy/water bottle
Who made those seagulls twinking boyzone lights
Over the parking lot going dark now
Nothing, nobody, a twig
of ontological peeling you're probably dying
But dying can be swooped too
stupid ocean. each poet a silly raptor. plate glass
The children running holding little clocks
Who do not guess their future disfigured alcoholic swimming
Mice don't want packrat sensibility
Cowboy mummified heart of Damien Hirst on the cover
What honest city will bring you the total cowboy enema of love you crave?

Anonymous Oil Painting, Circa 1813

Jedi pain that comes from using Facebook.
The image has suffered many logical deaths.
Silly wabbit hot buttered frippery.
"That's cum."
Your poem lingered like a face months up inside a father's dress.
You can keep your asshole.
Your long train.
"Rufus Wainwright, please report to the field of battle."
I can leave the body but no way
I can abandon the you.
Your long train.
This is such a playground boy mess smear.
And at the end strangers thieving pictures.
Then down for the count.

*

footnote

Children gently wrapping a clock that died
with a blanket. Going round
and round like an 18th century dance.

Mrs. Butterworth Whoring it in Branson, MO

I was waiting for the Damien Hirst question.

The pauper's skull covered with diamonds
and all that shit.

I love you. Goodbye.

Do the words turn, truly,
the way the worlds turn?

No hateration in my dreams.
Sometimes you swim in them
and possibly I hunt you
the way Inuit hunt the seal.
There is a sexual reverence
even in the kill.

Kill is metaphorical.

Hot buttered frippery
of the face in the dream.

You're distractive as a glacier
with a haunted gay casino on top.

Silly wabbit Jedi mind tricks
are all my love. Wipe your hand
across your mouth and cough,

using emoticons of the highest order.

Trying to Talk to a Pussyhound about an Ice Storm

Pick it with The Girl.
Even you who turn the wide labia.
Sometimes less than an afternoon.
Maybe you're the banana split lengthwise
and you could pleasure her
constantly to suck a koan?
Except she tells you dreams are overused.
And then the mental people
have funny afterlives,
poetry and your skin do interest me
but I don't know what to say to you anymore!
"Wednesday." "October." "History." "Applesauce."
I can't even put them in the right order
on the test they gave me
in the building like a white anthill.
Committing suicide in a museum
is such a cliche now.
It will be snowing again soon.
This feels like a workday.

Two Brief Love Poems

Probably this is another cut-rate exorcism.
Maybe I only came to show you my eye had layers.
I had a dream about the overused Yeats flea.
I was thinking about you yesterday
and all the funny afterlives
you will have to distill from nature.
I really do love you, you know.
Sometimes, I split your soul like a banana
lengthwise, and sit and think about you
in my car in a grocery store parking lot,
surrounded by hostile empty shopping carts
like european philosophies nobody needs.


*

Seagulls who are visiting briefly
this parking lot probably know more
about the cycles of the Ice Ages
than this poem or NORAD knows.

But your eyelashes.

The beautiful Ice Ages
which will remove the human will
from nature.

Things like that.

Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow

arrived today. I love it. It's a tiny little book smaller than a loaf of bread.

It's her celebrated book which is mostly White-Out with tiny glimpses of text allowed to show through. It's rather as though you've had eye surgery and have been wrapped in layers and layers of gauze like a character in the old movies and you're only able to see little bits of the world through your scrim as it's being unwrapped.

It's from WAVE BOOKS, one of the best poetry publishers in the country. They prove that again and again with books like these.

The book really has the Burning Deck sensibility. I could have seen Keith & Rosmarie publishing this book (another of those great poetry publishers).

I don't know how I managed to miss this book for so long.

I have some pages Mary sent me some time back from some of her earlier books where she had begun this process, and whited-out to find sparer poems within her own poems.

But those pages don't figure in here.

This book is as much a piece of short fiction as it is a poem...possibly more fiction than poetry.

And the oddest thing is that it reminds me of Edward Gorey (of whom Ruefle rarely reminds me otherwise).

But there's a Gorey dark humor here in the story of a soul that never got to emerge, effloresce, tell its stories, but instead came to us as a few fragments of beleagured existence.

Welcome to the Erasure Dome.

It's nice.

Pick it up if you love odd, gorgeous, insoluble little books.

"The Buddha Has a Pussy"

It's so obvious.
Your father probably told you this in anger
when he saw you playing with The Buddha
as a curious young boy or girl.
Even the ones at TARGET or PIER 1.
If you turn them over
you can often see the wide labia.
Sometimes he has a finger
up in there, playing,
or Buddha splays the lips beautifully
to show you the pearl,
the "little Buddha" in the canoe.
Maybe he was born that way
or maybe he had reconstructive surgery
in Thailand, like the others.
The surgery costs less than a Hyundai,
and can be accomplished in an afternoon.
Maybe he thought it more beatific
to split the banana lengthwise
and spread it with peanut butter
so that you could eat from it.
Maybe he thought it was funny,
the sounds you would make
licking the peanut butter,
and maybe he derives the same Bliss
you always got from doing this
to the family dog with peanut butter,
the confusion of the beast
trying to gum pleasure to death
when pleasure is sticky and escapes
constantly the gnashing of the teeth.
It wants you to suck its nutrition
not chew it. It's like a koan.
Except it's Buddha's pussy.

And there are 0 calories.

"Justin Sirois Added You as a Friend on Facebook"

Thank You, Justin Sirois.
Your name is sensuous on the tongue.
I like it when people add me on FACEBOOK.
It's one of the things that tells me
I exist. Another is waking up,
although dreams are more pleasant
than waking life lately,
so the overused Yeats quote
comes to mind. Dru
started a flea war in October.
I think we finally won.
I think it was a pillow
I bought at a thrift store
that was the plague-begetter.
Why didn't Nostradamus warn
me about this? Fuck You, History Channel.
Eight years without a flea
and then total fleaskrieg.
It nearly sent me to the mental hospital.
FACEBOOK keeps suggesting I add
certain people with whom I allegedly share
216 or 211 friends but those people
Facebook suggests are usually
the five or six people who
are still pissed at me. Bipolar days
made me say silly things sometimes
to people. Sometimes I was right,
sometimes very wrong. That's why
they call it BI-polar. Like a seesaw.
Some poets are more forgiving than others.
The more hateful ones tend to see themselves
as exotics, arrowana fishes, they
have funny eyes that glow in the dark.
Their afterlives will be cold slave cereal
but they will still be swimming
in the bowl, scouting contacts.
You know who you are. You live
in cities like Chicago, L.A.
and New York. You move beautifully
in restaurants, but not always
so beautifully in poetry. You
are thrice divorced from nature,
poetry and ambisexuality. You
are male by default and you dream
of a basketball made entirely
of pussy skin. ADD ME ON FACEBOOK!

Probably the Only Way to Survive in America Today

and my favorite B-52's song...

Ricky was still alive.

Sykur Molarnir

Things I Learned Today

Johnny Appleseed was a Swedenborgian.

That's why he planted striplings in the manner he did.

He shared the belief with Swedenborg that everything, every object, (every quality?) we see on earth had an analogue in heaven.

Everybody in American drank hard cider (alcohol).

This was prudent since many mortal illnesses were waterborne.

By 1830, we were a country of alcoholics.

Entire towns spent their workdays drunk. You got drunk at breakfast and you got drunk while you were working. Some Americans still adhere to this solid 19th century work ethic.

Apples trees were demonized.

There were editorial cartoons showing evil apple trees and the roots had words like hard cider and brandy and ciderkin written on them.

The demon apple tree.

Incensed people chopped down the evil apple trees.

Later, apple trees made concessions and promised to do good and become things like applesauce or apple pies.

Thank You, History Channel.

Underwater with Liz

Shum65 makes everything better.

Sarah Palin Jack-O'-Lantern

Sarah Palin Jack-O'-Lantern 2: 6 Days Later

The sequel.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if she actually got in office. The fast transformation. Scary stuff!

"Ben Lerner Has Added You as a Friend on FACEBOOK"

Hi Ben Lerner. Thanks for adding me as a friend. Poets talk about you a lot. You have a great reputation. I don't mean that in a girly or Catholic way. I have had good experiences in friendship with people named Ben. Both living and dead. Ben is an accepted word in "Boggler" on Pogo and it's in most puzzles, hence I find "(B)en" is good luck. Ben wa balls are designed to delight. Beneficence. Benevolence. Ben Gurion. Ben was a good friend to Michael Jackson before the nightmare turned truly perversely more nightmarish. Probably you know what "Benjamin" literally means. You have me there. I do not. "Ben" makes interesting words when it starts them. To wit: benthic, Benvolio, bent, benighted, benumbed, bendy-boy, bentage. "Bengali in Platforms" is one of Morrissey's songs which may or may not be hateration. I don't think it's really nice to tell somebody to "shelve (their) Western plans." I think Mary J. Blige invented the word "hateration," or certainly she legitimized it or did the most to popularize it with that one song. A song is not a snag the way a poem is. Mary J. Blige continues to maintain a style that transcends the seventies and yet is the seventies. In this, she is like a vampire. Vampires leave a certain distractive mental feeling on the human imagination like Ben Gay. Ben Gay is probably only a Jedi mind trick the way acupuncture is. A pain more confused with pleasure is substituted for a less adulterated pain. This allows the mind to slowly drift to sleep, focusing on the new adulterated sensation. I think this is how Tibetans learn to die well. But without using Ben Gay. Thank you for adding me on Facebook. I like the moist verdancy of the image I see represents you. My vision has suffered too much lately to tell me what it is, but it looks green and cool and somewhat Pre-Raphaelite, even without the human context. Have a happy Wednesday, the hardest day to spell for logical people. I don't know any logical people. I only know logical sentences. xo B.

Poem Abandoned by its (Putative) Author

I refuse to inhabit this poem
You won't find me anywhere near this poem
Let alone inside the pretentious funhouse thing
It's just dumb to try to say the unsayable
I refuse to support anybody's gossamer girders anymore
I refuse to stake a silly wabbit claim in unreal estate
I abdicate the hot buttered role of poet
It comes with ridiculous frippery anyway
Like a Halloween store open only two months a year
That pays its employees minimum wage (crazy/addict magnet)
Poem that must dress up like Elizabeth I or Sid Vicious
Poem that must dress up like Lesbiantron or Homotron
Poem that must dress up like Marilyn Manson or Ginsberg
Poem that must dress up like Wittgenstein or Betty Boop
Poem that must dress up like Walter Benjamin or Marilyn Monroe
Poem that must dress up like Cartman or Celan
The poem which is really a goth kid an emo bored outside the 7-11
It's just too gay to be inside a loitering poem
And (face it) all poems are loitering
I'm too old for the makeup this poem is trying to put on my face
I can't stand these poetry bowling shoes made out of rhino horn
Put down that camera no I'm not fucking Amish
It's just there's no way to do it
No way to stand here without striking a pose
And striking a pose is so gay
"It's Madonna night at Karaoke!" (finger on uvula)
I'm more concerned with extrapoetic activities
I will leave the poem gym to poem jocks like you
I abandon the locker room of the poem to you
I leave you in possession of the (open) field
You can shove your "pistols at dawn" up your asshole
Your asshole's that already been chapped & cleft by poetry
Your asshole and all the rest
You can mock me and make chicken sounds
As I abandon the field of the poem in a dress
And yes it is a wedding dress...with a long train
The field is muddy and I am a mess
Leaving something vaguely like a shit smear
On the field of the poem as I traverse it
On my way out
Shoving or kicking and cursing the occasional singing elf
In plastic football gear colliding with me in its mad dash
Towards the field of battle and valor

driving in the next lane

(poem beginning with a line by you and paralleling you)

    Quiet Crickets


Quiet crickets
A little pain
Soon we'll be thieving your pantry
The milkdream & the book of hours
Don't cough at me in my worries
The hammer of the grammar of the call of it

Trust the gramarye of woe, a tree it
Always was sworn by the crickets
First the venison of pictures
Now the reign
Makes swervy the hours
In the Antoinettean counting

Become a worry, country
Is gangsterish, it
Is wearing out our cometary flowers
What becomes of the freaking pickets
Silences will like children not like pain in sane

"Welcome to the Sitzbath of Kitties!"
We could barely open our eyes

To wean the dictionary in the city
In a wily attempt at a less neolithic country
Not to comply w/ cunt, as mad a word as stain
But not so wadded up
Doesn't spine up more gullible than potato bugs
Startled suddenly by fingers under
Off course flowers

Especially gillyflowers
Like the Slender Blue Fag...the witty
Has got axolotls & gingko trees, the wickets
Creep tup nubbing the country
To gather buds
From this perilous lawn we'll wear
Its ill raining

Actually I'm sad it's draining
It was kind of thought to visit for the hours
I loved the diorama of the City of God
Though tornadoes had made it mad
Do you wink at the tree of heaven silver Epcot survey city?
Will change the turbid and southerly country's
Fur bodies grow us to justify poetry's lusty thickets?

Dunno

Only know

Deceptive crickets (mails) I can't bear them in the rain
Country of this whelping of nameable flowers,
City makes a hammer out of wit.

Nothing, Nobody, Be Quiet

That poetry might be a twig
of ontological squeamishness
is a mighty fine thought

for a squirrel afoot
it's always morning here
inside the light box

of your new head
you're the Pope raining
questionable art on the Square

where bipeds gather not capybaras
hierophants mule not muse
if we could feign being sorry

we'd be a museum. nix that
It's almost Halloween inside the sea
and everywhere else

I get this Javier Bardem feeling
from the anesthesia of your words
I think I'm supposed to leap

like the people in commercials
or the dying in the harpstrings
of a bridge that image is stolen

What else isn't, even life
the molecules with which I salute
your pretty lips, a ruse, a money

Here the Metaphor Police arrive
as in Fahrenheit Who Cares and tuck
you into a book that mummifies

the child you were in the casinos
that smelled of the ocean. the child whore
at the center of each poet. a splendid thing

pretty baby, i whisper. glass plates
of Storyville. cyanotypes of you
cyanotypes of me was just on the gay radio

I Have Great Fears

I have great fears that the dinosaurs were tricked into existing and then unexisting
and all for nothing but "dinosaur existence."

This Poet

is writing so much work that craves to be bound in books, unbound in books...

The poetry often scares me, the swimming in evanescence...

I Remember

I remember when sleep was a punishment.

Stay (2005)

Ryan Gosling's character watches his dead girlfriend's dance class in a lucid dream while he is dying on the street after the same auto accident which killed her.

Yes, it's complicated and depressing and very beautiful.

I hated this movie because it has shivs in its deep pockets.

I REMEMBER

I remember Sue's German Shepherd Duke had been weaned too early as a puppy so Mr. Hower showed his children how you could put an alarm clock wrapped up in a towel under the dog's pillow so he would think it was his mother's heart. But one of the boys had stupidly forgotten to turn off the alarm. The dog was neurotic until the day he died. Don't blame everything on genetics, people.

I REMEMBER

I remember talking to Mary Ruefle on the telephone while I was in a snowstorm and it was very dark in the room where I was and she began telling me how she collects hands...doll hands, mannequin hands, Buddha hands, wax hands...

I REMEMBER

I remember when I first realized the mask Michael Myers wears in Halloween is actually a disfigured latex William Shatner mask. I felt like Leonardo da Vinci for having figured it out. Later, I read confirmation of it and I think the director said he had used acid on it. Some people think Shatner killed his alcoholic wife. She was found drowned in their swimming pool. Wouldn't that be spooky if it were true. It would mean John Carpenter is probably psychic. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

I REMEMBER

I remember many years ago when I told you I was going to leave you by walking the railroad tracks wherever they went. What fucking movie gave me that stupid idea? Well, I did eventually leave. But not by the railroad tracks. I don't really wonder that much about the breakup anymore. But I do wonder sometimes what pair of shoes I thought would be sufficient for this cinematic journey. And I would be amused to see what I had packed. Maybe display it as some form of performance art. Love dies and there is performance art. It is a consolation, if not quite a dignity.

I REMEMBER

I remember one of the many times our house was haunted there were eggshells arranged geometrically on the console table in the second floor foyer. Nobody had had eggs in weeks. We didn't have mice or any other Rodentia. It seemed unlikely some flying insect or bat with a packrat sensibility had created this miniature work of art. It was never explained. The house had been locked up tight and nobody else had a key. The ghosts wanted us to see eggshells. I have no fucking clue what they were trying to say. I'm sorry, ghosts. Here. Let me adopt that therapist tone. You're going to need to be a little more specific.

I REMEMBER

I remember when I hated home ec class so I brought Tarot cards to school and told my fellow students' fortune, which interested people much more strongly than home economics. Everybody wanted a fortune. And very few wanted really cared about economics in their present or future homes. I enjoyed a brief celebrity that year. Sort of like Miss Cleo. And I got there before her. Though I didn't get the mansion. (Does Miss Cleo have a mansion?) I think the home economics teacher hated me. She looked divorced.

I REMEMBER

I remember all the good people holding down the earth. Back in the day that was what they did. They were people holding down the earth. Imagine.

I REMEMBER

I remember when you pretended to have amnesia to get rid of your crazy-violent boyfriend and it was like watching a television program. It was like Dallas or Dynasty earlier in the day.

I REMEMBER

I remember when you died and I learned it from the newspaper. You were only thirty-six. I wanted to call your husband (whom I did not know) and ask what happened, but I did not. Because I didn't know how to ask. Because what is there to ask?

I REMEMBER

I remember when Sue Hower got so mad at Sue Lindsay (they were both sixteen) because Sue Lindsay was sitting on the hood of her car and pretending to pose like a centerfold and wouldn't get off, and Sue told Sue that she was going to put the car in gear in ten seconds so "get the hell off my car" (she had just got it) and Sue kept laughing and lolling around on the hood and then Sue patched out and suddenly slammed on the brakes and Sue hit the street rolling and her legs were all abraded and she began screaming and crying and picking little bits of gravel out of her bloody legs while Sue sat behind the wheel looked completely unphased, with a total cowboy face. And she didn't really get in much trouble. And I don't think she ever apologized. I wonder if the movie The Unforgiven is anything like this. I never saw it.

I REMEMBER

I remember I was walking through old Paxton Cemetery and I found a human femur belonging to somebody several centuries dead next to a winding hole dug deep down into the earth next to a cypress tree. I went inside the church and a woman found the groundskeeper for me and he followed me out to the spot and said, "That damn groundhog again!"

He was merely clearing out his living space, which is what everybody does.

I REMEMBER

I remember the summer everybody was talking about the girl who had been "beheaded" by Pop Rocks, the candy you put in your mouth that crackled and exploded.

I REMEMBER

I remember when I was ten and used to love to lie on the hot concrete like an alligator at our community pool after swimming in the cool water. I would watch people dive from the high and low dive with the one eye that wasn't closed against the concrete. A beautiful young woman with long black ringlets would always make eye contact with me before she dove and smile goofily. She did this all summer. She was slender and rather adept at some of the fancier dives, so she was fun to watch. She never said a word to me and I never said a word to her. I might have waved at her once when she was sitting alone in her lawnchair. I knew she was a nice person and I thought she was probably shy. She gave off that vibe and I never saw her mix with the other wives in those lawnchair klatches. I knew who her two boys were, but I didn't play with them. They were younger and we just didn't cross paths or share any group or team activites. I remember that fall I learned she had killed herself in her home while her boys were at school. The boys looked strange for a whole year. At the bus stop and everywhere else. Nobody said anything. The father remarried about a year later and the boys starting looking normal again. More normal than I ever did. That's for sure. But now she's with me forever. That smile. That goofiness. The people who don't quite fit in sometimes have these briefest and shiest of friendships, I suppose.

She was actually the second "pool wife" to kill herself that year, but the other one was much older and did it by running the car in the garage. I can almost see her face. I can definitely see her hair. That older woman. And her bags. Those bags that came from the Islands or pretended to. She was the queen of those grassy bags. I think she even had a clique of lawnchair women that surrounded her. Maybe it was cancer or something like that. The husband seemed a great guy. Everybody liked him. But who knows. You could roll a ball from the suicide garage to the suicide house (a connecting street leads downhill) in about forty-five seconds.

Is there a documentary about survivor partners of suicides? I think that would be an interesting (if intrusive) film. If anyone ever asks me who I would invite to that imaginary "ANY 10 DINNER GUESTS FROM HISTORY" I would invite that young woman who dove so well that summer. Because I would want to hear it from her mouth. And I would want to see her smile and enjoy food. I already know what Colette or even Rimbaud would say. But I have no idea what it was that took her. Who she really was. That lovely smile. It was a beautiful summer. But I was ten or eleven. She was probably twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

The centuries will fly past like little sparrows. But there is an open appointment. When I imagine your children, I imagine them filling holes in endless fields. I imagine your children shoveling for their entire lives in their dreams. Making a hole to fill a hole. Translators of dirt.

The replacement mother was nothing like you. Probably your children are having grandchildren now. I wonder if there are segregated family albums. I imagine that is how it would be done. Probably the albums with you are kept in a closed drawer. Out of sight or sunlight anyway. I can't even remember your name. Or the names of your sons. I'm so sorry for your loss.

I REMEMBER

I remember when the five and dime store where we went had wooden bins created by a simple checkerboard pattern of slotted boards set on table islands. It was like something from the last century. Some of the bins were subcompartmentalized with smaller glass partitions. Birdcages were hung at regular intervals throughout the store and I remember being fascinated by the cuttlebone in each cage, how it was shaped like a seashell. The store was mostly wood and birds. People didn't have music in smaller stores back then, so presumably the chattertrack of the birds was a substitute form of low-tech radio. If the store owners had removed the products they sold, it would be a rather beautiful setting for dance (I'm thinking Martha Graham) or a Shaker gathering.

I REMEMBER

I remember when Joel Medvidovich's one testicle was visible in the photo of the junior varsity basketball team in our yearbook at Swatara Junior High School. Everybody had missed it until the book was out and in everyone's hands. Joel was crouched in the foreground of the photo, his angular, lanky frame, and he posed in a somewhat rakish angle towards the camera, with one arm resting sportively across a knee. And of course he was wearing those satiny shorts. What can one say. It was a long testicle and it appeared to be very relaxed. Maybe if he had been nervous about getting his picture taken the world would have been spared the great drama. Maybe if the gym was colder that day. Who knows. He was more famous than a rock star for a short time. I can only imagine how much gnashing of teeth and lost hours of sleep this caused in young and old alike. Some tragedies are unfathomable. One must simply give them to the Lord.

I REMEMBER

I remember when Brian Heaberlin's obituary appeared in the Patriot-News and everyone was talking about it. Then we found out he was still alive. Apparently, he had turned drug informant and that was some sort of warning. I heard he left town quickly after that. I think today it's harder to get a fake obit past the editors. They check more. I was happy he was really alive, because he and his twin brother were always the hotness in the seventies. They sort of looked like vampires because of their odd canines, which had a funny way of showing up in their yearbook photos.

I REMEMBER

I remember when I was into toy rockets and we shot a goldfish into space in the payload container and he survived (thanks to that red-and-black checked parachute that looked like a cheap hairnet) and was then the only astronaut goldfish in the aquarium or the neighborhood. He seemed to enjoy the fame and the visits it brought. When Buzz died, we mummified him with table salt in some paper towels, put him in a small metal box and buried him in the garden, because we had been learning about Egypt in school. He is probably the only pharaonic goldfish in Lenker Manor.

Probably.

I REMEMBER

I remember when exorcism was cool.

I REMEMBER

I remember when I visited my aunt Helen in California that same summer and my powder blue short shorts mysteriously disappeared after a few warning comments about the disturbingly unisex nature of their cut.

I REMEMBER

I remember in the seventies when I was maybe thirteen and my hair was so long and I was so skinny and I wore powder blue terry cloth shorts so short that a truck drover driving past me saw me from behind and whistled.

I REMEMBER

I remember a funhouse in a very old amusement park that was extremely dangerous. It was designed by Germans in the 1920s but we went through it in the seventies. You would lose teeth or lose skin and that was part of the fun of the experience. Everything was metal or splintery wood. Metal bridges slid back and forth and propelled people in darkness into wooden walls or metal poles. Old people cried sometimes. Their injuries were often worse. Yet it was considered something people did. And then you ate a hot dog. You attorneys, weep and dream of time machines. This park had lots of rides with schadenfreude built in, actually. That should have been the name of the amusement park: SCHADENFREUDE GROVE. But it was called Williams Grove. Now it's a ghost town and I'm told an old man is dying at the center of it. I was told this by the woman who cleans the amusement park. All by herself. For some extra cash. She's normally a dispatcher. I miss the tacky haunted house. Its clear fire hazards and monkeyhair cellulose masks that look like something from thirties jungle flicks.

I REMEMBER

I remember when arson was the manifesto of the inarticulate youth.

I REMEMBER

I remember when you brushed your German shepherd's mouth with toothpaste and then had him chase you down the street while you screamed VERY LOUDLY about "rabies" and old people broke hips and other bones trying to get out of the way.

I REMEMBER

I remember when exorcism was an option for a teenage pregnancy.

I REMEMBER

I remember when children's bedroom doors didn't have knobs...or only had knobs on the outside.

The Magician and the Dying Wife

     She insists someone has removed the doorknobs from all the doors because she has trouble finding them in the night. And it is almost always night inside the house where she is dying. Blankets have been placed over those curtains which were not sufficient. Rooms have been soundproofed in unusual ways, tamped with piles of dolls she used to collect, or even pillows in some cases. This would be troubling to outsiders were they to see this, but no outsiders are allowed into the house of the dying one, which may only be looked at from the outside. It is sealed effectively as an ancient myth.

     Sometimes, the dying wife runs her fingers back and forth across the doors, seeking the knobs, but all she encounters, with increasing panic, is smooth paint. She can't even find the holes where she imagines the doorknobs were previously located. Not even with her ridiculous, long, pretty fingernails. Sometimes she curses, sometimes she cries: the usual schtick of the dying.

     Sometimes, the dying wife later realizes she has been standing against a wall and not a door in the dimness, trying to open it. Sometimes she curses, sometimes she merely laughs--schtick for herself only, since she is alone.

     Her husband is no longer a magician. The difficult economy has obviated any need for frivolous things like coffee shops or electronic pets that sing pop songs to children or magicians. He works all night in a small restaurant in a strip mall that's always open. He learns to speak the languages of drunks and the insane as he serves them food in the middle of the night. He notices how much their languages share grammar and concepts, how much of their languages is driftwood, really.

     The dying wife finds these nights alone very difficult. There is a cruel mirror in her private bathroom that holds all the radiance of the world, that magnifies like an evilly perceptive god or surgeon's eye.

     The dying wife finds herself involuntarily drawn to this mirror in the night. She is drawn to it like a snake to an oasis, and the radiance kills her bit by bit. Snakes hate radiance, though they live in it. The blaze of God's desert maddens them. This is why characters in stories sometimes have sympathy for serpents as they crush them underfoot. Characters in stories are usually more perceptive, more empathetic than us. We accept the fraying rope bridge of the narrative over the gulf, because what else is there? That is why we read books filled with stories. Our magic twins will do these things for us, and we will be spared the messy work. Or so the theory goes. Of course, we aren't really spared any such thing. But if you believe the blurbs and the critics, you might buy into this vicarious roadmap theory of literature for a few blissfully ignorant years or decades. Stories? Another strange economy in a world of strange economies.

     One morning the former magician arrives home to find his wife in bed delirious and screaming, her manicured hands scrambling madly in the forest of her long black hair. He sees black birds, manic ravens, swarming her hair, entangled in her long ringlets, scratching her face and scalp. They are pulling strands of hair from her head and making horrible noises like desperate old cokeheads fucking.

     The dying wife is even more horrified to realize the door to the bedroom has opened and that her husband is watching this, her shame, so she laughs in her horror, not knowing what else to do.

     Her husband smiles at her from the doorway, the smile of a Goya painting, but one of the less cruel paintings.

     He knows these are her former lovers, this contagion of claws. He feels a pity like moss. Like moss around his heart. He laughs at his own stupidity as he tamps the moss with imaginary fingers. But then he acts.

     The unemployed magician, just returned from a grueling night of work, knows he must use the old skills. They rest in his body like fibromyalgiac muscles, the old spells. He waves a spoon and the ravens are transformed into white mice that fall kerplump softly on his wife's gold and silver tasseled pillows, and the rodents begin to sing a tiny stupid song which makes the dying wife smile now, as she fixes her hair. Dignity is restored momentarily to the bed of the dying. When the mice are done, they scatter like Munchkins from Oz.

     All is well. She smiles at her husband. He sits beside her on the bed and lays breakfast, like a map of a gorgeous foreign country neither of them will ever visit. She, because she is dying. He, because he will spite that country. They smile a beautiful lie into each other. They know the gods forgive them everything. Because their lives were just Kleenex.

     When the dying wife finally does "live up to her diagnosis" and dies, the magician rarely sleeps, but walks through the house day after day, night after night, transforming things with his dusty wand, the one he actually used in "the old days" in his act. When the economy could support magic.

     He stares at the house filled with years' worth of accumulated treasure and junk. All of these objects are now to be travelers. The house smells like an airport. Where to begin the great shuffle of all this shaped and battered matter? He feels daunted, so he feels playful. He stretches his fingers like a violinist warming up.

     He turns an end table into a marble coffin with a glass window through which his dead wife smiles and waves like a magician's assistant, then changes his mind and makes it an end table again, but a garish one nobody would want. He transforms an opalescent swan-necked vase the dead wife liked into a chatty goldfinch, which flees the place of death instantly through the front door of the OPEN HOUSE he is having that Saturday morning.

     He waves his wand before the evil radiant mirror which tortured his dead wife, and it becomes a glass of champagne. He pours this into the cat's dish. The dead wife's cat drinks it and looks up at him with her late Saturday night smile. He turns the cat into a second goldfinch, and it gratefully pursues the first one, which it can just see on the horizon, in a greatly confused instinct.

     He feels only the slightest queasiness as he spoons cereal from a bowl which is levitating in front of his chest.

     When the former magician remarries, he takes only a few elements of his wife's spirit with him to his new home. He keeps the essence of her sweetish breath in a particularly sinuous vase. He keeps the essence of her wandering voice in a pillow in a back closet of the new house. He retains her ridiculous coveting of luxury in a single leather glove that he keeps in the glove box of his new car, a sleek car which is a gift from his obedient new wife, who is very much alive and not dying even a bit. He likes knowing that the glove is there, along with an odd assortment of things including a tire pressure gauge, a collapsible cup and for some silly reason, a compass. A gift from his new wife.

     "What would a magician want with a compass?" he often asks himself as he drives too fast and is magically never clocked on radar, never pulled off the comforting fluency of the highway.

     This question always makes him smile, always returns to him when he thinks of the glove, then--invariably--the compass, ridiculous objects sharing space in the dark compartment. And now ridiculously grammatically linked in his mind.

     In a way, this question takes the place of the entire relationship which has vanished, takes the place of the many torturous and tortuous years he has shared with the dead wife. Takes the place of many unanswerable questions which might be asked, but won't be. Stands in nicely. It prevents any collapse in the structure composed of impossibly light girders he has built around the death of his once-wife, a consummate magic trick.

     "A house of cards has no fears," he tells his new son by the new wife, one sunny morning. Everything is constantly made new in this real house in which he explains this to his young son, while constructing a tall house of cards. (A perceptive outsider might notice only that the new wife vacuums too often.) He fixes his tiny son's eyes to his. "The only thing magic about this trick at all is how the fear is focused in the audience. They are staring at nothing at all. Just some paper arranged on a table. If it were to fall, it would mean nothing."

     The small round son looks at him with the joy of not understanding anything, and arranges some plastic bears on the carpet in a pattern he is just beginning to delightfully intuit might be something called a war.

     The economy has improved but the former magician decides to continually change careers, as a sort of evolution of magic itself.

     For now, he sells used cars. But next month? Perhaps a minister of God. And several months later, perhaps one of those restorers of ancient paintings who somehow loses the ability of ordinary lunchroom speech and considers the loss a gift. Especially in winter, he thinks. Because winter has its own radiance, the magican knows, though there are few who have any fucking clue how to reckon it.

     Maybe a few painters. A few writers of fairy tales. Some drunks which disappear quickly.

     Lesser characters mostly.

Angela Genusa Told Me

that Dennis Cooper's blog has also been banned, blacklisted, unsubscribed from GOOGLE, whatever you call it.

I was shocked to hear that.

I can't imagine a blog more in keeping with the spirit of celebrating the arts, or one that represents better the best the medium has to offer artists and readers in general.

This is the dumbest form of censorship.

It's censorship by the unconscious (spam bots) at best, and at worse (this is a possibility) it's people targeting free expression and Google violating some of its charter principles.

This is even dumber than when Amazon did that thing where they "disappeared" so many authors from their listings.

Do I smell a class action lawsuit in this?

Or if that's impracticable, some sort of redress anyway.

The reason I respected Blogger and Google for so long was that they seemed to have transcended the WAL-MART model of free expression.

They seemed to be tolerant of the practicable reality of free expression, and the attendant messiness.

They understood the difference between the illegal and the prank, what was legitimate threat and what was merely a threat to somebody's taste.

This is probably really a bandwidth or size issue.

If you're a regular Blogger you've noticed the increase on Blogger recently of dysfunctional aspects (ex. profile counters) and problems that have gone unfixed system-wide.

This trend has been increasing for some time.

And then suddenly they start to wise up a bit: here, let us show you the post you just made and not your entire blog. Let's limit tags. Little steps of parsimony and husbandry in the machine.

I'm not tech-savvy enough to figure out if this latest trend has something to do with system balance (drive blog count down through spam bot traffic shutoffs which lead to blog deletions in frustration?) or not.

Don't Watch the Movie Stay

if your grip on reality is "tenuous at best."

Mine is, so it was like sliding down a greased Frank Gehry slope in horror trying to latch on to some Seussian apex of reality in the structure(lessness) of the thing.

If you are "doing just fine, thank you very much" you might like it or even find it boring.

The editing is very sharp and there are only a few cliches.

Overall, it owes too much to Vanilla Sky, I suppose, but it doesn't sew everything up at the end like that movie.

It prefers to stay a mindfuck.

Ryan Gosling and Ewan and Naomi Watts are good in it, but the real stars are the horrid New Brutalist architecture (the city pretty much becomes a character) and the nausea-inducing superfast, superfluent, supernasty editing.

Maybe I Will Get Interested in The Ghost Whisperer

I have been known to get interested in other crappy shows.

I watched half of one episode and noticed that 1) the plotlines are hackneyed 2) Jennifer Love Hewitt either can't act or refuses to do so and 3) something better is always on the next channel either up or down from it.

But why should I allow small obstacles like this to stop me?

It is there. Like the Matterhorn.

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

"Where were you when I made the spambots?"--GOOGLE to Job.

In Google Correspondence

no one can hear you scream.

I like the live html quality of Wordpress blogs

it makes me more visual in my cut and paste and makes me more hypertext...

i like that feeling...

here is my poem "Whatever"...

Whatever

CECI N'EST PAS UN BLOG DE PORN

CECI N'EST PAS UN BLOG DE PORN.

PLEASE EXCUSE THE MESS WHILE BOTS ARE RAPING MY BLOG

PLEASE LOOK THE OTHER DIRECTION WHILE BOTS RAPE MY BLOG AND PRACTICE BLOG SEARCH ENGINE CENSORSHIP ON ME.

GOOGLE IS NOT A GOOD FORUM FOR FREE EXPRESSION.

OR SHOULD I SAY "CONSCIOUS EXPRESSION?"

UNCONSCIOUS PROGRAMS ARE DESELECTING CONSCIOUSNESS BASED ON STUPID ALGORITHMS.

THAT'S THE USUAL FORM CENSORSHIP TAKES, BOT OR OTHERWISE.

IF I HAD MUD TO THROW RIGHT NOW...

I'M GOING TO GO MAKE SOME.

I Was Honored to Receive This

Hi William,

This is Charbel over at Wikio, the number 1 European news aggregator and blog-indexing website, indexing nearly 200,000 English-language sites. I'm contacting you because I sent you an e-mail last Tuesday and I was wondering if you received it? It was about your blog entering our Literature ranking at number 328. This ranking is one of the new rankings we launched last month.

To those who appear in the rankings we offer a badge that displays your blog's position, which is automatically updated each month. You can go to realclimate.org or baselinescenario.com to see what it looks like. The rankings themselves are calculated using links that appear in blog posts on other sites towards your blog. You can check out the rankings and how they work in full at http://www.wikio.com/blogs/top.

If you want to add this badge, just follow this link http://www.wikio.com/tools/top-blog if you'd prefer, I could just send you the code directly.


I am grateful for this, although clearly my rank is going to suck as it does above since nobody can even FIND my blog now since GOOGLE continues to keep me banned from their listings even though I am clearly a LITERARY/ARTS site and not a porn site. This was due to their bots misinterpreting my sense of play on this site and some conceptualist pranks I pulled here!

Anyone who can help me get reinstated to Google? I would be greatly appreciated.

This really is the worst sort of CENSORSHIP, because it is CENSORSHIP BASED ON BOT MISDETERMINATION OF BLOG/SITE PURPOSE!

ugh!

But I'm happy to be noticed and appreciate the ranking!

Unplugged Ocean

It washed the if perfect
do I collect
its late hair
seaweed held
stalked eyes gawking
as I was
walking along edges
sometimes yes
permuations of the surface
the light barriers
when late I
thought I
covered you
at last a thought
you'd tilt a parrot
in funny dreams
at my wayward sulk
so fix me when love
goes on paws
not human feet
the wolf's very whole
I wanted you to
or else I thought
or was it mine
he's Greek the island
fragments own him


[but...]


of all the last places
one only was unsorry
and stood its mountain
in the middle of the road
old-fashioned
terribly unworried
that mountain
it did a pirouette
in the middle of the my death
I was embarrassed
and upstaged
kicking as ocean
does was saved
by that mountain

Dear Flower,

But to die like that.
And up body when you next
arise you shall not
suffer the quarantined
sarcasm detectors
but feel the thanks
of nature's inventiveness
and ability, to find
the individual gulag
tossed to oblivion
our functionally few days
plunge their understanding
into their misunderstanding
and it's a beautiful jet crash
This you, solid bubbles
of earth from earth
even a gnarly weed
gaseous writ of eloquence
what happens that's it
omni interdicti possum
watch cursed salvaged
little flower
only if human
playing Latin possum
too funny
addresses you
a dreamed self or selves
Absolvo, silly flower
remember novel to navel
measure a man
backwards
lying down
feigning sleep
as best it can
which is not
nor can ever be
a flower
you

The Grift of Things

A pressured series of streets may disappear
and that may be quite a treat
to find ourselves remaindered, resembled, relocated

without our consent even: bee-yoo-ti-ful!

The fear narrative, the fucked tongue.

Everybody has these on the bedroom dresser.

Most episodes are actually perceived
as episodes now and that's television,
surer than the witches in Macbeth.

The ones who embezzle narratives
are the ones who drive us to murder
or thoughts of it. Bankrolling bots

infiltrate every family, it's inevitable.

Here are some common curses:

writing a novel
theory
Barcelona
pseudo-moral saviour classes
bicycles
well-dressed addicts
famous friends
collapsible blogs
set-up funds
etc. etc.

We are bed.

That's the only battle I recognize.

Or sometimes this is rephrased: We are bedding.

There is a fairy tale I keep close which insists:

we wear it won't
say goodnight patting
a covered now
my meadow
of you be a
nothing please
me should
books in words
midnight years back
But like that
I will cleave you
and cleave to you
messed-up
as the junkie cop
in the rathole
nonpareil
I promise you:
the stars are quarantined
above a story
like ours

Visual Problems in Dreams

Suddenly, I see our hearing difficulty.

It is another form of traffic we had blocked,
doubtless, in our new grammar of love.

I find myself a husband, a reckoning or animal
on its throne of abnormalities,
a glorious dyskinesia:

endearments wouldn't cry
said hearing is like to WAIT
go on leap it
brush the mortuarial fridge
from oh why
don't won't
be the whole
world secret names
what twenties
him pop so many
i like Mac.

Yeah, you count like that..

It is history at once.

It's why we all yawn.

So the last human robes
and the last human robots
occupy the same humorous stage,
the schtick begins...

movies as threshold consciousness

magic mountain

I bed pure regression
in you and love it

the way October is regressing now

I am much liking
or I was
I am embarrassed
the pure nuzzle is extratemporal
you're just night
we hospital I
I say here my
sweetest spending like a border
but then the me stable
which is your favorite
to WAIT for nothing
long does it go on
a war single
the can't yet
your hair freezing
it's your darling the and dream
the and man is losing
look up and see
the like guy disappearing
all thumbs
he can host etc.
goofily frustrated in a graveyard
a sparrow goes
it flits sarcastic
from name to name

These are No Moors

And he was liking his spirit as regretting
but not mindful of the reader any longer,
what could be done? We did our best
to remove might from the forest
where he had ridiculously lodged.

It was like an artist mirroring an artist,
a disaster! Then regretting his courage,
the animal mouth, we began to feel immune...

for hours the temple we stroked.

There's more...

It was a so clean brush every time after love
died. There was the the dog and the color red
and some pronouns. A sweater over everything
and coins, what choked you, a Tuesday strange
like somebody's once.

Any religion with a detailed sidecar
aroused our suspicions mightily.

Our mighty suspicions.

I Liked This Sea Lion You Put Up

Alive with bubbles...

They Also Serve Who Stand and Wait

for GOOGLE's absolution.

I am waiting to hear the words, "TE ABSOLVO."

Spoken from a mouth in Mountain View, California.

"Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat; et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis (suspensionis) et interdicti in quantum possum et tu indiges. [making the Sign of the Cross:] Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen."

Here's how you can say it in Latin, but I suggest you gingerly remove the references to the Lord, as he might get miffed at the usurpation.

Paul Monette

I thought of him today because he scripted an episode of Friday the 13th: The Series back in 1988 or 89 and it was on t.v. this afternoon.

It was (like most of the episodes of that series) either goofily bad or goofily pleasant, depending on your mood. Mine was sour so I didn't watch this tale of a cursed pirate treasure salvaged from Davy Jones' locker.

I remember reading his novel Afterlife as a young man and being so frustrated and angry at the hopelessness of it, but it was actually just mirroring the hopelessness of AIDS at that moment.

I remember not being the best or most generous reader of all his poems.

I had undergone one of those all-too-common conversion experiences with regard to poetic form and was (momentarily anyway) forging an immunity against rawer emotions or confessionalism in poetry; in other words, I was successfully regressing to mirror the tenor of the times.

I remember liking his autobiography much more, and liking his spirit as it was presented there.

And I remember regretting his fate deeply, and admiring his enviable courage.

I was seeing what was on YouTube and found him in Italian.

I was happy to see it was an elegy to his love.

I am older now and am no longer embarrassed by the horrible grandeur of loss.

And nobody is ever immune.



here's more...

No Goodbyes

from Love Alone: 18 Elegies For Rog

for hours at the end I kissed your temple stroked
your hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we'd
washed it Saturday night when the fever broke
as if there was always the perfect thing to do
to be alive for years I'd breathe your hair
when I came to bed late it was such pure you
why I nuzzle your brush every morning because
you're in there just like the dog the night
we unpacked the hospital bag and he skipped
and whimpered when Dad put on the red
sweater Cover my bald spot will you
you'd say and tilt your head like a parrot
so I could fix you up always always
till this one night when I was reduced to
I love you little friend here I am my
sweetest pea over and over spending all our
endearments like stray coins at a border
but wouldn't cry then no choked it because
they all said hearing was the last to go
the ear is like a wolf's till the very end
straining to hear a whole forest and I
wanted you loping off whatever you could
still dream to the sound of me at 3 P.M.
you were stable still our favorite word
at 4 you took the turn WAIT WAIT I AM
THE SENTRY HERE nothing passes as long as
I'm where I am we go on death is
a lonely hole two can leap it or else
or else there is nothing this man is mine
he's an ancient Greek like me I do
all the negotiating while he does battle
we are war and peace in a single bed
we wear the same size shirt it can't it can't
be yet not this just let me brush his hair
it's only Tuesday there's chicken in the fridge
from Sunday night he ate he slept oh why
don't all these kisses rouse you I won't won't
say it all I will say is goodnight patting
a few last strands in place you're covered now
my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names till the night's gone

what a beautiful cover of an over-covered standard

the guy at 3:01 looks like every other guy i hung out with in my twenties

it was so strange to see him pop up.

it was like a revisitation from so many ghosts at once.

see. i told you i like jews eastern europeans aramaic types.

great fanvid, Mac.

I've Got Nothing

I'm sorry. I've got nothing.

I am acquainted with hospitals and televisions lately.

I'm so tired of hearing the expression "pressured speech."

Books I find more difficult.

Illness should not resemble Las Vegas relocated to Hell.

Illness, if it must occur, should announce itself, identify itself clearly and give promising prognosis, hope of cure, treatment, surcease, balm in Gilead, all the good old-fashioned poetic words.

It should not pirouette on the interstate long after midnight, hide its true face, or cause one to fear mirrors, husband, and human narratives.

It should not fear speech, reckoning or consciousness.

It should not render you an animal on a gurney, but sometimes it will.

Depakote is a horrible drug.

I am so sorry I ever took it.

I had been getting better before I took that drug.

Lithium had messed up my body bad a few years back.

But they told me it was nothing like that.

And I trusted.

CNS abnormalities, hematological abnormalities, fucked up my tongue, tardive dyskinesia.

Yeah, you might look fine on a platelet count but find out what your platelets look like.

The new strategy is bumrush the FDA...they have money set aside for the body bags. Those drug companies.

Don't you wonder when you see the YAZ commercials running right next to the YAZ ambulance chaser commercials.

It's all in their accounting.

There are no surprises on that side of the fence.

Only on this one.

Haha! Thank You, Ron Silliman..

Thanks for linking to my imaginary Spacek-Niedecker biopic!

Now, if you can just use your powers as the Great Oz of Ampo to restore me to Google's good graces, Thou art the nonpareil.

They apparently "disappeared" me from their search engine because their bots said I had too many porn references (these too are almost always pranks, linking porn addicts to things like UNICEF for donations).

And because I have a poem called "Lithuanian Porn" (whose subject matter is not Lithuanian porn) I am being unplugged by the inhuman.

I did my appeal but it's all very Kafkaesque. It will take "weeks" and they may or may not grant my appeal, but I am not to expect a "personal response."

It is indeed The Castle and The Trial at once.

So much for free speech on Google.

Or free speech that doesn't get quarantined when the bots don't have built-in sarcasm detectors.

Ay de mi!

GOOGLE, HAVE MERCY UPON MY LOW-RANKED BLOG SOUL!

PLEASE RESTORE ME TO YOUR SEARCH ENGINE.

I feel like the last human standing in the detritus of T-2 robots after the Great War trying to get a Witness...and only a half-alive bot responds, saying "Are you spam? Are you spam? Are you spam?" over and over like a Dalek.

GOOGLE, PRITHEE LIBERATE THIS TROUBLED BLOGGING WIGHT! RESTORE THY LIEGE TO THY GOOD GRACES!

Art Sparker, thanks for your helpful suggest re Word Press.

I approved the comment but I know not whither it fell.

Sort of like the arrow in that old poem...


People, check out ArtSparker's great art on her site.

She's in my blogroll.

It's like having another Gorey, except alive, and she's her own artist, not a Gorey epigonus...but the level of inventiveness and the playfulness is as "spot on" as Gorey.

Google Doesn't Get My Sense of Humor

Google's bot crawlers apparently think I'm a porn site or something and killed the ability of writers, visual artists and others to find information on my blog through Google.

This is the much milder form of the Soviet gulag, I suppose.

I don't think I'll be writing a Solzhenitsyn-heavy novel about the experience.

But who knows.

Pain sensation varies greatly from person to person.

One man's athlete's foot is another man's testicular cancer.

I found the bot's compilation with complaints from everything to "Lithuanian Porn" (the name of a poem I wrote that has absolutely nothing to do with Lithuanian porn) to "gay boys in love" which is a YouTube video (non-pornographic) which depicts exactly that...two gay young guys having a good time running around Barcelona or someplace to references to "Amy Sedaris" (??).

I verified my blog, did the meta-tag thing and sent in my appeal (wait weeks they tell you and you WON'T get an individual answer, they say...well, their text tells you...you can't speak to a live human ever).

So they functionally killed my blog.

Sure, there are you few friends who are reading this, but the opportunity to meet new artists and discover new semblables through the joy of blog-connection is now beheaded. I was getting well over 300 hits many days and people were finding the artists they wanted to read about here. Those numbers plunged the moment Google pulled the plug (through their misunderstanding).

It would be more dramatic and I could rage, Lear-like, if I had been pseudo-morally vandalized by some amoral asshole, but I saw the report when I verified and it was clearly one of their bots. The inhuman critiqued my sense of humor. How like nature. I'm guessing when I passed the 100,000 mark it generated some sort of automatic check since it happened right around there.

Sure, I engage in the occasional prank....linking "hot free sex thumbs" to a UNICEF campaign to help dying children in Africa (for example) because I think that's a good wake up call.

I do not link to porn sites or sites which make money and don't believe I violated Google/Blogger's code of ethics. Maybe I have a weird sense of humor. But that's it. I'm sorry if I disappointed a few porn addicts. Hey, we used to shop at the same stores. I don't judge you. I just yanked your chain. And you like that, right? You're a porn addict!

I'm hoping they do the right thing and restore me to the search listings.

But it's making me think it's time to move on and set up elsewhere on the net.

And I don't mean Blogger.

Anybody have any suggestions for good free sites which have a good set-up and can host lots of writing, visual works, movies, etc and don't have stringent limit sizes or low convert-to-pay thresholds?



Tra la.

Sissy Spacek to Play Lorine Niedecker in Biopic

Sissy Spacek is lined up to play American poet Lorine Niedecker in a forthcoming biopic titled Life by Water.

Finnish-born director Karel Wialka says he was impressed with Spacek's performance as the mother of actress Charlize Theron's character in the movie North Country, which he had only seen recently, and made the overture.

Spacek was delighted and the director was pleasantly surprised to find Niedecker was one of Spacek's "lifetime literary loves."

Shooting begins in January, 2010.




BELIEVABLE LIES


Why is this lie believable?


1. Sissy Spacek does sort of look like Niedecker.

2. Poets love to believe that Hollywood will eventually get around to noticing all of them.

3. Karel Wialka is a dumb enough improvisation to sound like a director's name.

4. Life by Water is the sappy sort of title Hollywood (or a sappy indie director) would give the pic.

5. Niedecker has been dead long enough that somebody can exploit her without paying anybody much of anything.


Why is this lie unbelievable?


1. Sissy Spacek is too old to be in movies anymore. If she were a man, the situation might be different.

2. Lorine Niedecker didn't go anywhere or do anything but write some occasionally great poetry and suffer and occasionally giggle. This would make a silly movie.

3. I didn't mention a dragonfly-on-a-misty-lake-tiny boat-with-Niedecker-sitting-in- it death scene.

4. Charlize Theron would play Niedecker as she has probably already stepped over the "classic beauty to crone" precipice, which is somewhere around 38 according to Hollywood.

5. Directors are not born in Finland.



If you believed this lie upon first reading, SHAME on you. You are a naive soul and should be cudgeled mercilessly all the days of your life.

If you did NOT believe this lie, SHAME on you. You are a hardened cynical bastard or bitch who begrudges poets their ounce of posthumous microfame.

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "Why does every grocery line I GET IN always turn out to be the one that moves the slowest?" (See also list of LAMEST ASS-HUNT LINES EVER, where it has been #8 five years running.)

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "What's the problem?" (Usually rhetorical when spoken by bus drivers and taxi cab drivers. Occasionally rhetorical when employed by others. Unfortunately, this question is becoming increasingly rhetorical among police officers, congressmen and psychiatrists.)

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "Where were you when I made the world?" (Job getting faced by God.)

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "Tommy, can you hear me?" (The Who)


GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "Who am I? Why am I here?" (Some old guy in a Vice Presidential debate. I forget whom. I can think of no good reason why he was there. Nor, apparently, could America.)


GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "What the fuck!?" (Standard response of victim moments before being killed/devoured by alien/monster/unattractive being of an unusual sort)

That's Numberwang!

The best game show ever.

Ionesco + 1.42

That's NUMBERWANG!

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "What blowjob?" (Christina Aguilera)

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "What arson?" (Nero)

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

"Do you not believe God would let me have my cake and eat it too?"--a rather haughty and sated St. Augustine after the all-you-can-eat buffet of iniquities.

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?" (Gertrude Stein, dying words--still busily contemplating the paradox of grammar as both analyst and analysand as she exited the world.)

The Story of My Life

If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
- Gertrude Stein |

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "Well, did you think it was MY INTENTION to leave the fucking lemon meringue pie on the fucking kitchen island so that we could drive 112 fucking miles with you bitching about it 110 miles of those 112 miles?!?" (Milton Kotzwinkle, Perth Amboy, NJ)

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "Et tu, Brute?" (Caesar)

Great Rhetorical Questions of the Ages

GREAT RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: "Well did you think the apple just fell BY ITSELF, dickweed?" (Sir Isaac Newton)

A Culture Vulture Was Killed Today

Apparently it was an accident.

The creature was mistaken for another species and shot by a hunter.

Strange that the camouflaged hunter was in New York City.

Presumably his camouflage clothing resembled the storefronts of overpriced shops or bogus cultural institutions.

Game officials say "no worries," however, as the creatures are "hardly in danger of extinction."

"Frankly, it doesn't put the least bit of a crimp in my day," said one official, who declined to give his name.

"The beast was taken mid-Tweet," said another, who was responsible for cleaning up after the tragedy. "They might as well shut down that Twitter account right now. It's the respectful thing to do. I mean, if you consider bandwidth and all."

This Is A New Love

That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC America is addictive.

I just set my d.v.r. to snag all of them.

I particularly loved this Sherlock Holmes skit.



Here's Wiki on some recurring sketches.

I confess Numberwang is now my favorite game show ever.

Recurring sketches

Numberwang - a deliberately nonsensical game show, starring Robert Webb as the ebullient presenter, and two seemingly permanent contestants, Simon and Julie (Paterson Joseph and Olivia Coleman). The game itself involves calling out random numbers until the host declares "That's Numberwang!", although what constitutes a Numberwang or how it is achieved is never explained. Midway through the game, before the final "Wangernumb" round, the board the contestants are seated on is randomly rotated (an homage to the much-earlier BBC game show, Blankety Blank), briefly revealing a non sequitur scene, such as the birth of Jesus or two soldiers playing Russian roulette with a loaded pistol. Related sketches have included a German version presented by David Mitchell, a spinoff using words entitled Wordwang, a documentary on the history of the show, a trailer for a film called The Numberwang Code, and an advert showcasing a home version of the game (featuring a small pair of 400-sided dice and a 37 volume set of rulebooks).

The Quiz Broadcast - A television game show transmitted by the British Emergency Broadcasting System in the year 2013 some time after "The Event", a never-explained incident which led to the apocalypse approximately two years before. As "The Event" destroyed much knowledge of the previous society, many of the questions asked either have unknown answers or blatantly incorrect answers accepted as correct. Prizes can be won in the "Conveyor Belt Round" (in parody of The Generation Game), where contestants can win prizes by correctly recalling them after being presented them carried by staff (as no one knows how to operate the conveyor belt itself). Prizes in the round include fuel, food, tablets, various stones, items claimed to be unknown, and plush toys of "frightening animals." Other rounds have include the "Film Round" (where contestants try to guess what happened next in the only surviving video from before "The Event"), and "Sudden Death" (shortly after this round was announced, a contestant suddenly passed out). The broadcast contains continuing messages for viewers to "stay indoors".

Ted and Peter - A pair of alcoholic, chain-smoking snooker commentators, known for their absurd banter and dishevelled appearances. Ted is played by David Mitchell and Peter by Robert Webb. They seem more interested in swapping anecdotes about the players than covering the game at hand, and these exchanges are sometimes laced with homoerotic overtones, such as when Ted delivers a short monologue praising one competitors prettiness, causing Peter to ejaculate. In a later episode Peter comes out as gay, a decision he discusses with Ted, who admits to having been homophobic before meeting his colleague.

The Surprising Adventures of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar - A drunken, drug-addled tramp played by Robert Webb, who seems to be under the impression that he is a brilliant and intrepid Victorian detective, in the style of Sherlock Holmes. He and his companion Ginger - another derelict, played by David Mitchell, who serves as his Dr. Watson - commit various crimes (usually either theft or petty assault) whilst supposedly engaging in battle against the henchmen of their so-called "nemesis", a vague and undefined entity described simply as "some bastard who is presumably responsible". The sketch often ends with the pair being chased by somebody they've fleeced to the tune of Devil's Gallop. Although Sir Digby's past remains a mystery throughout the show, Ginger is provided with a certain amount of backstory. In one episode he alludes to having been sexually abused and repeatedly asphyxiated by his father, while in the third series we learn that his real name is Guy Pelly, and that he once had a wife and 12-year-old daughter whom he lost (and has since seemingly forgotten about) as a result of his severe alcoholism.

Big Talk - A debate show in the same vein as Question Time and hosted by the confrontational Raymond Terrific (Robert Webb), who loudly bullies his panel of so-called "boffins" into giving yes or no answers to huge social and philosophical questions (i.e. "is there a God?"). The bemused panel then try and reason with him by starting a sensible discussion, but never to any avail. In one episode Big Talk underwent a format experiment whereby, instead of the usual boffins, mindless 'celebrities' were brought on to discuss laughably small matters (i.e. "how's your day been?"); this new version was appropriately called Small Talk, and the embittered Raymond Terrific frequently voiced his disapproval of the change being foisted upon him throughout.

The Party Planners - A couple, played by Mitchell and Webb, discussing who to invite to their next party. The list is usually comprised of either historical figures or fictional characters, such as in one episode when they decide to ask Moneypenny along, but then worry that she may bring James Bond with her. The humour is derived from the way they sneer at the prospective guest's behaviour at previous parties; for instance, whilst deciding weather or not to invite the Scooby-Doo gang, they deride Shaggy Rogers' excessive eating habits and general cowardliness.

The British Broadcasting Corporation - An old fashioned black and white broadcast, in which characters talk about the wonders of the new medium of television, and how it enables people to see them talking to each other, or if it works like a telephone, but as 4 of the 5 televisions were in use at the centre, they were not sure if they were hearing through television or an open door.

Barry Crisp - Crisp (Mitchell) runs a range of attractions which are all unsafe, including charging £2 to jump off a cliff, or offering the chance to swim with a great white shark but with the shark inside the cage along with the diver. His middle class customer (Webb) assumes everything is "fine" because Barry has a sign, so it must be legitimate, and is seemingly oblivious to the obvious danger, always eventually agreeing to take part, much to Barry's surprise.

The Honeymoon's Over - Mitchell plays a rude, mean, condescending man who takes a variety of different jobs, in all of which he does his best to demean his customers (Webb and Colman) and make them feel uncomfortable and inferior. When Webb and Colman ask about the nice people they had seen in a previous visit Mitchell would always reply "She/He's gone, they're all gone, and we're back!" Jobs have included being a vicar, waiter and a tailor.

The Helivets - A pair of heroes clad in pink jumpsuits who claim they can rescue any pet in peril. A parody of TV shows following the Emergency Services.[7]
Lazy film/TV writers - In a parody of film and TV genres, two script writers, John Gibson (Webb) and Andrew Turner (Mitchell), can never be bothered to be original for their next project. Instead, they pick a genre, take its signature aspects, and put them together, to create something that is clearly a cheap cash-in on the genre. For example, in series 2 episode 3, they endeavored to write an "underdog" sport film about cricket despite knowing nothing about the sport.

Colin and Ray - Webb and Mitchell are co-workers in the same office, who have different jobs which tend to involve extraordinary plots. Colin works as a hostage negotiator, while Ray writes the plots to pornographic films.

Car boot sale - A car boot seller (Webb), amongst the normal tat, has unique items, such as the Holy Grail and the Wardrobe from the Chronicles of Narnia books, at ridiculously low prices.

Get Me Hennimore! - A parody of 1970s sitcoms, each episode featuring Hennimore (Webb) being given an important task by his boss (Mitchell) which always ends in disaster due to Hennimore's often understandable confusion as the items and rooms he must not mix up actually look identical. For example, in one episode he is told that a group of Korean chefs in Room 1 should not come into contact with a group of dog lovers in Room I, but the room signs get mixed up.

Food Advertisements - A series of parodies of some already heavily over-advertised foodstuffs (these aired in series 3). For example, a parody of Lucozade shows a runner drinking a bottle of 'Glucozade Port', the world's first alcoholic, isotonic drink or Cressps, which taste terrible despite the slogan Once you cressp you can't splessp whereas another advertises 'Mar-mitts' Marmite flavoured gloves that are 'completely unsuitable for human consumption' and finishes with Webb collapsing and Bachmann announcing "I think he's dead!"

The Car Man

was on OVATION tonight. It was this boringly slutty ballet. Men and women and men and men dance-fucked in a garage setting. Sans language. Some dimestore novel torrid plot involving murder and an innocent man blamed...the bad egg in a wife beater protected by his red-headed lover. Apparently it's an interpretation of Bizet's Carmen by choreographer Matthew Bourne: Ovation Blather. It was really stupid and the sort of thing OVATION keeps patting itself on the back for. The most predictable sexual moves were simply endowed with a fluency and sped up and this mock-coitus was supposed to be Instant Ballet the way you add water to make instant cococa. During a commercial break, they did a self-promotion where the network called itself SEXY the way a drunken middle age man might do in his own basement bar in a Cheever story. It made me pity OVATION even as I cursed it.

They also announced their intention to run that godawful John Adams opera again, The Death of Klinghoffer.

I like Nixon in China but the above is a piece of shit, and would get my vote for one of the worst things OVATION has ever run...and run...and run...talk about bathos...

I'm a Mamet fan and tried watching American Buffalo but couldn't get into that at all. I had never seen it nor read it, though I know the majority of his plays, and like a few of them quite a bit.

But it was something in his trademark Chicago stichomythia that was irritating the hell out of me. The actors (Dennis Frantz and Dustin Hoffman) were delivering it the only way you could deliver those lines (the right asshole way) but it all seemed so contrived and playlike, so annoyingly Pinterish (I'm not a fan) that the pawn shop looked like a stage set of a pawn shop rather than a pawn shop we're watching in a movie...it was as though it were a play cursed to remain a play.

Mamet has written plays which delight in being plays and will never be adapted into any other medium in any convincing manner (I'm thinking of works like Prairie du Chien) and one can respect those works.

But if it's not meant to be a movie, don't force it to be one. I suspect I would be just as dissatisfied with American Buffalo as a play.

It seems mired in an Ashcan stage aestheticism that emerged (and then died a natural death in the thirties) anyway.

Maybe I'm just in a shitty, non-receptive mood.

Not a great night for art that aspires.

I'll switch over to Forensic Files or one of the other murder shows.

I'd better stick with the homme moyen sensuel tonight.

Or is that homo moyen sensuel?

You Like You

You like people who are like you. You like people who reinforce your concept of yourself and help to do this by either expanding your concept of you or helping to curtail your sometimes galloping, even giddy concept of you; the latter of course must be done in a way that is not threatening...more like an ideological chuck under the chin than the rabbit punch any normal person would give you if they actually read you from the inside. You are aligned with a movement of people who seem to vaguely share similar aims in life with regard to aesthetics and very, very vaguely share similar aims in life with regard to ethics. Did I say very, very vaguely? Good. Of course, this all starts in kindergarten and I'm playing kindergarten cop by even mentioning what's so obvious here to everyone who is not you. But since you only really talk to people who are you, you miss this. Sometimes we pretend to be in love with your romance with you (we're bored; we're game) which does have just the slightest tinge of a puritanical side. That's where you pretend to rebuke yourself. By doing this you are also rebuking the multiple you of which you are composed. I don't need to add an "s" there. You like that part of you too. That's like The Lover You. In this, it proves that you are exactly like everyone else and this is why the ten thousand books of your closest intimates will not be read seventy-eight years from now. One or two of them will accidentally be read every few years. There will always be college theses that need tiny minotaurs. You might just do as a tiny minotaur. But there will be so many more of you worried about so many more of you. The proliferative you. It's a grammatical person that entered the language around the same time as capitalism. Don't worry. Even dead, you will still occupy the same socioeconomic niche (slightly privileged, with just a soupcon of delusional internationality) although of course it won't be you. You will be dead. So that you can be alive. I don't mean you. I mean you. You know what I mean. You in your numbers. You in the imaginary chairs by which you recognize one another. We have absolutely no idea who you are. Don't take that as a compliment. Although of course you will. Because what else could you do? But swarm all over yourself.

you wanted me

to watch True Blood with you but then you told me to fuck off because i kept laughing because the dialogue was so fucking unintentionally funny. it sounded as though it were written by eight year olds. and the fake fucking looks like epilepsy. hbo has done some okay shows but that's not one of them. what's the target audience anyway? goths in trailer parks? poor anna paquin. she probably felt like a heroin addict after the x men franchise dried up. enter this remora fish of a soap opera sucking on Twilight's anus. marthaville. the concept? southern gothic vampriana. it's niched like acidophilus milk. it's as much fun as an auto-immune disease. the gay vampires morally offend me almost as strongly as ronald reagan. an AA meeting is less depressing than this show. i bet there are five guys named josh who work on this show. and two jareds.

dear stalkee,

i have been in the places where you sleep. i know what your breath smells like the moment after you have left the bathroom. i have been in your dwelling moments after you have left it. your breath. it smells like pine needles where horses have slept in the night. i lingered over your prescription medicines. i had no idea you were so sick but i love you all the more. i switched some of the pills that look like each other. i wonder what that will do to your body. i turned on the t.v. to see what you had been watching. i cried when i realized you had no pets. i made breakfast and slept in your bed while you were at work. i traced some of your writing with your pen. i turned on your computer and i wrote something to you in the dust on the screen. i worry that you are dying. i google your name. i found the photograph behind the other photograph in the frame. who is that? your mother or a lover? i killed a fly and put it in the breast pocket of one of your shirts. it was a shirt that upset me because it looked like you wore it on another continent. why would you go to another continent. i only stole toys when i left. i wondered how good you were at figuring out what's missing in a room. like Find Waldo. except it's a felony. or is it a misdemeanor. ask google. do you laugh at the bing commercials. i hate them because they make fun of robots. lots of very nice people are robots. do you watch lifetime television for women? i think you are nice, soft and metrosexual. i think you would make a pretty girl. why don't you have pets. i didn't really cry. i lie a lot. later i went to big lots and told a stranger all about you. he got real concerned for you when i told him about all your terrible problems. he even offered to give me a ride but i think he might have been a serial killer. so i went home and thought some more about you. i wanted to leave an egg in a bowl but i didn't. because i know you do that sometimes and i knew it would fuck with your head. i did turn all the eggs upside down though. in your fridge. it felt right. it all feels right.

There Was a Mother

There was a mother lost in the mosh pit today.

Being Yoko

It could kill her. Asleep. Being Yoko has probably behind it semitones. If Yoko Ono. And Yoko Ono. Maybe Yoko Ono. You are suddenly filled. That doesn't lift you or you teach a course. But fooling is aware that much is clear. She is just waking is something that a lifetime can learn how to be. Her once was enough it was being there. It. She has already been crying while she sings and talks about it. What is writing outside of your body? Are you already too accustomed to the easy course to be as you say and or do. That is not a question. Music is like drinking water. The knowing. I heard her written and sung and couldn't decide. The leaving the earth or a frame you need too. Poor you. With hatred at a college it could be a pretty new name. (anybody.)

Let Me Tell You About My Mother

wings
on her leg
the Mother
left to stone
and earth.

*



when she was dying. decided not
to be a splendid
butterfly house
and now has made,
a You
you're balanced
because put stones
on your mother

*

from the splay
winking Make me

*


This is Zero Flutter
a walkway
in weirdness come see
this your right

Mother

*
Posted to post. grave. a child he comes
to it opens
a savior

a savior within a kitchen

*

tugs on iridescence
with your laugh
whorld
pinned to something

You are
behind the first book


*


the stone
you put on
my wings. iridesce

fly out of a hospital

room you laugh as you morph

whorld
interest only

you told me

the world

*


you have caught me
you horrify me
with the comments
from your wings

Some Kids

Some kids with cancer still hate Yoko Ono.

Yoko Ono

is aware that she is Yoko Ono whether she is just waking up, drinking water or avoiding flows of traffic that could kill her. Maybe not when she is asleep. Being Yoko Ono is something that has probably taken a lifetime to learn how to do. I heard her on Sirius radio the other day and I tried to hear behind her tones if she knew she was Yoko Ono, and sure enough it was there. The knowing. I heard it. She has already written and sung her death song, and that's what she was talking about on Sirius: she said you can her her crying while she sings it although the song's title talks about leaving the earth smiling. What is this crap about, you ask yourself or the air now. You are suddenly filled with hatred at writing that doesn't lift you outside of your body or a frame you are already too accustomed to. Poor you. There is a college where they teach a course called "HATING YOKO ONO." They say it's a pretty easy course to ace, but still not as easy a "MUSIC APPRECIATION" even though this has a new name (which isn't really fooling anybody).

A Butterfly Died

The chart at the end of its hospital bed said: ZERO FLUTTER

Zero Flutter

You are a splendid
butterfly a child has caught
and put stones
on both its wings
on the walkway
in weirdness
behind the house
and now he comes
to get his mother
from the kitchen,
tugs on her leg
to come see
this first book
he has made,
how it opens
to be read
how you splay
winking iridescence
with your left stone
and your right stone
Look at You
you're balanced
as a savior
you horrify me
you make me laugh
pinned to the earth.

This is something

I decided not to post.

I Can't Believe

one night I was so drunk I asked Jason Mraz to pay for my sex change operation on his blog. This was left as a comment. The next day I didn't remember I did this but I accidentally found out I did. Then I sort of remembered and I got this sort of chill in my spine, as though I had threatened to assassinate the president in a public way...or something irrevocable like that anyway. I didn't want a sex change the next day. Or the day after that. It was just something that seemed funny at the time, asking a music celebrity for sex change money. Drunks think of all sorts of escape plans that make no sense. Many of them die when these imaginary parachutes don't open. I would like to say that was when I hit bottom, but that would be not exactly true. You can't hit bottom on a blog, can you? I deleted the comment. I hope Jason Mraz didn't see it. Probably he was in Thailand or India and probably doesn't read his comments anyway unless there is a mini showing a hot chick. And probably even if he did it sounded like your typical stupid blogger joke. So I'm probably fine. I don't drink anymore. And I don't ask celebrities for sex change dinero. Since it's so easy to get a sex change now in Asia there are probably people who actually have done it on a drunken whim. What would I do with all this lovely gorilla fur anyway? Donate it to kids with cancer? I think I was just fascinated with how they take all that skin down there and invert it like a Halloween mask to make female genitalia. I think I'm attracted to the idea of it the way you can't really resist Silly-Putty or Playdoh if somebody puts it in your hands. Especially if you are very drunk at the time.

I Don't

have any more labels. Blogger took all my labels. They said you can only have 2,000 labels and that's it. They also stopped my profile counter a long time ago. I feel this is a trend in my life. Things are being chopped off. Procrustean is a big word. It's probably not really needed. A word like that. I can just say life is lopping things off. Meanings. Possibilities. I can't label this post. There is no way for me to tell you what it is about. You'll just have to figure it out. Isn't that terrifying? I can't strew search engine bread crumbs anymore. It's over but still there is talking. It's just like a funeral. Somebody bake a ham.

Sina Queyras

is the name of a poet.

the women who were musicans at auschwitz

she said they had been playing an evening program of classical music for the sick and dying who had been made to sit in chairs. the one admitted she knew this was just another form of torture. that when she had been sitting in those chairs (before being selected to play) she hated it. it wasn't an anodyne at all. although conceivably it might have momentarily transported some. she allowed. and that evening a woman got up and ran and threw herself against the electric fence. and she said of course that troubled her but that she couldn't dwell too deeply on the causal link between the music she was playing and the actions of that woman. this was not said without empathy but with a sense of the grammatical requirements of sanity.