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May 2004
 05.31.2004 |
In my country, alas, movies are the plot—all the really sexy stuff for sale
Rewind: words may be repeated, like light sparkling water, a life cannot
Can you be serious about anything if anything can be said to words?
Voice is one of the body's hollows, who finds one knows
What do you do as the mouth fills with time?
Dude, I word here, weird ear for the flesh eye
| 05.30.2004 |
Cherries, and the first corn & cantalope in the market—Sumer is icumen in
Cocktail ice clinks in the glass—That same old voodoo follows me about
Late Spring: The rhythm will keep me awake, changing — Robert Hass
What does whose body want? — Rosmarie Waldrop
| 05.29.2004 |
Light is a knife slicing into the hidden
Things we fall into: sin, silence, sleep, error, despair, debt, love
Turning waking time into words is one kind of work
Turning dreams to words another
That space and grammar correspond, comes out in the logos of dreams
That time and being mix like oil and water is shown by death
| 05.28.2004 |
God's heartache: exiled to the beach each dawn with dogs & fishermen
His pants got sandy, his patience waned, the Book of Job disappeared
Venus born of sea foam, of cast-away castration, undulates, undulates
Of all the unkind cuts, none agitates so amorously
Shall I declare you in a stunning way, while I yet breathe and see?
The truth is: love me Fancypants, a heart-attack's coming
| 05.27.2004 |
Now they have freedom to tumble into freefall
The hollows of the body stay dark, accepting fate freely
Good fortune, bad fortune, outrageous fortune—fat chance!
Fortuna and fortis—we pray for courage in a fort of good luck
Chance and strength—fraternal twins or Cain and Abel
The soul is drawn and quartered by the brave flesh
From out of distance comes a crushing strength (call it fate?)
You can't out wit, out run, or out live it—no place offers safety
He went underground, then rose to heaven—married hollow to distance
The Holy Ghost is easy, Father and Son are the hard ones
Light falls, death extends as far
Attracted to purpose by the gravity of limit—so blatantly valiant
Even light needs time
Let there be time
| 05.26.2004 |
Omniscience narrates acts too farfetched to ever happen
Vengeance surmounts an inner perimeter and rages
Everyday he went to work in need of other work
He took the liberty of selling his soul, and paid dearly
It began: If we do, will you suspect me tomorrow?
Had it been otherwise, whose wisdom might have triumphed?
We were on the right track and everything—then this
All this without Mom—and you still must doubt, you must!
Omissions are not accidental, you know we know their worth
The space thickened with ideas, congealed around an absence
| 05.25.2004 |
Shape caresses (and imprisons); death lacks shape
Shape is how you are—body, mind, spirit
The shape of yearning is expressed on shelves in the market
The shape of yearning is also expressed in music and myth
A raffish emphasis made the world seem tawdry
Lexically speaking, the plan was baubles
The long unraveling of purpose was popular on TV
Explanations hinged on experiences that were not forthcoming
Sooner or later, some things never turn up
A single word never speaks only for itself
| 05.24.2004 |
Metaphor's his formal content—layered light dives, surfaces, swims, glows
Metaphor—step out of identity toward difference, toward healing
A mind gets trapped like a bug bumping glass
Can't cross over, can't carry—dream of waves lapping fades away
| 05.23.2004 |
"Entire state plunged into darkness after collapse of super grid"
"The last word he pronounced was—your name" — Conrad
05.22.2004
Earth grows darker; the universe flies apart
The pull of dark matter empties the heavens
| 05.21.2004 |
Are we embedded in language, or is it embedded in us?
Words and their meanings displace "me" even as I speak them
We crave stimulation while lacking much perspective
Contemplation threads a life through time's mindless repetitions
| 05.20.2004 |
She knows, and you know, we all know, really—it's just hard to say
Two women laugh over at the bar; now, working on drink #2, they weep
Well, she smiled, I think of us all as former (and future) food
To be brutally honest, when he says "make no mistake," I wish him dead
| 05.19.2004 |
At the grave, we talk and sing and emptiness listens
As far as we know, no one thinks of everything—so music holds silence
| 05.18.2004 |
Accident: slicing it open I slipped and took some fingertip
On purpose: a spasm of joy brimmed and warned you
By the time he changed his mind it was too late to warn her
Bloody Hell was his limp rejoinder
Things of the world represent "things" of an "inner self"
You can't be serious—we are particulars of a "living past"
His problem: craves the familiar, laughs after orgasm
When I finish this work, I'll be able to rejoin her
It isn't really work, is it, just some fun we're having?
How come living it I'm clueless, only later it's a story?
You be careful (the world's getting darker) humor's tricky
Speaking of tricky (Hermes not Dick) this is where our story begins
I bumped into her by accident, but we worked at the rest
It was, to tell the truth, the most fun I've had in my life
| 05.17.2004 |
Purity is pale; mind affirms
Time is fabulation; flesh creates
Feral purr from the black cat as a mouse squirms in her mouth
Shelled oysters and chilled gin, clear liquids swallowed quick
| 05.16.2004 |
Stories are not about stasis, but they cannot start without it
More curious about the dead than the unconceived
Blue zone where clouds emerge—what place is that?
Prayer is what part of speech, sin what part of freedom?
Death transmutes to invulnerable purity
Eternity is always taking place
She loved the light in the columbarium
I do want to survive, but not only
To death: I will nourish my soul and await you
I am amazed there is no reason to love life
Come along my familiar—my unrepeating present
Not only was I happy, all of us were happy
To the past: I thought things would be different by now
I am sure bravery begins in fear—and ends there too
| 05.15.2004 |
So much unfamiliarity, and much more likeness, when words were new
The first gods—buried under millennia and words—what were they like?
Our heaven has more freedom, more gold, more girls
The enemy's fanaticism binds and blinds us to our sins
| 05.14.2004 |
You shouldn't have to live other lives inside this one
Hiding in plain sight, a story is beginning in the leaves
Spoken, the story leaves more unproclaimed than said
Without the story—its essential lie—truth is hard to hold
A new absence shoulders in, and requires imagination
Were they lost, did they wander to find me, these demands?
Let me start over in the middle, or maybe let the middle be the end
You stand in the road and watch, mouth open, knowing the moment
At last, restive and spent, I am given control
Make sense, or don't, but sing at least
I can't give you anything but love day in and day out baby
I've inflected it to you, I hope it takes you by surprise
It's not the agony I mind, it's the intermittent ecstasies
People I love disappear faster and faster—it's out of control
| 05.13.2004 |
The juice in the little things you do
Humans and their tricks, and their hopes, their plans—who knows?
The midnight birdsong says something's ready
Things that can be done only in moonlight
| 05.12.2004 |
Blue: goes forever, joy, joy; things disappear in it; it too flames and flowers
Brown: dense with gravity; everything turns into it; dense with life
When did humans first personify light?
Though it is, it seldom seems strange that we compare ourselves to light
05.11.2004
You hear ocean's music and know, at last, it's reaching a limit
You die once—unlike being born, you anticipate it
Rules for making love? Who believes they exist?
No rules shape it—it is this and that, not about this and that
| 05.10.2004 |
If a season takes you by surprise, some god is near
If the light takes you by surprise, you've got another chance
Suddenly gone you leave everything as it was—and everything's changed
I don't believe this world will go on—a world, yes, but not this
| 05.09.2004 |
If we anticipated our birth, would we also fear it?
The sun left you and the past left and the you left you at last
| 05.08.2004 |
You can only have it while you sleep, only know it on waking
Unlike waking events, no dream happens at the wrong time
The dream sees around the corner, sees the dark side of the moon
Something surges in the soul, not words—more searing
| 05.07.2004 |
Narrative is mask; make a thing without using a mask
What was created was set free to be only itself
Time sees all and wants to rest in you
So seeing needed a soul? You think?
"Do nothing in secret; Time sees & hears all, and discloses all"—Sophocles
No value in dying with a secret, even mindless time knows this
| 05.06.2004 |
"I muse upon my country's ills"—Melville, Misgivings, 1860
Tyranny be damned, violence is democratized
It's easy to do bad stuff; it happens near you
It's costly to turn down the heart . . . or hype it up
Also want to write: costly to turn down the world . . . or hype it up
The world is the heart of the matter, even if words and desire fail
So, hours, years of sleepless nights for this? This!
Well, she shrugged, now I know how, sort of even when, the end will be
| 05.05.2004 |
I had priorities, every day I had my work waiting, my before before
In no time a line of words queued up, but the clerk had gone on break
The sound of an image in the eye's rivery continuum
The glass world, misunderstood, made from the box of words
Seasonal things bloom and blow indoors to rival sun and storm
I taste the words, then pick and choose what might work
A bottle of orange dish liquid stole the morning kitchen window light
"Isn't that the artist's best joy, to control light?"—Dorothea Tanning
Summer light arrives, we use it after dinner, control it with a garden
Two gods pandemic: order, the sweet, the worker; chaos, the greater
| 05.04.2004 |
The past is fragments, the present continuous, the stomach churns
Down go torrents, crashing in gorges . . .
| 05.03.2004 |
A dream is an experience you never knew you had in you
Salt in the blood and those secret sounds in surf, interoperate
This room smells of lilacs, the knotty pine paneling brings back 1962
I was 13, in a new mountain place, when I saw my first "quaking" aspen
| 05.02.2004 |
"My Triumph lasted till the Drums//Had left the Dead alone"—Dickinson
"The impetuous ship in bafflement went down"—Melville
You know some details of the ocean, out beyond the gate, telling about time
Low tide down in the mud flats, water sucked out, wrinkled like old skin
We know nothing but time, yet we never know what's coming
One of those days you believe you must reinvent your whole self to go on
Those were not dreams worth dreaming—too much truth in them
Before it's gone, I'd like to have it once more—care free
Why the game endures: you can be safe; you can go home; you can win
The child could not write stories, but drew elaborate pictures
| 05.01.2004 |
Dubya's May Day—war melts down!
Mission Accomplished—First Anniversary Edition, get your WMD's here!
Whopper of mass deception
Wrought by monomaniacal delusion
What moral dilemma?
We're making dollars!
White House malaprop droid
World's most dangerous?
Woodward's malleable dunce
What a micturating dingus!
Washington's magisterial dementoes
Warbling monkey deputies
Wag my dog
Wash Moloch's donkey
Whittles men down
Wives mark days
Watch more die
Weep Mom & Dad
"The forces of good and the forces of evil are stuck . . .
I am going to bomb your whole dirty world out from under you"—Alan Dugan
"All that is solid melts into air
All that is holy is profaned"—Marx and Engels
"While you are not safe I am not safe"—Allen Ginsberg
Mayday . . . mayday . . . mayday . . .
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