Friday, October 04, 2002 :::
 
eden2000s
Registered User
(8/17/02 10:38:53 am)
Reply You Know How To Walk
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You fill the mind
with walking
and opportunities
for walking.
There you are
stumbling on sidewalks,
still managing to
weigh your steps.

Your arms hardly
leave the side.
Legs cut the air
like dull scissors.
Eyes push the sky
to where it's supposed to be--
between reaching
and holding on.

il poet paul
Registered User
(8/17/02 10:52:31 am)
Reply
ezSupporter
Re: You Know How To Walk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
good pome eden.

this is just my opinion on how the poem might work better...not that it counts, but it might offer insights that I can not explain.

You fill this mind
with walking,
opportunities
for walking.

You are stumbling
on sidewalks,
still managing to
weigh your steps

your arms hardly
leave their side.

Legs cut air
like dull scissors.

Eyes push the sky
to where it's supposed to be—

caught between reaching
and holding on.


the last four lines are amazing and i'll probably remember them for the remainder of my day, truly a sign of good poetry.

thanks for sharing.

-paul

Edited by: il poet paul at: 8/17/02 11:00:36 am

lynz
Unregistered User
(8/17/02 10:17:06 pm)
Reply it plods
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
it has the rhythm of plodding, but that seems unconscious. walk, plod, the whole dull scissors thing, gives me this picture of head down push, even as the walker looks skyward. vera vera good.

i see this person.

thewhitetree
Registered User
(8/18/02 7:13:37 am)
Reply Re: You Know How To Walk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Good short lines - perfect for the pace you want.

dull scissors, I like that.

t

eden2000s
Registered User
(8/18/02 9:27:01 pm)
Reply Re: You Know How To Walk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul, thanks for your edit. I think though that "this mind" is not what I wanted. Makes it sound like there is another person involved. glad you liked the last four lines. Thanks.

lynze, plodding? I guess..yes, pretty unconscious. I guess this poem is about effort more than about anything else.

tara, thanks...Glad you liked the dull scissors.

regards

eden
PoetrySz


Unregistered User
(8/21/02 2:30:29 pm)
Reply You walk to know how
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fill the mind
with walking
and opportunities
walking.
There you are
stumbling
on sidewalks,
still managing to
weigh your steps.

Your arms hardly
leave
Legs cut the air
dull scissors
Eyes push the sky
to where it's supposed to be--
between reaching
and
holding.


::: posted by hiccup at 2:29 PM


 
anders
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 5:33:31 am)
Reply haiku
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My life as a thief


dedicated to Lisa for all she has done for me



1.


My life as a thief began the day I was flying from
Philadelphia to Portland and realized that I’d left a
bunch of my writing on the printer in the secretary
cubicle. This was the lengthy poem I had written
about fucking the secretary, which I’d made up just
for the hell of it to entertain myself one late
Thursday night when I finally finished some work
assignments that had been dragging along and tired
and with nothing to do, I did not want leave the
office and go back to my apartment that was even
more tired, even more full of nothing-to-do. I
figured the secretary must have read what I’d written
by now (11:00 Central Time so noon Eastern) since
she was an inquisitive gossip and always sneaked
through everyone’s mail opening to see what it said.
Plus she was in her 60s and I just did not see how
she’d really be able to understand the aesthetic
purpose, the playful irony, of those Ginsbergian
stanzas that went something like this (I can never
remember my poems, or anything I wrote; however
my mind can recall and playback perfectly almost
the entire album Physical Graffiti) . . . anyway
it was full of stuff more or less like:

Ach she said her false teeth disengaging
from the roof of her mouth . . .

Well, OK, it was stupid. But what I realized, with a
bright heat of shame and stupidity, was that well
shit, I could never go back there now, couldn’t show
my face around the office . . .

At this juncture in my life, I had approximately
$5000 in my checking account and oh maybe
another $5000 in credit on my credit cards and lines
of credit. Now I also had maybe $10,000 in school
loan debts, $6000 in credit card debts, etc., not to
mention the alimony payments to my ex-wife Macy,
but obviously I would have to dodge those. There is
a moral obligation to pay those things back so long
as you’re moral. But once, for whatever reason, the
weirdities of life have stuck you outside of the moral
sphere, well, you can’t be moral can you? So I
figured, well, the loan entity, the bank in some subtle
and disseminated way, would ache (like a minor
backache along its giant spine) from the loss (like
one black gap in an ivory, million-teethed smile) . . .
now Macy would certainly suffer, would have to
turn more to her parents or turn to a job . . . . that
gets added to my bad karma if I ever return to the
moral sphere.

The first thing to do was to cash out all my accounts
before I couldn’t. When the plane touched down at
O’Hare on its way westward, I found a bank teller
machine in the lobby and straightforwardly typed in
“10,000” asking withdrawal. I found out there was
this daily limit thingie on how much cash you could
withdraw . . . I thought about returning to Statesville
where I lived and going to the bank and getting it
done via a real live teller, I guess next Monday (this
day being a Friday). But then I figured, well, why
not just stay in a fleabag hotel and go down to a
teller machine and withdraw like $200/day until it all
runs out? As I considered this, sipping on my pint
glass of Bud at the airport bar, I noticed how, outside
the window, black men in earmuffs walked rapidly
to and fro and got into small stubby tractors and
pulled long choo-choo rows of luggage racks . . . a
bird zipped by its form distorted where it went
behind the exhaust plume coming out the pitch-black
engine holes of a plane . . . flat midday light. The
cheap hotel seemed like a good idea.

I forgot to mention my family. Everyone has one of
these sticky networks: a spiderweb of loving
sustenance that turns into a guilt that really must
make you other to yourself if you are to
survive. My family web at this time consisted of
my Mom, my Dad, my sister, my brother, and my
God. Of course I’d been living away from my folks
for oh maybe 20 years, being a middle-aged tax
analyst and all; but they had never know of my inner
moral tumults, my spiritual desperations, my secret
literary longings, and my final professional
dissolution committed at the hands of that sneaky
60-something secretary whom I just knew had
to be leafing through my sordid poem right now,
taking it upstairs to show to the receptionist . . .
maybe showing the managing partner, and what
would she say? “He has been acting strangely
lately” . . . “I’m concerned for his mental health” . .
. . “oh dear I feel so violated . . .”

Or maybe she just silently coldly put it in my In-Box,
without telling a soul . . . but still, it would be
impermissible for me to go back there . . . too dumb,
too stupid! . . . .

In any event, my folks would panic, when they heard
. . . they’d probably call the cops, start a missing
person file . . . a real heartache . . . and their nascent
golden years had so far been so placid, with me
safely tucked away in my analyst job, my sister
married, my brother stable, their own health OK . . .
I guess I’d have to call them. So I finished my beer
and went to the airport payphone and realized I had
my cellphone and realized I’d never be paying the
cell bill again and I dialed their number and my
father picked up and I hung up deciding to call them
later when I knew they were asleep and leave a
message explaining I was taking some time off from
work, a leave of absence, I’d gotten some money
saved up and well a stupid thing happened at the
office, my christian secretary saw an experimental
poem I was writing, and well it was a good time
anyway to leave, so not to worry about me and I’d be
in touch . . .

It was almost time for my connection to Portland and
so I lugged my backpack and my suitcase to the gate
thinking suddenly what about my books my
clothes in Statesville and decided that I guessed
that when I had gotten in to Portland I’d hole up in
some nice little fleabag hotel with soaps with silver
wrappers with pink flowers on them and a cable TV
and brown stains in the white sink and at that time
I’d decide maybe to what, buy a cheap used car and
drive back to Statesville? But I couldn’t even really
afford that could I? And at the ticket counter at the
gate I asked the ticket lady if I could switch my
ticket to Portland to one back home . . .

Then I felt the delicious sweetness of life, its sadness,
its being-in-time, its sense of closing . . . how much
did I want to do to prolong, extend out, delay, the
date when my cash ran out and things got too rough
and I had to do something? But I did want my books
from Statesville and my clothes, and a few other
things like my toothbrush, and to see it one last time
knowing this was the last, so it seemed like the right
thing . . . and they were able to fix up my ticket and
fly me back there.



2. Comfort with pain

There’s something hopeless about a dead bird.
Unlike say a dead caterpillar, dead skunk. No, not
unlike. There’s something hopeless everywhere.
There’s always something inside their dying
gestures, frozen stiffened into the dead claw, mouth,
that speaks of the home they were going to, maybe
about to get to, maybe that onion-smelling kitchen
doorway up the road where the dog had lived, where
the gray-haired woman with flabby underelbows cut
and diced onions, tomatoes, plantains, potatoes and
made her famous stew . . . . maybe a new nest right
there behind the pine tree . . . where the bird was
flying back to . . . you can even see this in the dead
tent caterpillar in the way its back curls and in the
detached clench of its suck-feet in a green row . . .

That’s sort of what Statesville felt like, driving back
in. Would I ever see this town again? I doubted it.
So here, one last time, let us look at the spread-out
landscape of my life, my personal history, like the
growth rings of a tree split open. I found my car in
the airport garage and paid the sad cashier at the exit
gate and wheeled back up the ramp onto the highway
and exited back into the visible memories of my
youth still there.

It’s funny how the strip mall had shrunk, over the
years, like wood drying and cracking and growing
smaller, as I aged. When I was 10 years old how
sweeping and big it seemed, what a long slow
tortuous drive from home to the mall . . . now it
seemed small dried and shrunken – the water, the
life, had seeped out of it. Well, North Carolina
summers will do that to you.

They had a new grocery store, the Fresh Market . . .
all light classical music piping in at the corners and
dim sweet lighting and Mexican tile floors and
hanging ferns and musk-roses as you walk in and
imported cheeses and blue-shelled expensive
lobsters . . . but I could still remember the echoes of
the Food Lion that used to be there, and let’s see, the
Vickie’s Stationers that used to be there before that .
. . did these echoes corrode the substantiality, the
reality, of the new store, or did they just endow it
with a sad, dark-glowing reality . . .

La Hacienda Mexican Restaurant was still there, with
the funny arched alcoves, the little burbly fountain in
the “wait to be seated” area, the graybrown refried
beans drying and cracking in the heavy brown
ceramic plates . . .

And behind and off to the side where the bushes start,
Romeo’s Pizza Restaurant, with the red and green
diamond-shaped windows and red plastic tumblers,
mildly greasy . . .

Why this fetishistic recitation of places? Did I think
it would come to something? Oh gosh, not really . . .
but these were the scenes of my youth (like the
colored cardboard stage-sets of old elementary
school plays) . . .

I drove up to my apartment complex and got out and
checked the mail. A bill from Duke Power, a bill
from Sprint, a mailer from a congressman, a flyer for
a special at J.C. Penney . . . I jogged up the white
concrete steps, 2d floor, 3d floor, past the neighbor’s
apartment the door cracked rap music coming out . .
. went into my place and thought to myself, what do
I need?

Now I started to feel the boredom of ongoing life, its
mere continuance, its sinking . . . I packed up my
toothbrush, I spent a long afternoon cross-legged on
the floor of my bedroom looking through my books
deciding which ones to take which to dump, firm in
my mind that I was not taking much, only what
would fit in the back of my ’84 Corvette, under the
glass hatchback . . . which wasn’t much in fact
almost nothing when you considered the space the
clothes took up . . . finally I decided on a few –
Alan Watts, Lu Chi, Li Po, my beloved Nietzsche,
Simone Weil, Wittgenstein . . . a few old notebooks .
. . and left the rest there in the apartment . . . this was
my first real death, in the long sequence of deaths I
was now commencing . . . took one last look
through the kitchen . . . the tiny blue vase on the sill
above the sink, with a dried dead cornflower sprout
there dangling . . . two Coors in the fridge (that was
my second real death, leaving 2 beers behind) . . .
slung the bags and stuff into the car, looked one
more time long and hard at the brick-dust-colored
sky that final Carolina dusk in August . . . and drove
off. Then realized shit what about the money,
went back and spent a long sad weekend like a ghost
walking through my old life in that town, waiting for
Monday when I could go in at the bank and take out
all my money.

That Saturday night, I went out to Toko’s Sports Bar
one last time . . . this was a cedar-sided windowless
air conditioned big-screen TV’ed place about two
miles down the street. When you’re saying farewell
to things, seeing them for what you surmise is the
last time, there is an air of heightened existence,
which is nonexistence – a weird feeling of there
but not there that seeps into your fingertips . . .
that night Mindy was tending bar. She was oh
maybe 24 years old, part-time student down at
Community Tech, no boyfriend that I knew of, I
always tried to make her. So I walked in at 10 p.m.
with my hair as full-looking as I could make it and
my contacts in and my dark blue shirt and black
pants and sat there at the bar and exhaled loudly
since there was Leopold and we could say hi. I said
hi to Leo and he swung one pale-skinned gray-edged
hand out and we shook hands and he instinctively
wiped using his shirtsleeve with an upward motion
up from his chin with its dripdrop of sweat to his

nose to his brow, an automatic gesture bred by all
-day shifts working at the lumber yard at Lowes and
when he wasn’t doing that, working on the cars him
and his “posse” bought at the Spartanburg Auto
Auction down in S.C. and brought up and rehabbed
and polished up in the open double-garage behind
his doublewide trailer and they sat there for half the
night sipping Dickel and smoking weed and
watching the self-mutilating mosquitoes and moths
batting against the garage lamp behind its chicken
-wire holder. I sat out there once, or twice, when I
was looking at the Corvette or signing the title for
the Vette or stopping back by to score a little weed
or maybe stopping by once to shoot the shit, sitting
there noting with pleasure the gasoline taste of
Dickel and ice cubes and the slow lights coming on
here and there among the spread-out trailers of the
sleepy park, insects starting in the hedges.

These were the sorts of things I was giving up, I
figured, as I sat there in the forgiving dark light of
Toko’s, where a photo of Toko himself smiled down
from up on the wall arm around the shoulder of Dale
Jarrett, a fat happy guy evidently, there in his Izod
short-sleeve . . . pretty good golfer I bet . . . probably
a red vein stood out on his forehead when he fucked
mistresses . . . maybe even whores . . . according to
Leo they had “car auction whores” down in
Spartanburg . . . some of the them the same girls
you saw in the Spartanburg Auto Auction calendar
they had, actually, hanging there right next to Toko
. . . lessee, August’s girl is Cleo . . . a sweet
honeylimbed slender African-American woman . . .
Mindy walked across her holding the bar phone
talking apparently to her cousin again, the dealer . . .
as she strode down to the far end of the bar bending
over to adjust a toe ring I got a good glimpse of her
free white splaying thighs there . . . like an ice skater
girl’s . . . splaying out then subtly in again right at
the end, right before the panties . . .

Leo looked back at me at the same time I looked back
at him and silently motioned, “whew.” The problem
with girls like Mindy is you couldn’t engage them,
they had no apparent metaphysical flaws, no cracks
to come in through, no what-ifs, speculations . . . you
couldn’t hardly even tell what their dream
-constellations were, so how could you try to star
there? No, her dreams were probably I guess Doc
Martens, I guess pretty earrings with lime-green
gemstones, I guess those model boys in the giant
posters at The Gap . . . or the ones with the pagers or
cellphones clung on their belts and their loose shirts
and tight pants and short-cut hair and square regular
-boned faces and that pure, balloon-like fungibility
and anonymity of the people ten years below your
age group once you’ve gotten ten years above them .
. . and here they started to come in now, the college
boys and young professionals and cellphone
distributor sales reps and home mortgage specialists
and in-between-jobs and good-old-boys but all so
curiously corporatized, sort of co-opted, so
thoroughly bought-into the national myths, look at
them, so dog-gonned enthusiastic about the
Red Sox/Yankees game or the Sony 200 down at
Charlotte Motor Speedway or the colorful guffawing
to-and-fro of Greg Gumbel and Pat O’Brien on
ESPN At-The-Half . . . how do you talk to
these people? These men with their beady or even
soulful eyes, bright or even battered smiles, but
when you try to say there, when you try to say
– “What is the soul of us?” or “the beauty of this
evening . . .” or “Mindy seems so desperate” or
“from clouds they extracted gods, the greeks,
Heraclitus” what you get back is blank stares and
“huh whut?”s and but no, not to worry, a second or
two later the score flashes up or Mindy shouts or the
pager goes off and it’s all distracted, it’s all forgotten
again . . .

Well these nights always ended the same way . . .
walking back over the already-dewed grass across to
my apartment, oh maybe 2 a.m., one querelous light
still on among all the units, shadows of two moving,
the spatting too-young couple . . . and I’d open my
unit door and duck past the kitchen and not taking
any clothes off except for my shoes jump into my
bed asprawl with oblivion and peaceful and readily
giving up what I knew would be given back to me,
my daylit life . . .

But this night, Mindy spun a little different, on her
delicate terse tennis-player ankles with those ball-on
-the-back socks cut under the ankles, innocent as
pigeons . . . evidently having a fight on the bar phone
. . . and then seeing a customer needed it to dial a cab
she thunked it down loudly onto the bar counter and
asked me “do you need another beer?” pointing at
the empty glass actually not mine then “excuse me, a
Jack Daniels” pointing at my glass all undone and
disoriented and suddenly in a way I’d never seen
before unmasked, loosened, and I said “yes” and “so
tell me what was that all about?” hoping finally at
last to lodge the metaphysical ax against her ice face
and crack the lacquer . . . miracle of miracles she
says (it being quite busy, 1 a.m. now but Beata the
spanish girl now also helping back of the bar, so she
could lay off some) “you really wanna know?” not
looking at me, quite wistful, clearly wounded, and
she draws up the little bar stool they got over on that
side of the counter and slouches and gets out a
cigarette which I light for her and says “he’s just a
bastard. He knows I need him. That’s why he does
this. He knows it hurts me. I can hear the dance
floor in back of him I know what club he’s at” . . .

-- She was talking about her “on again off again,” her
“husband sort of”, Ricky or Ricco, I couldn’t quite
tell, and the rent they split that he never paid, and I
could semblance the rest, imagine it in my head (it’s
everybody’s story) – the frictioned evenings when
she had no need and he had a need and he wanted to
fuck her anyways . . . the horror and boredom of
standing up walking away from Nightline or
Letterman and staring at the bright-lit kitchen or the
night outside the window and thinking, feeling the
“this is it” of life . . . . hopelessness of the smell of
the cuffs of his pants when he comes home from the
Tyson plant . . . the sweat and angst that gathers
under the disposable plastic gloves you put on for
each new “may I help you?” working at Subway . . .
his lingering over the trailer for Pamela Anderson’s
new show on Fox, his actual hesitation, visible,
ridiculous, when she said “you want I get falsies!?”

“There was a writer, Jack Kerouac, had a name for all
those feelings, he called it ‘Beat’” I said.
Surprisingly instead of the cow-shot-in-head
blankness to be interrupted by loud flash on the
bigscreen bar TV or pager buzzing or whatever . . .
instead of that, she actually thought for a second,
doing that thing you do when you’re a girl smoking a
cigarette and you twist your lips off to one side to
blow the smoke out-and-away . . .

“I read Kerouac in high school. ‘On the Way’ or
something . . . ?” nudging the smoke away again
and suddenly shifting and staring at me quizzically
her brow knotted under the delicate, curled,
descended, spiced blonde hair.

“Yeah, that’s right” I said, “a lot of my poems are
influenced by him, when I’m not flying around
seeing clients.” As she absorbed that and, with
growing incredulity, I actually started to see the
wheels spinning, the vague, the rumorous, the “what
he’s a lawyer or something?” inside her mind, I also
added “yeah and I’m actually thinking of living out
part of his life.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve saved up some money, and I’m bored
with the job, and I was thinking of just taking my
Corvette” (micropause to let that sink in, she not
knowing it only cost me 8 grand, got it in decayed
shape from the Auto Auction) “and money and
heading West, y’know . . . drive across country,
which I’ve never done but I want to, and take my
laptop, and just stay in cheap hotels and absorb the
cities and deserts and stuff and finally finish my
book. . . .”

“Everyone has one, don’t they” she said shockingly.
“A Book, you know. I got my Book . . . . my whole
life, on paper, gawd when was the last time I worked
on it . . . musta been what 6 years ago? It’s so dumb
why am I telling you . . .”

“Well now, this has suddenly gotten quite
interesting.” We had basically already started going
out at that point, in my mind, the deal was already
closed . . . I asked her for a cigarette and she went
off to tend bar saying “I’ll be right back.” I watched
her ass with almost a proprietary glow.

Meanwhile Leo came back from the restroom and I
told him my good fortune. “She’s a writer too.
She’s had a fight with a guy named Ricci and I think
she’s gonna secretly pack up her stuff tonight and
we’re gonna hit the road. You better say your
goodbyes.” I got up and went to the restroom.

When I came back she was standing there by Leo
both of them shrouded in cigarette smoke laughing
and as I approached he looked over and said
coughing “What?! You told him What?!” and I said
“but why not, doesn’t it make sense? Look I’m in
my 40’s now, my sex drive’s down, I won’t try to
jump you unless you decide I’m such a Great Writer
you just can’t help it, but I can’t lie to you, I only got
$10,000, it won’t last very long . . . but I will get
you to Venice Beach and you can set up there . . .
we’ll have fun I’ll give you your space and we’ll
help each other write better, why not whaddaya say”
and she busted out laughing again as Leo hiked up
his knees so his legs weren’t touching anything and
spun all the way around on his bar stool saying “You
horny old bastard, what makes you think she’ll do
you?” and a short, dark, muscular boy sat down next
to Leo and said “Mindy. Come over. . .” and she
said “the fuck do you want, Rico?” and got him a
Strohs Light.

“Rico? You mean Ricky?” I said, “you mind if I
sit?” and sat on the other barstool so’s what you had
was Leo on one side, me on the other. Then I
thought better of it, got out a business card and wrote
my home address on it, left it under my tip signaling
to her as she glanced over shaking her bangs off her
face shifting her head sharply upward to blow out
the smoke her neck tendon standing diagnonal . . .
“Under here” I silently mouthed then also wrote on
the card “Leaving Monday” turned hugged Leo
walked out the door drove home and slept.

But I knew she’d show up, I didn’t sleep long, only
half an hour, the clock said 2:30, which would be
just getting to the end of close-up . . . I opened the
door of the apartment and took a big deep breath of
the sound of crickets and vague scent of mint you get
in North Caroline evenings in late summer . . .

I packed my small metal pipe with a little bit of the
remaining sticks and stems from the motheaten
baggie under the pillow, clicked on the tube and
watched a rerun of COPS . . . turned the sound off
and put on Hendrix, “Band of Gypsies,” and sat, and
waited. The smallness, the innocuousness, of the
daily desperation, is something like water, the drops
of which over years betray the rock to holes . . . . or
like those stone steps at Duke University, at the
cathedral, where the steps are dented down and the
step-lips softened slightly, from all those padding
feet . . . it’s like those little daily winds and the
contorted scrub pines that get left there, three
hundred years later, and who knows, this scar here,
maybe a caveman’s arrow? -- unless you, or me, or
somebody, shows me, for real, the grace inside of
each day – unless, when you open your hands, a
young dove sits there, eyes blinking . . . then what?
Well then we’re still in the miraculous reality even
then . . . but miraculous not really the correct word
for it . . . more like known, though undescribable . . .
when I heard her footsteps coming up the echoing
steps of the landing, it seemed natural as a night I’d
already lived, a memory already softening, darkened.

I wonder, eve if I really tried, could I really tell to
you the touching softness of the insteps of her feet,
arched between the calluses caused by the bar, all
that turning and pouring . . . the ugly lattice of blue
and black-red veins strung down from top to bottom
of her wrinkled insteps . . . the overall beauty of her
feet . . . the little lullaby “hmm hmm” to herself that
she sung, this girl, this woman, as she checked her
face in the bathroom mirror, all I could see through
the halfopened door were her two feet still in their
ankle socks, tip-toe raised . . . the variable sigh when
I first put it in her . . . sighs coming back when I
went in her greatly, or total silence . . . she getting up
to turn on the light, suddenly sit on the bed hunched
over, bangs-over-face, cleaning the pipe with a bent
coat hanger then quickly lighting up, over thin
smoke curl, glancing now at me . . . facility born of
much much repetition . . . yet this moment always
fresh . . . as if we had been a couple together for
years I had her lie straight back, all naked, and I
pushed each thigh out to the side rubbed the inner

-thigh-tendon that showed there, with my fingertip . .
. me a little more stoned now, I could feel the
tangible displacement (of reality from a Now now
made more real – or of Now from a Real shoved in
the background, so this crystallized sign-oddness can
predominate?).

I wanted to give her the benefit of seeing all of the
bad guilt of nakedly exposing herself in front of me
so soon, only minutes, after stomping out on her
husband actually, Ricco . . . she told me later this
was the first time she let another man even look at
her whole body naked, never mind touch her, in five
years of marriage to Ricco . . . she had a sweet
earnest quality by her face by the sides of her eyes, a
warm curling-up of her eyelids and the beginnings of
her pale cheekbones also caused there, by her skull,
where her glistening hair also falling, flourished.
She had a broad white smile sort of of a farmer wife,
a hearty smile, yet smushed and stretched between
wide lips, like they say in romance novels
“generous” lips . . . she was blonde like Macy my
ex- and this sort of kinked it somehow, made it
pretty . . . “did he ever look at you like this?” I
blatantly asked from back on top of her, my torso
lifted up on my arms stretched straight to the
mattress, me lifted up, looking down at her blank
bare body, noticing every detail . . . her nipples dark
brown like brown full of blood underneath, and milk
. . . the raised arc of the rim of her breasts, the white
curling-in where they join the shoulders . . . the
barely-seen gray stain of her shaven armpits . . . a
little scar she had on her brow, “from a bike fall” she
mentioned . . . because we still had just met each
other, had just started doing this, there was a
betrayed, raggedy, cold quality, an exploitation on
both sides . . . but also a genuine warmth, a shared
human vacancy sort of, how odd the human is, its
ability, in both of us, to suddenly come to the
immanence of each other, see each other’s cores, so
soon after meeting, and after a five year marriage she
had with him where maybe she never saw his core at
all? No that would be too presumptious . . .

He absorbed the guilt, the sense of replaceability,
inherent in the image of Ricco ahead of him, prior in
time, yelling and rutting in this same place, as
beguiled, as incensed by jealousy thinking he
stares – for an instant he and I glared at each
other across the abyss, his death, my life, not really
a glare just a looking, stupid, neutral . . . now it was
him riding her, his memory, while I, say, sat on the
cold toilet seat one skinny leg crossed over the other
flooded by memories of how my dad’s dick was so
much bigger than mine was that one time we took a
shower . . .


He imagined him and her being together forever, dim
in the future, him 60 years old her 40s, she showing
him how to get dripped candle wax out of a carpet,
by running a blow dryer over it, softening the wax
up . . . and in her wallet, behind her picture of him a
much smaller picture, imagined, never said to him,
of Ricco her first love . . .

Two days later they were in his Corvette on I-40
heading toward Asheville. She had worked some
arrangement with Fed Ex or some such where they’d
have 4 boxes of clothes and stuff and her scented
soap collection there waiting for him at the Seaside
Motel up from Santa Monica. His mind had been
burning a little bit that morning. It always did this,
to some extent, in the blank day sunlight, with the
creeping ridges of the traffic heading to town, but
this morning it was worse, he could tell it was, using
the worn thermometer of his grownup emotions he
could tell, a little bit burning, a little bit off. So he
drank the last beer in the fridge, smoked up some
weed, tried to re-screw his head on . . . what was it
bugging him? Ah, yes.

The family. Imagine how much worse this would be
if this twist of fate had caught him back in the
middle of one of his relationships, what then,
hmmm? What if let’s say he had wife and kids and
this happened, and the moral imperative of it, of
feeding the family, holding down the love (keeping
it from floating back to heaven), made it so he really
couldn’t go and quit the job, he had to go back in
that Monday, face up to his secretary, the whole
office maybe, the managing partner in his serious
heft and belt, glowering over his glasses, “Brad
you’re just too old for this” . . . what then
hmm? If his human ties to the world were just a
little too weighted to let him go, where the small
blinking suicide-lights like lights out across the
harbor in that bay in San Francisco . . . where he
couldn’t go to them. If he was fully stuck. But he
was only half-stuck, the only guilt was the family
ties, his mother and dad, his sister and brother, what
would their thoughts be, over, at the end, over past
his end after he was under the black water that
separates him from them . . .

So part of him got left there, torn off, in that
apartment, bleary as it looked that August Monday
morning, in the notorious blank daylight of America,
that work-light, that light you go to work in, the light
the color of backgrounds in home videos. And his
spirit bled a little as he walked from the door to the
car . . . as if to leave small black dots on the ground
like blood, dripping, except, if you leaned close, it
was dark and stars, these holes of torn appearance.

Without knowing, America, through the first years of
the 21st century, had aligned itself with the discourse
of Excess. By “excess” I mean all the things we do
to be ourselves -- each gesture, each motion of
which starts on the one side inside being, and stops
on the other side outside of being. For instance: the
gesture with which I fall asleep, with my real being
over here, my body, my grayish flabby lower calves,
my sick yellow toes . . . then the swing, then
over there in sleep, vague theater of dreams, of
fantasy bodies . . . . or the way a good movie hits us,
the way we go to the movies, we stand in line for our
ticket alive and hurting, irritated, worrying dimly
about life and work . . .and then the swing, and there
we are in the movie, not aware we’re in the theater
anymore, transported into that fantasy zone . . . .
think also of how, when we see a prisoner dying, on
Reality TV, when we watch the footage of his body
stiffened slightly then drooping, as the drug hits his
heart and stops it . . . over Here we suffer, sicken a
little, so far away from our dreams . . . over There
we nullify, we fuzz out to zero, nothingness, since
look how we don’t feel the pain he feels, don’t even
suffer with him, suffer for him, care for him, care
about others, start to be real, start to be human! And
these were my beings – the Real one that doesn’t
have a heart – and the Fake one that cries like a
velvet unicorn . . .

“How old were you the last time you had one of those
black velvet paintings up on your dorm wall, you
know, a unicorn with human eyes, a faery castle, a
treasure troll, a hobbit?”

“Actually I had a Led Zeppelin zeppelin” she said
and we both felt desperate. There were silences in
the car. Ten miles into Tennessee. “There’s gonna
be lots of times like this” he said. “Times when we
feel like the shallowest losers. This is when we are
in fact closest to the source. This losing, this failing.
You think he was doing any better, Kerouac, when
he was hitching through Arizona? What – what did
he know? That his writing was somehow there,
saved, that it was Great Book stuff? -- even if so do
you think that that helped him? No he said all it did
was expose the shallowness of the hierarchy to him,
the plastic human ruler . . . . so his achievement got
to 9.5 inches. Well fucking wonderful! Did that
answer issues of Death? Did that fix up his mother?
Did that make his girlfriend closer? Did that explain
the Buddhist bullshit he was trying to get into? Did
that make him feel less like shit for jacking off Allen
Ginsberg under a bridge? Ah, naïve Americans! We
always dream that the mythical syrup we pour on our
heroes can also get poured over us to somehow show
us how exalted and real it felt to be the Hero . . . .
none of this is true . . . these times Mindy, I’m
telling you it’s these times, that are the most real, the
most what people might call sacred, the most
sacramental, scarified, saturated, saddened, sat-upon,
satellited, set up, sucked and suckered . . . really it
makes me wanna stop the car right here throw you
out in the middle of the road and just Fuck You.”

“You dumb bitch” she said and they stopped at a
Wendys. After scanning the display for a while with
her thumb and forefinger on her lips humming
“hmmm,” she chose the Classic Single. I asked for
the Classic Single Biggie Sized and we drove the
tiny curve over to where the pick-up window opened
like a gate into hell and we got to see who was
suffering this time, a grandmother whose pension
had dried up or a housewife whose vulnerable wide
belly strained to wear the headset belt radio thingie
or the teenage girl would be pretty but for the acne
or the teenage boy trying to get a mustache or the
middle-aged white guy just like me except gay or
dull or too smart for this place purely suffering? It
was the teenage girl, the subset Black Teenage Girl,
she limply handed me back my change, we drove to
the exit, went over to the BP, I filled it up with gas,
stood there, no real thoughts in my head, not
especially noticing the moist heat of Tennessee night
coming off a rainstorm, here in my One Life, each
bit of it, time-bound, tied by moments, just this
etched into death as these words are here, just as
banal as the ordering of Biggie Size in the late nite
drive thru window. . . .

That night at the motel – and what a sweet motel it
was, the blue pool flushed and foamy over light, like
a blue ice cube in the night – the man at the counter
his hair awry, through the doorway into the other
room you can see the edge of his mattress – I held
myself up on my arms above her, the lights brightly
on, inside her, stiff, not moving, just watching her
breathe. It was still amazing to me how these series
of moments tripped by, one after another, heading to
death now, without any rise into a conclusion, any
gathering for a climax, a saving, apostrophe,
summation . . . the epitome is indefinitely deferred,
but somehow visible in the distance, like a bus . . .
waiting waiting forever in the rain for its warm dry
burnished interior to arrive. The moment before our
death will be just like this one, except more vague or
painful; and the moment after our death will be just
like this, again, except for some other, for a different
person, different name in the brain . . . .






3. Nevada

As they crossed the state border, she pestered him, “I
hear they got cat houses here,” as he watched the
steppe, the tundra around him, treeless, gray, drop
down below the road and now they were crossing a
river.

“As I start to get closer to death, I can’t tell if this life
is getting sharper, more focused; or dimmer, more
unreal. Which do you think?”

“Oh push off” she said, joking but she basically took
it seriously, wide-eyed and amber-cheeked by the
light of a candle two or three motels ago she’d sat up
in bed and heard him out, as he described his whole
misadventure, the sordid poem on the printer, the 60
year old secretary, his sudden decision to leave, his
bank account status, the exact amount of cash he had
in the glove compartment . . . . how he figured he’d
play out the string in a cheap motel or even with a
knapsack on the beach, till he was all broke . . . .
then how he’d get really drunk, one last time, and
walk to the sea, and continue walking, and walk into
it, drunk enough, and putting out his cigarette, and
turning to look at the shore, in the darkness, this on a
day in summer, next summer, when the sun had been
hot and the water was warm, and smoking some
weed, and smoke some more weed, get all zonkered
out there in the ocean, and displace reality in his
head, open it up into the pre-interpreted the
uninterpreted zone a good buzz gives you, then
leaning down, sinking on his knees, into the water,
really feeling the horror-suffocation under, entering
thereby into the deathly glory and pain of the
millions, the millions, the millions, and letting them
go, and letting him go, and breathing in water like he
breathed in air, knowing that sensation – one that –
at least for those truly dying – had often been known
but never been reported. He’d die, then, lucid up till
the click-off, almost, almost knowing the slam of the
door. As the death door closes. And to float then,
there, not knowing, off the other way, in his death
now. And she sat up with him listening, they split
the last beer, they both cried, they slept.

But as one might expect, all this weird time on the
road had damaged and disoriented her mind, or
opened it maybe, so she wanted to stop at a cat house
and “free a hooker,” she was insistent on this. So
after arguing for a while they pulled into a town and
she went out and looked at some yellow pages and
they found where a big one was, they figured a big
place would have more prospects and he had insisted
that if they were going to go and pick up a hooker it
had to be a sweet one, young and sad, smart, poetic,
drug-addled, not belonging there, and without
fucking her or giving her money they’d persuade her
to go and she’d get her car and follow them the rest
of the way, to Venice . . . what happened after that
got a bit fuzzy but Mindy insisted “let’s go, we’ll
rehabilitate her” so on they went. And down a long
dirt driveway, past some barbed wire, they located
Clubbe Thee Dollhouse, which boasted a staff full
-time of fifteen. This was the white, flat middle of
the day, and they didn’t expect there to be many
customers there, but in fact the parking lot was full,
as they saw coming out of the dust which effaced the
air around them. I’m going in with a bitch . . .
does this make me twice as cool or twice as
lame? he wondered as they locked the Vette and
just to get up his courage he dug in back of the seat
and found his plastic pint of whisky and drank it up.

Inside, out of the gloom we saw a bar and dance
floor, with some disco lights going, and walking up
to the tired-eyed biker behind the bar with the gray
-red hair tied back in a ponytail I asked for a Coors.
We both sat at the bar and took in the crowd. Next
to me on my right a fat guy with glasses, balding,
looked sort of like that balding guy in Seinfeld. Also
over there, some guys in the 20s, good looking
actually, even delicate, enlightened – why weren’t
they out skiing Lake Tahoe or studying geology not
sitting here? Also a crew of guys, like a road crew
off work, all sweaty on their t-shirts and red faces,
bloodshot eyes. And over there two businessmen in
suits and all, executive-looking, sneaky and snorting.
And also an Indian guy, his name “Surinam” the
bartender said, gesturing to a drink. And many other
guys. And some ladies mingling in the crowd, you
could tell they worked there because they each had
on the same uniform, a white and feathers
concoction like a duck come to life, or a seraph.
Two, no three of them were actually beautiful, the
kind of beauty where you’d consider falling in love,
giving everything, staying for rest of life.

He said “let’s pick that one. She’s the prettiest.” But
she was already hooked up, talking to this farmer in
a blue button-up shirt with short sleeves and gray
hair slickly combed back and old-timey glasses. He
guffawed aloud as she bent down again, her forehead
lowering her hair dusting down, the tip of her tongue
poking quickly out and back in from her lips as she
laughed and spoke quick. Now the song changed,
she looked up-and-rightward the way girls dream of
angels, swung her hair, closed her eyes picked up
one leg in a white boot, lifted it over his seated
thighs, lowered down and ground all over him . . .
but was she touching?

Brad and Mindy walked up close behind the girl
where she bent her hips this way and that, slow
-danced over Mr. Farmer, messed his lap with slow
-waving shadows, a few drips of his rum-n-coke
which spilt. His two meek boots nestled closely
together, his legs pressed tight to each other, to give
her space to dance. With one hand he gripped one of
his knees tightly, with the other he absently was
nudging the table off to the side, the table with his
drink on it, a drink and a napkin and an ashtray with
a menthol butt, green. Brad sat down at the next
table and tried to tell if the farmer had a hardon. He
looked at the dancing girl, her face in the soft light.
She smiled as she lowered her hips, seemingly not
faked, seemingly real, liking it sort of, this old
farmer, to give him a rise. Or maybe hating it daily,
but just not while she’s involved, while she’s in it?
(Like a drinker who is overall depressed with his life
but happy inside drinking). She had light green
eyes, and sparkly glitter confetti stuff on her cheeks.
She had soft fuzzy down on her cheeks like a
schoolgirl. She spoke and he heard how her voice
was roughened by smoking and vulgar but not all
that vulgar, here but not all that here . . . now the
song was over, the lap dance was done, and they
wondered if the old man still had enough in him, to
take her up on her offer for the back room, the
“Private Room” they heard her say, “you know how
much, it’s not much” she then said, seeming to
respond to his frail indirection, this drunk old man
talking.

But perhaps you think me strange, heartless, for
doing these things? Even bodilessly through the
imagined fantasy here, instead of (surely not) the
beastly real meanings there, out in life – I reserve the
implacable moral integrity of Agatha Christie who,
even as she put herself there in the murderer’s hand,
preserved her authorial distance . . .

So as they headed down the hall, she sauntering, he
hesitant, and took a left at the end of the hall into a
doorway the open greenblue glow of which
momentarily flashed us their faces in angelic
silhouette – Mindy and I tailed behind, walking by as
if to our own Private Room, and on a whim entering
a room in back of that, and finding it empty, Mindy
closed and locked the door and motioned to me
where, at the back side, there was a curtain which if
you opened it, showed you a two-way mirror into
their room, their Private Room – and there we sat
and saw the farmer man on a futon, leaning back, as
she was wriggling her hands hard trying to peel
down his pants . . . the old buzzard was wearing
blue jeans . . . finally getting them off his narrow
hips and past his hardon she yank, yank, yank,
yanked them, down past his muddy ankles, old man
knee socks . . . he was wearing tighty whities and
they watched as she patiently took off his shoes, took
off his socks, darted up and pulled off his whities,
came up higher and took off his shirt as he like a
young boy ducked down his head so she’d get it over
his head, meekly, slumpshouldered.

They watched as the old man leaned back on the bed,
his thin nasty hardon dangling to the side, his hands
behind his head, crossed, comfortable, his mute
blank glasses, while she started to do a dance, one
hand on a hip, one hand sashaying in the air . . . .




4. Being in the world


Consider this Food Lion Butter Syrup. It’s a curved
plastic bottle, narrow at the top and wide at the
bottom, with little indents and stripes on it, and a red
cap. There’s a picture on the front, on the label, of a
man who looks like a lumberjack, it’s a murky
picture, actually a painting. The lumberjack is
holding a big metal container with one gloved hand,
or maybe just checking on it, holding his hand to it
while he looks in. The metal bucket is against a
thick brown tree, with snow on top of the shoulders
of its boughs, and snow above its roots. Behind the
man, a horse stands on a path, and the man is
wearing a red cap, red plaid-looking coat, thick blue
winter pants of some sort, and in front of this picture
of a man collecting maple syrup is a light yellow
border to the Butter Syrup label. I know, without
checking the back, that there’s no maple syrup in it
or just a trace amount . . . . which some lawyer
maybe told them is the reason they had to call it
“Butter Syrup” not Maple Syrup . . . let’s see what
we got here – on the back, ingredients: high fructose
corn syrup, corn syrup, water, natural and artificial
flavors . . . maybe the real maple syrup is somewhere
hiding in “natural flavors”? But then if so, they
would’ve noted that, would’ve included “extract of
real maple syrup” or some such notation on the back
. . . not only is the picture on the front of the
bearded man getting syrup from the tree a –
whatchacall it, fraud? It’s not really a fraud, since
we all know it. . . . oh and also at the bottom of the
back it says, “THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS NO
BUTTER” . . . So what we have here is a product
containing a nostalgia for real syrup, a nostalgia for
real butter . . . and yet more “real,” in its own way,
more accurate to this time, than an actual tin of real
maple syrup would be . . . If asked, “What is the real
maple syrup of 2002, the regular, good maple syrup
for pancakes, that everyone uses?” if you had any
sense you’d direct them to this: a package, a
container, of an imitation of real maple syrup,
defined as such, known to be that, yet accepted. The
“actual” real maple syrup is a gourmet store
collectors item you can maybe probably find at the
Fresh Market or Fowlers Gourmet, among the
hardwood floors and classical music . . . there in a
little metal tin, “authentic real maple syrup,” for $7 a
pop. So where does that leave us in terms of the
present object? It is syrup, containing a memory of
“real” maple syrup of the past (the purported past –
in fact back then for all we know most common
people used sugar syrup or corn syrup or molasses or
so-called Maple Syrup that was a fraud, cut with
water and fructose . . .)

If someone asked me, from scratch, to design the real
maple syrup of the 21st century, what regular
ordinary people use and like it and it helps, it helps
to fix the suffering in life, it’s homey – I’d direct
them to this, I’d make something like this: a plastic
bottle, modeled in imitation of an earthenware jug of
the past (the purported past), and not really with its
own, sui generis plastic identity except with
this imitation, this residual need for a thing it no
longer is . . . and fill it with high fructose corn syrup
and regular corn syrup (why not? What’s wrong
with corn syrup? It’s just as good as maple syrup
and cheaper . . .) and I’d try to indicate some
nostalgia for real maple syrup in the label on the
front, and disclaim it a little with the label on the
back . . .

Now does this mean the syrup is afraid to be itself?
But what is self? If not this random collection of
weird nostalgias, dreams of past, facsimiles,
imitations of one way of being by another way of
being . . .

What if it was “itself”? Let’s try it. First we change
the plastic bottle a little, for a shape more natural to
plastic as opposed to a remembrance of an
earthenware jug . . . maybe shorter and squatter, so it
doesn’t tip over as easy . . . still rounded though . . .
like a sports car . . . and the label says, “Syrup for
Pancakes” . . . but what a sec . . . . are they really
“cakes” . . . . really in a “pan” . . . ? well in a frying
pan . . . I guess that’s OK (has the defect seeped into

the bedrock of language itself, like that old movie
Tremors, big voracious green worms in the ground?)
. . . . instead of a picture of a lumberjack and a tin
can in New England snow and a maple tree . . .
what?






5. Being outside the world

The road in toward San Fran from the Nevada border
is long, low and flat. The outdoors, the passing
scenery, is mostly white and flat, and dusty, with low
green scrub-bushes and signs for restaurants coming
up on interstate exits – those green or blue interstate
exit signs put up by the government that have the
names and/or logos for three or four or five
restaurants – which restaurants you ask? Well let me
tell you. McDonalds . . . that’s the main one in our
world. Also Hardees (Called “Carls Famous Star” in
California) . . . Wendys . . . Pizza Hut . . . also signs
for Inns . . . Budgetel . . . La Quinta . . . Holiday Inn .
. . Marriott Courtyard . . . also maybe gas stations . . .
Texaco . . . BP (British Petroleum) . . . Amoco . . .
Shell . . . named after a seashell . . . a big white
clamshell, north of Taos . . . I’ve never been to
“Taos” but that sounded like a likely genealogy . . .
in our reality, America, our heads are just totally
stuffed with these likely stories . . .

The landscape coming in from Nevada to San
Francisco is bleak and murky, intolerably beautiful,
tolerably beautiful, rigid, indefinable, obtuse. In fact
once on the way, while Mindy sat in the car, I got
out and put my face down in the dirt by the side of
the highway, eating its grit, smelling it, being there
with it. It was hot and warm. Birds skipped around
on a big farm field; a medical chart in the childrens
ward of pediatric oncology at Sacramento Valley
Hospital sat with red and blue stamps at the end of
line item entries for each kid, red “Discharged,” blue
“Deceased.” Pet parrots and parakeets sat in musty
livingrooms and dens across South Sacramento, all
unknown to each other, chipping shiny birdseed with
the edges of their beaks. Giant dominoes wobbled,
toppled, fell; ants scurried remorselessly across the
shiny tile floor of Southfield Elementary. Dust
gathered in the pits and hollows of artificial plants in
motel alcoves flourishing toward absence. A man in
back of a plexiglas booth cusses, spitted. A moth
baked in twilight. Two kids walked under the
eucalyptus tree, not kids really, but adults, grownups
who kept the child in them; one of them, the boy,
was clutching a weird black falcon statue he found
behind a bush. Adults, sitting among candlelight at a
restaurant, felt a gentle misting falling sense called
rain, called anguish. A man cried out in pain at a
hospital ward. A teenage boy had an orgasm, under
his covers, alone in his bed. A dusty mobile sat
stuffed in its box in an attic, waiting to be
rediscovered or lost.

Me and Mindy drove along the highway, resisting the
urge to stop and discover god in a grain of sand. We
stopped at a Wendys drive-thru and got some
burgers. I glanced over at the side of Mindy’s face.
She had the beauty of a dragonfly. She had white
-blonde hair around her temples, dirtier on top; a
wide mouth like that girl in “Leaving Las Vegas;” a
tattoo of a butterfly on the small of her back; her lips
were sort of thin and glazed with whitish cake
-frosting-like lip gloss she always used. She had long
narrow fingers; their sections, between each joint,
stood and rolled like sensitive hotdogs. She was a
composite, as I guess we all are, of every other lover
we ever had; some of the sensitivity of Steph the
Darryls waitress /slash/ med student, some of the
erotic tenacity of Phyllis the chubby-ankled placid
feckless mistress; some of the smell-of-breakfast
-morning grace and warmth of what was her name,
Marcy who sat with a jar of leaves and looked up
freckled and smiling and said “a newt’s in here.”

In bed I’d like to describe the things she’d do, but as
it was the poem of god, the one god wrote, it wasn’t
in words but actual world-life-particles, actual blue
gas flame and electric lightbulb and eye of newt and
toe of lizard and translucent, Mindy’s toe, pressed
against my flashlight, laughing, down under the
railroad trestle, the night we tried to camp out and
left the Vette off to the side of a dirt field, and
trudged down there with sickle and hail, with light
and regret in our heads; “why are we doing this?”
“Can you imagine my credit card debt by now” “will
you really die when the money runs out” “what do
you want from me” “who are you anyway” “what
are we doing here?” We felt dead and vacant and
there was a creeping sense of oddness inside of our
heads, as if the world was resisting, refusing to stay
in itself. We were creeping down through early 21st
century nostalgia-for-itself of missing life, still here.
Look at us trying to be like Kerouac junkies. But I
knew given a few more minutes and maybe a beer
my mood would change, it always did.

Every house is a house of the dead. Let’s start from
that proposition (I said to myself as I walked around
gathering scrub wood for the fire). Every house, or
almost every house, has witnessed the spectacle of
opening the closet in the bedroom that your spouse
used, flicking on the light switch (with a wince as in
flipping on a light to look under the bed where the
cat has dragged a bird under there, or a vole, when
the scruffy sound of chewing woke you up).

That awful, slow packing, dim, undiffused, really, by
say a halfpint of vodka . . . .

I brought back some driftwood from around the dry
banks of a creek and we built a little fire. I had a six
of Coors in my backpak and if this really was the
end of the line, the Last Days, this running out of
money and sweat between my knees . . .

Well at least we’ll be even, me and my dreams.




*





thewhitetree
Registered User
(8/19/02 5:52:26 am)
Reply Re: haiku
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Outside the self, the loss of self, there can be no art.

Inside the self, deep inside and shutting out all other ties, the art is sterile.

Where will you find your art?

lyzne
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 8:09:18 am)
Reply wow
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
did i say that outloud?

wow.

haiku is a good title.


tell me you are going to submit this to salon or somewhere or everywhere. tell me you are, even if you lie.

anders
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 8:12:27 am)
Reply hey white tree
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
nice moral insight.


hey lynze.... no my current plan's as follows. at some convenient point i am going to quit my job and spend like 6 months MAKING A BOOK. or two books. i am going to put together like 2 or 3 giant manuscripts and um, get them xeroxed... and send one to my dad to hold onto in case my house burns down !

cool
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 9:28:50 am)
Reply plan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
very cool.

break a leg,
lynze

Djuana99
Registered User
(8/19/02 11:05:13 am)
Reply Re: haiku
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I've met this man before, both on a barstool & in print. Not this exact man - no no - but someone with his own peculiar wealth of obssessions/insights/desparation/voyueristic tendancies/questions regarding light. I've never met this woman though - this Mindy - except in certain undigested forms, in men's books, so that the Mindys that I have met always had their own fantasies, the type which were characteristically left out like here - Mindys who, like many women, have their whole being incestuously bound up in various mens' ideas of them, so that we know but don't know them - often even other women don't know. Don't get me wrong - this is pretty wonderfully spun out. Just thought that the Mindy character was rather surface (I said surface, not superficial), so that the woman I am feels kinda outsider. Hmmmm - maybe when the type of character (Brad) is at issue, there's no other way to do the Mindy character, particularly because the details of herself that she shows feels authentic to what even me as a woman sees when I look, even as I'm reading little signs of other things I'd be apt to have in the portrait? Well - all this to say that it makes it so the story, the reflections read as a cross between literature & best seller, given that (forgive me) the woman isn't quite there. But no no no - this is good writing - maybe that's what you should be doing - & me? I certainly admire the sustained effort of the work & the way it entertains as well as philosophizes.

There are parts that need work, need an editor's eye - for example the way the "leaving las vegas" theme is incorporated - a little too tidily, I think. The family as the backbone of Brad works but in my humble opinion (& here it really is humble), something more distinctive could bring up the characterization of Brad an important notch. Some of the interiority stuff regarding Brad - that's phenomenal - that's the fullblown poet in you at work. The secretary poem thingy?? Well, as a narrative strategy/hinge, it's really fresh, funny, but I still get the sense that - ah no - forget about that - I think I'm very wrong there - that is, this fusion of short story/poetry/pulp fiction (as I'm reading it) wants to be different than what I might be thinking.

Really - I've only read once - need to read it again. What it actually reminds me of the most? no - not Kerouac but a movie, not because of the visuals but rather the way pulp & popular culture is used to the ends of serious, achored in real life themes.

Ah Jack - that's all I can say on one read...

You is doing very good stuff - here's to you continuing & also being able to rework stuff a bit...

One last comment: wow

Djuana who knows something bugs her about this but still admires immensely...

anders
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 5:48:19 pm)
Reply djuana
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i think you are right. the characterization of mindy is the weakest thing about it, she comes off as a translucent jack-off fantasy, not a person.

what about a collaborative verse novel where one of you women wrote the girl's POV?

when i wrote this saturday i was buzzing on 420, the most interesting result of that was the switching between "i" and "he" done unknowingly at the time.

to further indicate the probably underlying sexism, later that sat. nite once i finished writing, me and lisa and a friend of hers went out dancing, i got really fucked up to try to conquer dancing embarrassment, and at 2 a.m. i actually went psychotic deserted lisa and drove 30 miles home stranding her at closing time. fortunately her friend is a butch lady copy and flagged down a ride from a local yokel...

thewhitetree
Registered User
(8/19/02 8:06:23 pm)
Reply Re: djuana
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack, dancing is easy, its all in the hips.

Don't drink to overcome that fear, really.

In fact, don't drink at all for a while. See what happens. Drink as a mind altering substance is vastly stupid.

ps, why don't you reimagine Mindy? You are the writer, don't recruit collaborators, sweat it out yourself.

eden2000s
Registered User
(8/20/02 11:50:24 am)
Reply Re: haiku
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
yeah, what lynze and djuana said: wow. it has that authentic yet exaggerrated quality about it..you feel there is more truth and reality in it precisely because it seems unreal.

You would make a hell of a novelist.

regards

eden
PoetrySz

anders
Unregistered User
(8/21/02 11:15:56 am)
Reply notes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
this saturday i am going to wear dress and write from mindy's POV

eden2000s
Registered User
(8/21/02 11:17:45 am)
Reply Re: haiku
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
anders, good for you! look forward to it..

regards

eden


<< Prev Topic | Next Topic >>




::: posted by hiccup at 2:29 PM


 
eden2000s
Registered User
(8/19/02 10:08:20 pm)
Reply I'd like to try something different
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the first time,
I was able
to throw away
poems
wholeheartedly...

like cutting
chicken breasts
and throwing them
into
the frying pan

for the sound
and sensible
sizzle.

Edited by: eden2000s at: 8/19/02 10:24:57 pm

il poet paul
Registered User
(8/20/02 10:08:05 am)
Reply
ezSupporter
lucky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
yer lucky you can filet your stuff like that

it's hard.

I liked this one alot eden, it's specific to writers in general, but surely something I think we can all relate to.

i would add another bit tacked on at the end, I feel it needs a little something more, or rather I want something more. lol

well penned,

regards,

-paul

Djuana99
Registered User
(8/20/02 2:10:12 pm)
Reply So are you dreaming of
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

among other things, doing your own version of bounce-a-ball nat tricks, seething with the sizzle of play - not really like musical nat (or anyone else for that matter), but with the light light sound step - one two three - of Eden set free of that provocatively Eden perspective which consists ever so beautifully of statue/profundity stance? &/or is this about in life as well as poetry? The latter - the two fused - I speculate.

Eden: sound and sensible sizzle - ha ha - excuse me for laughing - it's genuinely affectionate - & I could almost see it but but...Still, I see it here, clearly writ - humour & other things too - shimmying relationship to poetry/life & a hankering like the one I meant to suggest via a title of an old poem of mine - that is, "Investigation of a nameless longing"...

Good poem. Sorry if my absorption of it is way off the mark.

Take care

Djuana

eden2000s
Registered User
(8/21/02 11:14:02 am)
Reply Re: I'd like to try something different
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul, yes, something more, that's the problem with most of my work...it's too short and end prematurely..I run out of steam. Haha. But the trouble is, it's so hard for me to go back and add things, you know. It's hard to get into that unique perspective when I wrote the poem. So more often than not, I just let it be.Thank you, paul, glad you liked.

Djuana, welll, this was written in a relatively short time, directly into the post a message box, I rarely do that, so it's a change for me. I was getting these snippets from the TV and fashioned them into a poem. I do that with songs too. anyway, in life? Maybe...sound and sensible sizzle, me? no, no sizzle. haha. Thank you for dropping by.

regards

eden

Edited by: eden2000s at: 8/21/02 11:15:03 am

anders
Unregistered User
(8/21/02 11:17:56 am)
Reply fuck throwing stuff away
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
that's for editors to do.
just stuff it in yr closet.
remember, on his deathbed kafka asked for
all his writing to be destroyed. should it
have been? and someone burnt
byron's autobiography. that was
a damn shame

eden2000s
Registered User
(8/21/02 11:30:43 am)
Reply Re: I'd like to try something different
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
anders,

yeah, it's true, not to throw away poems...I just meant psychologically throwing them away.

regards

eden
PoetrySz


<< Prev Topic | Next Topic >>




::: posted by hiccup at 2:27 PM


 
thewhitetree
Registered User
(8/19/02 3:20:50 pm)
Reply Jules' routine on a Monday morning in October (rev)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jules has no feeling in his leg
except the sense that it still lives
under the buzz of numbed flesh. He's patient,
like the drift of cigarette smoke
within his lungs, the nicotine jolt
that hasn't arrived, that won't show itself
for another few moments, the time
it will take to let his head turn to look
at the finch flitting along the cement
walk, scouring the thin lines for anything
it can eat. An old man, Jules takes another
puff. Feels the blood pulse, the brain expand
into focus, and when he exhales the bird
is gone. The leg drags in its brace
as he straggles into the van, the nurse's aide
takes his smoke, takes a puff and puts it out.
He smiles when she says thanks, that's what
he's been taught in life, that teeth
are important. That's why you brush. The driver
is late, the seat is a crackle of coolness
across his butt and back, and Jules takes
his glasses off to wipe, an automatic response
just like the smile. They will go to the park.
Soon he'll watch more birds and show his teeth
to them, and try to find more cigarettes to smoke.


Edited by: thewhitetree at: 8/20/02 12:52:01 pm

Djuana99
Registered User
(8/19/02 3:57:02 pm)
Reply This is just plain excellent to this reader
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


for the type of thing it is - the quirky, firmly planted detail & the sense of feeling it evokes & the way without abstract language it evokes a meta level. I'm not against abstract language per say, but here the writing without it feels inevitable, solid, sad, knowing, slightly ironic/surprising. & I'm trying Tree, but I don't want you to change a thing - & I certainly don't want you to add white space - think the fit between semantics & layout on the page is a really good fit. Am I gushing? Ha - I did like this so much...simplicity with inevitable echoes.

Thanks for an excellent read

Take care

Djuana thinking tree has learned how to write this kind of thing in her own way quite quite well - very compelling stuff...

Helm
Registered User
(8/19/02 4:20:28 pm)
Reply Re: Jules' routine on a Monday morning in October
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tree,

what a great parallel of emptinesses against base meaning, enjoyed this very much. Very sparse punctuation, but the line breaks are natural pauses, so who needs a sea of commas. A nit? Well, you might drop "all" in L3,

Helm.

laurel
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 8:57:32 pm)
Reply whole thing's excellent
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in terms of evoking the kind of versimilitude i search for in a good novel---a reality i believe because it is so well-wrought that it doesn't matter to me whether or not it's fiction.

coupla real standout lines in this:

scouring the thin lines for anything to eat

teeth are important

the seat is a crackle of coolness across his butt and back

damn good read, tree

laurel







lynze
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 8:59:09 pm)
Reply yeah
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
what they said. solid, uber and under meta maxed.

one day i'll fail into this type of perfection.

eden2000s
Registered User
(8/19/02 9:58:33 pm)
Reply Re: Jules' routine on a Monday morning in October
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
yes, tara, this is another leap towards the sensuous real...I have only a bit of nit: the numbed flesh. It sort of bothers me for some reason though I don't know why...coupled this with the absent drift, it seems too much. Must be just me. But the rest is great, alive stuff.

regards

eden
PoetrySz

Edited by: eden2000s at: 8/19/02 10:23:34 pm

thewhitetree
Registered User
(8/20/02 12:52:43 pm)
Reply Re: Jules' routine on a Monday morning in October (rev)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks everyone, here's the revision.

Djuana99
Registered User
(8/20/02 1:51:49 pm)
Reply Damn
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wish I had the original to compare to this, but I never printed it out (not in time) & I do the same thing as everyone on this board - that is, with the edit function just make my changes (we're - what are the words? rather "forget it" around here, something I like - but but). Thing is, I like this but think I liked the original better, except I can't recall it precisely & so have nothing to really say...

Still a good poem tree

Take care

Djuana

thewhitetree
Registered User
(8/20/02 3:01:23 pm)
Reply Dj, for you the orig.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The old man has no feeling in his leg
except the sense that it still lives
under all the buzz of his numbed flesh
the absent drift of cigarette smoke
within his lungs, the nicotine jolt
that hasn't arrived, that won't show itself
for another few moments,
the time it will take to let his head turn
to look at the finch flitting along the cement
walk, scouring the thin lines for anything
it can eat. He takes another puff.
Feels the blood pulse, the brain expand
into focus, and when he exhales the bird
is gone. The leg drags in its brace
as he straggles into the van, the nurse's aide
takes his smoke, takes a puff and puts it out.
He smiles when she says thanks, that's what
he's been taught in life, that teeth
are important. That's why you brush. The driver
is late, the seat is a crackle of coolness
across his butt and back, and he takes
his glasses off to wipe, an automatic response
just like the smile. They will go to the park.
Soon he'll watch more birds and show his teeth
to them, and try to find more cigarettes to smoke


::: posted by hiccup at 2:27 PM


 
laurel
Unregistered User
(8/18/02 8:59:51 pm)
Reply Bill Moyers Interviews a Dead Man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He taps his forehead where
his third eye would be if he had one,
says, "Heaven is here." Bill smiles,
nods, pretends he understands. "God

is the final wall," he says. "Coming face
to face with God is the final test
of faith." Bill's eyes widen. "What
do you mean?" he asks his guest.

Joseph leans forward, his eyes turn
inward. "You have to get past Jesus
to believe he is your savior. Get past
Christianity, escape the bonds of what

defines your religion. Like Merton, a devout
Catholic communing with the Dalai Lama."
I lean forward, tap my forehead. Heaven
is here? I doubt it. I change the channel--

Joseph's mid-syllable about the transparency
of the tricksters, the clowns of religion,
he calls them. Click. Merton standing
with the Dalai Lama, smiling like a buddhist.

Merton finally found it when he stepped
out of the shower and caught that current.
As he surged toward God, did he think: Here.

eden2000s
Registered User
(8/18/02 9:20:35 pm)
Reply Re: Bill Moyers Interviews a Dead Man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
laurel,

the last stanza, with the great shower line makes this poem for me. This poem, for me, is about limits and getting past limits. Man, laurel, you are getting better and better.

regards

eden
PoetrySz

lynze
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 4:37:01 am)
Reply dayum
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
my friend, this is a good direction for you.

(i am bill moyers' lack of third eye.)


dayum!

laurel
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 5:12:30 am)
Reply see
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i lied in this poem. and i might write another about it. right now the local pbs stations are begging for dollars and playing and replaying that interview with moyers and campbell--that's where the poem came from. but i lied. when he tapped his forehead and said heave is here----i leaned forward and said yes. heaven is here and hell too. even when i was a catholic, i never believed in literal heaven and hell and purgatory, always understood those as states of mind and being created by man. but what campbell said about god....man, that made me sit up and pay attention. you have to get past god to believe in him? damn.

thanks you 2 for reading me...

laurel



thewhitetree
Registered User
(8/19/02 5:54:32 am)
Reply Re: Bill Moyers Interviews a Dead Man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wonder what Merton thought.

Have you ever read his prose poem on Hiroshima?

Anyway, good poem, I've seen the Moyers' programs with Joseph Campbell, and they are fascinating.

t

il poet paul
Registered User
(8/19/02 6:46:45 am)
Reply
ezSupporter
didn't they
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
cancel his show?

-p

anders
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 8:09:26 am)
Reply the inside dirt on the mert
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thomas Merton, a/k/a Father Mary Louis, urbane and sophisticated young intellectual turned Trappist monk, best-selling author (_The Seven Storey Mountain_, etc.), poet, explorer of East Asian spirituality. In this last capacity, he was attending a worldwide conference of monks from many different cultures and traditions in Bangkok in 1968, when he was electrocuted as he got out of a shower by a malfunctioning electrical device for circulating air.




www.eppc.org/publications...detail.htm



There were also other Mertons, among the more troublesome: the Bohemian. This Merton felt a constant need to be an outsider. When Merton lived in the world, it took the usual forms. He had aspirations to being an experimental writer and poet (his Collected Poems, which show real innovation but great unevenness, run to almost 1,000 pages). He listened to jazz, dabbled in leftist politics, hit the bottle pretty hard, smoked heavily, had his share of girlfriends, and did a bit of drawing. All relatively harmless, but some incongruous holdover bedeviled Merton the monk. Should a Trappist be interested in Henry Miller? Or follow Joan Baez? Or Bob Dylan? As late as 1959 (after eighteen years in the abbey), Merton was reading books like James Thurber's The Years with Ross, an account of life under Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker. The New Yorker of the fifties was more staid than its current incarnation, and Merton often claimed the chic ads reminded him of everything in the world he had fled. But there was something odd in a monk even being interested in a magazine like the New Yorker. Merton sometimes took pride in what he regarded as the fact that poets and monks are marginal people. The Trappist life occasionally seemed good to him because it represented the greatest nonconformity in the world.



www.religion-online.org/c...em_id=1784


To attempt to "classify" Merton in any of these categories -- as poet, theologian, critic or monastic commentator -- is to miss the point. Thomas Merton was primarily a monk; that is the way he defined himself from the moment he entered Gethsemani Abbey, and that is the way he understood himself in the last months before, his death. It is true that his notion of monasticism had deepened and matured over the years. He had shed any romantic notion of the monk as a cowled figure padding about a cloister garden and had come to define the monk, as he did in a talk he gave just weeks before his death, as a "marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience" (cf. Asian Journal, 1973, p.305).
A Concern with ‘Irrelevancy’
This notion of marginality was very much a part of Merton’s thinking, and it was his pursuit of that ideal that, paradoxically enough, brought him from the margin to the center of people’s attention, In the same talk quoted above, Merton argued that it is the monk’s vocation (as it is the vocation of the poet, the hippie, the prisoner, the displaced or dying person) to be irrelevant. He is to be irrelevant (how odd to apply that badge to oneself in 1968!) because the monk needs to live close to the edge of death, for only in that way can one understand the limits of life.
This concern with the peculiar status of the monk is the leitmotif of the volume Contemplation in a World of Action (1973), which brought together a large number of Merton’s essays and conference papers on the monastic life done during the ’60s. In this volume his idea of "irrelevancy" is expressed in a somewhat different way: "The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness. In a certain sense he is supposed to be ‘useless’ because his mission is not to do this or that job but to be a man of God" (p. 27). It is from this peculiar perspective that the monk should be able to get a sense of the deepest meaning of life itself; he also "will be in some sense critical of the world, of its routines, its confusions. and its sometimes tragic failures to provide other men with lives that are fully sane and human" (p. 2 .
This sense of distance and marginality had to be lived in creative tension with the real world. Merton was anxious to erase the earlier conception of the Trappist that he himself had helped so create in Seven Storey Mountain: "The man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville, heading for the woods with Thoreau in one pocket, John of the Cross in another, and holding the Bible open to the Apocalypse" (Contemplation in a World of Action, p. 159). In fact, Merton the solitary carried on a passionate, if critical, dialogue with the world. His writings and his addresses attest to a Catholic appetite for the problems and hopes of the modern world.



Djuana99
Registered User
(8/19/02 11:44:28 am)
Reply Hey - just a little thought
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why not try rewriting this very same poem, which is pretty good, without the lie? Meaning when the speaker says "I doubt it", you freefall into the non-lie, the stuff you talk about in your comments to the critiques, just to see where that goes? Probably the ending would change (though maybe not), & maybe the title would change. I dunno, just a thought...

Thanks for the read Laurel, & oh - Eden is right - you are just getting better & better...

Djuana

laurel
Unregistered User
(8/19/02 8:47:19 pm)
Reply slight rev
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He taps his forehead where his third
eye is, says, "Heaven is here."
Bill nods, smiles shut-mouthed.
"God is the final wall," he continues.

Bill's eyes widen. "What do you mean?"
he asks his guest. Joseph leans forward,
eyes turned inward. "You have to get past
Jesus to believe he is your savior. Get past

Christianity, escape the bonds of what
defines religion." Like Merton, a devout
Catholic communing with the Dalai Lama.
I lean forward, tap my forehead. Heaven

is here. And hell. I change the channel--
Joseph's mid-syllable about the transparency
of the tricksters, the clowns of religion,
he calls them. Click. Merton standing

with the Dalai Lama, smiling like the Buddha.
Merton stepping out of the shower, catching
the current, surging away from heaven.

lynze
Unregistered User
(8/20/02 10:29:48 am)
Reply ooo yeh
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i like that twist on the end, the validation of where heaven is....

good rev.



laurel
Unregistered User
(8/20/02 12:07:32 pm)
Reply one more time
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
felt like i was saying too much in previous drafts....

He taps his third eye, says, "Heaven
is here." Bill nods, smiles shut-
mouthed. "God is the final wall."

Bill's eyes widen. "What do you mean?"
Joseph leans forward, eyes turned
inward. "You have to get past Jesus

to believe in him." Like Merton,
a Catholic convert communing
with the Dalai Lama. I lean forward,

tap my forehead. Heaven is here.
And hell. I change the channel
Joseph mid-syllable about the transparent

tricksters, the clowns of religion. Click.
Merton standing with the Dalai Lama,
smiling like the Buddha. Click. Merton

stepping from the shower, catching
the current, surging away from heaven.




<< Prev Topic | Next Topic >>





::: posted by hiccup at 2:25 PM


 
fafalala
Unregistered User
(7/25/02 3:30:43 pm)
Reply A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Box of Stars


You call to tell how your father
was your grandfather. The dog stares.
I ran out of dog chow days ago.
She likes potato salad. The trouble
with the truth is eventually
you run out of things to say. Truth
is like that box of stars my kids press
on the bedroom ceiling. Shine a light
and they glow a little while
in the dark. Then they stop glowing
no matter how much light you give them.
Then they fall one by one. My father
told a story about how he cut off
a man's ear and stuffed it in his pocket.
When I was seven, the doctors
wanted to break both my legs to fix them.
They bowed just like my father's did.
Standing side by side we made an M.
Mother told the doctors No. She wore
her anger inside her skin. Father
talked with both hands, grabbing things from air.
I thought if I could see the shapes,
I might understand his logarithms
of happiness. At eighteen, I ate
blotter on a paper star,
saw colors in my lover's face
that weren't there before or after.
I walked my dog along the broken
notes of railroad tracks, memorized each
missing spike, her favorite spots for squatting.
I walked in shoes of blood. I walked
away from love so many times
I ended up walking back into it.
When my father died I searched
his pockets for dried ears, and found lint
stars, a broken watch with light-up face.
I have outlived three dogs. I talk to fill
the space. What I don't say is yours.
Take it. Reach into this box.


lynze
Unregistered User
(7/25/02 3:55:34 pm)
Reply man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i really like this. n how it's so full of melodrama and how well it's hidden. sounds like mpr sprit.

sorry to always use yr intials but i never can spell michael right.

whoever, this is simple great. a full box.

fuzzy dice
Registered User
(7/26/02 4:28:59 am)
Reply Re: A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...it's good...

reminds me of the glenn/jack style from writer's block a long time ago.

good wiseass tone...deadpan, i like that.

thewhitetree
Registered User
(7/26/02 5:32:13 am)
Reply Re: A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If this is Michael, best of yours in a while. Though that's due to my own predjudices. If someone else, very nice.

Especially logarithms of happiness (though algorithms might work as well).

eden2000s
Registered User
(7/26/02 10:39:08 am)
Reply Re: A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i like this, esp on the second read. On the initial read, a few "cliche" sounding words jump out but when taken in context, they are not cliches at all...There is a good weaving of remembered images, esp liked the talking with hands, and the bow-legs. Well done.

regards

eden

native dancer
Registered User
(7/26/02 11:49:18 am)
Reply Re: A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
this is the best poem anybody's posted around here in ages. i don't know who the poet is, but you guys ought to be falling down in lavish praise for this one.

il poet paul
Registered User
(7/26/02 12:02:02 pm)
Reply Re: A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
wow,

This is so well written, and although i haven't been around long enough to compare, it's damn good.

-paul

fuzzy dice
Registered User
(7/26/02 12:32:07 pm)
Reply Re: A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ok, jim likes it...everybody hear that?...an authority has made a pronouncement...so all you slackers can come out of the woodwork and commence complimenting... ;-)

il poet paul
Registered User
(7/26/02 12:47:41 pm)
Reply Re: A Box of Stars
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hahaha

-paul

falalalalal
Unregistered User
(7/29/02 9:50:20 am)
Reply Thanks all!
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I am not who you think I am. Not who I think I am. Think I am. I am. am I.

But enjoyed your kind words. I posted this some other places and got a few peeps and lots of white noise. So the comments here lifting my spirits some.

Thanks all! I should come back some day.

ala
Unregistered User
(7/29/02 5:25:34 pm)
Reply Oh yes!
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there is much buried here
to chew on
so I'll dogear this one
dig it up later
when the tado salads gone
wait for the sound
of crunchies
in a deaf bowl
always willin
to
listen.

Michael Pare Reid
Registered User
(8/23/02 3:27:53 am)
Reply "man"'s been used so
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fuck. this is a poem and a half. eh. you a good writer.

The trouble
with the truth is eventually
you run out of things to say. Truth
is like that box of stars my kids press
on the bedroom ceiling. Shine a light
and they glow a little while
in the dark. Then they stop glowing
no matter how much light you give them.
Then they fall one by one.

this whole poem is perfect. i have high standards. i'll be awy for a while. i decided to let the poems sit there and see if they get up and do anything on thier own. it's highly unlikely but anything is possible. laters folks. i'll be tacky lurker so no shit poems ok?


m



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::: posted by hiccup at 2:24 PM

ARCHIVES :::

Any poem posted here is allowed to be edited by anybody here. No need to save the original version for comparison. Any final poems are considered the joint product of anyone who helped work on it. The conglomerate name for this amorphous ''poet'' consisting of the dabbling hands of every originator and editor is, let's say, ''Phylicia Drabble.''