I know that only my love letters
Arrive in silence and upon my waking,
That glorious waking that fills you
With the feeling of space and the taste
Of morning light pouring through the windows
Like auburn iced tea consoling a dry
Hungover mouth. I may forget,
Forget the great sculptures and brilliant books,
Forget the rules of fate and the proper employment
Of lascivious looks but may I remember waking,
Maudlin harlequin waking that without
We would be prisoners to our dreams
And stare wooly eared and wild eyed
At the cacophony of unrelenting sleep
Unfurling like tattered banners in a snapping wind.
I much prefer the dust at dawn,
The death of night and the sparrow's song,
A trash truck moaning up the hill
And the loose attention to the coffee pot
And breakfast that reminds us who we really
Are as we glance out the window and see
Only blue beauty and true skies,
Making us forget the need for true endings
And false beginnings.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
positive thinking never works for people who have imaginations
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response to my writing
"I do not know what to do with this. Pick any point on the compass...in that direction madness lies. "
Ah, how illuminating. Truely, what did i expect? Praise? Congradulations? I mean, it is obvious that i am seperated from most of the writing community, if you could call the smattering of published and unpublished writers across the nation that. It first came to me during my brief and disasterous internship for Pacific University's MFA in Writing program over a few too many glasses of wine. Writers defending warfare, writers defending corporations. A compendium of conservatives, writing cute little slice of life poems and essays detailing the minutae of installing toilets amid incense. Then a fictional story about fighting the Taliban and Al Queda, glossed with Republican justifications for aggressive occupation and civilian casualties. Pretty blatent pandering to establishment vanities in the hopes of recognition.
Another problem, the adherence of writers to the strict history of the art. I mean, it is fine to admire the writing tradition, but to expect people to adopt the structure of Tennyson? Of Whitman? Well, as Vonnegut's artist friend said "There are generally two types of artists, those who respond to the history of their art and those who respond to life itself." Perhaps i should be writing a Victorean novel to illustrate how ridiculous adherance to tradition for the sake of tradition is. Even following contemporary styles is a dead end. Who wants to read writing journals stuffed with tepid journalism masquerading as poorly researched sociology, in the classical form of the short story? "He left her after she had the abortion. She cried out his name into a telephone that was off the hook. 'John, John, I'm sorry." Bleh. Life is all there is. Communicate with it. Do not speak to the dead or for the dead. They left what marks they could in the atmosphere of their times. Deconstructing Holocaust literature should be a crime. Let us remember to sing our own songs, to intimate our own musics, to abscond from criticism if we do not create.
Ah, how illuminating. Truely, what did i expect? Praise? Congradulations? I mean, it is obvious that i am seperated from most of the writing community, if you could call the smattering of published and unpublished writers across the nation that. It first came to me during my brief and disasterous internship for Pacific University's MFA in Writing program over a few too many glasses of wine. Writers defending warfare, writers defending corporations. A compendium of conservatives, writing cute little slice of life poems and essays detailing the minutae of installing toilets amid incense. Then a fictional story about fighting the Taliban and Al Queda, glossed with Republican justifications for aggressive occupation and civilian casualties. Pretty blatent pandering to establishment vanities in the hopes of recognition.
Another problem, the adherence of writers to the strict history of the art. I mean, it is fine to admire the writing tradition, but to expect people to adopt the structure of Tennyson? Of Whitman? Well, as Vonnegut's artist friend said "There are generally two types of artists, those who respond to the history of their art and those who respond to life itself." Perhaps i should be writing a Victorean novel to illustrate how ridiculous adherance to tradition for the sake of tradition is. Even following contemporary styles is a dead end. Who wants to read writing journals stuffed with tepid journalism masquerading as poorly researched sociology, in the classical form of the short story? "He left her after she had the abortion. She cried out his name into a telephone that was off the hook. 'John, John, I'm sorry." Bleh. Life is all there is. Communicate with it. Do not speak to the dead or for the dead. They left what marks they could in the atmosphere of their times. Deconstructing Holocaust literature should be a crime. Let us remember to sing our own songs, to intimate our own musics, to abscond from criticism if we do not create.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
story ideas
Let me expend some of my energies. Story ideas are a good place to begin. I have to expend these and let them fly out in the world so i can get past my obsession about writing on mental illness and medical hospitals, so i can write something a little more mainstream and less esoteric. That's the intention anyway. Plus these ideas aren't that inventive, in one way or another they revolve around my life.
--A woman police officer picks up an escaped mental patient from a luxury gated community. The patient is wearing business slacks, no shirt, and plastic sandals. In his pockets are a Costco club membership car and seed pods that rattle when shaken. The officer asks where he got this stuff and he says "You'd be surprised." She takes him back to the mental hospital he escaped from in handcuffs. Upon releasing him, his hand brushes her finger, and she sees a glaring light appear in front of her with the intensity of the sun. The patient collapses on the floor and has to be dragged to a chair in the middle of the hallway where he is seen convulsing. A nurse slaps him out of it. The woman police offficer leaves, but continues having visions for some time of bright lights. She sees her doctor who says "it's either schizophrenia, migranes, or a brain tumor." She asks about all three. "There is no test for schizophrenia or migranes, but we can scan your brain for any abnormalities." She agrees. A week later, she gets a call from the doctor explaining in a banal voice that she has a brain tumor the size of a blueberry, but that it's operable and it was caught just in time. She undergoes surgery, recovers, and wonders about the mental patient who touched her. She writes it off as a coincidence.
--Title "The Awakening of April" A young women living in a low income section of town awakens first to the blossomings of spring, and then to the fact that a Russian crime syndicate is manuevering its business into the neighborhood. Nobody believes her, people refuse to comment. Her boyfriend is mugged. She decides to do something about the syndicate by herself after police laugh her off as paranoid. Over a period of months she gets to know the Russians individually, then surprises each of them by inviting them over to dinner. They arrive separately, are pleasently surprised to see their comrades. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is cowering and being a jerk at the same time. The russians appreciate her hospitality, and proposition her to the effect that she could have a small job to play for the syndicate being that she is american. She reluctantly agrees, seeing no other option. After working for them, seeing the violence of the criminal profession and the corruption of law enforcement agencies, she looks at life differently, lamenting her innocent memories and placing a distinct value on life in the form of a discrete letter to her parents.
--Love develops in a mental institution between two patients. Of course they are torn apart and never see each other again, but their experience permeates their recovery
--A college poetry professor in a perpetual state of wonder at the world. This gets him into trouble when he begins to seduce his young students. Makes an impassioned speech to the administration board thinking of firing him. They go with the standard policy decision and the professor is forced to become a poor poet again, relying on his somewhat questionable charm with women to support himself through entirely female earnings and handouts. He becomes a minor poet in a circle of regional writers until he writes a memoir expressing the beauty of love and sex, mingled with poetic considerations of the wonder of the world. The book is called "The Rebirth of Wonder." He becomes a famous writer and lives in Paris, finally dying of cirrohsis of the liver like most of the French do anyway
Thats it for now, i know there are some i have forgotten. I am nervously awaiting a response on a story i wrote for a private internet writing group, which i got into by way of professional pleading and flattery.
Someone write a poem with me!
--A woman police officer picks up an escaped mental patient from a luxury gated community. The patient is wearing business slacks, no shirt, and plastic sandals. In his pockets are a Costco club membership car and seed pods that rattle when shaken. The officer asks where he got this stuff and he says "You'd be surprised." She takes him back to the mental hospital he escaped from in handcuffs. Upon releasing him, his hand brushes her finger, and she sees a glaring light appear in front of her with the intensity of the sun. The patient collapses on the floor and has to be dragged to a chair in the middle of the hallway where he is seen convulsing. A nurse slaps him out of it. The woman police offficer leaves, but continues having visions for some time of bright lights. She sees her doctor who says "it's either schizophrenia, migranes, or a brain tumor." She asks about all three. "There is no test for schizophrenia or migranes, but we can scan your brain for any abnormalities." She agrees. A week later, she gets a call from the doctor explaining in a banal voice that she has a brain tumor the size of a blueberry, but that it's operable and it was caught just in time. She undergoes surgery, recovers, and wonders about the mental patient who touched her. She writes it off as a coincidence.
--Title "The Awakening of April" A young women living in a low income section of town awakens first to the blossomings of spring, and then to the fact that a Russian crime syndicate is manuevering its business into the neighborhood. Nobody believes her, people refuse to comment. Her boyfriend is mugged. She decides to do something about the syndicate by herself after police laugh her off as paranoid. Over a period of months she gets to know the Russians individually, then surprises each of them by inviting them over to dinner. They arrive separately, are pleasently surprised to see their comrades. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is cowering and being a jerk at the same time. The russians appreciate her hospitality, and proposition her to the effect that she could have a small job to play for the syndicate being that she is american. She reluctantly agrees, seeing no other option. After working for them, seeing the violence of the criminal profession and the corruption of law enforcement agencies, she looks at life differently, lamenting her innocent memories and placing a distinct value on life in the form of a discrete letter to her parents.
--Love develops in a mental institution between two patients. Of course they are torn apart and never see each other again, but their experience permeates their recovery
--A college poetry professor in a perpetual state of wonder at the world. This gets him into trouble when he begins to seduce his young students. Makes an impassioned speech to the administration board thinking of firing him. They go with the standard policy decision and the professor is forced to become a poor poet again, relying on his somewhat questionable charm with women to support himself through entirely female earnings and handouts. He becomes a minor poet in a circle of regional writers until he writes a memoir expressing the beauty of love and sex, mingled with poetic considerations of the wonder of the world. The book is called "The Rebirth of Wonder." He becomes a famous writer and lives in Paris, finally dying of cirrohsis of the liver like most of the French do anyway
Thats it for now, i know there are some i have forgotten. I am nervously awaiting a response on a story i wrote for a private internet writing group, which i got into by way of professional pleading and flattery.
Someone write a poem with me!
"Sister Let Them Try and Follow"
The trailer park smells of cheap dinners, salty and larded food wafting out from open sliding doors, permeating the porc, the sunset, the road, the nostrils. People here are as interesting as people anywhere, maybe friendlier, but the difference is that you see their facades when they smile and wave to you while driving out in their Nissans and SUV's and then hear their true selves at night as the smell of their nourishments envelops the porch and overwhelms even the tobacco smoke. Cheap food and cheap language, bickering unfolds like a ratty notebook. Men controling their wives, girlfriends saying 'fuck this fuck that.' My own mother seems to be in the spirit. "Joey, get your finger out of the cat's asshole! If you do that one more time i'm giving the cat's away!" And my nerves grate against something rough, the cliff of her voice filling me with vertigo and absolute revulsion.
I miss my nights in cheap apartments with a warped record spinning on the turntable, a crate of records from the thriftstore askew and asking for further damage as I smoked on the balcony, discussing literature and revolution with a roommate, his girlfriend mixing flour in the kitchen, her hands like two white birds. The sentient sky above, traversed by whisps of water vapor and the pearl of the moon, hinting at expanse, the desire of the spirit. Wet streets that smell like dead leaves and a dry wind effusing ginger, quiet memories of love. The interuption of a record for a public radio broadcast with no hard feelings, people in the apartment do what they want and no one is annoyed. Then the television, reruns of Seinfeld or Futurama, and cookies for everyone, which i refuse but appreciate none the less. Then to my room where my vintage typewriter speaks as the keys strike the paper, its language like an archaic robot, the cross between golem and HAL: sentient, destructive, and weirdly productive.
But this is not a complaint, just a simple sketch, the way an eccentric might sketch out the face of a woman with six lines on a restaurant tablecloth using a permanent marker. More of a gesture than an intent.
I read love stories all day long today, then I walked to the bookstore to return a book by Bataille so i could get the next volume, but the clerk refused me, he seemed to understand that i thought Border's Rewards constituted making the place into a lending library. First refusal ever, on the grounds they stopped carrying it. I checked; they had volumes two and three but not the one I was trying to return. I left after coffee. I noticed things on my walk back, useless things without meaning, like the smell of a cheap diner and the driving habits of people on a busy boulevard who must, without any doubt or hesitation, make right turns across crosswalks without any thought or consideration. I recall Erika spitting on a taxi that almost ran us over on the way to the Hangar, and I smile inside, waiting for tomorrow when she returns. The people I run into on the sidewalk all have desperate postures, as if walking were great suffering that bent their postures into question marks directed at their misery, as if a life spent walking through dense suburban commercial zones simulated the eight circle of Hell. I light a cigarette then sputter, hack and cough. The thought strikes me that i could die soon. I would be embarrassed for the people who would have to speak at my funeral. "This is a tragedy, but really, he almost did this about six other times in his short life, so maybe we shouldn't take it so seriously." Then someone would try to shake me awake, but something inside me that the embalmers put there would break and then result in an instant mess and more embarrasment. "Oh, i guess he really means it this time." However, it is important that corpses possess more dignity than the living. Or so it would seem.
Small aircraft travel in curliques above the bank building. It smells like burnt gasoline everwhere, even on the freshly cut grass, where it should smell like freshly cut grass but doesn't, and this is sad to me in a way that violinists playing a requiem on a sinking ship is sad to me. I'm reminded of this news story I saw about an entrepeneur who goes around the city of LA with an airbrush, painting dead lawns into a pantomime of life, increasing real estate values after the huge housing bust and all the foreclosures, and he is making money because people with money care about image and not life. Imagine if they did that with anything else but grass. "Well, my wife miscarried, but we took the body to a doll-painter, and now my son looks better than the real thing..." Or the rivers get blue dye dumped into them to conceal pollution, the army paints landmines to appeal to children, and skywriters create clouds to detract from all the damn smog fouling up the nightsky and increasing the light pollution.
I am happy because my future prospects make me optimistic; i will leave town with a girl i adore and hopefully will never have to come back for more than a week. Even if i am struck with sickness, there will always have been that hope, that chance to leave, to walk away from the nightmare of living in Los Angeles with the attitude "Yes, and i condemn everything you have built and worked for. It is obviously an atrocious mistake."
I miss my nights in cheap apartments with a warped record spinning on the turntable, a crate of records from the thriftstore askew and asking for further damage as I smoked on the balcony, discussing literature and revolution with a roommate, his girlfriend mixing flour in the kitchen, her hands like two white birds. The sentient sky above, traversed by whisps of water vapor and the pearl of the moon, hinting at expanse, the desire of the spirit. Wet streets that smell like dead leaves and a dry wind effusing ginger, quiet memories of love. The interuption of a record for a public radio broadcast with no hard feelings, people in the apartment do what they want and no one is annoyed. Then the television, reruns of Seinfeld or Futurama, and cookies for everyone, which i refuse but appreciate none the less. Then to my room where my vintage typewriter speaks as the keys strike the paper, its language like an archaic robot, the cross between golem and HAL: sentient, destructive, and weirdly productive.
But this is not a complaint, just a simple sketch, the way an eccentric might sketch out the face of a woman with six lines on a restaurant tablecloth using a permanent marker. More of a gesture than an intent.
I read love stories all day long today, then I walked to the bookstore to return a book by Bataille so i could get the next volume, but the clerk refused me, he seemed to understand that i thought Border's Rewards constituted making the place into a lending library. First refusal ever, on the grounds they stopped carrying it. I checked; they had volumes two and three but not the one I was trying to return. I left after coffee. I noticed things on my walk back, useless things without meaning, like the smell of a cheap diner and the driving habits of people on a busy boulevard who must, without any doubt or hesitation, make right turns across crosswalks without any thought or consideration. I recall Erika spitting on a taxi that almost ran us over on the way to the Hangar, and I smile inside, waiting for tomorrow when she returns. The people I run into on the sidewalk all have desperate postures, as if walking were great suffering that bent their postures into question marks directed at their misery, as if a life spent walking through dense suburban commercial zones simulated the eight circle of Hell. I light a cigarette then sputter, hack and cough. The thought strikes me that i could die soon. I would be embarrassed for the people who would have to speak at my funeral. "This is a tragedy, but really, he almost did this about six other times in his short life, so maybe we shouldn't take it so seriously." Then someone would try to shake me awake, but something inside me that the embalmers put there would break and then result in an instant mess and more embarrasment. "Oh, i guess he really means it this time." However, it is important that corpses possess more dignity than the living. Or so it would seem.
Small aircraft travel in curliques above the bank building. It smells like burnt gasoline everwhere, even on the freshly cut grass, where it should smell like freshly cut grass but doesn't, and this is sad to me in a way that violinists playing a requiem on a sinking ship is sad to me. I'm reminded of this news story I saw about an entrepeneur who goes around the city of LA with an airbrush, painting dead lawns into a pantomime of life, increasing real estate values after the huge housing bust and all the foreclosures, and he is making money because people with money care about image and not life. Imagine if they did that with anything else but grass. "Well, my wife miscarried, but we took the body to a doll-painter, and now my son looks better than the real thing..." Or the rivers get blue dye dumped into them to conceal pollution, the army paints landmines to appeal to children, and skywriters create clouds to detract from all the damn smog fouling up the nightsky and increasing the light pollution.
I am happy because my future prospects make me optimistic; i will leave town with a girl i adore and hopefully will never have to come back for more than a week. Even if i am struck with sickness, there will always have been that hope, that chance to leave, to walk away from the nightmare of living in Los Angeles with the attitude "Yes, and i condemn everything you have built and worked for. It is obviously an atrocious mistake."
Saturday, February 2, 2008
mien
Sight orange in the light of everything
Economic white walls drying and hardening
Totems built around the home of the homeless
The answers with their shadows and the
Individuals with their dolls
But I wake up next to you
And think that beauty isn’t just
A word we say.
In the infirm sky
the winds chased down
certain birds slated to die
In the midst of storms
Flew the angel of thorns
who shed its swords into
The edge of people’s words
And now our peers outline
Blades with the forks of their tongues.
But the lyrics rise
In the tired buildings
Of our breasts
And the light still slides
Down the sequined
Curvature of your dress
Rent me a language
For the vespers of the moon
Buy me a lighter
to burn up this paper room
And we’ll lease it’s pleasing fire
With warm smoke as our perfume.
Economic white walls drying and hardening
Totems built around the home of the homeless
The answers with their shadows and the
Individuals with their dolls
But I wake up next to you
And think that beauty isn’t just
A word we say.
In the infirm sky
the winds chased down
certain birds slated to die
In the midst of storms
Flew the angel of thorns
who shed its swords into
The edge of people’s words
And now our peers outline
Blades with the forks of their tongues.
But the lyrics rise
In the tired buildings
Of our breasts
And the light still slides
Down the sequined
Curvature of your dress
Rent me a language
For the vespers of the moon
Buy me a lighter
to burn up this paper room
And we’ll lease it’s pleasing fire
With warm smoke as our perfume.
Friday, February 1, 2008
lyrical fragments
a sideways gin upon my mouth and slant jig on my feet
i smell the death of a hundred suns as i walk into the street
well the police have gone through the back of my house
and are drinking whiskey there
they know me from my bloodshot eyes
and my greasy unkempt hair
in my car i broke my mirror and drove across the lake
that dried and filled with bones of steers and bodies set to bake
why do you know the make of my car
and it's performance on the lanes,
when you're driving really it aint far
unless you go insane
flames arose in the back of my mind and writhed with wisdom there
the phoneix scream is long and loud like burnt feathers in blue air
i drew my fire fast and hot
around me where I care
my family moved out the front of my house and found my shoes set there
i took a ride on a railway car with nothing but skin to wear
the police have gone through the back of my house
and are drinking whiskey there
they know me from my bloodshot eyes
and my greasy unkempt hair.
i smell the death of a hundred suns as i walk into the street
well the police have gone through the back of my house
and are drinking whiskey there
they know me from my bloodshot eyes
and my greasy unkempt hair
in my car i broke my mirror and drove across the lake
that dried and filled with bones of steers and bodies set to bake
why do you know the make of my car
and it's performance on the lanes,
when you're driving really it aint far
unless you go insane
flames arose in the back of my mind and writhed with wisdom there
the phoneix scream is long and loud like burnt feathers in blue air
i drew my fire fast and hot
around me where I care
my family moved out the front of my house and found my shoes set there
i took a ride on a railway car with nothing but skin to wear
the police have gone through the back of my house
and are drinking whiskey there
they know me from my bloodshot eyes
and my greasy unkempt hair.
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