Sunday, July 31, 2005

i.9.

"Angela was twenty-two then. She had been the real head of the family since she was sixteen, since Mother died, since I was born. She used to talk about how she had three children--me, Frank, and Father. She wasn't exaggerating, either. I can remember cold mornings when Frank, Father, and I would all be in a line in the front hall, and Angela would be bundling us up, treating us exactly the same. Only I was going to kindergarten; Frank was going to junior high; and Father was going to work on the atom bomb. I remember one morning like that when the oil burner had quit, the pipes were frozen, and the car wouldn't start. We all sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until the battery was dead. And then Father spoke up. You know what he said? He said, 'I wonder about turtles.' 'What do you wonder about turtles?' Angela asked him. 'When they pull in their heads,' he said, 'do their spines buckle or contract?'

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Friday, July 29, 2005

get started, start a fire

You stop in the old cafe where you used to play pinball. And look for the air-raid shelter but it's gone and the cafe seems so small and all the gardens that had trees and stolen apples now have small businesses flourishing in cinder blocks. Then they will call your name and hand you a gold watch. Then they will call your name but it doesn't sound like much. And you'll never discover why it's like an old lover you can't touch anymore. It doesn't mean much anymore when you go back in time, back in time.

You head down to the local try to find a focal point. A scratch in the wallpaper but it's all been wallpapered over. Down at the newsagents it's all pornography and you try to get high again but it's like time-lapse photography. Then they will call your name and hand you a medal or something more practical like a whistling kettle and it'll test your metal just try to keep grinning knowing that this feeling is indulgence worse than sinning, trying to go back in time.

Photographs with a glossy finish, letters lovers never finished. And there in a dusty drawer a necktie you once wore. And a girl you tried to court made you feel about two feet short. Where is she now today? What would she have to say? Then they will call your name and hand you a pension. A bottle of pills that guarantee life extension and give you a mention in the local boy makes good section. But all the old news is like print stains across your mind when you go back in time.

from the song "back in time" by graham parker

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

the view from stalin's head

"you should steer clear of that guy," I said. "there are some who consider him an evolutionary cul-de-sac."

from "homeland" by sam lipsyte

metal school

their clothes; their rings as well, until
at last they wore nothing. all was visible:
flourish; humiliation; some things,
more than others, looking almost the same.
as if not only torn but lavish let be
the angle all tearing starts at,
as if this were the rule, each
splitting open around, unfolding
from -- so as, incidentally, to expose --
its wet center

by carl phillips

Monday, July 25, 2005

how to survive in this world and not even know it

[fragment]

When she touched me
I couldn't stand it,
as if missing layers of skin,
where had I put them,
I love you
she said, she kissed me, I said,
Ow.

Outside the mist lay over the city,
the mist always lay over the city,

Charles, she said
where are you going

In the park I saw a girl stand up
and her bottom held the imprint
of her seat,

In certain ways
even a picnic table
can want you,

Charles,
in certain ways
you are the only thing I know.

tea time

"Tut-tut, it looks like rain."

Friday, July 22, 2005

For my 2 Favorite Sad Bastards

Dean Young
He Said Turn Here

and then Tony showed us the lake
where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer
and it had dissolved like powder
so he thought maybe the lake could take
some of the radiant, aluminum kind
he had been making lately.
And it did.
It was a perfect lake,
none of the paint had chipped off,
no bolts showing, the arms that Dante
and Virgil would have to hack through
not even breaking the surface.
Mumbling Italian to itself,
it had climbed down two wooden stairs
back to the beach now that the rains were done.
How strange to be water so close to the ocean
yet the only other water you get to talk to
comes from the sky. Maybe this is why
it seems so willing to take on
Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes
his friends, which is really
many different sadnesses, smaller
and smaller, surrounded by more
and more space, each a world and
at its core an engine like a bee
inside a lily, like buzzing inside
the bee. It seems like nothing
could change its color although
we couldn’t tell what color it was,
it kept changing. In the summer,
Tony says he comes down early each day
and there’s no one around so the lake
barely says a thing when he dives in
and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine
and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand,
trying to drag him to safety
and some nights in New Mexico,
he can hear it howling,
searching for him in the desert
so we’re glad Tony has this lake
and we promise to come back in August
and swim with him across,
maybe even race.

Miranda July does Bruce Lee

Audio file of Miranda July which appears on The Diagram. It's called Bruce Lee.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Reading

from The Sofa Series
by Martha Ronk

For the sake of absolute balance, on one side
of the walkway a pink bush, on the other, a white.
Her socks match her shirt. On the mantel two candlesticks
push out six inches from either wall.
Everything's like pieces of desert paper
blowing in the wind. The motel disappears,
the road already comes undone, and beer cans litter
what's left of vacancy. On Saturdays there's no room
except the sky. Like a veneer of saranwrap the city
lies across a basin waiting to be rolled up,
taken to a new set of circumstances and spread out
for hoards of people with weapons or without.
Everyone prances like ponies, skitters like lizards.
No wonder her silver shoes, no matter her silver hair.



If the chair doesn't move across polished floors
and tables aren't burning with electric pulse,
if I can't glide in patent shoes over turquoise tile,
why have you brought me here?
What reason for such straight lines,
such an ill-drawn moon?
When the cactus glows at night I'll swim the length
and hold my breath until the edge of the sea.
Once, in between one belief and another, I thought
this town's at the end of all waters.
Nobody lives here who isn't already taking notes.
Across from her at the counter a cowboy reads a script
and she responds with coy laughter.
Nothing happens. We take walks. Suddenly the slide.

---------------------------------------------------

NEWS OF
by Carol Snow

another massacre; and the clean bright morning.
Keeping walking. 'Contradiction' is human -- I know that.
And 'knowing'... A stirring from the place the whirlwind -- something like
fear -- arises, and watching my breath

to still that. Suddenly thinking somewhere in the breath -- along
the breath, is an understood place. Somewhere -- but somewhere
in passing -- where the matter is reconciled.

Reading at City Lights
Thursday, July 21 @ 7:30pm
U.C. Press New California Poetry Series
with Laura Mullen, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Martha Ronk, Carol Snow, and Juliana Spahr

The New California Poetry Series presents works that help define the emerging generation of poets–books consistent with California's commitment to the Black Mountain tradition and reflective of California literary traditions–cosmopolitan, innovative, experimental, open, and broad-ranging in their intellectual makeup. Forthcoming for spring 2005 in the series are books by Sarah Gridley, Laura Mullen, and Juliana Spahr.

You know you want to go.

Friday, July 15, 2005

venus drive

you could touch for a couple of bucks. the window of the booth went up and you stuck out the bills. they might tell you not to pinch, but I was a stroke type anyway. some guys, I guess they want to leave a mark. me, I just like the feel.
I went over there on the way to see my sister. there was a lit-up eye with an eyebrow over the door, a guy in front with a change belt, an apron that said peep city. peeptown was up the block. they didn’t have an eyebrow over the eye over there.
why do they make these places so dark? I like to cop tit in the light. guess I have no shame. maybe I got through shame a long time ago. somebody said I had an old soul, which I took to mean I’m older than I am, or that I’ve been places I haven’t been.
you could hardly see in there, in peep city, and all that disco, that ammonia, it made me sick. I looked around for a girl with a good set, one who would maybe tell me I was sweet. sometimes they asked about handjobs, blowjobs, all the jobs, but I never wanted to go that far. I felt sorry for them. somebody told me they were exploited. me, I always paid in full.
this time, just to break habit, I went for what one of them had down below, just a few bucks more. she was a giant with plenty on the chest, but I put a fivespot out. she swiveled on the ledge, pushed an ass dusted with glitter out over the sill. I palmed her there, thumbed a pimple near the crack. what am I paying for his for? I thought, thumbing it.
the giant was talking to another girl pressed against her on the ledge. the other girl was a sway of hair that moved like a metronome. the sway took on the color of the strobes.
“what’s he doing down there?” said the other girl.
“jeez, nothing,” said the giant.
I dug a knuckle in.
“what the fuck,” the giant said. the blind was buzzing shut.
“prick,” she said.
there was a bucket near the door with soapy water in it. I got down like you do for a shoelace, dipped my knuckle in the bucket. the man in the apron came up.
“I got ass germs on it,” I said.
I figured it was peeptown from now on.

from “old soul” by sam lipsyte

Monday, July 11, 2005

yolk

blurry grays shamble the halls
clothes hang the back of doors
a looming
a brush of fabric, framework
body pressed
the silence of the glass of water
by the bed
objects stack, pile lives
the choosing words in a mouth
the runny off
the no longer
they

Thursday, July 07, 2005

jet plane variations (1)

Every Gerard I see
is Gerard Depardieu.
I tell you babe,
it's not a pretty thing.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

At the Seaport Restaurant

by Andrea Baker

At the Seaport Restaurant

The birds kept twitching. All the snarling birds, snarling at the table. Say you are adorable just as you are; say I love to see you sitting below the ugly green umbrella. The texture of the plastic table was the texture of wood grain and it had a hole in the middle. Who ever was an empty one was sitting at the table. You were saying love love love.

Your hair was tight and curly black as always. It was looking like tight and early bird feathers curling in on themselves. It was looking like a whole set of unborns. Their hands inside their mouths. Them licking each one of their fingers.

The dinner came. It was linguini al fredo. It had a parsley garnish. The waiter was wishing me a happy birthday. None of these were the reason I couldn’t stop laughing.

There was a long piece of cellophane tied to a parking lot sign. I couldn’t believe the color. It was something that light itself had done. Illuminated crystal green, the inside of a saint left beside chicken bones and a broken toaster.

I wanted to hold you and hold you but the birds were all eating and crying at the table. The people had attached themselves to the sky. They had bird beaks but they also had hands at the tips of their feathers. That was both the birds and the bodies. Your face looked laced with tendons and puttered almost. I was deeply hurt; I said of course. The waiter came. You put your face in your hands. It looked half eaten.

I ate very little below the ugly green umbrella. I put the sparkling glass of water down on the table. More water, please waiter.

The to Sound

from The to Sound by Eric Baus

I was thinking birds with extremely long necks



And my sister sees I was using words I didn’t know she nods and we know

a voice

my mouth uses rain to say the body is a sequence



that counts

as it moves the body is a museum

where we apologize for our voices