you could have it all

millstone

I used to be such a burning example
I used to be so original
I used to care I was being cared for
And made sure I showed it to those that I love
I used to sleep without a single stir
Cause I was about my father's work

[drum kicks in]

-- Brand New

edwards drive-in

when did ryan gosling become edward norton jr.? just watched the believer and half nelson back to back and I'd do it again. cause I'm an internet using motherfucker, or with hyphens: an internet-using-motherfucker.

"john, the internet using motherfucker"

turning on every bright light

yeah, that’s you on the overpass, walking past workers, looking like you. if you had a different name you’d still feel like this. two miles from your office motorway. motor away. reinvent the wheel until it rolls over everyone. the wheel waiting until sunday and then it goes around finding people to roll over. the newspapers make it a front page story and then it rolls over newspaper buildings. you can’t understand anything the wheel says. if you show it this or that it will say that’s a bridge. music to take you from one set of words to the next.

ashes ashes we all fall down

king tut and elvis both spent time there
there are other sad boys
hiding in bathrooms
crying in mirrors
they reinforce themselves
they know their own stories
they sleep with one eye open despite being the largest predators in the domain
waiting for the other shoe to drop
children of neglect
they still run home
and genuflect on the way back out of memphis

The Garment in which no one had Slept-Pam Rhem

from Thus I find my legs

IV.

The fact of sex under a microscope can be determined beforehand.

I have, on the other hand, an apprehension as to what exists outside of myself. As force. Thus, my waiting isn't spoiled.

There is no loss of speed. My decision to not know comes from my inability to affirm the prediction.

I remember the needle swinging above my mother's wrist read as one boy and four girls. However, he is absent.

I could never ask if he had existed because I was never told the story. Sometimes I thought that I only overheard myself.

everything's fine--part two

“That’s the thing,” said Principal Fontana. “I want to be involved in your lives. Or I think I do. But then, really, when I look into my heart, I’d rather be on the driving range, or getting drunk, or getting my wick dipped. Is this shocking you?”

“Some nights,” I said, “I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it’s not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.”

“Right,” said Fontana. “I knew I could talk to you.”

---sam lipsyte

I was never your assassin

The more I think about it, the more I’d like to take a rain check on the subject of me. What I’d like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself. how important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it. That’s how I’d grasp a clearer sense of who I am.

from "sputnick sweetheart" by haruki murakami

Everything's fine.

"Everything's fine," I said. "You're here. I'm here. Everything's fine."

"Fuck here," said Gary. "We were from a town. A little town. Do you remember?"

"What a question," I said.

"There were people there," said Gary. "There were cars. Carports. You knew where to park."

"Dog hatches in the doors," I said. "Dog doors. Nearmont Avenue. The trestles on Main."

"Spartakill Road," said Gary. "Venus Drive. The Hobby Shop, the Pitch-n-Putt, Big Vin's Pizza, the Plaza."

"Behind the plaza," I said.

"Exactly," said Gary. "Behind it."

-- from Sam Lipsyte's "I'm Slavering"

more words about skin

we speak of space so space speak
holes in a waiting ground
split difference in an atom
or the distance at any time between our skins

pick a day soon and ask me what I want to do

pick a night when I’m myself and I’ll only bring the tips of my fingers




why were you out collecting rocks by the train tracks




when I woke up you asked me what I’d been saying
I acted like I didn’t know what you were talking about
I was saying don’t, please don’t. oh god, don’t.

my head squeezes into shape
vice grips
thongs for picking cotton
or removing babies from the womb
a tightening of the almost done with myself for now
my head will wonder what comes next

fourth dirty monday

Fourth dirty monday.
washed up and old
before the washbowl
the dull razor pulls,

catches,

at last aquiesces
and cuts.

You've always stuck by me,
my skin,
today as I again
abrade you,

let that not go unthought of.

let it not go unsaid

what

if we
were the only
three things
in the world.

you,
me
and the reflection of me
at 6 am,
the fourth dirty monday.

taping the lips-Tony Robinson

'taping the lips'
Anthony Robinson


all involve the idea of sweetness

the honey of elbow brown hair firefly

+

inside you

+

loping latitude. the loveliest I've seen
on that particular chair. bend back. over. again.

+

stars. douceur. the purloined love letter.
we burned everything left our clothes on her banks

+

the french have a word. it is not "freedom"
those men have a bomb


+

"you, my gazelle, really are the bomb."

—the man, you see, was drunk
he was trying to say the name
of a rhyming poem—

she fucked him. lucky error.

+

all develop independently all make reference to the slippage.
sever sever sever. my love, i owe you several
missiles. i misspell my desire. drop it on the floor.

watch the cartoon flames dance dance &.

+

it is not like a womb it begins with "mother"

+

i need to be your skin.

look at those people. their flesh is on fire.

"i suppose that must have been some buildings
with people in them"

+
all involved.
all culpable.
all cuppable.
the idea of sweetness.

inside you, capably so.

from Movements of Sincere Banality

restless

like a swishing skirt
I should wear that dress
grey and black stripes

oranges rolling forth from a bin
they thud
softly
hitting the ground

seek and find but never hunt for it
hunting begets hiding
hiding doesn’t need your encouragement

black and grey stripes stick to
the backside of my thighs
when I bend I see you looking

but someone must right the oranges
before they roll off

on sunday poppy found faith, went
downtown looking to get in someone’s way
turned tall
turned black for you, a well-paid poppy tight as ever
purple flowers, dark seeds, opium shakes a drowsy syrup
when she moves on top of you, leaving
behind a looming scent
oakmoss resin
shed of night
the smart set

or mr. emerson, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise
she then, a sleep inducer who leaves a mark, the
inside of my arm has been thinking, it is
uncertain where this is the same word, although
all the forms are the same
a poppet
a six-string puppet comes down dangling elevated ornaments
she a generous flourish, much better
than this papaver
milky juice like pale skin narcotic
petals four like limbs

but this is reality so give me some room

It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline
But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline
Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying
Over luxury's disappointment
So he walks over and he's trying
To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her
That the Third World is just around the corner

In the Soviet Union a scientist is blinded
By the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded
That Dr Robert Oppenheimer's optimism fell
At the first hurdle
In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear
Is the sound of someone stacking chairs
And mopping up spilt beer
And someone asking questions and basking in the light
Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the fanzine writer

Mixing Pop and Politics he asks me what the use is
I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses
While looking down the corridor
Out to where the van is waiting
I'm looking for the Great Leap Forwards

Jumble sales are organised and pamphlets have been posted
Even after closing time there's still parties to be hosted
You can be active with the activists
Or sleep in with the sleepers
While you're waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

---billy bragg

The To Sound

THERE APPEARS TO BE DIAGNOSTIC FRICTION IN YOUR AMBLYOPIA, YOUR
PATCHED OFF FLIGHT.

The corrected version begins: if a seed powders to husk in the bowel
of...not the x-rays came back blank, the coral hull is groaning...

Follow the pointer with all your moths closed.

Crack this grounded star like so: as a symbol of my capitalized wing
[better one?] as a dented speech of teeth [better two?]

Your vowels have been spreading since I notarizd the "ancient am"
under your arm, and your tilted diction suggests a torch of arid
bladder syndrome. The crunching in of hosts.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Anybody Speaking Words" (1982, acrylic and oil
painstick on canvas, 96 by 61.5 inches) is perhaps the best glottal
stop for your repealed gloss, your nitrogen highness. As I'm sure
this piece of clay demonstrates, the centrifugal swere in your third
opera is almost entirely crossed, an impossibly intoned operation.

i assuage you, this aphasia will swoon.

from The To Sound by Eric Baus

blow

two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life. at seventy-three, I’m not about to change. the mental health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter of me half my age. I have shot germans in the fields of normandy, filed twenty-six patents, married three women, survived them all, and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS, which has about as much chance of collecting from me as shylock did of getting his pound of flesh. bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on the other hand, am perfectly lucid.
note, for instance, how I obtained the SAAB I’m presently driving into the los angeles basin: a niece in scottsdale lent it to me. do you think she’ll ever see it again? unlikely. of course when I borrowed it from her I had every intention of returning it and in a few days or weeks I may feel that way again, but for now forget her and her husband and three children who looked me over the kitchen table like I was a museum piece sent to bore them. I could run circles around those kids. they’re spoon-fed ritalin and private schools and have eyes that say give me things I don’t have. I wanted to read them a book on the history of the world, its migrations, plagues and wars, but the shelves of their outsized condominium were full of ceramics and biographies of the stars. the whole thing depressed the hell out of me and I’m glad I’m gone.

from "notes to my biographer" by adam haslett

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

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