prop hate
May 27, 2009
California continues on it’s be heart breaking march to deny me and my brothers and sisters our rights. Thanks for nothing Cali.
artistic links
May 22, 2009
- Jenny Saville (again)
- Sonia Delaunay
- Arshile Gorky
- Annoying as hell blinking cat
- Chloe Sevigny (torward the end it’s nsfw)
why it works
May 14, 2009
When poetry works it turns language into art. Just read.
A Night in Martirios
Sometimes when the story is wildly implausible
the author will have one character say
I have a hard time believing this
and the other explains:
it’s the axle working loose,
the fog in the orchards,
controlled fires in the canebrake.
Now we are resting at twilight
on a frayed floral quilt
and the dimity curtains open
in the wind from Orizaba.
Now the author has the characters undress
and sleep together, they are naked
as the space between words,
the lamp is unlit, the bed unmade,
the silence is absolute,
occasionally a faint hiss of rain
or the scritch as the author
erases his own name.
Evora
Maybe we may talk our way out of death
given that the I disappears so disingenuously
whenever you look for it, so does the poem,
leaving only the track of a snail
in the stucco alcove where we catnapped
in Evora, in late summer, scrunched
in the osier bed, before you knew me,
before I didn’t know you, when the future ended,
cracked sun in the mirror, when the finches
instructed us in thin scattered voices
to stand our ground against delight.
in other words
May 6, 2009
Landscape with Arson
Have you ever watched a cigarette released from a driver’s fingers
swim through the night air and disintegrate in tiny embers?
Invisible by day, fire’s little shards, its quiet dissemination.
That’s how, one hot afternoon, no one noticed when
something desperate made the boy devise the strategy
to siphon gas from the motorcycle with a discarded straw,
spitting mouthfuls into a fast food cup until there was enough
to set the apartment complex on fire.
It happened in a neighborhood at the edge of town
where the wind sifted a constant precipitation of dust
like desiccated snow and the newly-poured streets
looked like frosting spread across the desert field.
Ducks had just found the man-made pond.
At dusk, they waddled ashore
to explore the construction site like the boy.
He started with the door. Stood mesmerized
as the fire took on new colors. He fed it litter
collected from the field. It hissed and turned green,
it splintered pink, it bloomed aureoles of blue.
But there was hardly time to admire it before
remorse overtook him and he fled.
Before the howl of sirens. He was
gone before—he started with the door—whatever
he wanted to let out.
Something can stop being true in the time it takes
a cigarette to burn to its filter. It was your crime
but it’s me who goes back to the scene. Now it’s only me
who wants to burn something for you, but there’s nothing left—how
do you set fire to the past? Only an impulse to shake free—like cellophane
peeled from a pack—something that clings.
Sometimes I conjure a fire for you in my mind,
the gnats swarming furiously above the water, up and down,
can you see it? How they mimic flame, hovering
at the pond’s edge. Lately I find myself there all the time.
so far
May 6, 2009
Some of my favorite songs so far. A short and not well through through list for Chris.
- Magpie to the Morning – Neko Case
- Hand on Your Heart (Kylie Minogue cover) – Jose Gonzales
- Reasons to Quit – Phospherescent
- Inspiration Information – Sharon Jones
- Wichita Lineman – Johnny Cash
- Trust Me – The Streets
- Daniel Rossen – Too Little Too Late
- Paperthin -Via Audio
- A Falling Through – Ray LaMontange
don’t know
May 3, 2009
Fear is the opposite of love. That’s what this book I’m reading says. It’s not hate. Nope, it’s fear that closes one’s heart right down.
It’s green and blue outside. Green and blue and clouds pass by. Undeniably spring. It makes me think of Joseph Campbell’s instruction to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. Nature knows how.
But not me. I don’t know how to do that. Or if I did, I need to learn it again. Or maybe you spend your life learning it over and over again. I don’t know. I profoundly don’t know, which is scary because I thought I knew. At least, kind of.
Fear makes me think of Jesus. When I get wrapped up in fear, which is easy for me to do as it is my second nature, I wish I believed in Jesus enough to believe in being saved. I’m talking that old time give yourself over to the spirit being saved — knees buckling, tears flowing, speaking in tongues, falling over — that kind of being saved. It’d be a miracle, wouldn’t it, if accepting Jesus could really cast out one’s demons. That one could really be born again.
But Jesus rarely makes me think of love. Maybe, it was all those years spent looking at the life like crucifixion over the alter at All Saints. It was morbid. And the way we glorified his suffering and his death. The whole “he died for us”. In high school I used to think about it a lot about how people died for our sins all the time –torture, murder, neglect, genocide. And I’d ask myself what made Jesus different than a baby whose head got smashed in by some Nazi guard at a death camp. Son of God, I suppose, but then aren’t we all children of god.
Sometimes I think if the whole Jesus thing is really true, wouldn’t it piss him off that we don’t do more to celebrate his life. That we don’t do more to celebrate his instruction to love one another. Wouldn’t he go in a church and see that crucifix and think I meant for you to remember me in love, not death. His last meal was seder, it was Passover meal, which is the celebration of freedom.
I don’t even know why I’m talking about all this. Maybe I just want something to make sense.