Maybe crying

Sam Taylor-Wood

Maybe crying is childish but in a good way.

Maybe crying isn’t everything.

If you were standing next to someone who was visibly upset, maybe crying?

Maybe crying after orgasm is a result of pain or of hurt feelings.

Other times I dream that, after a few drinks, we find ourselves in the sauna at YMCA talking about the old times, laughing, maybe crying.

i understand maybe crying for an oscar or a grammy, but a kids choice award?

Maybe crying is an exception.

On the other hand, maybe crying is a functionless byproduct of increased autonomic activity in distressed individuals.

Pay Raises — Maybe Crying To The Mayor Will Get Results From City.

Maybe crying is something you should try more often.

I was rubbing her back and it seems like she was sad and maybe crying, I’m not sure.

You’re thinking: Maybe crying’s not such a bad idea…. Whoa. Hold it right there.

Not shrieking, necessarily, but maybe crying and acting cranky.

BRAND: And maybe crying a little bit on the outside.

We are not freezers of bears

These Things
Peter Davis

I’ve been meaning to say something.
I’d love to go on and on about how artists aren’t conduits
or special. We are not freezers of bears. We aren’t
shaman or conjurers and nothing we do is mysterious.
I could just go on and on about how people are like
“it just flowed through me” and “it happened” and
“enlightenment” and, you know, the general
mystery thing and super good, good thing. It’s like
everyone is special. I mean, like artists
as prophets and whatnot, getting all deep
in the belly of the goodness shark, gnashing away at injustice
and silliness, being better, being more than, being
the Jones’. O how I hate the idea of Talent and Exceptional
and Gifted and Blessed and Touched. I could go on and on.
Or, I’ve also been thinking about family and how it happens
that one has one and one lives with one and so on. But then
other things happen, like not going on and on. Like not
saying these things. Like not anything happening.
At those moments I end up slightly confused, looking
at myself in a mirror and feeling like a dead god.

The speed of light is the right speed

Muscly back

I wrote Beautiful Plague for the year 1505 for for every year.

The leaves on the paths ran like rats

Annysa Ng

Tea
Wallace Stevens

When the elephant’s-ear in the park
Shriveled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp light fell
On shining pillows
Of sea shades and sky shades
Like umbrellas in Java.

Hey hey hey, monsters

Anguiras

excerpt from I Will Unfold You With My Hairy Hands
Shane Jones

The hair monster checked out the ass of a handicapped woman. She was standing with her back turned when the hair monster noticed her panty line against her white tights and thought, hey hey hey. He was a typically lonely hair monster, and often looked at women trying to imagine what it would feel like to caress their human skin.

He kept watching her as she walked away.  And that’s when he noticed her hands balled up against her chest, her chin tucked down and rubbing against her knuckles as she shuffled her feet. The hair monster looked away, feeling ashamed, questioning  just what kind of hair monster he really was. His mother had raised him better.

(thanks to Crispin Best for pointing me to this story)

Wtf, Punctuation Day

“When Hemingway killed himself, he put a period at the end of his life. Old age is more like a semicolon.”– Kurt Vonnegut

! ! ! is pronounced by repeating thrice any monosyllabic sound. Chk Chk Chk is the most common pronunciation, but they could just as easily be called Pow Pow Pow, Bam Bam Bam, Uh Uh Uh, etc.

cmd+shift design blog

Stockings

Handbook for the Woman Driver: A Must for the Woman at the Wheel – 1955

Clothes and Beauty En Route (page 173)

Stockings: Practical as American women are, they often have a phobia against wearing stockings suitable for the occasion. For everyday wear, even with walking shoes, women buy hose far more sheer than what was considered evening weight just a few years ago. Have some sheer nylons for dressy occasions, but for the trip consider a medium-weight stocking (45-15 is good), knowing it is sheer enough to flatter your legs, yet able to take strain. If stockings are too short or skimpy, their tops may cut into your thighs as you drive, and they won’t be long enough for you to garter them to your girdle without pulling uncomfortably.

So

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
Linda Pastan

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Say farewell

Letman

Dance Dance Industrial Revolution

celebrate Steampunk and the age of Victorian sci-fi

Be me in voice

page 439 Finnegans Wake

Adventure pig

Why did they do this?

Soft white

Am I an animal
          able to distinquish
                    beams of light
                             like music this moonlit night
                                      eyes closed

–Mizuhara Shion (trans. Hiroaki Sato)

There’s sometimes a buggy

Meaning threat

Don’t stop talking to me

Emily Wells

Were you ever my favorite?

Rollerfink did a nice re-mix of my last 16 blog post titles; check it out, he is quite a talented fellow.

Some strange gravity

For Elizabeth
Jim Carroll

It is winter ending on earth. The planets align tomorrow in March and grow more distant from the sun and each other like stray, worn soldiers retreating from an enemy that no longer exists. It is a mild spring in purgatory. In green limbo the children whose foreheads are dry, whose hands do not grow, are transformed themselves to seasons of birds circling an obelisk of shivering mercury. None are allowed prey, none are allowed heaven’s crooked beak. They are radiant swallows with thorns for tongues to feed on the shifting mercury from the mythology of God’s hand, which I cannot break, even now, under this tearful scrutiny. I’ve tried. I’ve tried. I am allowing to pass through me a statement of death. You, the catalyst of such distorted memory. In that limbo the children move in some strange gravity within and outside Grace. Their Lord is angry. They have died with their innocence untested. None knows what it has been or will be ~ each day it changes without changing ~ do you understand what I am saying? It is the life you chose on this Earth, the life of junk and lies. But that wasn’t You, I knew You ~ you had perfect lips, eyes like a true child, your breasts unformed, an incandescent mind. This place where I put you now, it is a cursed season, an awkward line, a flawed circle, a snake on fire devouring what tomorrow it will itself become.

Eric Thompson "Jim Carroll"

If you aren’t going to die, at least make a palace of it

I imagine myself in socks sliding lengths of marble hallways, and finally gathered up sleeping at the end of the last.

Mongo, Mingo, Mungos

“Spacehog | Mungo City“

Questions About Life and Shit

I received a preview of Questions About Life and Shit today, which as of now can be pre-ordered from Bureau de Books. It’s filled with poetry (including one from ME) and short prose, each titled as a question. There’s no table of contents with the title lined up with the author in the proof I read, so I’m going to put one here, for you, and for me.

Jessica Maybury, The Earth is Filled With Violence?
Cami Park, Where is Cyrano?
Greg Gerke, Vincent and Theo (and Murray?)
Ani Smith, Can I Offer You a Refresher?
J. A. Tyler, Am I How This Is?
Chris East, Do You Want to Live With Me in My Parent’s Basement?
Sariya Iman Ikoye, Illegible Emotion/If the Meaning of Life Is to Find the Meaning of Life What Does This Mean; Is it Like ‘The Joke Is There Is No Joke’ or ‘The Point Is There Is No Point’ or Something?
Ben Brooks, What Are We?
Jimmy Chen, Who Has the Key to the Lactation Room?
Andrew Borgstrom, Whose Goddam Oatmeal is This?
Sam Pink, Is There a Way Not to Sweat While Sleeping?
Ninian Doff, Why Are You Bleeding Every Morning When We Wake Up?
Dollar Money, Who Is Mark Wahlberg?
Catherine Maskell, Congratulations, When’s It Due?
Crispin Best, What Are the Side Effects of Birth Control?
John Oldham, Where Do You Want to Go Today?
Vaughan Simons, Are You Lookin’ at My Bird?
Josh Kleinberg, What Will We Do Tonight?
DJ Berndt, When Will I Finally Die?

Okay, there’s much good stuff in here. My favorites were Ani Smith, Jimmy Chen, Andrew Borgstrom, Crispin Best, and Josh Kleinberg, but everyone’s favorites will be different in such an eclectic, well-edited collection. Greg Gerke is funny, Ninian Doff is sexy and mysterious, Sam Pink is weird and whimsical, DJ Berndt is absurdly existential, and Chris East is rueful as shit. I am line-broken in the wrong places, but okay otherwise. Thank you for asking.

Scorch Atlas

Scorch Atlas by Black Butler has been released today from Featherproof Books. Reviews have been justifiably great– I’ve read Blake for awhile now, and know his writing to be consistently powerful, eloquent, innovative, and beautiful. Excerpts I’ve read from Scorch Atlas are no exception; here is one from one of the 14 linked stories in the book (you can read the entire story at DIAGRAM 8.3):

excerpt from The Many Forms of Rain ___ Sent Upon Us in Those Days Before the Last Days

–Static

As if the planet had learned to scratch its back. In massive columns like what we’d seen on TV during our worse storms, stretched check-pattern, warbled spatter. As well, the sound of a billion needles wheedling, tearing their tips against the grain. Sometimes I felt I could hear laugh tracks buried under the floorboards, wedged way deep down in the sod. Somewhere down there was my father. His knuckled rapped against the beams. I began to feel everything inside me at once humming. I felt my organs screech alive: the static replicated in me. When my mouth opened, it came out. The vibration cracked my mirrors. It cracked the foundations of my soft skull. It made me giggle just a bit. I couldn’t keep a hold on as through the windows I saw the wide scrim that for years had nestled me into sleep—the gray/white/black transmission from dead channels, from wavelengths no one had thought to walk.

Plus, a video/audio presentation of another excerpt from the same story:

‘Water’ | from Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Hettie and Joice and Daisy

Rebecca Loudon is punching poetry in the gut and not saying sorry over at Radish King, HERE and HERE and HERE. Remember breathing.

Hauschka – Morgenrot

Hauschka – Morgenrot from Jeff Desom via the excellent Radish King

If people were rain

Two of my favorite things

Ulrike S. Hardberck "Urlaub (III)"

Swimming and storms. Swimming in the rain is a sublime experience.

Such divisions of promise

All Particular Wishes

Discussing the weather,
we were careful to be inexact
in the smallest particulars.

Carefully, too, we packed
in newspaper the fragile
mountains I had decided
to take with me– Kawa Karpo,
Cerro Toro, Kailash,
exquisite Fuji, Mount Meru–

Except that’s impossible. We
couldn’t have done that. Mountains
are so big, and there is not enough
newspaper in the world. Really,
what I want to say is, such divisions of
promise are preposterous, you might as
well peel the bark off the trees or
tear the bricks from the house, you will
still be hungry, you will not be full.

Which I know because I know someone who did that once.

by Cami Park

I had another post

I spent a lot of time on it. It was terrible, so I thought, fuck it.

It’s gone now. This is better.

Counterpoint

con⋅tra⋅pun⋅tal [kon-truh-puhn-tl] – composed of two or more relatively independent melodies sounded together.

Elizabeth Murray "Empire"

“Jorif offers us a contrapuntal approach to the usual history of slavery and law in early modern America. . . . We are more often engaged in arguments over whether an action is just than over whether an injustice has been done. Jorif’s study. . . . gives us a new handle on this problem by positing, among his observations, that the community that arises out of, or coalesces around, acts of loving forgiveness are just in ways that the law never approaches.” – Prof. Jon-Christian Suggs, review of How Slave Narratives Influenced American Literature by Rolando Leodore Jorif

No violet eyes

          to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

–Ellen Bass