rainy sundays drunk at noon

"Well I'm not braggin' babe so don't put me down
But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town
When something comes up to me he don't even try
Cause if it had a set of wings man I know she could fly
She's my little deuce coupe
You don't know what I got"

- The Beach Boys, Little Deuce Coupe

il deserto rosso

vacant complexities

Sometimes when we are together - and we are always together- I think about all the doors I've ever passed and never opened.

some things are fine

It's a darker place - a Saint's belly, perhaps, a deep sea cave or some inner chamber of a mountain temple - only it's not so dark once you're really there inside. She's like a syrup when you find her, a formless sweetness that reminds you that it is - has always been - about the blood. And it's the hollowness that resonates in your bones; the edges of the echoes that drain the wounds. After a time (and nobody can say how long- perhaps you will lie down or even sleep a while). After a time, something in you fingertips will tell you that you have begun to breathe again.

how do you know?

You are a bird in the hand and some vital education, poetic syntax, words on a wall, a principality by the sea. You are a pistol, a picnic, a hot air balloon and the roaring forties, the bass drum; the five am rain in my spinal chord, the dewey decimal system, a furious trip.

lodestar

Hier soir, notre conversation s'est tournee au sujet de "happy place" - cet endroit dans sa tete auquel on peut retraiter quand on a l'envie d'echapper a la douleur ou a la banalite de la vie reelle.

Et moi, mon 'happy place'? C'est simple - un matelas sur la plancher, nutella, les chansons de Nashville... et toi.

tu me manques (comme toujours)

x x

ars oblivionalis

I wanted to show you the edge of myself. The things I don't believe in but do anyway. The desert that becomes a beach. But now that I am here I have forgotten how they go.

Relax. It's fiction, baby, FICTION. Look it up

sine qua non

Sometimes I want to kick you in the shins and run away

oh my stars

tokyo, there are no words.

my mind is blown

our one mosquito

"... when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say,
Seems wisest, virtuouest, discreetest, best;
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded; wisdom in discourse with her.
Loses discountenanced, and like folly shows;
Authority and reason on her wait
As one intended first, not after made."

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

how come you're so solid gold?

options

make me

miserable

generic girl

songs that remind me of people I once loved and no longer speak to

It'll All Work Out - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Gangsta's Paradise - Coolio

Baby In Two - Pernice Brothers

Landslide - Smashing Pumpkins (Fleetwood Mac cover)

Let's Go To Bed - The Cure

MMMBop - Hanson

To You I Bestow - Mundy

I Found A Reason - Cat Power (Velvet Underground cover)

Se A Vida E - Pet Shop Boys

Good Fortune - PJ Harvey

Curs In The Weeds - Horse Feathers

Heard 'Em Say - Kanye West ft. Adam Levine

Skip To The End - The Futureheads

Silent Shout - The Knife

(You Dyed Your Hair) Chartreuse - Louis Jordan

Leave (Get Out) - JoJo

NYC - Interpol

Leather and Lace - Stevie Nicks and Don Henley

Crap Kraft Dinner - Hot Chip

it's not a thing it is an is

'only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?'

- Faulkner

collapsible

You never say 'bless you' when I sneeze and though I've never said anything, I love you a little bit less for it.

I must be insane to go skating on your name

If you loved me back it would ruin everything.




One day you will realise how intelligent I am, and it will intimidate the shit out of you.

i think you are a fascinating new technology

I found a bag of chocolate coins in the library. I kept them with me all day but didn't eat them. In the evening I threw them out.

fuerze e animo

We shake our fists -
that's it
we're done, we won't.
But we will.
We always do.
It's what we do.
We open up

we've given up every other thing

You're angry with me because I think your art is pointless.
It's angry with, not at.
What?
The preposition is with.
Your art is meaningless.

ain't that the way it goes

this would be so much
easier if I could remember
where I left my pencil/ dignity/ groceries/ panties

awkward at parties

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

- From Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

straight back to my door

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds



because there is never enough e.e. cummings

san francisco wear some flowers in your hair

whereas, my dear, i'm afraid
you still think you have
a thousand serious moves

i will sing you songs

You don’t even know her.

She could be a convicted murderer.

Or a member of Oprah’s book club.

She could have any number of grating habits.

Or perverted fetishes.

She could own a pair of Crocs.

You have no idea.

Maybe she has terrible taste in music

And books

And art

And people

She could be a hopeless cook,

A vegan

Or a Scientologist.

You don’t even know her.

And yet you do.

the part about the trouble when your time runs out

when the thrill is gone

when your deal goes south

yeah, it's all over when your time runs out

this is me getting my priorities straight

a boy named runcible spoon

He wants

To think he’s holding this whole thing together

Getting drunk on new philosophy, and random acts of what not

And tests the water,

To find, she too, hears it the way that he does

But fails the next round by not being interested in circles.

An awkward structure, she is just a frame

For such precious metal and sinking feeling

And leaves him in his crumbling city

To go ride out this storm in a teacup

With a boy named runcible spoon

you will not make a sound

this clock that hair those wars that name this noise that stare these maps that red those lights this fuss that room this stain those days that place those drugs these streets this trip that self those shapes these girls that boy this chill that note those lips this bed that fight this dream this clock this clock

sure don't make em like they used to...

way over yonder in the minor key

going beyond and leaving behind

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one ... to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurence itself returns ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"

- M. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

postcard from the edge

In certain places

Little things begin

Little hazards

Passing things

Little things

Lately, I dream of sailing trips

And unnamed oceans

I find myself in hardware shops

Comparing hammers,

Purchasing wire

And maps

Skipping meals

In certain places

At certain altitudes

Certain ghosts are waking

I dig for things

I can’t remember where I buried them

Or if I buried them

Or just thought about it

When the cracks in the earth were new

Certain things happen

In certain places

I am different people

Certain people

People who kayak

Read biographies

A certain spinning stops

In certain places

Old scars run parallel

With new desires

And rivers flow uphill

In certain places tiny shivers

Tell me that what I want is something impossible.

falling down in geometric patterns

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I think I like it when you fall to pieces. I think I am waiting for something to begin. I think I missed the point somewhere.

twenty three is everywhere

Today we are twenty three

We are twenty three and we are facing facts

For there are facts to be faced

We are turning nifty tricks and tracing wandering veins

We are flying balloons and swallowing stars

And blossoming flowers

And giving up old truths

And getting on with it

let the right one in

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

- from e.e cummings I Carry Your Heart With Me

Medicine

By Ottessa Moshfegh (my literary crush)

In China there was a honey man on the corner of my street who sold his honey in old Coke bottles set up on a box full of bees. He also sold dried-up honey pellets. I knew if I ever ate them I would live forever. They have things like that in China: magical cures.

One spring my boyfriend and I took a trip to the southwest. We visited an ancient stone village called Lijiang. We saw a sign hanging on a tree at the foot of a long road that said “Herbal Specialist, World Famous, 5 KM.” We rented bikes and went down the road. It was a road that cut through a valley with lush hills on either side with neon pink and golden flowers. When we neared a little wooden house there was a painted sign that said “Doctor.”

We got off the bikes.

A little man came to the door and motioned for us to come inside his house. He did everything with practiced grace and spoke perfect English. “These are my Trapper Keepers of letters sent to me by people who have been cured by my herbal teas.” He motioned to a wall full of bookshelves stacked with binders. “Feel free to look through them.” Then he left us in there to look around while he went into his laboratory. We could see him sniffing leaves and mixing potions, dotting magic serums into test tubes with a glass eyedropper. I took a binder off a shelf and read a letter from a doctor in Los Angeles. The letter said that the doctor’s patient had failed to be cured by chemotherapy, but had recovered from thyroid cancer by drinking the herbal tea he had brought back with him from China. The doctor requested more tea and gave his address. There was a check for 500 dollars paper-clipped behind the letter. It was dated 1989.

When the little man came back into the room, he closed the door to his laboratory behind him. “The land here is special. Things grow here nobody understands. Scientists come here, they want to study it. But they end up just going home. Some things, you should just come and go, you understand. Now,” and he looked at me. “Say what the trouble is.”

I wished my boyfriend would go away.

“I have scoliosis. The feeling of being loved never penetrates. Being alive is irritating. I can’t come without thinking of the porn in my dad’s closet. I feel bad for wanting the easy way sometimes. I don’t think anything is really real. Everything hurts.”

He took my pulse and stared at my eyeballs. Then he looked at my boyfriend.

“And you?”

“Sometimes,” said my boyfriend, “I get a rash.”

“Wait here.”

He came back with two little plastic bags of powder. He put mine in a black bag and my boyfriend’s in a red bag.

“Make yourself a tea. For the girl, don’t put any honey in yours. Here is my address. If it works, write to me and I’ll send you more. No charge. But if you want to donate to the upkeep of the land, you can give me some money right now.”

We gave him 200 kuai.

I never drank the tea.

This one time at the end of my last summer in Wuhan, I went to get a foot massage. I was depressed the day I went, hungover, and I missed my boyfriend. The next best thing to love was a foot massage. So I went to a more expensive massage parlor on the corner near the lake by the big university, upstairs, and got a peaceful private room, with a cozy chair and a TV remote covered in plastic wrap. I had tea and grapes served to me by a teenage girl in a long traditional silk dress with a slit up the side to her ass. I was very excited and relieved to be there. The city was so hot and dirty that summer.

Then a man came in, wearing a suit. He took off the suit-jacket and shuffled in a wooden pot of boiling water. He introduced himself as a doctor and gave me his card. It said he was an expert in Chinese medicine. I was in good hands. He put some magical medicines into the boiling water and I put my feet in. I was wearing a skirt. He dipped my feet in and out carefully and dried them and put creams on them and propped them up and massaged them and wrapped them in silk towels and propped them up and unwrapped them and dipped them and massaged them over and over again. Then he worked on my calves.

It was heaven.

He got to my knees and it was labored, gristly work. He got to my lower thighs and it was tense there, I had a lot of pain. Then he got to the upper thighs, I began to sweat. He looked at me in the face. I was worried he might go into my underwear, he was very high. He moved my skirt up away above my hip, if you can imagine this, and massaged my hip. He was basically inside my underwear there. Then he moved to the inner thigh. I weighed maybe 100 pounds then, and he could hold my inner thigh in his hands, and wriggle my flesh between his fingers very skillfully. He went higher and higher until my underwear started. I was sweating.

I looked at him. He was very serious about what he was doing.

I decided to hell with it, and looked up at the TV. I took hold of the remote control. Then he did this. He went over the underwear. He used his fingers over the underwear, are you understanding this? He worked for a few minutes. Then he used just one hand and used another hand to put a cool towel on my forehead. Then he put that hand over my mouth. I would tell the story later to my boyfriend in a way that made the whole thing into a story of accidental misunderstanding. But that was not the case. I settled back into the chair a little more. He went under the underwear, and I leaned up against him. I was kissing his arm. He held my face against his heart.

safer at night

You can’t forget the stories you’ve heard. Of the way they go when it’s over, the way they brace themselves – clench and grit and curl- for the final act, the violent fall.

just another snowman

This isn’t water,

The loop and hoop of what you are

It isn’t water, doesn’t flow

Doesn’t spread out, on a table

And form a shallow lake

The form you take

I know it well

It isn’t water

Doesn’t rage and swell

The sun writes you on concrete

You drip and crack and bake

And whisper through fences

This and that

This isn’t water, isn’t cloth

The form you take

angels in the architecture

 "I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."

- Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be a Verb, 1970

and possibly i like the thrill

my eyes  (your eyes, for all they

seek and find 

is you - and eyes or marrow or whatever else is part of me 

I gladly onthedottedlined away to you 

that once - and it only took a once - that I knew you)

knowing no better shall orbit you

(you central sun, you extraultrasupernova)

a trillion billion light and never heavy years

steady on your periphery

till all of hollow time collapses

exquisite fucking boredom

This is an excerpt from a postcard I received from a friend recently.  It is reproduced here with zero permission from the author. I just had to share it.

I hired 82, 083 private detectives.  One for every leaf on the tree outside my flat. I receive updates twice a day.  All absurdly poetic.  Schmaltzy mystical elation.  I've asked them to report just the facts, nothing more. Please - just the key details.  The specific particulars.  They can't help themselves though.  They weep with joy every night because their particular leaf did this or that.  82, 083 people sobbing, in loud love.   Sweet, but unendurable.  I've bought earplugs for the whole neighbourhood.  They know it's only until Autumn, and then the detectives will drift off, one by one, in heart, honeyed, hot pursuit.

crown street haiku

sometimes i feel like

the only  person who did 

not go to art school

on the day of the forty-four sunsets

Exotica is the art of ruins, the ruined world of enchantment laid waste in fervid imagination, the paradox of an imperial paradise liberated from colonial intervention, a golden age recreated through the lurid colours of a cocktail glass, illusory and remote zones of pleasure and peace dreamed after the bomb.  Nothing is left, except for beaches, palm trees, tourist sites with their moss-covered monuments, shops stocked with native art made for the invaders, beachcomber bars and an absurd perception of what may have once been.

Just ruins and a spell, repeated endlessly to provoke fading memories: lust and terror, chainsaw bikers, sultry tropical airs, Aztec spells, x-ray eyes and hot pants, sunken cities, lost cities, singing sea shells, electric frogs, bustin' bongos, wild stuffed bikinis, jungle jazz, sacred idols, space escapades, switchblade sisters, pits and pendulums, tabu, taboo, tabuh, tamboo, taboo, tabuh, tamboo, tabuh-tabuhan.

- David Toop, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World, 1999

bathed in filth from monday to saturday

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

- William Carlos Williams, To Elsie, 1923

oxytocin

Your cup was full, the wine was sweet

You wet my lips. I let you in

I’m brittle now with quick defeat

I opened once; I won’t again

They Don't Want Your Corn, They Want Your Kids

Last night while looking at the sky,

I saw a little planet die;

It died and fell without a fuss

I wondered whether it was us,

Or part of us, that I had seen

Disintegrate.  It could have been

- Michael Leunig

the internet - the spiritual home of crazy people

 This site is all about ninjas, REAL NINJAS.  This site is awesome.    My name is Robert and I can't stop thinking about ninjas.  These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.


Facts:


1.    Ninjas are mammals.


2.    Ninjas fight ALL the time.


3.    The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.


girl is electric

If love is a bolt from the blue

then what is that bolt but a glorified screw?

- One Crowded Hour, Augie March

just a casual, casual easy thing

I built a shrine to you my precious love!!

Well, it was more like a pinata actually

waiting to feel the effects

'In America, percentile is destiny'

- Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy:  How I traded an education for a ticket to the ruling class

a mere interlude

From Alice in Wonderland

`He might bite,' Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have the experiment tried.

`Very true,' said the Duchess: `flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is--"Birds of a feather flock together."'

`Only mustard isn't a bird,' Alice remarked.

`Right, as usual,' said the Duchess: `what a clear way you have of putting things!'

pineapple head

Used to be all I could do was sleep; curl up in the deliciousness of it and into the dreams that had waited there, patiently, for my homecoming from the world. Dreams that spiralled wantonly into the afternoons.  Heady sleep that burrowed into blankets, smelled of baking bread, ignored phone calls. Not the refreshing, battery charger kind, the heavy lidded, heavy limbed underworld kind.  Sleep that, when it finally released me into the midday sun, continued to follow me through my day like a weighty shadow.

 

Everything is changing.

 

Here in this bed, something is racing. Locked in. I am staring at the ceiling. At the unchanging blank slatedness of it; projecting a slideshow of monsters in the dark thoughts upon it, until, at last, I am drawn in to it’s vast whiteness. In it and of it until I have spun into a thousand colliding fragments of myself, and I forget which one is the me I am supposed to hold onto, and I become a voyeur in the corner, observing these versions of myself, projected again and again, and if I never sleep again I can live with this.

even on our birthdays

 "Today's youth don't have dreams, they have illusions. To dream is to want to accomplish something difficult that is a challenge. Instead youngsters believe they have a right to everything and if things don't go the way they want it's someone else's fault."

- Dr Jean - Robert Pitte, President de La Sorbonne, 2006

ditty for dandelion

the sea swept dry; a mother's fear

you tried to tempt me out of here

my spirits lifted till they fell; you doing what you do so well

I had a chair I stood upon

(I closed my eyes and now it's gone)

I never meant, but always tried,

to leave you broken, satisfied

eighteen with a bullet

From Tao Lin's Bed

" As one had to expect very little - almost nothing - from life, one had to be grateful; not always trying to seize the days, like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up to be seized by the days, months and years."

a mighty capacity for rapture

you flew, you flew! yes i saw it darling - two hours you were up there, at least. a farmer in romania spotted you; there were sightings over panama, too.  whole villages gathered to watch you pass over in New Guinea.  Cloud covering prevented the sightings in bhutan.  you did it, you did it, you clever darling. i am so proud. and to think i made your wings of tissue paper.

damn, i wish i was your lover

and at some point you realise that it's now the ghost you love instead of the being.  it's the precision of the incision and the shape of the scar that has become precious.  i don't know what you're supposed to do once you know that.  but the knowing, at least, is a relief.

slutty, sad, anonymous

You introduced yourself but I knew who you were and what you were.  And you knew I knew who you were.  But I just said hello and how do you do? And I poured you a drink though you hadn’t asked for one.  And I didn’t offer I just poured us both a drink and told you my name, though I knew you already knew it because I had heard you ask your friends about me in the kitchen.

 

 Oh is that so? 

 

And you were shy or rude or both, and stared out the window.  But I didn’t care, I just threw back the drinks in quick 1-2-3 succession. Down the hatch.  I don’t want to know the trivia of your work -to -make-a-buck life, your loud mouth day  job, and I don’t care to share the details of mine.  So I grab your hand gunpowder quick, although your choice in shirt bothered me, and such poor sartorial taste on your part could only lead to trouble in our future, if it should come to that.  For now, you are here and material and that is why I have to touch you with my hands.

 

Shall we have a little night music?  You know and I know that something has been established in the space between us and though your talk is boring, baby, boring, I think I like you in the flesh, like the very fact that you exist, like it very much that I am ungraspable to you.  You thud-thud in my chest (and now in my thighs) and I think I like that I hardly know you.

 

To us, a  silent toast.  That I am here and you are here and it has come to this, as it always would. 

 

The wine has become deafening to me and all signs point to the door.  Everything is changing.  Find my recalcitrant feet. 

 

Goodnight, your name, your name, you deliciously arrogant fuck.

           

I’m gone. 

now honeys play me close like butter play toast

Until, much later, is heard, very faint, a low wailing song. It ebbs and flows, growing stronger.  It is accompanied by a low didjeridoo.  The music, the song - a mournful dirge - builds up rhythmically.  A light comes on.  It shows three figures - three old women - sitting in a circle in the centre of the otherwise bare clearing.   One has a piece of bark which she beats softly on the ground, one a pair of clapping sticks with which she keeps time, and the third beats time with her hand against her thigh.  The wailing is melodic yet unchanging; infinitely sad but strangely pleasant.  It rises and fall to an underlying beat as old as time.  Then, gradually, the sound fades.

So too does the light.

And again it is dark and quiet.

It has been dark for some time.

tiny hands

Church and factories at our door

I don't mean it like i did before

your head, your books, your fucking nietzsche

stand back, this could get dirty

my heart is shot for tenderness

you pissed it all there's nothing left

the saints and soldiers all went home

watch out, this could get easy

just when he thought he got lucky, she stole his watch and chain

you can't have it both

the knowing and the not knowing.

you have to choose.

you can't have it both

you want the overunderstated intoxications 

of being newly known

but what of 'mystery'

(you'd call it that, wouldn't you, in polite society)

you can't have it both

the knowing and the not knowing

you have to choose.

you can't have it both

Conquerors and Concubines

Yes, you still have a place in my heart.  But I'm selling the joint (recession, you know) and the new owners want you out in a week.

I have a vacancy in my spleen if you're interested.

Sorry that I chose so poorly. Golly gee, am I the poster girl?

He has a disease where he bites off his own fingers, you know.  He can feel the pain just the same as you or I. Agony. And it's not that he wants to do it, either.  It's beyond his control.  They have to tie his hands behind his back.  There is no cure.

He kind of reminds me of you, actually