perching on your arms and shoulders
My father took aim out the window,
Following, with his gun
A dark shape moving
In the Queen Anne’s Lace,
In the goldenrod.
My father came in from the field,
Ahead of the dusk, swinging
A groundhog by its black paw.
It was as big as a two-year-old.
“Nathan, Naomi, Stephen,” he said.
“Come out here, on the porch.
I’m going to show you
The chambers of the heart.”
1. The deer was a list of lichen, stripped from trees.
2. He scraped the skin off the rabbit, I mean, the hairs from the skin.
3. The owl ate the discarded intestines, that we removed from the rabbit.
4. The hive was crafted, cell by cell, corrugated, a feat of geometry.
5. There were worms and I wept.
Sometimes I like to look around a classroom and try to guess how many of us are heavily drugged. I like the idea of a great mass of artificially normalised people, who can only function when they are in perfect chemical balance. It makes me feel like a scientific creation, with wires for brains and a petri dish instead of a heart. I really do not think I can write this final. If I was a robot, I wonder if I would run on batteries or be solar-powered.
If I had the choice to be beautiful, I think I’d rather be invisible. There’s something really horrible about being looked at. I think beautiful people must suffer tremendously all the time. Beautiful people are constantly being corroded by other people’s eyes, the skin probably prickles and burns from the toxicity of the gaze. I’m sure it’s like being a fossil scraped out of dirt with a tiny polished pick. I think if I were a fossil I’d rather not be exposed to light and air. I’d rather keep my secrets hardened to myself.
Everyone always tries to be more beautiful. I think this is a very serious mistake. It would be better if people tried to be more invisible. Everyone would be safer from each other, and there would be fewer accidental deaths.
I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve just been broken up with and haven’t had the courage to write much these days, or do much at all. I sit in my chair by the window. I’m turning into Eli, which is disheartening. That’s what happens when you work on the same material for 2 years. Your process becomes more and more insular and circular until you realise that you are not writing a character, you are writing your own existence on a parallel plane, and you and your character exist as empty mirrors for each other. When one of you suffers the other one laughs, nervously, and then goes back to thinking about blood in lungs or old banisters or whatever it is that old men think about when they are trying not to be a twenty year old woman who is in denial of the fact that she is secretly a dying old man.
I’m not looking forward, but I refuse to look back.
Two of my current papers involve space/time. Moreso than normal. When I figure it out, I will update.
We need to create invisible birds.
I’m terrified to be in public lately. I’m afraid something will happen that will make people notice me. Something horribly embarrassing. They’ve just put up the signs downtown that say
“Caution: Falling Ice”. Every time I leave my apartment I’m afraid I’ll be struck by an iceberg, and splayed on the sidewalks of the theatre district. Which would attract a crowd. I just read Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Man of the Crowd”. (which is good to read if you’re into Baudelaire’s work) It was about a man that couldn’t exist apart from a crowd of people. All he does is follow wherever the crowd is thickest. I think I’m the opposite. I shrink from people. I’m a misanthrope, I think. I live in hateful fear.
It offers no answers. It looks at culture, and then it: reacts in indignation, stages reflections, burdens with implications, attacks corrosively …advances no answers whatsoever. This I love.
On another note, the problem with left culture is that it can only mobilize through guilt. Think about it. It’s true.
I forgot to mention the excellent album “Down the River of Golden Dreams” by Okkervil River.
Highly recommend.
1. Belle and Sebastian “If You’re Feeling Sinister”
2. Nick Drake “Pink Moon”
3. David Bowie “Ziggy Stardust”
4. Neutral Milk Hotel “Aeroplane Over the Sea”
5. Cat Power “Moon Pix”
6. Sun Kil Moon “Ghosts of the Great Highway”
7. Bob Dylan “Blood on the Tracks”
8. Smog “Knock Knock”
9. Air “Moon Safari”
10. Bela Fleck “The Bluegrass Sessions”
It’s been a while. I’m far away. I’ve changed some things. Stay posted.
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