perching on your arms and shoulders
I am sick in the mornings;
A time of waking. Timid morning sounds,
The birds in the lower branches; the shadowy violence
Of squirrels–they bark down the young trees.
They scatter at once when silence breaks sound,
And the branches are wraiths to the rising light,
Waving shadows on the rooms already dim.
When what is in me is reduced to lighting,
I can go only backwards, past dawn—
To where grey shapes are moving on a screen,
Or—I slept imageless last night.
Glistened;
The light on the ice on the water.
We spoke too loud.
Cars muffling other sounds, to irritate:
The heaviness of a false silence.
Sometimes above (on) waterways, ways which cross
And then divide—to things indivisible. I
weigh the universe in these pieces.
Light shattered. Dark, solid river–solemn.
A pale, dreamt shape, my shapeless hands,
Cutting the air. Through distant air.
A low swooping bird, skimming the water.
Together, we don’t attract or repel.
What is weakest, what sinks to matter, to flesh
(but deeper than skin) bone close.
And the closeness of bone leaves me lost.
In the alley behind, Jack smoothed back his wet mop.
And tightened a belt around his upper arm
Only to find the devil had switched his needles
With ones from behind a toilet at the bar.
He forgot who he was.
Which is as good a place as ever to start
Writing someone else’s poem, badly
To sabotage all their dreams of print
To make them cry late at night, punching their pillows
And cussing at trees and calling the homeless snakes
Out into moonlight, with their heads to the ground.
I pass the mural on the seawall.
It has faded into streaks of green.
I tighten my collar against the wind.
Tracing the cracks with my fingers,
I feel nervous in the uncertain light.
I keep walking, stepping over garbage,
Clumps of algae, tangles of wire.
I pass the pier where men
Cast lines for catfish, the sun sinking,
The first of them leaving, shaking their heads.
I am a trilobite.
Or, the hollow shape of a trilobite
Engraved, a prisoner in patterned shale.
I have become limestone.
I have become a picture in a science book,
An image clicking through a set of slides—
The State Fossil of Pennsylvania.
Is such fame, such reknown, a triumph?
Am I trampled in the mud? Crystallised
In a bituminous vein.
So for lack of anything better to post, I’m going to put up some of the products of in-class exercises—or the exercises I do with my writing friends. Feel free to dislike anything, or like anything, or to do anything, or to not do anything.
I liked writing on this thing better before people actually read it. Now I’m self-conscious about my posts (which is why there haven’t been any). Will I be held responsible for what I say?
I’m feeling inspecific lately, like a balloon in space. I think the best thing to do in that case is to write (using a pen with a thick, inky line) lists of very specific things, that exist in a certain place, at a certain time, in a certain way. And then orient the self, according to those points of reference, in the particular.
As I am typing, I am observing the veins in my hands, which are almost transparent in this light. I like seeing my veins, I always appreciate evidence of my circulatory system. It’s reassuring to know that I am full of wires and tunnels, it makes me feel less vague about things.
When I was eleven, a year before I became vegetarian, I was eating a piece of chicken and a vein slipped out of it. It had lost its color and was like a piece of rubber tubing. It was stretchy.
As blood is supplied to every cell in the body—especially the muscles, I wonder how many capillaries and vessels the average meat-eater consumes…laid end to end, how far would they go?
So Nathan remarked that my recent posts have been a little emo. And he is right. I apologize.
I guess if you don’t have anything uplifting to say, you should keep your thoughts to yourself and not drag other people down into your sad and bitter world. I’ve been low on creativity lately, but I don’t believe in not working just because you’re out of ideas. Even though I’m busy with finals, I’m forcing myself to write for about an hour each day. I think if you don’t maintain your practice daily, your work loses its focus and becomes dull and weak. You lose confidence and it shows. So anyway, if I come up with anything interesting I’ll post it here, otherwise I’ll try to keep quiet until I have something nice to say.
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.
Going to what is arguably the most conceptual art school in the country, I find that issues of dress often come up. I feel that, while students of other disciplines may be as flamboyant or hip as they please, there is a certain style that is specific to the serious writer. As a serious writer, you should dress so as to not exist. You should be so nondescript that you dissolve before the eyes, an apparition. The sad fact of writing is that you are always observing, never participating. It’s impossible to actually take action, at least in any way that is seperate and other from the act of observing. Since this is the way it is, you may as well accept it and adopt that philosophy as an element of personal style. You should be the most anonymous person you’ve ever seen. Not merely anonymous, not merely bland, but literally invisible. This is also important because, if you are me, there is nothing more problematic than the fact that you exist and nothing more desirable than the idea of appearing not to.
I don’t think that dressing this way requires buying “mall clothes” or going “mainstream”. That would be helpful to no one. But I do find that it often involves grey wool.
It’s been a while. I’m far away. I’ve changed some things. Stay posted.
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