On the Road Home

Witnessed on the road, as I biked home:

·        a  crow so large as my cat, picking with insistence upon the corner of a swollen bag of refuse

·         A rat crushed beneath a  tire’s vehicle

·         Gore from said rat, which I tried to imagine innocuous – telling myself pomegranate seeds, cranberry juice

·         My legs, spinning to and fro in a rather comic way, as I sought to gain elevation beyond the scope of sight and sound of the man screaming “you fucking whore”

·         The grey shape of the man on his bike; how large and determined and sure he was, as he pedaled towards me, screaming “you fucking whore”

·         My strange and sure and sickly whimsical surety that the man was speaking to me, not only at me

madness

the kick start forgot.

alas; blood on the pillow, the pillow stained through with mold leaked from the wet, cold khaki wall.

december tidings

It turns out that studying literature doesn't actually intersect with having any inspiration or time to actually write anything non-research-y. Too bad.

But I did manage to get my manuscript in for the Whitman Award. I won't hear anything till Spring, so I'm contemplating shopping it around till then - I'm pretty pleased with it, and nearly 1/3 of the poems in it are revisions of poems I first posted to this very blog.

That said, it was incredibly gratifying to go back and edit myself, and really work on the pieces. The problem, as I've said before, with blogging, is that you get a dose of instant gratification - but I'm juuuuust sloppy enough that I'll slap something up and let it represent me, as it were; even knowing it could be better. So, my point being that I really am pleased with my manuscript, and tried very hard to craft it into something I would love. Yeah, I need to look into a publisher.

If only I didn't have so many darned papers to write - I'm in a weird paradox; I get to spend all day writing (8 hours today and still counting), but 7.45 of those hours are devoted to rather dreary literary criticism. Regurgitating things I don't believe in. It's tiresome. Not sure why I'm here. Hoping to get a job offer and walk away. Burned out. School bad. Miss writing. blaaaaaaaah

oh shit!

Damn you, Blogger!

I like the instant gratification of poetry blogging, but it must be duly noted that I usually take these poems - sorry things they are, in their rough draft version - and re-work them properly, eventually. In a Word document.


For two years now, it's been a simple matter of cut and paste, as I'm sure all you plagiarists are aware.

But something is fucked up, and now I'm getting giant black squares as well as the text - it's being so goddamned literal about the "cut and paste" action all of a sudden. I just want the words! Just the words!!!

So, I will have to reverse the production process, I guess. Because it's supremely annoying to deal with the intricacies of re-formatting.

This may again delay my posting.

That, and I'm getting paranoid about plagarism. I clearly have convinced myself of my artistic merit, otherwise intellectual property rights wouldn't menace my fantasies quite so much...

the doctor is sick

my feet scuffed the grey - again!

tired trope: me and my bike and my backpack;
when i was a child i wished to get so far away
for awhile, i did.

grey town. grey town filled with credentialing processes
and power constructs and discourses and Foucaults,
and lacking all balance, and praising alcohol and white men and dead tongues
in suspiciously conservative parlance.

i'm growing impatient with all this glorious decomposition.
"Moi, je n'impose rien!"
Yeah, moi non plus.

Yeah, moi made for education, but by that I mean the real kind -

la more

"La-more"
He pronounced it, tongue rolling,
Head swaying,
a puppy searching for a treat -
- i laughed -
"you must think my french is crap!"
- so i gave him shit.

but today i remembered,
because the word slid out from the lubricated tongue of a fluent,
of a hugeonot, some parisian painter speaking of
l'amour
but i thought he said
la mort

yet in either case i'm right

translation

at once
the night, black and still,
and full of love safely closed behind doors and locks;
i ran it through, i ran it all the way through with my longest
and most wild fight.

i battled the thought, the lisp, the giggle
i picked up my gladius and thought 'bellarum'
my ears licked at the fulsome oink of the night
ein abend geschlossen fur mich

Helas! Helas that he was an adherent of acquisition,
a trader of slaves,
a god dethroned.

We sit in circles and must reduce his feigned greatness, now what with
the exposed, puzzling claims of that human heart.
which shall i believe more?

i think to myself, that the beautiful guerre goes on,
the belle guerillas scramble in the night
for guns and fists and bananas and girls.

und ich, ich liebe das so