December 2009
1 post
Wednesday December 30 2009.
We write the water because it’s always changing. - May 8 2008.
I find letting something I’ve started sit in anticipation (even if I’m the only one who feels it’s open-ended) leaves me with a weight of unease. Putting an official stop to it gives me less to consider. I sat down to type this note and deny all that sits below. I was...
April 2009
1 post
Account of a Steady Hand
Leonid Tsypkin, the soviet doctor and writer, never saw the publication of his only completed novel, Summer in Baden-Baden, a fictional account of Dostoevsky’s years in Germany. He became obsessed with depicting Dostoevsky’s live as accurately as possible, leaving nothing to his own imagination except the motives that led the man to his decisions, the...
February 2009
2 posts
31 15’15.53N, 24 15’30.53W A professor in Kentucky or Indiana who was bored and afraid to get caught looking at pornography and had already caught up on the sites that covered his general fields of interest, skipping the articles of the authors he hated (some friends) and reading the ones of those he respected (but feared he didn’t have the respect of) stumbled out onto...
Four out of five dogs bark loudly when I am bored at work. The first is hunger. The second, anxiety. The third is fear and the fourth, rebellion. (The alternate dog never barks, content to turn his head and look at the lunatics howling out, and perhaps smack the settled spit from his jowls. His name is passion.) I yell out to them, almost joining in their screams, as if it were the more natural...
November 2008
2 posts
Skip of the Heart Orson showed us those bulls shamed, their ancestors culled from the earth and bred to face battle. If we ignore the moral implications of this and see it all just as the spectators we are, then we can experience one rare opportunity of watching man collide with nature completely on his own terms. The circumstances are his; the crowd, the stands and the bull himself, built,...
The Leaves
I called out of work this morning and, oh, what a day to ring. Last night was the first hard rain after the first freeze, and even though the leaves had gone not brown but yellow they still had fallen from their branches. It was a separation of the trees; I didn’t know which parts should be considered. The trees I had known had fallen to the ground and were now pasted to it....
October 2008
1 post
Crops
The washboard, the sawdust hacksaw were all I could think of on the road, rear tires sheer black and wearing against gravel. We fought, settled in with brick leather banks pushing our shoulders down, forcing us to make fists out in front of us. You claimed it was the first, first beautiful date, terror – no, not terror but excited fear billowing under. Traps tried to close us in with signal...
September 2008
2 posts
You will be able to watch ideas swirl off of this and it will be worth something. I am starting to revert back to my more inconsistent musings that were more interesting if less clear. In a longer format the ideas will clean up nicely, brushed, and fully formed, but it is that jump that some words have when scribbled down instead of mused over that I find most important to my own work, even if it...
Turn Inward
She put a south-bite on my jaw; no, just under, in an attempt to keep me from moving. With each kiss, I moved closer to the door and wondered how I stormed into city with a wing and a sail; all strapped to my back in a sturdy pack with its stitching guarded by angels. The same wasn’t said for my coat which ripped in the shoulder and let rain fall through with her first tug down...
August 2008
1 post
Scene
We sat in the car and waited with our hands over our heads as they lowered the casket. Hers were raised in black gloves tracing up to bare shoulders, I assume, to block the east morning sun shining in through the windows of the black sedan, or from a pair of eyes on the hill that in no way could reach us. My hands were raised to the ceiling, at which our driver turned inward and scowled as...
July 2008
1 post
June 2008
2 posts
Esper (or the first part of something)
There were clothes piling in corners. Coats were returning to hangers in closets, timid and knowing there was one more snow and two heavy rains coming, when flaps from outside turned my head. Windows were still fogged as we looked from our morning headboards. Rushing to the screen door led to calls from my mother standing in the smoke rising from the skillet....
Bereavement
They say, hey, we are all going to die some day.
I just know I never wanted to go trying to escape the prick of a finger or the first tear that stings all of the way down to your gut; the feeling that you’ll be sick again. We hate the tears at first; their warm reminder that there is still blood pumping, keeping us alive. By the end we squeeze them out. It’s hard to...
May 2008
6 posts
My Coal-Stained Hands
I want to churn the gears on a train but she won’t let me and goes off the rails every time I throw a speck of coal into our fire. Our train is empty and cold, mostly abandoned. It used to run warm and clean. I stand in my conductor cap waving for her to join but she sits in the field with her legs drawn, picking flowers and only looking up at me when I put forth my...
This is the Night That Took Our Grandmothers Years Before Their Men
Give up nights with the boys, whiskey-hi balls and smokey poker rooms. Sell off your complaints about home (this home) for more than a song. There can only be so many hard days and man can’t be filled with burgers at the bar, and corner slices in bright city lights; stars can’t be that calling. We lost more than...
The Glove I put my hands on the leather and slide to the window. With a slammed door the sound is muffled to a dull roar. All we hear are the thud of palms and the lock’s click into place. We’re detached like being buried under snow but we see through it; the hands, young flesh pale and soft, the teeth and mouths open, tears for no real reason. We sit back and watch them fade off some...
Branched On I only saw one ghost in a raincoat. The rest let drops shop through them. Like moonlight through shaded windows, they snuck past the fabric in the wings. Evangeline waited on concrete steps and washed out the dust along the road with her nervous legs brushing heels against it. She pulled back, stammered to be picked up in the cold back alleyway just behind my shop, the kind that set...
Disappearances They beat me. They shocked me out on Moscow streets. They emptied my pockets and threw me into their standard vehicle of authority. I tried to speak out, are you the KGB? The butt of an umbrella landed my jaw as they muttered under their breath. My head hung from my shoulders, frolicking left to right with each dip in the road. The judges were corruptible. That’s what I got...
Algeciras I miss dirty Algeciras, as the lone soul walking winter streets, everyone locked up in homes, hidden from the echoes of the water flown to the borders, pleading to tear them down and asking to see the beaches; no beaches, just docks for Moroccans to crawl up with packs on their backs, shilling their wares, spreading them out over Europe as I try to shield them from the sky, their grey...
Fits and Rhythms They took my leg, snapped thirty-one years off at the base. I could see the smoke billowing out my veins. It streamed, not like the blood from my lungs that I choked up at the sight. No use in wrapping. I just shook against the concrete with the sun was six feet further than it ever was before. Breeze brushing in the blood, the rest of me flailing. And I used to be the fastest man...
April 2008
11 posts
What are You Making, Exactly? I can’t think past the pen in my hand, the ache in my back from the chair, made-for-comfort. As the stones get thrown around the room, it is hard to imagine that a meal would mean this much in my real life. It is bleak despair under florescents.
Pianists If we set the soft, the cold white tableware out in the garden would we be visited by a rabbit? The closest thing I ever got to imagination was a drum kit and pointed shoes … We smile upwards and ask, with his hair combed back, what was proper. He mentions the Calvary Tea and men with their sleeves rolled up to play the piano. But we’d bet our gins on honey farms and cuts at...
Harte If you ever get caught up in prickle thorns Or beaten by wind in city entrances Fields gates or trolleys I’ll find you.
There is a stage and I am setting it up for you. Wooden floorboards, chipped and split down panels. Shadow alley, chopped lights but nothing in the wings. Its all from a florescent choke or stumble, a slash across your wrist and the black blood seeping. It puddles of the floor and there’s a reflection. No creaks, just the tap in the nibble across that rides through the hall over two...
Interrogation She set sails off to the right. The Clubsom breeze came in and swept us all away. With currents and the angels carved on fronts of boats, the paces, the boards came together. We crossed our arms and legs and let tribes take us because we knew we would get to dry land. They got all of this in the police report.
Full Sail If you close down the station how will we all get out? We rode on railways past west bound lines into each cat-eyed night. Someone stole the kettle from the kitchen so we could fill our thermoses with Stella from the tap. The one-man cook/barman could see the foam forming on the floor, one drip at a time. The rhythms of the track, each give, heave and jam was part of our well earned...
Standards I held a gloved hand, black silk leading to the elbow and pointing on towards bare shoulders. We waited in the cab for most of the morning, hoping he would leave. I thumbed through the driver’s manual left in the back seat, with my body rolled and knees up against the paneling. The sun treated us like ants through the glass but we didn’t mention it, afraid to complain as if it...
Markers We emptied out the punch bowl, leaving almost nothing but the ladle, clear and rocking in its shell. I could spot a line of pink huddled into the crease - the one positioned with the tables slightly dented leg that fumbled for the floor. At the beginning of the night she stood blocking the light from the stage, the color hidden on the gym dance floor, basketball dashes hit with purple, the...
Fearfully and Wonderfully I bit the top of my steering wheel, blocking out the talk radio and the hum of my running engine. I kept my eyes open, each passing car, each light lit pavement the way hers would. I had never seen so many Malibu’s in such an embarrassing red. It was that or the white Impalas, circling, waiting for me to make my next move. I didn’t have any moves. I just waited. It was...
Eye Contact We started standing off to the sides of dresses, riding on top of soft shoulders in the flash of camera bulbs, the folks trying to decide to keep them on or turn them off, depending on the low level glow in the dusk. I could see them all laughing. I sent them all to hell with my glances. I buried them in attitude, drowned them in my apathy as she stared off into the camera, trying to...