East Quad, 2008

We turned one of the lounges in East Quad into a found art exhibition one year.  This is the fun mess we created.  I was drinking a lot of Coke back then.

Insonmia

Clumps of Brown Hair

When he makes love to the young girl

what does the middle-aged long-married

man say to himself and the girl?

- that lovers live and desk clerks perish?

Al Purdy, “Married Man's Song”

When it's late

And I remember her face,

Excited, flashing under

The come-and-go streetlights

Flaring past

At one hundred miles per hour

As I try to rush her home on time,

What am I supposed to say to her now?
A cold handshake and wish her the best?

Those kind words

Would come out layered

Thick in honey and venom,

A spit in the face wrapped

With a crinkled red bow,

An offered hand, septic.

That would be a disservice

To the years that slipped down

The drain, staring in the mirror

And cutting my hair

At one in the morning,

Trying to get each trace of

Months-old smell gone

With the buzz of a razor.

That ride to her house

I lied to her and said

That desk clerks die.

Clumps of brown hair

On white tile floor

And the clerks still

Have their wooden desks.

Unprotection

Driving

Faster than ever

A voice, scream tears

My ear, a hot breath,

Caught, frozen in a

Final spasm, released.

Driving
Slowly, morose, gray
Trees, dead leaves brown

Voiceless ride, tears

My hand touches, cold thigh

Soft sigh, wordless chill.

Heavy weight, I’ve killed,

Trickle, moment of pleasure.

Ships Sail Backwards

Reversing sands for Helen,

Who once tore down my city walls--

Running soldiers in reverse,

Priam grows younger as

Paris drops his arrows,
Takes to his mother’s breast--

The ravages of a beauty’s look,

Now nothing and the same

Only rebuilds stone titans
Guarding the city's heart

And the hardened shell lets her

In no longer.

Send her back to Sparta.

hang out for eternity

[redacted]

No one wants to hear about it.  So keep quiet like they taught you.  Good, good.

 

nothing to say

leaning on cold iron railing

and remembering the time

sensei picked me up by the neck

and hung me for an instance off

the ground.

the feeling of head separating from

body and the dark hands like rope—

and then drifting off in memory time,

with each failed picture overexposed,

monotonous sepia tone photo

with pensive lookers trying to strike

poses and coming off as contrived

with fake looks of inflated meaning

and hair too-perfectly flung back

over bare foreheads and cast down looks

of playacting deep thought with

trim beards and hats and tired

cookie cutter stances mugging for

camera shot.

thrown away in piles of forgotten

memories left by the bed near

drawers full of unread novels.

standing at a party with

opposing lights, casting moods

on rooms and people crowding

and talking in flits of conversation

over beers drowned out by wailing

sax, chugging cherry wine

on

windowsills, precision camped out

on

brick carpet, picking

tiny bugs from the grass grown

long with unrealized duties of

maintenance and lack of sunless nights,

turning brown, each blade flaking

off in tumbles of dried plant,

dying quickly into the dirt over

the roots of the withering green.

eating Chinese too many nights

with paper forks and straw hats,

blowing tunes on an old recorder

and singing made-up camp songs

about Alexandria and her baby Antiochus,

singing in the stables on a hot

July night with mint julep and

submarine sandwiches, nightmares of the

horrid Holy Ghost waffle house,

baking brownies when the night watch

has given up the vigil and the crime

spree sprinters put on hiking pants

for a short walk to the station

with axes and brandishing hunting knives

with dried deer blood and grimaces

through a tulip flavored beanbag chair

and sickening thuds of the whacked flesh,

running through the street lamps

when tiny corsets stop holding back

and little people with big thoughts

and smaller fingers pick locks on

the horse troughs with deft wrist

movements and the flicker fire flare

of a movement too fast in the stillness

of the gutter eats through the glass window

and bursts in upon sex orgy to the

tune of Ayler and many sounds

bumping walls and leaving fingerprints

for the disturbance detectives to lift

and run at the central computer with

files of immigrants and little white

lies upon which the flag was hoisted

and with which dirt was moved from

the Grand Canyon to Peoria with toothpicks

and subway cars.

the subways cars stopped running the night

Memphis died sprawled on the iron

tracks with electric lines rounding her

neck in its gripping falsetto squeal.

she died from asphyxiation and mild

indigestion, the train was a coincidence

and a mischief to make matters worse

for the cleanup crew comprised of

uniformed jumpsuit workers with

blue face masks and grey eyes and

purple Mohawk wigs made out of

cat hair and spit from the mother

of the child that once could.

“finally,” the poet said wearing a smile

of utter exhaustion and the possibility

of being born again upon a day with

a brighter sun and more avenues for

the discussion of maybe not being alone,

“for once my job here is done,” and he walked

on knowing that he had not said anything

once again and would always

be the failed poet

who never would and

changed into the silence

machine that was the perfect description

and became synonymous with his

name and the children born in

white-lined hospitals would be

branded just as he when they

would refuse to talk about the restrictions

of a running narrative or could not

think clever, witty things when

pressed to be engaged.

they were marked and sent to the

antipoet’s camp where they could be

taught to wear smiles and enjoy

carpet rags of conversation

decked out in the haze of alcohol

covering the minuscule midnight

of the lighthouse perched on the

distant city shore—

this was their task, to become one

with the rolling pigsty and enjoy

that lot and park in it everyday

in shiny automobiles made out of blood

and swear words uttered by swollen

pig lips wrapped in oily bacon

on top of languid pigeon feathers

and the possibility of slipping off

into an oblivion made out of catapults

of slimy objective-based learning methods

developed by people who were

never children, but who roped cattle

out of the womb with lengths

of pubic hair.

the poet only wanted one moment to burst

out in colors improbable and finally

prove that he had the capacity for

being a normal boy and not a wooden

puppet with the personality of a rotting

cardboard box in a swamp—

precision standing on tile floors

and the impossibility of finding

her when the tables had been cleared

and walking was the mainstay for

the evening when the indoors were

turned out by angry waiters with

dishtowels and bills.

the subway stopped

with a piece of old Memphis

hanging from his hungry teeth

and bleeding down his chin

the bright light eyes looking at

the solid concrete walls and

old Memphis dripping more—

the awkward mess after

the meeting of iron rail.

and it’s always how it ends.

the most beautiful song in the world

will now only remind him that he need

but buy a yard and find a horizontal post

hitch his horse neck to it and hang out

for an eternity and in heaven most likely

will there be only parties with inside

jokes so old not even the saints pick

up on them.

Pound It

A quick one for now, one of my favorites.


In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound

Litster

These are some of the books I'll be reading this year.  Last year was a good year for books, especially since the book club started.  Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Welsh's The Marabou Stork Nightmares, Pahlaniuk's Survivor, Kundera's Identity, all of them quite good.

I also read Hesse's Demian and Soseki's Kokoro.

But the list wasn't long enough.  Shameful, even, in its brevity.  I've been infected with a shortened attention span.  Random music, channel surfing, no patience for reading.  I spent the morning updating my Facebook profile, adding things to my favorite music, books, movies and television.  Music and books far outweighed television and movies, though television is a problem, while movies just haven't really interested me as much as music and books.  I then started cleaning my room, ordering my life, really.  Organizing the books left unsorted on the shelf, making an attempt at alphabetizing my CD's.  Everything was going so well.

I'm missing a book, a very important book, and it's essential that I find it.  But I'm afraid of where it might be.  I know I gave it to someone to read, but I don't know if she gave it back to me.  I should never have loaned out the Norton edition of The Sound and the Fury when I had a perfectly untouched and unimportant Vintage copy.  The Norton version, perhaps though seemingly meaningless in its annotations, is the only book I've ever dragged through multiple courses, the only book I've really dedicated to dissecting completely and with purpose.  I think it's been through three classes, all of them taught by very knowledgeable, old professors, the dying breed of old school lit professors.  I've used the book on papers for classes that didn't even cover the novel.  I need to find this book, or I need to get it back (if it is indeed where I think it is).

So, if you're reading this and you have my book, please return it to me.


Anyways, here's the list for 2011 (The first three are in order):
Murakami -- Kafka on the Shore
Bourdain -- Kitchen Confidential
Pynchon -- Gravity's Rainbow
Aeschylus -- Oresteia
Sinclair -- The Jungle
Hesse -- Narcissus and Goldmund
Danielewski -- Only Revolutions (trying it again later this year)
Sinclair -- Oil! (again, trying it again)
Nietzsche -- The Antichrist
Johnson -- Tree of Smoke
Cervantes -- Don Quixote
Faulkner -- Three Famous Short Novels (maybe just The Bear)
Bronte -- Wuthering Heights
Ariosto -- Orlando Furioso
Mann -- The Magic Mountain
Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera
Konecky -- Allegra Maud Goldman
Hurston -- Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ovid -- Metamorphosis
Dostoevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov
Nietzsche -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Mann -- Doctor Faustus
Lee & Schlain -- Acid Dreams
Burgess -- Honey for the Bears
Hesse -- Steppenwolf
Plato -- Republic
Shikibu -- The Tale of Genji
Descartes -- Meditation on First Philosophy


Twenty-eight in all, and a decent mixture.  I'm going to try to branch out to more non-fiction, and I think the philosophy angle is a good place to start (even if it's still just a knot).  I'm reading Murakami right now and have made it about halfway through.  Mentioned in the book are Soseki, The Tale of Genji, Eliot and The Beatles (to name a few).  I'm looking forward to this year and its books.  I just can't slow down.

Kalamazoo comes to me
In three faces--

One is framed
By the touch
Of black hair
At midnight.

The next has grown
In wrinkles
As I have grown
In feet.

And the last
Is a silhouette
On a sunny morning
Buried in a riverbank.

January 1