Ride we now upon this narrow pavement
which winds between the joyous and the dead,
which claps its fists in warning drums of thunder
like monuments that shake their stony heads.
A warning cry, a shrill black song of fear
flamed from the road when our hearts realized
the hidden knowledge ringing in our ears:
"Couldst thou prescribe a solvent for mine eyes?"
Your hands so pale that grip the steering wheel
are shedding innocence and dripping blood.
Agape, the charred bystanders watch you heal,
as clean gore cleanses smudged. Redeeming flood!
Above the road's dull roar our voice we'll raise
and drown out opposition to our praise.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Agape
then he who numbly lies
on sand and sand of stillness,
who had long dashed
bloody fingers on the rocks of Fortune
and been slivered by the
spiny tides of Fate:
who had long divulged of dominance
and grit
will find himself quieting
in the gentleness of love.
on sand and sand of stillness,
who had long dashed
bloody fingers on the rocks of Fortune
and been slivered by the
spiny tides of Fate:
who had long divulged of dominance
and grit
will find himself quieting
in the gentleness of love.
Sobriety
Mum as an iced-over tulip
she catches midgallop,
pitched up and shot
silent by the resoluteness
of All.
Luster drying dully in the
Maddening Concavity:
All colors spinning to still in her
Whiteness.
Spores anchor and dig heels
in the burnt war-time scrub spaces
black pitched, uninhabitable
still, yet shapeable.
Concavity, Concavity, Concavity
Worse even than the rabid song,
the silent
Stillness
taken root and frozen over.
Spit-pitched, frozen black
in the stillness
And she wizened last of all,
at one with the still blue
Eye of stasis,
mumming its lidless stare
on the sobriety
of oneness,
enigma no longer enigma
but Void.
she catches midgallop,
pitched up and shot
silent by the resoluteness
of All.
Luster drying dully in the
Maddening Concavity:
All colors spinning to still in her
Whiteness.
Spores anchor and dig heels
in the burnt war-time scrub spaces
black pitched, uninhabitable
still, yet shapeable.
Concavity, Concavity, Concavity
Worse even than the rabid song,
the silent
Stillness
taken root and frozen over.
Spit-pitched, frozen black
in the stillness
And she wizened last of all,
at one with the still blue
Eye of stasis,
mumming its lidless stare
on the sobriety
of oneness,
enigma no longer enigma
but Void.
anthology of flaws
i have never been a collector of flaws. but shouldn't it be cathartic, at least, to catalogue the harmful idosyncrasies of oneself?
1. I have a little Pride, and a whole lot of Prejudice.
2. There is a default to solitude. There is the gnawingness to hole up in blackness and hide from you, in the familiarity of Self.
3. I am the psychological; i cannot help but judge you.
4. I cannot endure myself to be hideous. As long as i feel attractive and well-loved, i think i can endure anything. Brains without beauty are only brains-- and of what use are only brains? There is my inch-and-a-half of Pride.
5. I have intolerably unattractive feet.
6. There is a default to loving. Perhaps you do not need or deserve love, perhaps you need a solid whack about the head, but you will be loved.
7. There is an absolute laziness of mind that prohibits the trivial from sticking inside.
8. In the face of perceived injustice, or in the face of the person Injust, there is a default to absolute stubbornness. A strange, cocky compilation: a parfait of stubbornness and love.
9. I have an insatiable gnawing to know. No banality, no easily-forgotten triviality, but real knowledge, every good or bad facet; to be able to look at the world and to know it.
10. There is so much single-minded Otherness in my mind at this time that i cannot immediately conceive more than ten flaws: this is a certain destruction.
1. I have a little Pride, and a whole lot of Prejudice.
2. There is a default to solitude. There is the gnawingness to hole up in blackness and hide from you, in the familiarity of Self.
3. I am the psychological; i cannot help but judge you.
4. I cannot endure myself to be hideous. As long as i feel attractive and well-loved, i think i can endure anything. Brains without beauty are only brains-- and of what use are only brains? There is my inch-and-a-half of Pride.
5. I have intolerably unattractive feet.
6. There is a default to loving. Perhaps you do not need or deserve love, perhaps you need a solid whack about the head, but you will be loved.
7. There is an absolute laziness of mind that prohibits the trivial from sticking inside.
8. In the face of perceived injustice, or in the face of the person Injust, there is a default to absolute stubbornness. A strange, cocky compilation: a parfait of stubbornness and love.
9. I have an insatiable gnawing to know. No banality, no easily-forgotten triviality, but real knowledge, every good or bad facet; to be able to look at the world and to know it.
10. There is so much single-minded Otherness in my mind at this time that i cannot immediately conceive more than ten flaws: this is a certain destruction.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
26 february
Have you ever tried to see yourself as a stranger would? To watch yourself from outside your own skin? (I have come to the conclusion that this is why we have eyes on our faces, and not on our hands, or feet; if they were not cleanly and safely fixated we would be all the time watching ourselves, and not give a lick for the world around us; which rather defeats the purpose of living.) Here is how this moment is, if i were not I but Omnipotent Stranger (today was very dead and very barren; i am completely dead; i cannot make myself feel anything at all.)
He would be looking for her, blue eyes grazing innocent across aisles and aisles of facelessness: while she shriveled boldly outside, a thousand tinny magnets flown together inside her and ripping her organs to ribbons. But no-- she did not feel worthy of that sort of violence. She had not martyred herself into flowering flames, nor disintigrated into a violent heap of ash. She had simply died. Cold hard cadaver, jostling stiffly along the nameless warm flesh of the living.
He would be looking for her, blue eyes grazing innocent across aisles and aisles of facelessness: while she shriveled boldly outside, a thousand tinny magnets flown together inside her and ripping her organs to ribbons. But no-- she did not feel worthy of that sort of violence. She had not martyred herself into flowering flames, nor disintigrated into a violent heap of ash. She had simply died. Cold hard cadaver, jostling stiffly along the nameless warm flesh of the living.
Monday, February 23, 2009
23 february
How closely one is guarded by the fear: that upon becoming near to someone, our true selves will break through, and our dirty water will muddy itself all over them, erupting quick and irrepressable like unfortunate cat vomit, and they will turn away in disgust. only it never quite works like that-- rather-- our water is never as dirty as we imagine it to be, and how free we are when we break open the bottle.... so uncaged, and unswollen. how free.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Ishmael
Fathered by Our Father
And we ourselves great Fathers:
I born of the Moon,
And he of the Sun:
And he of the Sun:
Eloah following Allah.
Planetary blood is shed
And wrists take root in heels.
The sword is dropped
Between celestial brothers
(The sober and ebullient,
Both to father wild men:
Mirroring and mirrored by the other,
By the birth of an enemy-brother,
A nation.)
The sun-child draws his blessed blade at birth.
Favored child of God, he scythes three cycles
From my side and prospers:
I, stripped of berth and birthright, lance
A star from his exterior
And wander.
God has heard, but God has also
Shunned:
Eli, Elohim, Father of my father,
Lama Sabachthani?
Which God decrees, and scorns what He has ordered?
What God has left, no beauty can redeem.
I blacken my iniquity, and wander.
Below the Stellar Cradles battle nations:
Gabriel and Gibreel draw their arrows,
Samael and Azrael draw swords.
Sun and Moon stand shaking in their fury,
Husband, what a foul thing you have done!
Shall I now watch the blood flow from my son?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
21 february
what secrets the sky keeps: the skyline splintered, swollen, cracked blood-red from cheek to cheek as though someone or something has been crying. is this not what we hide from? the fear: that we are not an enigma but a void?
salman rushdie-- the moor's last sigh
here's my collection of quotes from The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie-- it's a good book, but dense; i'd recommend it, but it takes a while to muddle through.
Suspiro ergo sum. I sigh, therefore I am. The latin as usual tells the truth: suspirare = sub, below, +spirare, verb, to breathe. Suspiro: I under-breathe.
-SR
There's not a star worth following: it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.
-SR
Was weeping such a weakness? he wondered. Was defending-to-the-death such a strength?
-SR
Beauty is destiny of a sort, beauty speaks to beauty, it recognizes and assents, it believes it can excuse everything.
-SR
Did we really love her at all in those days, or was it just her long dominance over us, and our passive acceptance of our enslavement, that we mistook for love?
-SR
Much that was corruptible in me has been corrupted; much that was perfectible, but also capable of being demolished, has been lost.
-SR
I had fallen from grace, and the horror of it shattered the universe, like a mirror. I felt as though I, too, had shattered; as if i were falling to earth, not as myself, but as a thousand and one fragmented images of myself, trapped in shards of glass.
-SR
I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience.
-SR
The truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative, almost never what cold calculations would suggest.
-SR
How easily the human mind 'normalises' the abnormal, with what rapidity the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable but humdrum, not worth thinking about!
-SR
Civilisation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.
-SR
For the barbarians are not only at our gates but within our skins.
-SR
The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they had fought in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed; but still we could say-- and say truthfully-- that we had loved the best.
-SR
How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuing, seamlessly, as night follows the day, so to speak-- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal ruptures, falling upon our defenceless heads like the blows of a woodsman's axe?
-SR
Defeated love is still a treasure, and those who choose lovelessness have won no victory at all.
-SR
The past and future are where we spend most of our lives. In fact, what you are going through in this small microcosmos of ours is the disorienting feeling of having slipped for a few hours into the present.
-SR
He was caught in a shrieking feedback loop of remembrances, a screaming of memories, whose note rose higher and higher, until it began to shatter things. Eardrums; glass; lives.
-SR
(and my favorite:)
But after a not-so-long (though gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being crucifixion enough.
-Salman Rushdie
Suspiro ergo sum. I sigh, therefore I am. The latin as usual tells the truth: suspirare = sub, below, +spirare, verb, to breathe. Suspiro: I under-breathe.
-SR
There's not a star worth following: it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.
-SR
Was weeping such a weakness? he wondered. Was defending-to-the-death such a strength?
-SR
Beauty is destiny of a sort, beauty speaks to beauty, it recognizes and assents, it believes it can excuse everything.
-SR
Did we really love her at all in those days, or was it just her long dominance over us, and our passive acceptance of our enslavement, that we mistook for love?
-SR
Much that was corruptible in me has been corrupted; much that was perfectible, but also capable of being demolished, has been lost.
-SR
I had fallen from grace, and the horror of it shattered the universe, like a mirror. I felt as though I, too, had shattered; as if i were falling to earth, not as myself, but as a thousand and one fragmented images of myself, trapped in shards of glass.
-SR
I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience.
-SR
The truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative, almost never what cold calculations would suggest.
-SR
How easily the human mind 'normalises' the abnormal, with what rapidity the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable but humdrum, not worth thinking about!
-SR
Civilisation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.
-SR
For the barbarians are not only at our gates but within our skins.
-SR
The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they had fought in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed; but still we could say-- and say truthfully-- that we had loved the best.
-SR
How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuing, seamlessly, as night follows the day, so to speak-- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal ruptures, falling upon our defenceless heads like the blows of a woodsman's axe?
-SR
Defeated love is still a treasure, and those who choose lovelessness have won no victory at all.
-SR
The past and future are where we spend most of our lives. In fact, what you are going through in this small microcosmos of ours is the disorienting feeling of having slipped for a few hours into the present.
-SR
He was caught in a shrieking feedback loop of remembrances, a screaming of memories, whose note rose higher and higher, until it began to shatter things. Eardrums; glass; lives.
-SR
(and my favorite:)
But after a not-so-long (though gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being crucifixion enough.
-Salman Rushdie
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
aurora
wind-ladled raw
in sharp Levitical slaps,
made soft and pink and clean
as the inside of a
baby's mouth;
inertia transposed over layers
and layers of prophecy.
stripped down shivering to
stasis, the birth cry
in the damp white seclusion
of hollowed-out eyes:
strangers bloom from the dust
of what once was.
in sharp Levitical slaps,
made soft and pink and clean
as the inside of a
baby's mouth;
inertia transposed over layers
and layers of prophecy.
stripped down shivering to
stasis, the birth cry
in the damp white seclusion
of hollowed-out eyes:
strangers bloom from the dust
of what once was.
Monday, February 2, 2009
4 february
i was being so happy until it all came unravelled: a dot floating buoyant and redly in the great grey gel of the ocean; a hiccup in the downpour. there is a price to freedom, a haunting ache that accompanies being bloomed and newly uncaged.
it was never supposed to be this way. but it is, and so we remove and rearrange and reheal.
no matter how many ripped-up hearts have been unconsciously mutilated by my naivety, i have always considered myself a human, and as an exceptional specimen of how the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes human beings: "mostly harmless".
mostly harmless, my foot. humans are dangerous, dangerous creatures. (perhaps this is why God chooses to conceal: because of our great capacity to love, but also to destroy.)
when my mind is piled with too many richnesses, my body cries: abort! abort! and shuts down. i disintegrate into a muddy pool of blackness; my weak unbrave subconscious flies to the first available 'out': and i faint.
that phone call: i felt like i was reading a cheap novel, wavering mildly along until smack! jab! the plot twist that rips and garbles one's stomach into a thick tangle of muscle and weeds! it was one too many bricks in the building, and i fainted.
i was the opposite of wholesome, falling facefirst into the soft white mattress of love: but rather peeled open and turned inside out, drunk and digested by a thick plural blackness. i felt heavy, like solid gold: like the tombcasket of an egyption emperor, poured into, filled with, death. so i crawled into a tiny tiny mostly-harmless ball and crawled like a shot animal into the cramped blank corner of the closet. Only i am not the one who is shot: i am demented, the one who is shooting. i filled my back with the wall, with the scratchy blue paint, and i closed my eyes.
and i cried. i cried for j----, and for j---, and for this bent-up game of love; for the soft young hearts which crack their necks against the tides, who invariably remember that it isn't a game after all, and retreat into the dark safety of their closets.
it was never supposed to be this way. but it is, and so we remove and rearrange and reheal.
no matter how many ripped-up hearts have been unconsciously mutilated by my naivety, i have always considered myself a human, and as an exceptional specimen of how the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes human beings: "mostly harmless".
mostly harmless, my foot. humans are dangerous, dangerous creatures. (perhaps this is why God chooses to conceal: because of our great capacity to love, but also to destroy.)
when my mind is piled with too many richnesses, my body cries: abort! abort! and shuts down. i disintegrate into a muddy pool of blackness; my weak unbrave subconscious flies to the first available 'out': and i faint.
that phone call: i felt like i was reading a cheap novel, wavering mildly along until smack! jab! the plot twist that rips and garbles one's stomach into a thick tangle of muscle and weeds! it was one too many bricks in the building, and i fainted.
i was the opposite of wholesome, falling facefirst into the soft white mattress of love: but rather peeled open and turned inside out, drunk and digested by a thick plural blackness. i felt heavy, like solid gold: like the tombcasket of an egyption emperor, poured into, filled with, death. so i crawled into a tiny tiny mostly-harmless ball and crawled like a shot animal into the cramped blank corner of the closet. Only i am not the one who is shot: i am demented, the one who is shooting. i filled my back with the wall, with the scratchy blue paint, and i closed my eyes.
and i cried. i cried for j----, and for j---, and for this bent-up game of love; for the soft young hearts which crack their necks against the tides, who invariably remember that it isn't a game after all, and retreat into the dark safety of their closets.
at all
You don't know that i am allergic to pennicillin or about my obsession with Sylvia Plath. You don't know that i write poetry. You don't know that i am kosher or that i love the color yellow. You don't know that my muse is Jane Bennet, or that i hate carbonation, and only pretend to like Earl Grey Tea. You don't know that i have a 25 inch waist, size seven shoe & two missing teeth. You don't know that i pass out when i feel too much. You don't know that i'm terrified of elevators and crosswalks and parking garages and heights. You don't know why my jaw only opens two finger-widths. You don't know that i take 800 calories a day, that i was anorexic last summer. You don't know that i read 17 books last semester, or how careful i am with my heart. You don't know, i bet, the father i come home to, the sickness and shame and manipulation that seeps through our walls, that there is a reason for my training in being a doormat. You don't know that THAT'S why i started singing. That it's my 'out'. You don't know why i'm still so happy, or even that i AM so happy. You know me, perhaps, but you don't know me at all.
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