4:05 am  •  3 May 2013

“A remembered relation of spaces, a hole, a circle, a shaded area — and a whole life comes alive. The real appeal of the map, perhaps, is not so much that it stores our past as that it forces our emotions to be pressed into their most parsimonious essence — and, as every poet knows, it is emotion under the force of limits, emotion pressed down and held down to strict formal constraints, that makes for the purest expression. These maps are street haiku, whose emotions, whether made by the well known or the anonymous, are more moving for being so stylized.”

— gopnik

11:33 pm  •  2 April 2013

i still hold my lungs in high esteem

breath before the next act

loosen your tie 

ok. i give up.
sardines are my preferred lunch
twice turned corners
notice the salutations 

and hellos building goodbye castles

for the dukes and peasants

let’s make this work for everyone

i give up
eventually very much nowhere
find me in the wasteland
yea, april is the cruelest month
april is the cruelest month

i drink my wine in soft melodies
don’t tell me who i am
interestingly never in the position to remark 
slurp the soft
you’re voice is strange, 
can’t you whisper
the bending isn’t becoming
for you

bangs for whimpers
lungs for ashes
cold tongues encased in brittle…

simmering flawlessness
rose mouth, ice frothing lips
don’t kiss me, I’m a wanderer

7:31 pm  •  23 March 2013

struck with a thought

cradled a thought

found  a thought

stumbled upon a thought.

encountered a thought.

inhabited a thought.

lost a thought.
fought a thought.
still fighting thoughts.
thought i thought.
gave a thought.
or gave a shit.
want to think?
thinking.
i thought.

got a thought?

1:25 am  •  12 February 2013

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.”

— M. Foucault, preface to Anti-Oedipus (via raynoll)

5:04 pm  •  11 February 2013  •  3 notes

“Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.”

8:38 pm  •  26 January 2013  •  3 notes

you need to eat memories and digest them on a regular basis,

like kale and garlic and wine

6:14 pm  •  25 January 2013

i read a Brodsky poem earlier today,

(‘i sit by the window’)

so of course, 

i moved my chair and pulled back the curtains:

“i said the forest’s only part of a tree, 

who needs the whole girl if you’ve got her knee?”

and i remembered late last evening when i decided to sharpen a few knives,

slow swipes back and forth across japanese stone, 

then stoned,

to bed,

and my dreams largely consisted of this act - sharpening select blades

and cutting white paper suspended in mid-air.

small cuts of life make up Life, 

or maybe Life is only a piece of small cuts,

and the forest’s only part of the tree…

4:52 am  •  20 January 2013  •  1 note

the days when i witnessed myself as a conductor

and coordinated sweeping passages of my own life

with broomsticks and lullabies of monstrous childhood fears

i feared the day the sun would stop burning at the age of 6

and one can only imagine how petty my fears are now

growing inward, sadly,

preferring to spread out like moss which holds life beneath snow, ice and the driest winters. 

i recently went to the snow for the first time in years. Our cars slid down the hill and missed the driveway on the first night. we rose the following morning to shovel ice and snow from the driveway, tossing massive chunks into the neighbor’s territory; we carried firewood on our shoulders and the tops of our heads; we teased darkness, gambled in the wretched outskirts of Nevada and smashed icicles from the edges of our cabin. I cannot recall the last time i laughed so tremendously, three days in a row, my stomach was sore; we tended to a roaring fire which has only now caught up to my soul and ignited some furious desire for life in all its naked intensity and melting. 

*and here begins another attempt to write on a consistent basis in this goddamned blog*

it’s now a sharp and bitter san francisco night. listening to sally whitwell play philip glass, reading henry miller’s letters to anais nin, flipping pages in “sons and lovers” and finally, after a week away from my apartment….

to bed.

4:06 am  •  13 January 2013  •  1 note

st make

more

2. other accomplishment

3. hawk siting on thanksgiving

4. armless

5 the solitude of moving forward

6 leaving space ahead of oneself

7 performance

8 photographed music

9 systems of sound

1:40 am  •  25 November 2012  •  1 note