Thursday, May 31, 2007

damn you, John Updike

You broke me down again. But I’m grateful, in a way. Janice loses the baby in the murky bathwater. My eyes swell. Harry comes back home.
Nelson, age five, asks, “Baby sick?”
Then the next day, “Is baby Becky dead?”
“Yes.” Harry answers.
And I’m useless for the rest of the day. Because I want a Janice. And a Nelson. And the bad times. Because you only know bad if most days are better. Good, even.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Too visibly unaffected

By the news that you have plans to wed. Because I know it moves something deep in me that previously clung to indeterminacy, or to some impossible possibility that we could—

Never has come just as we knew it would (should?). Yet your reservations reverberate, and I wonder what that means. To me, implicating.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Henry

Phantom my killing is theater
imminent on the object anonymous.
It’s daunting with possibility.
I lie faking if I succeed.

What yellows in my own tomorrow?
Cardiogram antithesis if a reason.
Oh sear is cigarette
as I breathe in again.

All, I come closer in arriving left of
after all our pier is not sunk,
mocking out to sea who aren’t
in epic romance vacuous.


[a homophonic rendering of Sappho's "Fragment 31" with heavy influence from Laird Hunt's The Exquisite]

Monday, May 21, 2007

of Ribbons and Rebellion

I want a typewriter because I think I am supposed to be a writer. It’s what I’m good at, what comes naturally. Words and phrases flow from my fingertips and create paragraphs, pages, and pathos. And if not pathos, at least noises, stirrings, whispers. All the things that are the beginnings of revolutions and rebellion through reticence and recalculations of how you thought of words before and how you will never see them the same again. Or maybe I’ve had one to many whiskey and 7ups.
 

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