I'VE MOVED.

HI. I'VE MOVED HERE: somethingdistant.tumblr.com

Follow me thither!

something new

dry hot scraping rust, unbreathable, stopping up your throat until you can hardly manage a whisper. and they say, use your own voice, use your own sounds but it’s no use. there are many more hands around your neck -- real or fake. spend 8 hours a day at it. 12 if you have to, many more if you’re lucky. you want to be a muse for the one you know should be inspiring you. but you’ve stopped trying. stopped reflecting. stopped feeling. a lethargic puny scum choking yourself through the thought, the mere thought, of rust. the inescapable dryness of it. the unholy appearance of its surface like crusty ridges hardening into one another in the dark. in the wet. naked, neglected metal. you hear the sounds of two cars scraping up against each other, unraveling the paint off the sides to reveal the hot sharp layer beneath. you choke up because you then feel the whole chalkboard against your nails, taste the thick spice without any liquid respite nearby. you curl your fingers in so the nails sink into your flesh but that doesn’t help either. from the backseat on the drive home, home to your native land, you can only feel the screeching scrape of every car out there burning up against yours as your seatbelt closes in, clutching at your throat.

energy, please renew thyself

i need to work like dr. frankenstein. mary shelley really knew what's up. this is how inspiration and creation and art should be made. damn.

"A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not benefitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed." 


-Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

beginnings

"Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested by it."

-Mary Shelley, in her introduction to Frankenstein

so in love with you, walt

the perfect cure for winter despondency:

"I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
I show that size is only development.

Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

Press close bare-bosom'd night -- press close magnetic nourishing night!
Night of south winds -- night of the large few stars!
Still nodding night -- mad naked summer night.

Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset -- earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow'd earth -- rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.

Prodigal, you have given me love -- therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love."

-- from "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass (1891-92)
by Walt Whitman

just a bit

the small boy fingers the keys of the piano,

the girl at the piano bench,

the rosy mornings when the girl sticks to the dampened sheets, still damp from the night before,

wondering when the disease will grow, what it will be,

how infected she really is

while the boy showers off the night

and aged men clutch close to their television sets, sulking their ears in the swollen sound

young jonathan rolls a joint on the cover of a vegetarian cookbook

and mother cries

so true

"...and winter was settling its pale miserable ass across northern New Jersey..."

"...a particularly Jersey malaise -- the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres."

-from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

today's inspiration

found this gem stashed on my mac.

atticus and scout finch (a.k.a. cutest father/daughter in literature).

the first love poem i've ever received

"sam" by enrico bruno

emily always knows

I felt a funeral in my brain,         And mourners, to and fro, Kept treading, treading, till it seemed         That sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated,         A service like a drum Kept beating, beating, till I thought         My mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box,         And creak across my soul With those same boots of lead,         Then space began to toll As all the heavens were a bell,         And Being but an ear, And I and silence some strange race,         Wrecked, solitary, here. And then a plank in reason, broke,         And I dropped down and down-- And hit a world at every plunge,         And finished knowing--then-- -Emily Dickinson

oh. my. goodness.

"And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die, and walked four long miles..." (162)
-On the Road, Jack Kerouac

i can't believe i'm just reading this book for the first time; it's so mindblowingly incredible. the feminist in me will admit to there being some patriarchal ideas in it, but i'll accept that that's how things were then. anyway, the language is way too good to even get stuck on those things.

enlightening

i've been getting into helen vendler, an amazing poetry critic, who has a new book on emily dickinson out. i've yet to read the book but it's on my list of things to read.

this is a link to a great to interview on her by some guy named bruce cole. good stuff.

click here.

wow

so one of my friends shared his favorite poem with me the other day, and it's so incredible that i have to share it with you, too:

The Truth the Dead Know
by Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June.  I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape.  I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch.  In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely.  No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead?  They lie without shoes
in the stone boats.  They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

feeling the shittiest

You’re a hungry fool,

and I, the simple man’s psalm,

the prophecy of the utero-cave, 

the umbilical vines

in which I’ve trapped my pen and hands.

The next season that reminds you of

the closeness of your death

will be stuffed with blank holly

and cinderblocks.

But this...

is not a verse to make you think.

I’m hooked to this life, dangling from a doorway

Neither in nor out

a smoke signal away and yet I can’t start the fire

a simple leap up but this fatigued body holds me in place

this hairy slumping body holds itself together

seamlessly

the carpet set numbly against the floor

like my mother’s dinner on the table

the vapid lights of an aging city

again, again, repeat, again

I know not this language I speak.

How to begin the stories of my life. 

And then, how to begin the stories of others. 

Finally, if attainable, how to begin the stories of the made-up, the unreal, 

how to turn the empty space into life? 

It is the work for God only, 

to big bang this thing from question mark to pen. 

Smiling, bright, shining, blinking life has left me. 

I know you’re out there, friends, stripping your clothes off, 

while I pen you down but will never understand the precision 

you give to unraveling the straps that dangle from your shoulders, 

the halfhearted toss of a belt and shoes,
that comprehensive look you give to your lover, 

or to the mirror, or to anything that moves. 

I have resigned from the comprehensive; 

nothing can sum me up anymore except the curve in a cursive arc. 

I am a word in cursive, 

left to the uncertain precise emptiness of the blue line. 

I am the victim of white space. 

I am a thought monster. 

And you will never remember your drunken fits.

good stuff

"Interior with Sudden Joy"
[after a painting by Dorothea Tanning]

by Brenda Shaughnessy

To come into my room is to strike strange.
My plum velvet pillow & my hussy spot
the only furniture.

Red stripes around my ankles, tight
as sisters. We are maybe fourteen, priceless
with gooseflesh.

Our melon bellies, our mouths of tar. Us four:
my mud legged sister, my bunched-up self,
the dog & the whirligig just a prick on the eye.

We are all sewn in together, but the door is open.
The book is open too. You must write in red
like Jesus and his friends.

Be my other sister, we'll share a mouth.
We'll split the dress
down the middle, our home, our Caesarian.

When the Bishop comes he comes
diagonal, from the outside, & is a lie.
He comes to bless us all with cramps,

mole on the chin that he is,
to bring us the red something,
a glow, a pumping.

Not softly a rub with loincloth
& linseed. More of a beating,
with heart up the sleeve.

He says, The air in here is tight & sore
but punctured, sudden, by a string quartet.
We are! In these light-years we've wrung a star.

I am small for my age.
Child of vixenwood, lover of the color olive
and its stain.

I live to leave, but I never either.
One leg is so long we can all walk it.
Outside is a thousand bitten skins

and civilization its own murder of crows.
I am ever stunned,
seduced whistle-thin

& hot with home. Breathless with
mercury, columbine. Come, let us miss
another wintertime.

well done, poem-a-day

"He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."

"Eternity"
-William Blake

withdrawal

my lips withdraw
my tongue withdraws
my hands withdraw
my very fingers withdraw
my eyes withdraw
and my nose withdraws
my hair withdraws
my feet withdraw
my nails, too, withdraw
everything inside of me that
makes me a woman withdraws
half the things I own withdraw
except this pen,
this pen does not withdraw
as my heart withdraws.

despondency

The dishes clatter and chime as
my mother puts them away in
their rightful places.
Hard porcelain plates scratch together in
a raspy lament as fingers retreat.
Glasses clink and mingle in the drawers,
behind cupboards.
Hissing legato water melts from
the tap to clean her working hands.
My father raps on his aging keyboard
as the images around him darken
in the glow of his desk lamp.
He brings together lines to fashion
houses that families
will one day inhabit.
His parents glare solemnly at
the moving screen in the next
room, the next dimension, calling
out for silent help with the
washing machine, with the phantom
remote control;
alone among their pleas.
My brothers, friends, gods slam
together party glasses and
shout of love;
real, or artificial, or forgettable.
And I, upstairs,
somewhere in the dark and frothy
edges of purgatory,
can hear the sounds of the working day
from beneath the clatter of
messy heavens crying and orgasming
as they mesh with new hells.

last night

The stuffed panda is coming apart.

My internal organs are comping apart.

Walter is indeed coming apart.

You know something about the body.

Speak up, then.

Advise me on the rope dangling from my navel.

Advise me on the bleeding, on the white stuffing.

Last night I applied bleach to my whole body.

The splotches faded while all of me faded.

Everything around me faded.

Some dreamed-up villain held a sword to my throat.

And to think, those things could happen in my own bed.

But I need some patching.

Patching and coping.

Fall asleep to a woman’s voice, oh Focus!

I don’t breathe the way she tells me to;

I breathe my way, my huffy burdened quick way,

The way that comforts me.

Devil-may-care,

But he should, because I’m a-comin’.

my story in school publication

so my story "split" has been published in our campus news magazine, the perspective.

there are also a bunch of great articles on the site.

check it out here