redhead (this is by no means a literary production--i am barely writing this)

my eyes hurt. my teeth are throbbing gently in the gums. i feel very heavy. and i'm starving. i can't talk to anyone--i don't deserve to talk to anyone.

you know what dylan thomas said. they used it in 4 weddings and a funeral. i don't feel like that. it's possible i just don't have the capacity. it's possible i'm doing it again--pushing myself, testing out how far i can go before i break. but i've never broken yet. which means i've never gone far enough.

stop all the clocks. i don't feel like that. i mean, i want to know. i want to break.

i broke once. on the street corner next to city hall. it was kind of like something out of lermontov. this is why a hero of our time is one of my favorite books, even though i will probably never read it again.

i broke a little in boswell's.

i broke in controlled swells in the bathroom at the california theatre. i guess that doesn't count.

i'm so sorry. i hope you know how sorry i am. i hope you know how extremely sorry i am.

interests

1.

hell or high water

on the twelfth day o' december

i'm with you in rockland,
carl wethers and
lillian shapiro shapiro shapiro

and william h. macy

and that guy over there the one standing up
on a promontory strafed by the wine-dark surf.


it was screaming all day long
into the rain

there was no matter, clarice--
you already knew she was going to die.

(twelfth day o' december.)

shut up and take it like
it was meant to be taken.

stop whining like a little rat dog
with its little rat tail in a little pink purse and the tail thumps the sides.

(twelfth day o' december.)

glass eyes and a clockwork tail
that thumps on the floor.

(twelfth day o' december.)

thump thump.
thump thump.


2.

it likes to be stoic.

it makes itself a daisy chain out of fucking daisies
and little hopes and dreams and a dress with an apron.
and it's like ooh i'm so stoic check out my apron.

god damnit i want it to die
i want to hit it over the head with a frying pan
and make up for 24 years of lost time.


3.

GRAUGH AUGH MRAUGH AURRR CRAAH AURDGH MORGGRAH

I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND MIKE McCLURE.
I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND SADIE HAWKINS.
I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND DAYS OF OUR LIVES
LUCY SNOWE
JIGOKU HEN
THE REAPERS WITH THEIR SILENT SWINGING
OUR HUNTING FATHERS
WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON
THE DAY THAT LADY DIED
SKETCHES OF SPAIN
WINTER WHEN NO FLOWER
MISHIMA'S ST. SEBASTIAN
RED SCHARLACH
AND THAT GUY IN SPIDER-MAN WHO WAS MADE OUT OF SAND WITH A FIST LIKE A BOMB.
YEAH, I'M WITH YOU IN ROCKLAND, BOMB-FISTED SAND GUY.

4.

neophyte angels with tongue-twisting names
on the sun-cracked streets of laredo looking for a bit of play
space space


dendribium orchids
and dendrobiums and phylliums and ondridiums

concupiscent
on a scented pillow
like something out of anne rice.

fuckin' music, papiols, come.
play on, bitches. play on.

(twelfth day o' december.)
to have a billion-track mind.

jimmy cracked corn and
unleashed the dogs of war and

his eyes were green as leeks.
and yellow cowslip cheeks, lady,

i barely knew ye.


5.

she was so beautiful and so talented.



where the hell is that fucking music?

blah blah-ologist

it interests me nearly that van gogh could know the potato eaters for a masterpiece. (because everything i hear, see, read, taste, smell or touch--everything i experience, in fact, except for pain--gets processed through me at an alarming rate--i'm not bragging; it is alarming; i continuously have to go back for obscure pieces of my comprehensions that i didn't realize i'd absorbed in order to get to where i've got, consequentially my ratiocination is not so much full of holes as just soaked, you know? jumbled? doing something quickly doesn't entail doing it well. anyway, because of this, finding out about van gogh means something to me, and i recognize that it's something not necessarily intrinsic to van gogh. like janie with her meshes, i'm checking it out.)

i realize that a lot--most--of the things that are on this blog are crap. they aren't always unnecessary crap, i guess, but they lack dimension. i write them because i think someone would like to see them, or because they relieve a piece of consciousness that sits heavier than a denny's meal on my insides (i do like denny's; i just don't like how it makes me feel). poetry's hard because it's like singing: i have to superintend the feeling. the process is by no means obvious. and every once in a while i get it, but most of the time i fuck it up.

my point is thus: i'm no van gogh, but i know--i'm fairly sure--that the "dream leaven and dream" poems are, not good, but the best i've done thus far. it's quite possible they're not publishable. they don't make any sense; they're overly self-involved; the words in them are like stones in a field under the jackhammer (but, you know, less good than that would imply). hopefully they pass the point of comprehension without being incomprehendable. what they mean is a flavor, a texture, something past the point of "meaning," right? but they're furry, like a lollipop in a couch. they're improper. they're not good. they're too personal--they're like laura riding's in that sense.

i have no idea, in short, how to quantify the fact that i believe in them more than i do in other stuff i've done. even ed wood, even that "facets IV," which i like alot, is just goofing around. i believe in "facets V," but you can't have that without the first 4, and 1 and 2 are playthings, and 3 is overly, stuffily portentous.

i did some poems before i came on here, after i'd...gotten mused, i guess (did you know that v has a wonderful plan for your life?), and some of those were good. but i abandoned them because i thought that they were too traditional. can you stand it? of course nothing exists in a vacuum. millions of people more talented than i have things to say. if i can't run with the curve, i'd probably best get out the kitchen (way to mix a metaphor).

i don't know. i just don't know. (i'll have to take it up with my sales manager). h.d. meant every word of "helen of egypt." but niedecker might not have meant every word of her thomas jefferson poems, and those are just as beautiful.

the point is, it's okay if my poems are unacceptable. i'm not saying that's what makes them great, but i'm taking leave to believe in them--only a select few, however--despite probably-deserved rejection. does that make any sense? maybe i only believe in the state of mind i was in while writing them? self-doubt, with bells on, ladies and gentlemen.

heimat

persephone redux

1. english breakfast

i said i hate to beat a dead horse but i'm freaking lying. i love it. i can't get enough. i see a dead horse and i just go to town.

2. whiplash

i like ice cream but it's more a second date sort of dessert. first date dessert is like pussy. no, it's like vodka. yeah. it's the drink you have after you get home from the date and go oh my fucking god what did i just do?--that's the true first date dessert. you savor that drink. pussy's, like, a third date dessert.

3. i love you, vicky/vicky, i you love/you love vicky, i

when picknicking in the park an effluvia, an excess of fizzy drinks is necessary at the outset. to defray the expense i reccomend a pencil sharpener, a wallet, a lava cake, some dark receptacle. a train tunnel, maybe. sometimes i'm at work snapping on my latex gloves and all i really want to be is one of the tongue depressors in the jar on the counter, all wooden and ready for tonguing.

4. player

hold me down.

5. in the sky with diamonds

lately i'm not half the man i used to be. fortunately this isn't a problem because people want me to be this other guy, this new man, who's, like, basically equivalent to approximately one half of the former me, so it all works out. i think. i'm not great at math.

broke drone prayer

PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE
PLEASE

words without thoughts

poor v. that's sort of the gist of what i have to say on that subject--that to a certain extent, despite personal ineptitude and undeservingness (nice word, there, c), i've taken part in orphic riddling, that to orpheus, eurydice was no more than a means to his end, to a certain extent. if i were better with words and concepts, if my understanding were stronger and smarter than it is or ever will be, i could maybe hope to express what is almost assuredly my guilt in the matter of v...that it's not fair, not right, to subject a living, vital being with its own problems, its own thoughts and feelings, its own meat, a being i only fleetingly touched and that not for long, a being i was never honest with, one that barely knows me, and one that ought not to have been drawn so deep into myself, one to whom i am completely insignificant, a brief codicil at the end of a rather uninspiring chapter (possibly--i'm not sure what a codicil is), to the incomparably inane burden of being the augustinian signifier around--against--which my "poetry"...uh, revolves? mechanizes, maybe?

v, i manipulate a you that i have no right to claim even exists. and it's creepy. and i feel bad about it. but i keep doing it. so maybe i shouldn't even acknowledge my guilt in the first place, right? if my life were hamlet, i'd be claudius. guilty-ass claudius. i'm not sure what to do about it. so, heh, maybe i'm hamlet. and it's possible i see myself as protesting too much. so i might be gertrude. or i might just be crazy, and ophelia, or a dumbass, hence polonius, or, hell, all of these options sound accurate to some degree or another, so i guess if my life as v's manipulatress is hamlet, it's basically a one-woman show. the point is that for the pitifully small amount that it's worth, i acknowledge my guilt as regards you.

what a crappy point.

specificity

persephone redux redux

1.
what's not to love about the red cresting the hillsides--the way the poppies, those tonal glories, set each other off like bells clustered in a steeple, shivering from one shape to the next, residual as income, the distortion of a carefully healthy formality of sorts becoming pellucid, volatile?

2.
close the window against the sound of the wind, lupus-waldsworth. scythe through its meaning like a dark red reaper swinging.

3.
pressed into the stone, that sound: a shot hart's blood creates the location of the new steeple. vellum. things are living and dying in that wind: the sound of bells, the sound of bells cresting against the window like waves.

4.
shivering, residual
from one stone to the next: lime, slate, mica, ore, cedar.

like water to water,
red runs into red.

5.
a dark red god breathes rust into a soft red bowl.
six seeds between slow white teeth.
the poppies shake, pellucid, volatile.

first attempt.

persephone redux

1. still life

with a pre-raphaelite coloring, a sheath of copper-red hair
arrested mid-bound, smiling on her face like an ad for butter
weather flung around her with an over-arching deployment of sheer blue joy
those pink arched feet mid-bucaholism, poppy petals raining down
red as juice from where they'd been flung overhead by pillow-soft hands.

2. enciente

it ripped the canvas.

III. misfile

but there was no data.

4. reconciliation

facts rubbed against words like mint leaves under a pestle.
she could stand this.
watching granite creep closer.
dust rubbed into her shift.
and enraged dark.

5. every valley

six seeds stained her lips.

and/or void

st. exupery is something else. i was reading flight to arras in the hospital while my dad had heart surgery, which kind of screwed the pooch as far as appreciating it went, plus i was too freaking young, i think, but night flight's just blowing my mind. s-e flows from image to image in a manner that is like skin over muscle, or real skin over imaginary muscle. it's a little bit like dissonance, or richness, or richesse (which might not actually be a french word, but it's taken on a slightly separate meaning from "richness" in my head and so i'll use it, realities of the language be damned) in music, copeland or turandot being the examples i have in hand, where these harmonies just freaking become not lines but great piling swells (think "pines of rome" but less ganked from butterfly and with less freaking birds)--moments in which music gets the piles, that's what i'm talking about. and s-e does it with his writing, creates that feeling that your brain is swelling like a double-time melon and eventually will burst in sunset colors...creates that feeling that your heart's about to explode with the sensation of it.

that's a pretty awkward description. first of all, it may not be applicable to people who can actually experience emotion about their real lives (if such people exist). but more importantly, it just doesn't do its job (of, you know, describing). it's not a feeling of explosion, it's a feeling, maybe, of inward hum--an effect of resonance. yeah. all these things (notes, words) on top of each other create a...an arch, yeah, each object (stone) in tension with the other. something. the point is it's awesome.

and, hey, to bring it back to meam, the point is i don't know how to do it. and i should work on that. ashbery knows how to do it (i get the feeling that it's a different sensation for different people, hence the feeling created in me by the poets and authors and musicians and painters that i love gets created in other people by different poets, authors, musicians, and painters)--puccini always does it (to my mild shame)...then there are these things that do other things to me which aren't quite the same but are equally awesome. however i think i should stick with working on the first effect. now i've gone and confused myself, and should probably just quit while i'm only mildly behind (in self's comprehension of what self is writing, not in the comprehensibility of what self is writing, which i'm sure is pretty much nul).

it's a picture of a borgia

expense of x/

it must cry heigh-ho
for two, pellucid two.

/waste of y

it isn't really my fault, cuz hello last time i sang the body fuckin' electric you plugged your ears. bitch.

is x1 y1'd; and

bored to tears with thomas edison, rodney dangerfield ruled the dirty city.

something something

last name was fuckin' dangerfield, bitch.
nothing electrifies my body but you pellucid two.
tumty-tum

i'm livin' in an empty room with all the windows smashed, won't you pick the pieces up cuz it feels just like i'm-a walkin' on broken glass.

not actually all that creepy in 100% real life

swingers
how to resist

that tiny bruise

if they were making a movie of jane eyre, i'd be blanche ingram

sorolla y bastida: valencia, two children on the beach
richard diebenkorn: cityscape 1 (landscape no. 1)

sorolla y bastida: corner of garden

for some reason i once randomly picked up a print of walk on the beach, i think because it was on sale. i like sargent--why wouldn't i?--but for some reason sorolla y bastida appeals to me slightly more, kind of like the difference between loving, i don't know, renee fleming and leontyne price (here i go again). bearing in mind, as always, that i have not the slightest information regarding what the hell i'm talking about, what i think is later sargent, with the brushstrokes and the incomplete hands, is not only awesome, but kind of up-my-alley (ahrem) awesome (cuz what can i say, i love the brushstrokes); however the sorolla y bastida, whose brushwork and method i am comparing to sargent's (possibly INCREDIBLY INACCURATELY) seems to use the light he paints in a different way. it's like with sargent you get your gray light but the gray light is kind of a counterpoint, almost ironical, to the joyousness of the figures he paints (i mean, even when they're, like, sallow angry people, they're always somewhat flamboyant, you know? taking a scrooge-like glee in their own sallowness and anger?). whereas with sorolla y bastida the light, though significantly less dusty-blue-toned than sargent's, vergin', even, on the cassat palette (oh, i said it), expresses, to me, something sad, slightly grim, somewhat in pain... the light's an isolating force. but this is based on two years living with walk on the beach and five minutes of yahoo searchin'. looking at that valencia painting, i'm tempted to think that maybe the isolation i'm talking about is actually just his painting of wind. on the other hand, the look on the little girl's face is just very inward. you know?
hrrranyway.
something about corner of garden reminded me of the diebenkorn. it's probably nothing more than the colors. but it might be the structure--or maybe maybe maybe it's the brushwork?

still like

still


like a place with a name. uncontested

and habitable.

sans

form.

sans


medium, sans


divisor, a



hole. with a cat in it.

frankly ridiculous

agony, agony, dream, leaven and dream

I. and dog will have his day

concave, pale
with loss,
veins collapsed on themselves
like shells:
pellucid, cupped, emptied.

II. a vampire lover
telescoped in and out,
it became the sand on a
somewhat grotesque shore,
grainy, legionate and wary.

everything rolled into one oversimpled
gaze, becoming like silhouettes
(red over black [black
over red]) against a satin backdrop.

III. said v may not have existed// / / /

red like hair,
hair scattered, reddened
over redgold.

according to the diary of pembroke
yesterday's middle is
today's end. in dirt. it was a riddle

without an answer:
he was in a forest. there was green.
gold light fell, fell, fell to the ground.

IV. ([dream])

when it is dead,
bind its wrists in your hair,

about the skin
that held in tidal blood,

as if indivisible,
it commands,

at the wrists, infinite
at the wrists, in your black hair.

V. acrostic

AGONY there are never to be two in meat// / / /only one

AGONY meat bound

DREAM in your hair

LEAVEN x = 2 pellucid 2

DREAM 1 x'd against pavement. a fetid yellow streetlamp.

precious

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream
1. typeface

it gives up questioning
the meat.
it eats whatever's dead on the ground.

2. a noteable source

a dish of kings:
liver and
fava beans.

tell-tale detrius: red,
its repository the face
of what's-its-name.

3. not to say i didn't enjoy it

(purple
over red)
pigeon-toed

over the graves of
some of our finest dead.
(red

over black) the object-rich
dirt: lightless earth
and the raw meat.

4. (dream)
your hair
about
my wrists,

lover,
when i
am dead.

blue veins
that beat
for you only:

tie their stillness
together, tie it
in that// /black/// / /river.

5. (break)
e questo?
songs piecemeal
in the wind--

e questo?
is it still singing,
precious?

e questo?
(wind against
a face)

e questo?
(pellucid
in meat)

e questo?
and this one?
god, and this one?

m'easjg;geska;

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream

I.

with irony as its mistress, agony as its guiding principle, it wanted to write something a little dark--a little off--with a soft glow to it, like a prom dress--on a beach, with a large drink--in siena, named after paint.

humbled in silver or glorious in gold, like a worked mask for a face: some kind of cheap ceremonial of death, things going into the ground and not coming out, and the psychological chicanery of closure.

II. foaming at the chops
yesterday
it asked little more from you

than a nod

for the pants
to come off,
vespucci.

III. schleppin'

insignificant details of the highway at night:

the crossroads

the indiscriminate meat,
the headlights

strains of meyerbeer on the tape deck,
the house on the left,
the mastabatory bag on the seat

IV. dream

i am full of pain

when i die,
i demand,

tie your black hair

about my wrists

wrap my wrists
in your black hair

V. from the diary of pembroke:

it loves it. and will love it. the ground is unyielding.

propriete

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream

with your hair bound about these wrists
jespeth.
it is demanded.

opened at diverse points:
the mouth, wrist.
the raw flesh riding
over the brittle bone
like a horse ridden
over a waterless plain.

why did its white salt take you in
if it could not draw you down?
sunset driven to the hilt
into the horizon's dirt--
why did not it drown itself
in the black river of your hair,
wreck itself like wind
against the song of your face,
open itself like splitting forms
against you?

it gives up questioning
the meat.
it eats whatever's dead on the ground.

everyone steals from puccini

agony, agony, dream, leaven, and dream

1.
i did have a vampire lover once. he came out of the night with blood like rubies on his lips, blood glistening on his mouth like micated silt at the bottom of a wine-dark sea. he liked to kiss me on my pulses. and he brought me white roses. my purity, he said, attracted him like a death's-head hawkmoth to a vestal flame. anyway i slept with him. but i was drunk when i did it.

2.
since all forms
broke.
loosed

like oil
from a split lamp.

3.
the apocryphal pembroke was, it has been determined, in a forest. moths and serpents abounded, apparently; the green trees and the dappled ground were both present as was requisite. lupine bloomed exquisitely* and from tree to tree hanged strung spanish moss as if it were catgut spun out and slack on a lute's rosewood fingerboard. he wrote thus:

with the world as my bier.

he was crazy; the squirrels ate his parts. but my eyes are raw for him.

4.

it demands of you:

wrap its wrists

in her black hair

when it is dead.

5.
[excitedly]
...sent to me from Heaven
Straight from the throne of Glory,
Take one last and careful
look At its poor face!
That its memory may linger,
One last look!
Farewell, beloved! Farewell, my dearest heart!
Go, play, play.

all my trials, lord

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.
when you look at it, capital R is a pretty character. i wish i were less of a failure at everything. whinety whine whine.