The Paper Drumhead

Birdie - School Poem

2011-12-20T20:03:00.001-05:00

Got a new poem for you's two fuckers that read this. :) It was part of my poetry portfolio for class, so it's gone through a bunch of changes. I read this one to live music and while a bit tipsy on wine. The reception was quite good and I was happy. School is almost over and I'm happy.

Birdie

The mockingbird sang its song—

to break the funeral in my ears

under this tree a hundred yards

from the black-and-gold casket—

too tweet too tweet little birdie

tailgating Death and its familiar

hips like mom; dad always said

Death was a woman you heard

with haunches like thunder,

before passing on to another

thing another lull of oldness:

“When so much youth was…”

He spoke with a solemn drift—

it’s how I knew his life, a breath,

and also the ravaged ground

of his face, “like the beaches

at Normandy,” he’d say,

“see this wrinkle here, here is myfriend, a boy

from the army, he is buried here” and

“this blind eye, a broken telescopicsight”

(the snowy night when he couldn’t seehis demons

cloaked in fur and hatred andinnocence).

Dad was the big man you never felt,

except for the ends of his stories,

with the sobless hiccup of his body,

and his gritty calloused hand pushingthe

sand castle of his face into a screwedform,

like a so miserable child—he missedhis youth.

Under this tree a hundred yards from afuneral

for my dad a mockingbird bleeds music

but all I can think of is the poppiesin Flanders

Fields, and the place in poetry wheremy dad lives

like the youngest boy in the children’s’choir.

Too tweet too tweet little birdietailgating Death,

before dad finally gets lucky, and isswept up

in the singing of the parishionersinstead,

and then maybe afterlife maybe justmaybe.

Poem for Class

2011-11-02T18:43:00.001-04:00

Life is shit and full of work I don't feel like doing anymore, but I'm happy. I don't know why. If my happiness had a face, I think, it would look like a simp. Probably. Anyway...

I wrote this poem for class, after reading some Lawrence Joseph. I got some good responses. Though I don't really take most of them seriously, especially from E., whose comment structure is this: "I liked/really liked/loved the whole thing, especially the middle". You bastard. Most comments concerned the third stanza and the final stanza, which I totally expected and have ideas on fixing. Until then, enjoy.

Feeling too human

Time feels too human, sittingnext to me here,

anywhere I am. A passengermoving between

cars sits next to me, untilgone, unnoticed.

I would never have known ifnot for the sunlight

moving between shutters of apeacoated body;

were it less driven, it wouldstill be here.

If man is always fightingagainst the imperial force

of time, is he a soldier? Butwe die from the moment

we are born, little by littleuntil big by big.

Feeling too human, I losetime like I lose all

the other people, not meaningto be transient

but still so nevertheless.

Until the day when my face isTime’s, wizen

and typical—old and lonelyand hardening and

still getting weaker, like limestone,I am dying

with Time sitting, standing,smoking, fucking,

cursing, cooking, cleaning,reading, learning,

writing, saying, loving, living,right next to me.

Homework Poem 1

2011-09-10T03:34:00.000-04:00

Look! at how they age,

the characters, they’re gray

by what by what—the rage!

or it’s just maybe they need

a good shake from the shoulder,

-shake shake shake-

to dust off the snow of too much

winter. Still! look at how

they pass, from youth

to whiteness

and indolence,

despising work

and the news brought by sense

and realization meeting.

Look at how they age,

like bedsheets.

- Patrick Pawlowski

I had to write a poem for class that shared some traits with Langston Hughes's poetry, namely brevity, musicality, and rhyme. This was my effort. I wanted to balance those three attributes out without overdoing any particular one. Hence I have some rhyme, not too much, which I compensated for with a natural rhythm (which took care of the musicality), and I tried to paint a picture as opposed to an overlarge mural. My inspiration was the common idea of how too much stress can cause premature grayness. The poem went over well, with the only significant criticism being my underdeveloped "characters," which I purposely chose to be ambiguous. More people than expected were into the second stanza, which I thought, when writing it, would be too elaborate for appreciation. If I wanted to make the characters less ambiguous and develop them more, with using a minimum of words, how would I do that?

Why I Want To Be A Teacher

2011-09-03T21:26:00.002-04:00

This was my first assignment for one of my teaching courses. Hopefully it's not TL;DR. :)

I havealways considered—and from so much teacher feedback, known—teaching to be arewarding career path. I have been very lucky in my lot of teachers over time.In middle school, I played Scrabble and practiced for the Regional Spelling Beein Home Room during lunch with the other kids, who all convened, despite theirdisparate personality types—the funny epitomes of jock, nerd, cheerleader, bandgeek, etc.—around this cult of something, my English teacher. She ruled withimplacable kindness that could do naught but elicit respect. She was the firstto appreciate my writing and overlong essays, despite their being terrible. Shewas the first to appreciate my potential.

In highschool, I had multiple English teachers, administrators, and even instructorsof subjects long forsaken, of math and biology, that appreciated not just mywriting but also my character and in the case of math, ineptitude. Theynurtured these aspects like family, and perhaps even more so, which left anindelible mark on my opinion and regard for the public school educators of NewYork. After a series of events in my life, which depleted my stability andquality of life, school became more important. School and teachers represent astability that I did not have for a very long time. I recognize that this airof stability is not inherent to the field; it is something developed. My highschool philosophy teacher once told me it takes a new teacher five years tobecome comfortable with this material and at least an additional five to masterit. I was fortunate to be the pupil of masters.

Others areless lucky in their lot of teachers. I have likewise witnessed long-in-the-systemteachers lacking in the expected faculties and skills requisite in their role.And these are not the extremes. I have not seen the absolute worst teacher butI am sure they exist. I have not seen the absolute best teacher but I hope Iwill one fateful day. I want to be an English teacher because I recognize theneed for good teachers (despite the pool of English teachers being absolutelyinundated), because I want to one day be one of these good teachers, andbecause for some quirk of my biology, I am at my most creative and happy duringthe rigors of the school year.

How do Iplan to become one of these “good” teachers? At present, that answer is amystery. My guess is some recipe of knowledge, adaptability, competency,agreeableness, entrepreneurship, and telepathy. The road is long and the kidsare not all right, according to every national and global statisticalevaluation of the United States educational system. As an overarching goal, Iwant urban students reading at their appropriate grade level, if not higher. Iwant more urban students to go to college, which means disabusing them of ideasof ineligibility or inadequacy on erroneous grounds of self-doubt.

I havefriends that are currently pursuing teaching degrees and opportunities; hearingthem talk about building lesson plans and discussing their approaches towardsteaching—often the conversation moves to how to best relay some informationfrom a different angle—invariably interests me. I once read an interview withpoet laureate Billy Collins regarding his dissatisfaction with poetry educationin today’s classrooms. He believed that the poetry curriculum, if it at allexists, should be flipped around. I immediately agreed. The curriculum toooften throws Shakespeare at minds too young or unprepared to appreciatehim—with gratuitous time spent on Shakespeare’s Sparknotable plots than theintricacies of his language play—and rarely broaches the topic of modernpoetry, deepening its underappreciated status. He states that if we gobackwards and teach modern poetry first, effectively tracing poetic techniquesand the technical inheritance of poetry through time, some improvement willfollow.

What will I contribute besidesteaching poetry backwards, if at all? I do not know, but what I envision issomething like a fork. I would like to explore the parallel stories of theworld and its people and see how they meet in the middle. Every high schoolstudent learns about the slave narratives, often times in social studies andEnglish, so you imagine such repetition would reinforce and concretize ideasabout historical struggle. I read that high school students do not benefit fromrepetition as well as young children in their more formative years. High schoolersneed stimulation, engagement, and something which to relate in order toremember. There are numerous historical examples of other cultures and societiessuffering through slavery and disenfranchisement; connecting these examples ona cross-cultural basis could possibly lead to a better response from students.With my college experience, I would have appreciated such depth as a highschooler, and possibly learned more in my study of literature.

A teacherrecently told me a short anecdote from one of her private writing seminars. Shesaid that her seminar is mostly “Wall Street guys,” whom she says are “nothappy, not at all healthy,” a recognizable type. It is only practical to pursuea profitable degree and lifestyle, but to see passions and desires debased to asecond tier hobby, even to hear about them from a teacher, is heartbreaking. Ijust want to see more people independently writing on a greater creative level,and better yet, thinking on a greater creative level with hopefully theprocesses of thinking and writing informing each other. If I can even do thelittlest bit of the above, then I can one day die happy, feeling fulfilled andhaving spent my sublime retirement thinking of a clever quote to put on mytombstone.

National Poetry Month: Day 16

2011-07-11T21:00:00.001-04:00

This is my attempt at writing a poem in a different language: Spanish. I considered mixing Polish into it, but I much prefer the sound of Spanish and couldn't figure out a way of playing the sounds of both languages off each other in a manner I'd find suitable, within the time limit of course. I outlined the basic poem in English and then substituted words as I worked with the sounds of certain Spanish words. All I knew was that "paloma," or dove, would be in it. I just really like that word.

In writing this, I only wanted to write something coherent and yet somewhat "new," not that I know what that means. The poem naturally took on a political tone and message because, I'm guessing, of all the highly-political Spanish poetry I've read. Thank you Neruda and Espada, among others.

Las palomas son un preámbulo
a la discordia, como la primera
copo de nieve de la final
frío del invierno de este siglo,
tan sombrío en un extremo y brillante
como el ángel de las alas por el otro.
Iluminado desde arriba por una aureola
de la luz.

Son atacados por los halcones
con la boca como palas,
crujido de los picos de protesta,
silenciar chirridos ya imperceptible
y en paz. Las plumas blancas limpie
todos los pequeños huesos
de los lados de su vergüenza.

Y pichones son pichones.

National Poetry Month: Day 15

2011-06-17T18:25:00.001-04:00

4.15.11 amnesia / bad idea(s)

if forgetting is fulsome
then i don't want
at all the empty feeling;
give me! where
there wasn't, let--
there is this
foul forgetting brain
filling itself from a
faucet of bad ideas
that look suspect like
breasts and the vacillation
of long, straight hair

and booze so brown dripping,
on everything made damp
(least of all the expanse
under the eyes). Come back
memories walked away in slumber,
on loud feet so I know you're there,
so all will know I remember, and
can begin!

National Poetry Month: Day 14

2011-04-19T20:31:00.001-04:00

This is a found poem; a poem "found," or rather cobbled together from a lot of different sources. My favorite found poems are the kind where you bowdlerize a book (scan the lines with a black marker as if you're redacting it). Pretty cool stuff. Anyway, I "made a poem" out of The National lyrics, using song lyrics from "Bloodbuzz Ohio," "Conversation 16," "Tall Saint," "All The Wine," and "Terrible Love." I don't really know what I think of it, except that it was an enjoyable experience. Most legit fun you can have with plagiarism, I think.

4.14.11 Found poem

Stand up
straight at the foot
of your love, and
it's a terrible love
I'm walking with; spiders
and quiet company give us
less than amazing black
dreams.

The floors are falling
out from God; I am
a confident liar and,
Tall Saint, I'm devoted
along with my ship of hopes
to you, 'cause God is evil

And all the wine
is all for me,
'cause I'm evil.

National Poetry Month: Day 13

2011-04-19T19:48:00.001-04:00

This is not at all done. My mission will be, when and if it's finished, is to connect the images of the sun/sky, lips, and lovers together, with a maximum of three, maybe four stanzas.

4.13.11 first kiss

I pucker up to the sky,
twice daily
between hello and good-
bye, but remember that
first kiss? oh, my
mind has never forgotten it
so many millions ago.

Hot, my center a pulsating
ball of fire; your eyebrows,
clouds on the rim of a dewy
forehead, or something equally
dramatic

contained inside a damp summer
day, nestled atop a bed together
like lovers.

Slightly Stalled

2011-04-19T02:17:00.000-04:00

I haven't been updating this blog daily. I've been going through a lot lately which has put stresses on my psyche and time, as well as made me a ball that needs hours upon hours of chill episodes of The Mentalist to uncurl. I will get to it. I have the prompts all set up and waiting for my small input of time. One of them is a foreign language poem, which I've actually considered doing for a while. I'm excited for it. I don't know if I should plan it out in English and simply translate it or start from scratch. Or if I should stick to a single foreign language (probably Spanish), or two (Spanish and Polish). I think it might be fun playing with the sounds.

So ya, that's all. I think it's nice to just take a step back for a minute and write something that looks more like a paragraph than a stout little building. Good night.

National Poetry Month: Day 12

2011-04-12T21:51:00.001-04:00

I Wiki'd "numerology" really quickly to have some background before delving in. Still not sure what it is but I'm sure my mom would love it.

4.12.11 numerology

numerology is like hocus pocus;
a funny word that means nothing,
except to a comical sect of old
maidens, rummaging for scraps
of luck among their magazines.

National Poetry Month: Day 10

2011-04-12T21:48:00.008-04:00

Struggled with this one a bit. The topic sort of naturally obliges a greater length of time than 10 minutes, which is a constraint I really don't wish to do away with. I once did a similar poem, though. Here's what I did today. I'm not into it, though, but I like the idea of a nose-to-the-spine bookworm following Jesus. Definitely can do more with the material.

4.10.11 (fake) interview

Jesus and His Biographer

Following the Son, shining
among lepers, the Biographer
asked his questions:

"What do you think of death"
"What do you think of people"
"What do you think of life, again"

Which the Son thought at length upon,
his long fingers like beams of light.

Finally,

"I think
I'd rather have died
proper."

National Poetry Month: Day 11

2011-04-12T21:48:00.007-04:00

4.11.11 meat substitutes

what is meat but marble?
and pork, wood?
bacon, the shim I stir
milky paint with.

if they started selling you,
or I, wrapped in plastic (while
still alive, no less, making us
hope for the female supermarket
worker with the long, sharp finger
nails),

would vegetarians be
marketed like kobe, "grass-fed"?
and would bastards like me,
out of sheer irony,

be the mad cows,
the frothy-mouthed
cannibals?

National Poetry Month: Day 9

2011-04-12T21:45:00.001-04:00

Here's a haiku, because I was really tired.

4.9.11 window / temporary

Temporary is
a window and a baseball.
They could have been great.

National Poetry Month: Day 8

2011-04-12T21:43:00.001-04:00

4.8.11 sound of binder snapping

oh,
how we don't use
binders anymore. child-
hood is made trivial
by things like that,
many like the bumps
on concrete or blades
of grass in the landscape.
trivial, but the essence;

a curved and cloved nail sinking
into another is the sound of
my childhood, shuffled along
with pattering and puttering
sneakers squeaking, crying,
faces butting fists, and beer
bottles breaking like vases,
for some reason made precious.

National Poetry Month: Day 7

2011-04-08T00:02:00.001-04:00

Can't admit I knew what I was doing here.

4.7.11 stream(s)

is a stream a river,
a river small as
an ocean a bank
(to gods discontented)
and an estuary
just loud?

what's the point to names
if water by any other name
is water narrowed, made long
and wide as a talkative bird?

what's the point to a name
if you are just I and I you
and we us?

what's the point to gods if
there are many and all vulgar
children?

what's the fucking point
if a stream and an ocean
can be the same difference

while you and I are distances
apart despite being of the same
parts.

National Poetry Month: Day 6

2011-04-06T23:11:00.001-04:00

This one obviously isn't done; I couldn't finish it in ten minutes. I would have added something like one more stanza, and talked about thread. Tightened it up a bit. Whatever. What's "finished," anyway? Enjoy.

4.6.11 misunderstanding and/or loose buttons

the buttons give
cheaply of her breasts,
little round misers;
the nipple's second-cousin (
an unnatural relationship),
the buttons, the kind that
don't fall so much as pop
like a gasket, are stronger

today than yesterday,
when they pitied the hungry
virgins and rakes, with their
eyes like telescopes.

National Poetry Month: Day 5

2011-04-05T23:28:00.002-04:00

I really would have liked to have done or incorporated the lyric portion of the prompt, but I couldn't think of anything. I'm terrible at remembering lyrics. I considered starting from the chorus to Edward Sharpe and Magnetic Zeros's "Homes," but it would have been too constraining.

4.5.11 messenger and/or lyric

there are few things as good
as a hand-written letter,
filled from edge to edge
with the shorthand history
of friendship; the exchanges,
the handshakes, the memories,
the passions which, despite
the many billions of people,
still unique and lovely.

but the paper will degrade,
just as the people most certainly
will. we all die, and everything
we ever did or said or loved
simply and complicatedly is
no exception.

now if they write everywhere,
even on the envelope flap,
well then,
have that shit laminated because
plastic will outlive roaches.

National Poetry Month: Day 4

2011-04-05T23:26:00.001-04:00

I think I had my most concrete idea for this poem, and the most defined idea and characters. I will definitely like to revisit it in the future.

4.4.11 transplant

"post-op poem"

before the cancer, "my heart
was always with your heart",
as old Edward said, and wherever
I went you went and whenever I slept
you slept and whenever I fucked,
hopefully, you fucked.

now my heart has your kidney
to filter all the nasty drink
of life, should it present itself
again; you know me, "ever the recidivist".
you and your words. i wish my heart
had them, or at least will have.

please, please darling, wake up
so my words may have yours,
again.

National Poetry Month: Day 3

2011-04-05T23:24:00.001-04:00

Day 3. I just had a bit of fun with this.

4.3.11 new faces

the day should always
begin with
some cereal or eggs
a liquid -a stiffer
drink if life hasn't been
nicest to you-
a smoke -because life
only gets longer-
and a lay -because
the blood needs to get
really moving, and
running isn't for
everybody-

now just find a new face
(or two) to do this shit
with, week to week,
day to day

and you'll be a happier man,
week to week,
day to day, depending

National Poetry Month: Day 2

2011-04-05T23:23:00.001-04:00

Here's Day 2. Here I tried to compare the commitment expected of a loving, many-decade long relationship that has experienced its hurdles, versus simpler more basic commitments one may make to others and to himself.

4.2.11 commitment

commitment is not the same
as eating a ghost pepper and
drowning in milk ten minutes later,
or pumping iron until your body
looks like an absurd triangle,
as seen by Salvador Dali.

commitment is not a omnipresence through
modern technology; it is not learned behavior.

commitment is boredom's uninterrupted
solitude, a homely hospital room, and
changing out piss bladders. a wheelchair
you know every part of but the seat.

commitment is the callouses you've earned from
merely grasping your lover's calloused hands,
themselves the inheritance of a lifetime of struggle.

it is
the appreciation of necessity and routine
for the sake of love, and several words
someone said some half-remembered day,

long ago.

National Poetry Month: Day 1

2011-04-05T23:17:00.002-04:00

It's National Poetry Month and I've decided to participate. Using some basic prompts from my school's literary journal, I've written five quick poems for the first five days of the month that I missed. I spent no more than ten minutes on each poem, just as a guideline for myself. I'll separate each poem/day with a new post.

4.1.11 ode to--

nighting-gales

and Gales with brown hair

and all the familiar tropes

of levity,

love parceled out, for once

more than piecemeal

and to everyone,

as if Cupid was

as Sam is, a Fed Ex

guy.

poetry skims the same

lines as birds on a telephone

wire, though the jolts

don't fry our feathers:

they either melt our hearts,

a surge of images too profuse

for pipes so small,

or they stun our fingers,

forbidding us the same words

for fear of death.

Hell and Jelly Donuts: Fun School Assignment

2011-03-27T01:37:00.002-04:00

Hola! No segue. I had to write a blank verse poem (unrhymed iambic pentameter) for class. We also had to play with kinds of enjambments and whatnot, but that's less of a requirement. Came up with this. I came up with "The sky is built on candied air", thinking of cotton candy, and just took it from there. In the third line, remembering the whole bit about the sky, I used the word "heaven" and instantly started to get all religious. Fun stuff. Hope you like it. For lack of a better title, I just titled it "Candy," but if anyone's got a better title, by all means, pitch it my way.

"Candy"

The sky is built on candied air; solid

As fluff can be, what carnival is hell

If blue heaven causes black gum disease?

The cloying taste of drink and halos like

Sugared jelly donuts makes light of sin

And bores the pearly-toothed angels, their wings

Made of flour. When Hell serves desserts

The pyres blot with baker’s cream, slicking

The chutes and ladders too, damning to end.

The world is just complex carbohydrates.

Poem for Escuela

2011-02-23T00:58:00.003-05:00

I wrote a poem for my college Poetry Workshop; the exercise was to emulate and modernize the style of Ben Jonson's "My Picture Left in Scotland". This is actually my second attempt. My first attempt was okay, but it rhymed (I'm not really a rhymer) and wasn't too modernized. It used the word "moribund" in the first line ("Love is by no means a moribund doll"). You get it. So I wrote this one using a sweet opening line I had in my pocket from an inspirational visit to an art gallery, observing only the syllable count. The idea is to fix this poem over the course of the semester (I think). I'm looking forward to it.

The people are beautiful wireframes,

Withexploding parts and

Longbits

That extend far into infinity,

But remainjust as still.

They have a squiggly and bare sort of stride,

But remainhumanlike,

As if there’s art in lunch noodles

But not thebody’s landscape,

With its abstract breasts and many-colored hills.

I don’t know the people,

Nor whythey are empty

Andexisting barely

But I can see allof them;

Their souls aremore than sinews,

Resisting about thebones, like rebar.

The people arebeautiful wireframes,

With shiny copper locks and concrete skin.

In other news, I've set up another website for my more marketable work, Kind of Professional, bothering to actually register the domain with GoDaddy (this excites me). I also just ordered some business cards from Moo.com. They will be here in two weeks. Kind of awesome.

What I'm Thankful For: "Thankskilling" Quick Review

2011-01-26T23:57:00.005-05:00

Thankskilling is the worst thing in existence that holds a place in my heart. It's situated somewhere between The Room and Kangaroo Jack, which themselves are respectively positioned at opposite ends of the SMS--the Shit Movie Spectrum. Both films are unequivocal pieces of cinematic shit. The Room, however, is brilliantly bad, with a humorous and even awe-inspiring background--Tommy Wiseau, the man with all his fingers and toes buried six-deep in the project as actor/writer/producer/director/prop guy/grip guy/2nd grip guy, that guy that holds the boom mic, which looks like a Fuzzy Feather Duster, all that shit, actually raised a million dollars selling fake fur coats in order to make the movie. It's kind of horrifying to admire Wiseau because of his association with The Room and self-delusion. Kangaroo Jack, meanwhile, is a piddling something. Its a gangster-comedy geared towards kids, ostensibly because of a CGI kangaroo (and the combination of Jerry O'Connell's and Anthony Anderson's penchant for wacky faces). I don't know what Kangaroo Jack is besides confusing and terrible.

Anyway, Thankskilling is really bad, but being situated in between the above flicks, it has its limited strengths. The lead and protagonist in the film is the Killer Turkey, whose name may or may not be Thankskilling. There's actual lore in the film, but the actor that plays the nerd-stereotype is so good at being a nerd caricature, I can't understand a word he says in between his nerd-tics, like obsessively wiping his mouth due to an overactive salivary gland or, even more commonly, being awkward as fucking shit. You wonder if they cast the actor for his wonderfully uncomfortable acting or if they just found him that way.

Some people may disagree (no they won't, because they haven't seen this movie), naming the only survivor as the lead, but her survival was dependent upon traditional horror movie tropes. The homely white girl always survives at the end of these things. We all knew she would make it. Just like we knew the only approachable and hero-type male would die for the homely white girl towards the end, after banging her (jury's out on this one; he might have just fingerbanged her in the movie, we're not sure). The slut always dies first. The nerd always survives the bully (though he wasn't a bully in this movie, merely a one-dimensional idiot--bullies, at least, have psycho-emotional crutches). All of these character types are disposable ciphers for some social anxiety, at least traditionally, but Thankskilling takes an American tradition and lampoons it, making the characters disposable husks without any of the valuable analogy. A good reviewer would know the names of the characters or actors in a movie, but the expense on my self-interest would be too great. I don't want to know their names. I'm convinced that the characters (and possibly the actors) are sociopaths, witnessing more murder and mayhem than any normal human could handle and still showing less emotion than the mouthless Groucho Marx mask the Killer Turkey dons halfway through the film.

Why is Turkey the hero? Because he's awesome. He frequently breaks the fourth wall, shares and understands my loathing of the retarded high school students (college? preschool for the pituitarily-overabundant?), and fills his ass with a whole bunch of shit. Gone is the familiar turkey stuffing, replaced with a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun, a metal tomahawk, an unsheathed dual-sided combat knife, a lit cigar, a Groucho Marx mask, and probably some more sharp and pointy stuff that can induce deeper sleep than tryptophan. Killer Turkey's scene with the dumbass sheriff father is one of the funniest I've ever seen, juxtaposing a murderous turkey in a human mask and a human in a turkey costume, positing the notion of cultural homogeneity against the backdrop of modern commercialization of tradition. Or some shit. It's stupid funny, though.

I don't feel like I'm doing the film justice. Aside from the hilarious camera work, terrible script replete with stereotypical halfwits and cookie-cutter imbeciles, and its most-likely sociopath performers (they are so bad at communicating emotion, they can only be described clinically), it's So-Bad-It's-Good and has the potential to be a fantastic drinking game. I'd suggest doing a shot every time you can see the camera man's shadow. You'll fucking die.

Also, don't watch Troll 2.

Austin. Austin, Massachusetts.

2010-12-15T01:02:00.012-05:00

So, I just came back from Boston, a trip the result of my boss' spontaneity and my absent-minded willingness to do things with little notice (like eat a strange pomegranate seed that was in no way a pomegranate seed). Some highlights:

1. This building has a bow on it. Only thing that could improve it: ensconce that shit in green wrapping paper.

2. Macaroni dresses, dubbed "Militaristic Futuristic Punk Funk" or some shit like that. Hilarious and wildly impractical. I can't decide if this is douchey or somewhat innovative. I guess it depends on the intent, which I can't surmise. If it is douchey, though, I have to appreciate douchey's inventiveness as well as pervasiveness.

3. New England Aquarium. Kinda small but this is in part due to all the closed outdoor exhibits. Sadface, since the seals are so fucking cute. Also, penguins are dandies. That is all.

4. Lobster tree. Look at the king-claw-star! The ornaments are made of lobster limbs and yet it is still not as garish as a doored alleyway with Christian iconography everywhere along the length and height of an adjacent brick wall ("Put the Christ back in Christmas"). Wish I had a photo of that.

5. Creme brûlée. Not my favorite dessert in the world, but having some for having some was plenty satisfactory. The texture contrast was sweet too, kinda like a crunchy, cream-filled wafer served cold. I feel guilty for comparing a 5-star creme brûlée to a cold wafer, but it all turns to shit anyway.

6. Red velvet cake, with actual cream cheese (do not accept substitutes). The piece was the size of my head. Thank you, Bova's Bakery.

7. Waiting for a sunrise that never came. Fucking sun.

8. The severe lack of sleep which is contributing to my present sensations: some weird pulsating throb at the back of my skull which is giving me a surreal tunnel vision. I'm a man who enjoys his sleep. This fucking sucks.

9. I'll cap the list prematurely 'cuz I'm exhausted. The complete and utter lack of people on Boston streets after midnight. No guards protecting pristine docks and parks; not a soul in sight for minutes at a time and when people do appear its a total surprise. Everyone looks like a scarf with legs in what feels like 20 degree weather.

[UPDATED] 10. Finding a place to pee between the hours of 1am and 6am that aren't McDonald's franchises. Pretty balla.

11. Realizing my fear of churches. We all decided to go to some church next to Paul Revere's house and dude, I hated it. I was legit afraid to step inside it. I don't know what it was. I had no desire to bash the damn thing, either, as some atheists are wont to do. When finally inside, walking between the pews (one of which could be specially rented and then decorated by paying patrons), looking at all the money boxes and whatnot, it was the surrealist experience ever. Weird.

I could say more, but I'm tired. Fun times.

GIVE ME BACK MY JACKET THANK YOU VERY MUCH GOOD DAY

2010-11-29T19:21:00.006-05:00

HOWDY!

Long time no see. Sorry for yelling--not because of the unnecessary audibility, but because it's misleading. I'm not nearly that excited. Oh, the hoodwinkery (should have been made a word a long time ago).

So, I watched some indie flick and wrote an OK article about it. Then I saw Rocky Horror at Chelsea Clearview and was pleasantly surprised. I wrote an article for that, too. Not sure which article was better; they're both a little contrived and self-serving in their own ways.

I try to fill these articles with as much of me as I can, while I can, before a future writing gig limits me to more tolerable levels. I can be quite intolerable in great quantities. It's a good thing I'm a rather compact individual. Har har. Oh, self-loathing.

(If I was one for slapsticky, comedy-of-errors writing, I would have written "I can be quite intolerant" as opposed to "I can be quite intolerable"--this is me experimenting with flow-of-consciousness writing. And racism! I'm not a fan, so far.)

Right now, it's just no-pressure fun, so I tend to go off the writing-rails and experiment with language as much as my limited "journalistic" sense will allow. I hate journalism. It's mad-libs. I miss yellow journalism. That was FUN. People DIED, man. (This is unverified by me.)

The ultimate goal is that I will not have to curb my writing and keep it as so (or more or better), as florid and fun and... exploratory.

In other news, music!

The Modern Leper by Frightened Rabbit

Far and Wide by Roadside Graves (adorable vid; I identify with the rollicking kid)

Can't stop listening to these two songs. You can find much better quality versions of both on Hype Machine.

And with that, I'm off. Here's hoping it won't be so long before we speak again, and hopefully it will be at greater length.

A Band I Saw

2010-10-03T23:13:00.003-04:00

Just wanted to draw up this post to no one in particular about a band I saw live at the Rockwood Music Hall last week. They were really good, and I said so in this article I wrote. Not my best work, but I was more concerned with just enjoying the music at the time. Also, I know nothing about music. Either way, they're playing a show in Jersey next week Saturday at McCarthy's, which is probably a Jersey landmark of some kind. It feels like everything's getting uprooted, so it makes sense to make everything immovable. Whatever. They're a good time and I'll probably go, depending on how I feel about risking a trip to a Hoboken pub when I'm still not veinte uno.

No word on drink minimums.

Smells like money up in herrrrrrrrRRRR...

2010-09-23T19:13:00.005-04:00

Har har. Mail came. 'Twas my first check for my first couple articles. $64.17. My check is French-Canadian. Don't know if I should trade her in. Maybe laminate that bitch.

Smells like money; sounds like a career gearing up. Mmm. Money mill, that's what I'm gonna be, as opposed to one of those subway beggars claiming to be a published New York Times poet. Hopefully. Fuck.

I have to live the miserly life to be happy on my deathbed, theoretically, which is pretty grim. And I have to kinda dive into that stereotype (and existence) of the curmudgeony (curmudgeonesque sounds better but is less apt, sadly), impoverished writer. Whatever. Here I go. Life be damned if the pool is shallow.

Sorry about the LOLcat. They need to be less effective at expressing my deepest pickles and plights.

The Ol' Updaterooni

2010-09-03T16:31:00.007-04:00

So. The Spear-Danes... Just kidding. Been reading Beowulf again, not of my own volition. Dammit. So, got another article up on TimesSquare.com, as well as a review of some alright eats. Read those if you like. I'm also gonna start writing for the school paper, The Envoy. Hopefully that will bare (bear?) some sort of fruit that isn't painfully sour.

Also, I've become very good at cooking meat lately. Because I don't have access to a grill (or one nearly this awesome) and can't figure out how to turn on the oven, I just make burgers and little steaks on the skillet, seasoned with cayenne pepper and adobo. Best steaks and burgers I've personally ever eaten, not to toot my own horn or anything (toot toot, toot).

Also-also, I have allergies to something. I initially thought I was going hoarse from my job, from roaring at children all day ("Grrr, I'm a dinosaur in a vest! I'm gonna eat ya!"), but then my soar throat didn't go away. So I attributed it to my smoking, except I don't smoke enough to warrant such desert-like throat properties. In short, apparently it's ragweed season and life likes to find new ways to fuck with you. What next? Asthma? The fuckin' measles?

Cholera. (That's Polish for "dammit", or cholera, I assume.)

New Job, Holler.

2010-08-11T14:06:00.003-04:00

So, I'm working again. Yay. The dough is in the oven, makin' that bread. I'm kneading it, three times a week for two weeks straight, waiting for those nifty, yeast-leavened slits to appear (I get paid bi-weekly; drats). But it's a lot of fun. Some familiar faces (awesome), some less familiar faces (just as awesome, if not more). I'm taking pictures again, though less than before, on account of the heavy need for personal-yet-oddly-public (vice versa) solicitation, which it turns out I could be better at (it takes a lot of yelling and hooting to rouse any person's interest, which you would consider oddly contrary). I'm all for yelling and on occasion shouting snarky one-liners, but not in any fashion that would label me as "Hell's bell's, that guy's fucking nuts!", but to each his own. I admire anybody that can bolster my commission and make me laugh by simply losing his ever-lovin' mind at the sight of a prospective purchaser. Go Ef.

Anyway, I think today I developed my first light crease in the sofa cushion of this new job position when I yelled at a group of small Latin people. I was pretending to be a dinosaur(o). I nailed the roar, figured out the proper ratio of yelling to directing to pitching (3:2:1) and took the selling photo. Goodie gumdrops. Beyond that, there's not much else to the job. Editing photos, stuffing them into narrow slits (har har har), and shooting them off into the faces of eager foreigners (I'm practically doubled over at my own wit, I'm kicking the air here). Writing's still the old métier of choice, but this job has its perks. My ID gets me into any museum in the city. FOR FREE. Not really considering just standing outside expensive museums and renting my ID card to people, like those guys that buy multiple unlimited metrocards and sell rides to anyone in need (and not near one of the ubiquitous MTA Card machines). I can also get my friends into these museums, but I don't know which ones. Nothing for sure, everything is tentative (the motto of life; if only I knew it in ye ol' Latin).

So ya, that's that.

Also, how I got the job, which I consider to be a somewhat interesting/funny story: Went for an interview for a magazine internship. Ostensibly got the internship, with a request for some references. Called my old boss for a ref 'cause we be tight (and he was my most recent legitimate employer), he says "You got it, Craptik" (it's the most unappealing anagram of my name) and asks if I can come in for an interview for a job because a spot opened up. I know, right? I fill out an ungodly amount of job applications, it's fucking sinful, really, revise my trusty old resume twice and write a completely new one (yup, non-refurbished), which, incidentally, is totally useless since almost every business wants online applications that aren't in most cases sophisticated enough to draw the information from a .doc file, fill out a handful of actual paper applications that I had to pick up from various places, spoke with various managers at various clothing outlets, some well-known, one in particular a hole in the wall, broaden my horizons to the meantime professions of porter, line-cook, personal assistant, junior editor and receptionist, grab a bunch of dense-ass business cards, and all I had to do to get a job was call a previous employer. Fucking networking. Fucking Wordsworth. Fucking Coleridge. Fucking Wright Brothers.

And the magazine internship people never contacted my references and all my emails get an automated reply. Not burning bridges here, but a courtesy email or some veritable pseudo-human contact would be appreciated. Like a phone call from a person that isn't frozen in a computerized voice machine. Or an email, as previously mentioned. It doesn't even need an attachment. Just a single line telling me what the fuck's up, not including the bullshit ten-line signature denoting your bullshit enterprise and all the great manner of which to contact it's hivemind of computers and nobodies.

I love blogging. I can write all I want and no one is a dick about it. Moment I start getting paid for it, though, people are gonna be total dicks about it, I can already tell. Fuckin' dicks.

/End rant

Armond White reviews The Room, says it's phenomenal, better than other movies about small and cramped rooms

2010-07-26T04:15:00.002-04:00

This is a review I wrote of cult-classic film "The Room", the twinkling opus of schlock film auteur Tommy Wiseau. Except I wrote it in the voice of contrarian film critic Armond White, who is an asshole. I love to hate this guy, for his seeming consistent opposition to all the movies I love, including "Up", "Wall-E" and "Toy Story 3", and for his, admittedly, vast knowledge of cinema history. But what does he do with this vast knowledge? He exalts inferior works like "Jonah Hex", "Grown Ups", and "Clash of the Titans (2010)" as the numina of popular cinema, maintaining and falsely meliorating their threadbare importance by attributing to them themes that have no defensible connection or relevance. Also, I'm pretty sure he never smiles.

Anyway, imagine my chagrin when I noticed Mr. White hadn't yet positively reviewed "The Room" (he no doubt would have loved it, if not bought the DVD as a direct contribution to Wiseau's middling efforts as a director and destroyer of cinema). Considering it a disservice to the film medium and White's sterling career pedigree, I'm gonna review the film for him.

-------------------------------------------------

THE ROOM

Tommy Wiseau's film is refreshingly unconfined by normal filmic sensibilities

by Armond White (Patty Pawlowski)

The Room

Directed by Tommy Wiseau

Runtime: 99 amazing minutes

Panned universally by the world over, I can now see why Tommy Wiseau's The Room has aroused this much ire: the world is, like Phillip Haldiman's virtuoso character Denny, retarded. Tommy Wiseau has, after adapting his original play into a novel and now, finally, a film, constructed a triptych of humanist art, succeeding where Lars von Trier's Antichrist failed (instead opting for its own brand of painful renegade nihilism). Wiseau strips the frills and melodrama that plagued John Patrick Shanley's Doubt and most conventional Hollywood fare, baring everything for the camera about every 20 minutes or so --the many sex scenes in the film, widely deemed as unnecessary, are its most potent ciphers to Wiseau's sexual and directorial dogma.

Where other directors adulterate sexuality and poignancy with either the callow-but-cool awkwardness of Michael Cera in Juno or the aged-but-young salt-and-pepper masterstroke of Clooney in Up in the Air (Jason Reitman is obviously a deprived dilettante out of touch with relationships), Wiseau is economical and yet refreshingly enterprising with everything from sex to set design to extraneous plot details. Rather than deign to hire stand-ins or abridge the lengthy scenes for purposes of timeliness, Wiseau's sex scenes are elaborate, heavy and wallet-wise, offering large meat-and-potatoes portions of thespian grandstanding that is not entirely unwelcome as Wiseau's work is, from beginning to end, tongue-in-cheek.

The movie takes place for the most part in a one-bedroom apartment and its building rooftop, the setting of many deep and climactic exchanges cleverly camouflaged as a never-ending game of catch. Where normally some token fan-service self-referencing prevails similar cult-classic films, as with Kevin Smith’s self-contained View Askewniverse films, or where there is lay film student mawkishness and hyperbole, Wiseau uses stock film, portraits of spoons, and completely expendable characters to remove all distraction from the film’s centerpiece: the covin of Mark and Lisa to destroy Johnny. This dastardly plot is punctuated multiple times by multiple sex scenes and the film’s greatest line, Johnny’s lion roar of “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!”, artfully emphasizing the crux that colors The Room.

Wiseau’s approach is decidedly minimalist vs. liberalist, dismissing Hollywood’s distended budgetry and politics by funding the entire production himself (there’s that directorial enterprise!) and still having the élan to rotate the entire production crew out twice for some backstage kerfuffle. Had he not been a director/screenwriter, Wiseau would have undoubtedly been an expert financier, The Room’s financial statistics only second to the scantly produced but skillfully crafted Primer.

This is the best movie about a room since the quad-directed Tim Roth-vehicle Four Rooms. The performances by Wiseau and Carolyn Minnott, who plays Lisa's mother, Claudette, are especially nuanced and appropriately kitsch. Wiseau is absolutely convincing as Nosferatu and I never once did not believe that Minnott's character had breast cancer. I would say Minnott herself has breast cancer; there has not been a character actor so believable since Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Except Minnott should win two Oscars.

McDonald's Pizza

2010-07-15T18:37:00.003-04:00

http://andiamnotlying.com/2007/using-mcdonalds-as-pizza-toppings-this-cannot-have-happened-above-the-mason-dixon-line/

The above is a link to abdominal doom. Don't click on it should you cherish that paunch of yours, you fat bastard.

That's internet-meme-quality eats right there, just ridiculous and utterly out-of-sync with the normal human diet. And it's wonderful. I made it with Peter. Or he made it while swatting me away from the ingredients (Mmm... McNugget goodness..). Anyway, it was awesome, though I recommend you cut up the burgers and nuggets and spread them out evenly across and around the pizza. Even out the fries across the pizza and top off with shredded pepper jack cheese. The fries will crisp in the oven perfectly, signalling your imminent death as your natural and more animal impulses take over. At best you'll wait for the pizza to cook nice and proper. At worst, you'll assault that bitch mid-cook and bake your head, a la Sylvia Plath.

Enjoy. Then promptly keel over.

New Giggins

2010-07-13T16:34:00.003-04:00

I'm now a writing intern at the venerable TimesSquare.com, so check it and myself out at your leisure.

Here's my first post. It's a review of the show I saw with Sim. Hope you enjoy.

Now to think up another one... any ideas, anyone? Know any cool new places or things for me to check out and provide some written insight? I was thinking about checking out Shakespeare in the Park, but with Al Pacino starring, there's no way I'll get tickets. And the people that don't get to see the 'Cino in "Merchant of Venice" will just settle for "A Winter's Tale", so I likely will not get a chance to see that either. I was considering doing an interview with someone important or interesting, but I can't think of anyone. My best chance is to keep tabs on the openings of new bars and clubs and whatnot, maybe interview an owner on his or her motivations. Sound good?

Also, I'm the middle of writing a satirical piece with infamous film critic Armond White as the star. After it's done, I figure I'll try to get in contact with him, let him know I exist and gauge his response to my work and maybe take it from there. Maybe he'll belittle me snidely. Or sue me for libel.

All in good fun.

Birthday Cards

2010-06-15T11:58:00.005-04:00

It was my birthday recently. The penultimate 2-0. Made me consider the importance of birthday cards in comparison to other, regular gifts. I appreciate them more. Which makes me sad, considering that their general importance and prevalence wanes beyond this, my, temporal point. Too bad. Here's to well-written, thoughtful yet pragmatic, personal birthday cards; they are few and far between the acquaintances and friendships that form us.

Bummer.

Living Facebook-less

2010-05-13T15:24:00.005-04:00

So I just killed my Facebook account. As in "delete" and not "deactivate". Takes two weeks for them to delete your account, apparently-- bullshit: It's a two-week "grace period", a dangling carrot for users to munch on until they reach the stem and want another. Bullshit: If you didn't bite the carrot and instead uprooted it, you'd see it germinating from branches of fallow recidivism.

I am struggling with my identity. I do not know who I am, not in a narrow or broad scope. I know what I am; a collection of decisions and mistakes I take no pride in. I know what I want to be: Better.

This is one of the handful of decisions that I feel need to be made to bring me closer to whoever it is that I am expected to be, and very much want to be. It should be noted that I'm not quitting Facebook because it is a broken apparatus. The fact that it is a broken apparatus for human connection is beside my point; it's an unnecessary apparatus, at least in my life. A time-waster I am done abiding and nurturing.

Moments before I deleted my account, I was friend requested by an acquaintance from my past. This was this person's second time friend requesting me; he had evidently deleted his account before just as I am doing now: I never noticed his leaving. I actually paused between the "Confirm" and "Ignore" buttons knowing fully my intent to end my relationship with Facebook. I just couldn't figure out what to do with the guy, for at least a second. Don't know the significance of that, but you should know that I "confirmed" that relationship before I ended it abruptly, not with a bang or a hollow whimper but with the input of my sacrosanct password and the Captcha code "South furrow", which is nothing at all.

EDIT: Also, hopefully now I will have more free time to put towards my blog and other projects.

EDIT #2: Funny and relevant: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1390.jpg

A Short-Piece - Simple but Still Pretty Grisly Death

2010-04-22T18:23:00.008-04:00

Saw a dude a day or two ago and thought how sad it'd be for him to kinda just die. This is where that comes from. Enjoy.

----------------------------------------------

It would be comedy to me to watch this sad fuck fall and die. Chewing on a Starbucks sandwich, with its flavored mayos and roasted red peppers, lettuce like gristle in between his teeth. Die a goat, a ritual sacrifice to the MTA gods with delightful verdant green among the white of his shattered teeth and bloodied gums. His tongue looks like it's been pickled for a week in blood and vinegar; severed of its root, an undue root itself flopping for no more reason than nerve-endings exploding unpleasantly.

He drops the plastic casement for his sandwich. Bends over, fumbling with a full mouth and clumsy fat fingers. He dies. That is how I imagine it in my head walking past him. He falls and dies hungry. Or maybe he collapses into the train tracks. He’s not that close to them so at most his head would peak over in wait for the Downtown 6. I feel bad for him in this instant and at the same time curious as to the effect of postmortem mutilation on the soul. Does he enter wherever he’s going with a head or not or is he granted a reprieve of near-headlessness?

Maybe he would just get a heart attack, a not-dishonorable death by today’s standards. A quick coronary between bites or as he is bending over. At best he’d die in the fetal position, where you can’t see his distended cheeks still full with food, like coins for Charon but for fatasses. At worst he would petrify where he stands, drop all his worldly possessions, at the time his beloved sandwich, a newspaper and traveler’s guide, some rim-horn glasses and a pen run dry (like it knew). He would drop all his shit and squash it with the force of a supremely sad and overweight person, mincing the wind and all beneath him.

The coroner would come by to check his pulse and put him in his own casement, a duffel bag inconsiderate police officers sometimes use for trafficking laundry. The coroner would notice the sandwich plastered to the center of our vic’s shirt, a sad symbol the farthest distance from Superman's noble insignia. He would note it in his report, “Bertus May, 43, and one half-eaten Starbucks Turkey Club on Rye with Pimento”, thus furthering the most embarrassing death in existence.

It is not to die with your penis dangling that is most disgraceful. It is to die with a sandwich stuck to your gut, close to where it is supposed to be but not quite. It's to be a sandwich yourself, sandwiched between the rye of Heaven and pumpernickel of Hell, neither sure of what to do with an abomination so velveeta like this fucking guy that died with an oversized olive stuck to his eye, a tasty monocle none saw because this fucking guy is at the front of the final line, choking on his closest and most valued friend.

Poem - Oversoul

2010-04-19T16:01:00.007-04:00

Hi guys. I'm not back. Just in pain. That pain has caused me to create, limited as my creations might be. They have little stick legs, little blood-spattered branches. With each sharp pang of pain, I'll add veins to my figures, and capillaries and eyes and lips and maybe an aquiline nose for character; then, a penis or vagina for gender and a brain so maybe my stick figures will think for themselves and take the weight off myself. Knowing my stick figures, they'll probably just procreate and leave me with a burdensome fagot of sticks, fuel for more empty prose-people.

Whatever. Here's something I wrote on the train ride home from class today.

EDIT: Also, I've discovered another wonderful poet. Martín Espada. I've been reading his "Republic of Poetry" and am smitten with his words.

----------------------------------

Oversoul

The soul did not rest wisely

And respire in its fleshy container

Of sinewy wire - bent by demiurgical hands;

those same that molded the marble of

its chartreuse mud

that would generate over as

the skin of another lovely person.

And the firmament too.

(The soul is a pulsar of

Magnitude beckoning the gratitude

of similar satiety.) So

it was lost among all the other

wispy vespers and breaths

floating in the airy mind of the world.

There it floated like a skiff, skidding

along the rims of mouths, the chattery

teeth of individuals looking

for its kiss. A double to share

the mind of the world with.

Double Post Sunday: A Song and a Haiku, Not Rolled Into One

2010-04-03T23:48:00.002-04:00

So I didn't do a Writing Prompt Wednesday, on account of being lazy and uninspired, so here's some dirty haikus and my first batch of song lyrics, written on the bus after some coaching from Barbie, who will supply the backing tune and vocals in time. Welcome to my compensatory Double Post Sunday!

Haikus
-------
1.
Hosiery like black
Laced with flowers strewn
by dalliance sweet.

Braided close to skin
Like hair that I'd pull to me
And tear at feeling.

In my mouth, flossing
Across my teeth and pink gums
A loving dentist.

(This is actually a form I first saw with E.E. Cummings: three stanzas of three separate haikus combined.)

2.
A tongue shoveling
in soil pink and flowered
For treasure that swells.

3.
Stitches tightening
Against aluminum force.
For his life he runs.

(This one's not dirty. It's about baseball.)

4.
Hair I'd pull to me.
And release upon release.
Dead virginity.

---------------------------------------------
And here's the song. I wrote one before this, but it was too wordy.

I Suck at Guitar

I couldn't get it right.
No matter how much pressure I applied
To your carotid.

You wouldn't sing.
Not a note, not a chord.
I slackened and you still choked, gurgling the notes.

I said, "baby, don't you fret".

Just sing to me.

(Like a word aborted)

My hand at your navel and its absent hollow,
I pleaded, "just sing, dammit, sing".

Not a note, not a chord
I strummed your throat,
which you couldn't bring,

to sing, fucking, sing.

To sing to me.

Poem - Old Men

2010-03-25T19:41:00.005-04:00

In light of yesterday's excited but eventually fruitless (though gains were made and metaphors pigeon-holed) conversation on love, here's a poem:

---------------------

Yellow markers scrawling

sunsets, rays wavey askew

and inaccurate, aren't enough

for unhappy men (that aren't

boys at heart) to create

accurate settings for happy

poetry and

the kind of symmetry

especial

to relationships; nor

are paper stencils

shaped like tears

placed against the sky

to make it rain like

romantics desire

(a boy weary and in love

walks to the edge of the riverbank

and blows defiant raspberries

at the firmament, hoping he'll make

clouds and incur wrath; the Earth

whistles back a wind, blowing off his cap)

or some other real-world facsimile

for the ineffable quality of

being one of two.

Writing Prompt Wednesday: Love

2010-03-24T16:45:00.005-04:00

I am going to describe love and attempt to demystify that pit-area between loving someone and being IN LOVE. Before I go on, I should stress that I do not believe myself qualified to crystallize love in its many human complications and idiosyncrasies and imbue it with a singularity of meaning. Therefore, I already consider this a failed endeavor. But I will continue because WPW needs to go on and I do not shy away from love.

Another caveat: I do not believe myself ever to have been in love, though I love enough people. Not a lot of people, but enough to perceive myself (and be perceived as) a sort of stable person with perceptible human connections. Granted, simply knowing and caring about folks and (hopefully) them caring about you doesn’t in any way mean you are stable or sane, as correlation does not imply causation (stalkers, for instance), but for our benefit just assume these things about me. Admonitions aside, I think I can pin down the characteristics of love that others will find agreeable. I will make this up using my collective intelligence and infallible manly intuition. (After-note: I have failed in summing up love. Go figure.)

I do not seek to romanticize love, despite the close linkages between love and romantic sentimentalism. As Jorge Luis Borges might say, I wish to excise the “baroque excesses” of love’s conception. Love is not a million butterflies nesting in the stomach; it is not a resounding pin drop in the abysmal blankscape of one’s psyche, suddenly lighting things with sounds and echoes; or a ritualized set of traditions or practices shared by two people. If there is one thing I hope to ignore in my short treatment are thought-terminating clichés like the above and other reductively compressive phraseology. To romanticize it is to make it unattainable and so degrade it, which is a travesty.

Love is a feeling in which the means will have always outweighed the end. Even if the relationship will have ended in death or some other irreversible demise, the feelings in the interim will have been worth it. In that way, it is selfish and involved and I believe gains a greater and more personal meaning than the kind of love that characterizes agape or that humanity-loving compulsion one finds in Superman. (After-note #2: If I could, I would end it right here, but I wrote all the drivel after this, so I will just leave it up.)

We know love is a thing to be shared between two people. I agree with this. Humans are given to easy jealousies and should avoid too many hands in the basket, so to speak. We know love is a mounting of emotions and experiences and later, bodies. It is a progression from simple but formative courting to the honeymoon period where everything is cherries and strawberries and normative; and then finally to the heavy stuff, where the previously simple dalliances become touchstones of emotional intricacy and pointed, revitalizing interest. However, love is not the attachment engendered by lasting marriage and children. Nor is it complete and utter dependence on another.

Love at the same time is outside such stringent controls, logic, and common sense. Therefore, I am going to abandon the philosophical and psychological approaches, and supply simply this: Love is like porn, in that you will know it when you feel it, and just like porn, love has COCC (pronounced “COCK”).

Commitment
Order
Cohabitation
Comfortability

Commitment is necessary to love and it should be somewhat universal. You should be willing to do almost anything, and be understanding of almost anything, in terms of your partner. They want to do the fisting thing? You should at least discuss it and not jump back in hideous contortions of fear. (Maybe just a wrist, or an elbow?) The reason I qualify universal with “somewhat” is because I do not trust people that say they would die for their partners. I can understand dying for certain family members, if you believe they deserve it. But dying for someone you met in a bar or seminar? Please. That is just dangerous.

Order is subject to each relationship and involves the establishment of a basic but natural set of ground rules for the relationship. You can think of this as the backbone of the rest of COCC, in a similar manner that all the cardinal sins are derivative of stealing. This is where responsibilities are apportioned and accepted or denied. None of this should be done formally but organically over time, via courtship rituals. This is where the male decides he is okay with the female making more money than he does. This is where the female decides if she is okay with the male maintaining civil but platonic contact with his exes.

Cohabitation is there because I believe you do not really ever know someone until you live with him or her. Puppies are cute and clean when they are in their cages, but the moment you adopt and take them home they become an entirely different monster, burdened with responsibilities and endless notes on maintenance. Same goes for people, except they talk in their sleep and want to share the bed. Or they smoke or do not bathe twice a day. People have faces like die that change depending on their surroundings. It is in a relationship that you meet all those faces.

Comfortability is something that we should all strive to find. A comfortable relationship grows from practiced rituals to the pleasant acceptance of profoundly intimate lounging. It is as if the two of you were born minutes apart and have spent your lives mimicking each other.

If you can transpose COCC on your current relationship, or at least the first and last “C”s, with Order and Cohabitation coming later, then you should give a relationship a shot and see where things go from there. Chances are you will not ruin each other.

(After-note #3: As you can see, I was unable to crystallize love and make it understandable to your lost hearts, readers. However, if you think you can describe love in any succinct or credible way, you are delusional. Love is ineffable, like Sofia Vergara. Nevertheless, you can very well try and if you find something you like, something pleasant to the ear and heart, write it down and make a poem out of it. That is what all love poems are. Little failures that you do not really mind.)

"I'm in the business of effing the ineffable." — Alan Watts (via Wikipedia)

EDIT: As for what makes a person fall IN LOVE, I don't know. I would have to say when the pain becomes unbearable. Last time I was remotely close to love (though still a good distance from it), I was in some constant form of restlessness around her, a limbo of semi-catatonia and malaise in which my inner-self spilled out and subsumed my personality. And when I wasn't around her, I thought inconsistently about her. Even these days, when I hearken back to her I get a headache (at all the memories). I think declaring that kind of "devotionary" love is like giving up in face of the pain and just going along the grain via a masochistic sublimation. That, I imagine, is where all the images juxtaposing love and fire come from, like a pit in oneself exploding.

Writing Prompt Wednesday: POV of a Scrubbed Floor

2010-03-17T13:43:00.002-04:00

For this week in WPW, I am going to try to impersonate a freshly scrubbed floor. Back to basics, eh?

I laid down on the floor for this one.

For the curious, the scrubbing liquid of choice is OrangeGlo.

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I can feel the sunshine. And the film of clean on my face; the warmth of the windows and cabinets like skyscrapers, cereal boxes the antennae and dust the clouds. I am shiny and like new for the time being. Eventually, feet will fall on me, those same cabinets will explode, shards of clear and opaque porcelain will fall on me, and bits of the heavens, asbestos and ceiling and that dusty cloud-cover, will fall on me too. And some rescuer or godly caretaker (I call her Mom like the rest) will lift the rubble off me and shellac me in clean once more, personally, with her own hands. But then, in contradictory fashion, she and her raucous ilk will step on me with cold feet and I will live my ambivalent life with sympathy for this devil.

That is my existence, feet and Cheerios falling like rain on my face, not bloodying me but still changing me in little ways I cannot control. I will have fissures and cracks and other telling signs of age by the time I am three. Worse, I am stuck to this place with glue and in other places nails, the house the Rood and my face adorned with thorns, sometimes, when Mom is trimming her roses over me.

When I am bored and alone, I like to chat with the walls. They have their grievances. Something about shelves and “too many fuckin’ holes”. The walls have no idea what they are talking about. They are adored and lavished with adornments like family photos and surrealist art; the family trusts them with their cherished belongings, like a million salt and pepper shakers collected over some dumb amount of years and stacked on a handcrafted shelf, freshly stained and finished. Salt and pepper shakers that routinely spill onto my face and give it to itching.

The chandelier is just a douchebag. He flicks on and off when the family is not home. He tries to blind me, effusing his bulbs, his eyes, until they almost blow out. He likes to lower himself by his ceiling tether to the floor and let me feel the heat from his hundred-watt bulbs. When the family tried to swap the bulbs for those energy efficient ones (“the ones like spirals” the daughter Susan called them), he strangled them broken. He snickers and shakes like a bastard chime in the wind. He regularly pulls his cord up so you cannot, for your life, turn his fan on.

The Aeolian harp is stuck in the window not of his own accord. He says he would rather be stuck somewhere in England, where the wind is less unguent and oil-tasty, despite being just as industrial if not more. He is obnoxious and loud and I wish for rats to gnaw on his stringy lips or termites to chew his ass.

Today I will lay here dying and waiting, waiting and dying, into tomorrow when I will do the same. I will only know the differences of each day by the friends that signal it, the heat of the sun and the song of the wind in the nighttime. My world is flat and there is no contrary philosophy.

Poem - "She is wholeheartedly. inside."

2010-03-10T13:25:00.002-05:00

Quick poem. I feel like I'm back to form, playing with sound like I like to but haven't in a bit.

I've had this argument before, whether a poet's work is representative of his views. I don't believe so. I manufacture meaning like a water bottling factory wastes plastic.

This one seems a bit suicidal, and I'm not a fan of that emo-leaning image, but that's just the way the words fell out. I don't know his motivations for killing himself, despite creating him. I think he's had enough of trying to figure out this girl, of her being within herself emotionally, so at the most inopportune time, when she decides to open up and "unfurl" of her catatonia, he goes within himself. And hangs himself, I suppose. And she goes on living (that's what the last parenthetical portion is about, her moving on). That's the only part I'm completely sure about.

-----------------------------------------

She is wholeheartedly. inside.

like the the place you rend with

timber fingertips in a burl -

a clump a sartor couldn't untie

if he had all the time

and a blowtorch hot

as the core of the hateful Earth -

and rip unrest unknot

until "yes hello

how are you finally",

tongue-tied and unspeakably

gleeful she unfurls

(of a coiled sleep)

to find me,

wholeheartedly. inside

my self,

tying tightly a noose

(about the self now worldly

and embodied, quite starkly

juxtaposed and stitched

to the ceiling crossbeam,

a lightbulb of flesh,

an incandescent soul

casting the penumbra of life

upon everything).

Writing Prompt Wednesday: Dream House

2010-03-10T00:49:00.013-05:00

Finding interesting writing prompts is getting difficult. Damn. Just when I thought I'd found consistency. I like the ones that I think I'll be able to recycle into another work later.

For this one, I have to detail my dream house.

This one's pretty lame, but I like having to think about it realistically. I'm gonna try to avoid sentimentalism and aim for rawness; I've always fancied myself pastoral, despite the city-life, and pastoral is simple. So I'll try to be simple, while unveiling a bit of myself through this shit exercise.

---------------------------------

I actually don't have a dream house, I realize. I don't really care. I obviously don't want a squalid little lean-to in the backyard of some middle-class family's home, or an infinitely cozy oil drum. Or a lavish mansion with an indoor swimming pool and a retractable roof, for that matter.

It's all about the smell. If I can have internet access and be within walking distance of a woods-and-river smell, I think I'd be happy. It could even be a little briney. I'm not anti-metropolitan or jaded from city-life. I'm anti-neighbor, I think. I'm tired of neighbors. Never had good ones. They were always fuck-loud (the music and the moaning was deafening) and some kind of screwed. Granted, my family probably appeared likewise in their eyes, but still. Fuckin' neighbors.

The awkward moment when you step out to school and meet them in the hall as they go to work or to do laundry, if they don't work. I'm not big on neighborly love, or neighborly like, as you see; I'm not even that private an individual. My personal space doesn't extend too far, so folks can step forward as they may. I have a cynicism about thin connections, those "how are ya" smiles, anxious eyes and phatic talk. I prefer not start anything at all if I know the outcome looks bleak or nonexistent. I'm not a nervous individual, so I don't hear myself saying "We are on a road to nowhere." It's an unconscious concern. Or maybe I just want to be able to walk around the house naked. Ever done it? No? Add that to your list of unfulfilled ambitions, good sir or ma'am.

Anyway.

Assuming this place is in the country, we can also infer that it rains there pretty steadily. And that it has trees, which I also like quite a bit. It's the rustic romantic in me. What I'm gonna need now is a sturdy roof with glass. I enjoy the pitter-patter. It's calming. And it also signals my kind of weather, where I can wear warm long sleeves and jeans, but not necessarily a jacket. You wouldn't think all that kind of stuff factors in, but one factor of comfortability is connected to another in a not-necessarily fibrous manner. This is where I would write. The glass roof affords nice natural light, and this room will have to be connected to a nearby house somehow because I can't risk my papers getting wet mid-travel from the main house to the writing house. If it's connected, it's got electricity.

I think that covers it.

Writing Prompt Wednesdays: Dear Writer's Block

2010-03-02T23:08:00.006-05:00

New writing prompt for you guys today. I was to write a break-up letter to my Writer's Block. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

----------------------------------------------

Dear Writer’s Block,

It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been inconsiderate to your needs: debilitating uninspiration and a slavish approach to creation. I know what I’m doing. I don’t want it to seem like all the time we’ve spent together has been for naught—you introduced me to some great breathing techniques that have gone far in tempering the small rages you sometimes instigated. You labeled me “inattentive” so I added more details to the setting, trying to create that same dramatic and tense atmosphere you and I sometimes had. That, like all else, didn’t satisfy you. You nagged, underlined me green, like I was some sapling to the world of words; you picked up on my misspellings, grammatical missteps, metaphorical meanders, and like a wicked teacher slapped my wrist until I couldn’t type any longer.

Maybe I’m being unnecessarily harsh. Maybe I should be more appreciative of the lengths you took to stunt my growth as a writer; you are to me what a gallon of coffee is when given to a child. You relegated my life to random sugar-hyped jots in my notebook, sentences so fragmented I’m still unsure if they started out as prose or poetry. Nothing makes sense. It’s like when we first met.

I was successful and just beginning to get my legs, just beginning to balance my style and my craft. And then you strode in with your consummate distraction, a metaphysical body designed to lure unsuspecting writers from their desks by the chin and put them into a tenuous sleep via an energy sapping self-deprecation and ennui. You whispered into my ear, like a soft-spoken fifth grader, “la la la la la, neener neener neener”. You filled my page with abstractions and doodles; I don’t even remember them being there. You must have stole away under my desk during one of my many contemplative bathroom or lunch breaks and popped out with your damning pencil then. You filled my head with new ideas every day. But they were all terrible. Petty bobbles of scant imagination, emaciated phrases with no meat on them, nothing of resonance or substance that is tenable to the writer; for the first time I couldn’t be sexual.

That really is the crux of the argument, then. I’m impotent with you. I can’t get my pen up like I used to, let alone uncap it. If it ever did sit rigid against my palm, I’m not sure I’d want it flowing upon paper you provided. The words would lack meaning, and the paper wouldn’t sink in the air like my favorite pieces do. Try it. Throw Vonnegut off a step ladder or building and watch the crater form; all the good writing finds its way to China. Throw something you and I created, collaborated on, off a step ladder and it would float its way on to the nearest rubbish heap.

There’s no pill for us. No ink cartridge that will give new weight to my pen and solve our problems, like some forgotten groove that will put me back on beat and my hips into assonant motion. You’ve taxed me and my work enough. This is my bread that you’re sawing up and crumbling for the birds. Writing is the life-blood that will get me out of here and onto a plane or a boat somewhere off-coast; hopefully one day into the inspiring warm arms of a more agreeable muse. I’m excising you like a sore, you awkward little bint.

Tarry no more by my doorway. Fuck off.

Patty.

I'm a Fuckin' Fogey Friday. Short Story time! "Funny The Way It Is"

2010-02-26T21:39:00.004-05:00

For want of new material and enjoying myself too much with these writing prompts Sim is providing me, here's a quick "story" I wrote based on the song "Funny the Way It Is" by Dave Matthews Band. I like the song quite a bit, and was tasked with drawing on its lyrics for my plot. I don't have much a plot, or rather I couldn't glean and repurpose one without ripping the soul out of the song, so I played around with it. I wanted the "funny" of it to remain intact, how the world ain't right no matter what your karmic destiny. Please, tell me what you think. Read the lyrics and listen to the song first before reading the story, though.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/funny-the-way-it-is-lyrics-dave-matthews-band.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew8hmVIGKcM

---------------------
The bomb blast brings the building crashing to the floor, drifting voices to the exterior like pillow feathers. But that doesn't kill the boy. It's a pretty bird on the breeze, parking its feet on crucial load-bearing debris—rubble so important, you wouldn’t think. The boy’s burr softens as his lungs harden with chalk and brittle caulking, pulverized by the handicraft pigeon coop. There are more voices, houses burning down, sirens passing fire engines, which were washed candy red this morning by the boys’ father and marooned by soot.

The air is compressive and hot and leaves lives decocted if not destroyed by descendents of the bomb—fire and famine and the deathly shock of atrocity. Humans can be bugbears to one another; bugbears’ going hungry and the only chewable is dusty cinderblocks and brackish tinder in this world of harsh and sudden opposites. Batteries from a CD player, busy humming a lover’s tune over the dying counter-clock wise cluck of the damaged plastic platter in its gut, are taken and kill it. A ham radio is freshly-souled and plays some song like mayday. Men and children are frantic; women are braying next to their broken hearted.

A school of diligent little feet that walked ten miles for their letters today are dead. The teenager who forsook the fetters of adulthood is splayed under a wood beam but breathing like sleep.

Soldiers roll in. They brandish hopefulness like an unsheathed knife, stabbing at the rubble and voices and pulling fresh fingers by the long barrel of their carbines. A baby hospital is the quietest part of town.

The bridge where townspeople used to stand watch over the water passing underneath, and the young schools of fish, is collapsed like all else. Like the Murphy beds that are just stoic Slinkys. Like the demolished sacristies of abandoned churches that are now just unholy ceramics farms, where after two rains and a sullen open-collared priest standing over, the area will devolve to discrepant holy mud that will see many dirty feet. Like the schools and hospitals and homes and trams—decimated as a firecracker in sticky rice—and twisted iron and frayed copper and exposed piping, sloshing sludge like water on flowered gravestones.

A man in a tattered black suit and a crumb-beard of dust puts a silk cloth to his face and breathes as normal before replacing a damp palm with a hefty check, and apologizing like a martyr.

Writing Prompt Wednesdays: Future Author Me meets Present Unenthused Me

2010-02-24T00:41:00.005-05:00

"Unenthused" wasn't a word.

So I've been drawing blanks on what to write for this damn blog. So Sim gave me the idea to post writing prompts. So here we are.

For this one, I am to write up the author biography of the book I would write now, and the book I would write in the year 2020 (when I'm 30).

Here it is:

-----------

Writing Prompt Wednesday:

Me Now:

PATRICK PAWLOWSKI (1990-Present) was born in Brooklyn, New York but has since relocated to Queens, New York. He has not been published, though he is patiently waiting to see if Hunter College's "Olivetree Review" will print his three poems, "Key Food", "She being branded", and "Tempus Fugit (or Carpe Diem)" in their eponymous bi-annual creative anthology. He thinks they probably will and that the response will be nothing short of tepid and unnoticed. He has one sister, also a smartass.

Me in 2020:

P. OLIVER PAWLOWSKI (1990-Present) was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he still lives. He is a product of New York's public education system so expect a lot of errors like misplaced commas and parentheses (though this may be a carry-over from his love affair with the poetry of E.E. Cummings, who always wrote his poems immediately after reading the reflected text of E.B. White's "Elements of Style" in a mirror). He graduated from CUNY Hunter College as a Creative Writing major, the silly goose. This is his first novel.

Erstwhile Tuesday: "Stars and Stripes"

2010-02-23T17:44:00.003-05:00

This is Erstwhile Tuesday, where I'll post shit you might not have seen (or maybe you did, on Facebook or something). It'll probably be poetry, because that's what Past Me pretty much exclusively wrote. It's always good to go back and see what Your Old Self wrote, because, y'know, it's good to vomit sometimes. Purgative Poetry, ftw.

Also, tomorrow is Writing Prompt Wednesday, so I'll have my answer to a writing prompt up because I'm honestly running out of ideas. I'd post it today, but I've already come up with the name "Writing Prompt Wednesday" and it's obviously not "Tautological Tuesday".

Here's some old shit:

------------------------

the sun at 12am

is boldly clustered,

like patriots, with

stars and stripes:

if those stars were

dimples, and stripes

your body unfurled

(as tongues are

wont to do) and

writhing across a bed

(like a flag in the wind,

or just another damsel,

if you wish),

I would be the moon

(no less at Noon

and yet still a speck)

raising the tides

and giving eyes:claws:nails:

love-bitten-toes transit,

(to move you more is this

soldier's dying wish,

plus,

tell ma I love 'er);

and where was it- i?

besides under the sun

and its rays like gunfire

(and salutes like every

so often bolstering heat,

pushing as fingertips

forehead vessels),

i was,

i felt,

lost like every-where/one

under the sun at 12am;

i was blinded, i suppose.

Poem - Assembly Line

2010-02-07T20:51:00.007-05:00

This is what happens after a long absence: I overwork. Here's another poem. Let me know what you think, and don't forget to read my last post, the poem and short story combo, in case you haven't already. And comment!

Or I'll kill you.

---------------------------

Assembly Line

The whistle sounded,

a hymn,

piping up like orchestral organs

to signal work time.

I got to my station

and put on my apron.

It had a picture of a man

on the front, sectioned off

like a cow or pig is

on nutritional posters.

(You want the flank.)

The rotation belt spun,

sending something like folded

falafel pockets my way, except

fleshy and like black-forest-ham

to the touch. Slimy. I stuffed them as if

I were serving a loyal customer,

with a soul large and fit for two

and valves so many you wouldn't

know what to do with.

My supervisor, suit and a tie

that has a blood-stain on the wide-

end, signs me not to,

"watch out, those parts are limited!"

he yells while faux-decapitating himself,

but someone forgot to give me

an earhorn when it was my turn

on the giant assembly line

so I pretend I don't

know better and make sure

no one ends up like me:

a deaf God acting dumb,

unsure whether he's

fashioning man or man's

parts,

and I don't mean the hearts

and minds,

but the soul and the chivalry,

the lover or the loser.

Poem - The Sublime; Short-Short Story - Caramels and Roses

2010-02-06T22:20:00.011-05:00

Hey guys. I've been away. On lack-of-creativity leave. No expenses paid. Nuts.

I've missed ya.

I feel like I've dropped off the face of the earth; that's what happens when I don't blog. It's an odd relationship I have with the internet. (One of many odd relationships, I'd say, but that's perhaps debatable.)

In class we've done some light talking about The Sublime, which I feel I now need to describe quickly just so the context of the poem doesn't fall through. It's something so damn big and inherently beautiful, it's scary and punishing but worth every bit. Like mountains (my professor used The Alps as an example) or thunder or a waterfall (you know there's a "waterfall" that spits nothing but fire and lava and stuff all day?). I'm a bit in awe of the meaning of the term. So I wrote a quick poem about it (about 5 minutes, not counting the pee break). Enjoy. Please comment.

Then, realizing a simple poem wasn't enough of a splash return, I wrote up a quick short thing, a story so-to-speak, of a bum I'd seen on the train. Except it's not really about the bum at all. But whatever. Enjoy! Please comment.

-------------------------------------------------

The Sublime

It's like waiting for slugs

stuck in an hourglass

to squeeze through a hole

that is several sizes too

small; by that, I mean,

it is slow.

I am self-effacing in its presence,

which is idiotic because

in such a situation,

when I'm so small,

I don't even exist.

Comparatively, I mean. I always exist,

either way. It's just less apparent.

(Comparison is too mathematical, and so

whimsy becomes the stuff of life-scholars.)

It's like a mouth, pretty

with lipstick like juiceboxes.

Colorful, or it could be flesh-toned

(lips are never wholly beautiful,

but they begin the enchantment,

like a fog kissing the earth);

you could stuff a fist in it,

it's so wide. And agape. It's

a little embarrassing, actually.

You shouldn't stare. But it's so damn

big.

It's a kick in the nuts from

that girl you like. It hurts,

but you know you're moving life

forward. (Backward is a relative term;

relativity recuses itself in the presence

of The Sublime.)

And that's how life begins;

grappling without apologizing

and then a struggle, hopefully

compliant, like walking up a rough

hill to meet a valley with a kiss

of your own, of exasperation, and then

that thing in the beyond. Staring

at you. Scaring you. Like The Sublime.

That's it.

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Caramels and Roses

He fingered the caramel candy wrapper for its contents - alms of sweetness for the brassy bitterness of the subways - and tossed it in his bucket of red roses. He sucked that caramel, it skidding along his molars like heels on gravel. It clicked to an internal rhythm, sounding, like, maybe "S.O.S. I'm melting." Everybody knows caramel candies love The Wizard of Oz.

He was like a generic Halloween pumpkin, empty save for the two teeth front-and-center. When he moved his mouth, in a chewing motion, you could here the turnover of freed pulp. Whoever carved him was inexperienced and eager, and maybe carved him in his own image; I guess God was a teething baby with a knife. The candy was still there, pushing against his cheeks and clicking against the two teeth. (The teeth are like pebbles in a hollow drum, if such a thing can happen. The sounds are different for only some minutia.) The caramel candy clicked and pushed. Except now it was trying harder to escape, fighting for its life against those gaunt papier-mache cheeks, trying to break through like a football mascot. You could see it back up, measuring for speed and distance, rubber banding from the right cheek to the left and failing. Again and again, making less of an impression each time. You can hear the cry through a part in his lips. It's a sort of final hiss, and then a choke in the throat. That's when I know the caramel has died. Coroner wouldn't be able to tell ya, suffocation or drowning or suffocation by drowning. Could go either way with this one.

He is bored now; killing doesn't sate this beast, no. He gets to breaking the toes of roses, the ones in his bucket. He picks one up and chutes it, like a sword going in a sheath. Raises it a few inches out of the bucket and bam. As if the slow rumble of the train wasn't scary enough. He is mocking, raising one and slamming it then two or three at once and slamming, then he rearranges them so they don't confederate, poofing them in and out en masse like they were one unsatisfactory pillow to an idle sleeper.

He twists in his seat, clutching the rim of his beautiful little blue bucket and twisting it along with him, taking them for whatever ride he is on now. He tilts the bucket to and fro, circling the bottom rim like it were a tuna can lid dropped from a certain enough height, or a quarter coming to its final revolutions after a good spin.

He must be tired now. The roses certainly are, red in the face and sweltering like the air does; you can see a minute vibration if you're a rose, one rose to another. He might fall asleep from all the mayhem, fun as it was, and he doesn't want the bucket, with its hostages, to fall over and roll away so he puts it in between his legs.

A new fear embraces the roses, lodged between these pincers, mechanisms for gnashing when not holding, which is really quite a thin line to be treading for a delicate rose that has witnessed the death of a caramel. Teeth are just pincers with skin, really.

I give you an "A" for effort. And your ass. (Where I write about prostitutes from the future...)

2010-01-27T00:38:00.023-05:00

I get to thinking about life a lot, when I'm not playing video games or writing my little poems. And I've been more gray lately, in the sense that the outline I "wrote" for myself, the one we all write for ourselves, our "Ten-Year Plans" and whatnot, has by some horror gone askew. Concrete goals and dreams have become mirages and my throat is dry. I'm pulling at my collar with a bit of unease now.

I don't know why I'm feeling so constricted, at the neck and soul, which can be said to be for all intents and purposes heavier, brassy, but I can guess it has some source in my aloofness; however, my aloofness is irreparable. Not until I move away from home, anyway. That is a certainty I've worked out personally.

Conveniently enough, my good friend Sim stuck my future life into a colander (via text, no less) a few hours ago and, after a quick wash and drip, I was presented with two jocular options, both of which I don't mind in the least and kind of desire/agree with:

1.Become the quintessential family man.
2.Become a college professor (whiskey drinking, pipe smoking - whole ten yards) and use my not inconsiderable professional influence to seduce and second female students from their seats and onto my tent-pole lap.

Why I like these:
1. Because I want a family, with kids and a wife. Though mainly for the kids. I want a legacy, dammit, rich with an extended, multicultural family. I have a lot of home videos where I'm three years old and stick toys and shit in my underpants because it's funny and lovable. Those videos deserve sequels and Direct-to-DVD knockoffs. Enter, my spawn.
2. Because I've thought about becoming a teacher, especially the drinking-and-smoking kind, and it just seems to fit. If me and teaching were Lego pieces, the student-teacher sexual relations would be the thematic decals you put on the Lego pieces that give them character, like little yellow faces of surprise and Han Solo-esque deviance. Little stickers of ephemeral seduction and bargaining.

My particularity to #2 gives me pause, mainly because it seems so cold. It sounds like fun and will probably prove endless fodder for great sex poems and metaphors, but may be too frigid and dissociative for my romantic wants (stability, the holy grail for lunatics, which is what I feel a little like, presently; I actually looked up "lunacy" to see if my feelings corresponded and, granted I'm not insane, there is an allowance for capricious craziness, by definition. Lunatics' craziness corresponds to lunar cycles, hence, luna-tics). Doesn't mean I wouldn't give it a try. It's a short life we live and it has its benefits.

Anyway, to the crux of my discontent: I have a hard time establishing and maintaining relationships with people. It's not because I'm antisocial. I'm social enough (though perhaps not for my needs).

The older I get, the more I think about what friendship truly means and the more disappointed and dissatisfied I become as I worry away at the truth, like a meek hamster digging through smelly bedding, burrowing for something. Sustenance or seclusion out of different fears, I don't know. The connections between myself and others, even those I am closest to, feel insubstantial and supported by little more than banter. The only difference being for some it is day-to-day banter and others week-to-week or year-to-year. I wonder how it is for everyone else and their relationships. I wonder if it's the internet's fault or fortune; even when I wasn't texting and emailing and Facebooking, I wasn't doing much: I was playing cards and riding bicycles. Happy memories, but thin ones. I can see through them like I can spy through a curtain.

I'm probably going to spend a lot of money on prostitutes. That's the conclusion I've come to, anyway. That is, if my outline remains so askew and I fuck up real nice down the line. Without strong friendships or family, I will grow old without close relationships to normal, grounding people and forces. And you can't be 35 and looking for new friends. It just seems like a lot more work than my old self would bother with. It's a lot of work for my present self, actually. Prostitutes just seem to be able to fill that gap nicely and seamlessly, if things should go awry.

I'm gonna need a decent paying enough job to support my prostitute habit. I've already accounted for a regular prostitute, the one I have on call and know personally, like Christian Bale in "The Machinist". Hopefully she'll give me discounts. (Hell be damned if she requires valid coupons; birthday suits do not have pockets!) Teaching should supplant poverty and loneliness well enough. With my future-self's luck, I'll get nabbed in a prostitution sting and have my teaching license taken away, and get extradited to a Milwaukee prison or something. For no reason at all.

I'm not sure what it will take for me not to become a lecher. Probably not that much. I will probably stay on the straight and narrow for all my life, but it still gets the brain to tickin'. It's not exactly a fine line between family and 1.21-gigawatts of pussy (I use the popular BTTF phrase because this entire time I've been talking about my future; can't waste clever quips on the un-privy). Unless you're a New York State Governor. Then, it is. So I won't worry about it; I rarely do. Until moments like these when I'm not necessarily self-pitying but self-interested, peering through mirrors into myself, leaks into another dimension where prostitutes are pleasantries and good for the waning heart (there's some Vonnegut in that sentence).

A very old but still venerable study says that humans, no matter how social, can only maintain a max total of 150 friendships, purely because that is the only amount of space allotted in the brain for remembering all those close connections between all those not-so-close-people. I struggle with a dozen. I have 184 Facebook friends.

I swear I had more.

SPAM: A Poem by J-Ville KingKongington

2010-01-17T21:19:00.003-05:00

Welcome to "SPAM," my anonymous submission segment. To get on here, email me at thepaperdrumhead@gmail.com with your own poems and prose and links and shit and I'll, depending on the content, publish and comment on your anonymous works. I haven't thought of a clever longhand for the "SPAM" name. "Submissions Patty Admires Most"? Meh.

Here we go. This poem comes from J-Ville KingKongington. That's not his real name. But it should be.

TITLE: Waking up to nothing but the crappy October Air... Nothing good happens after 2am (or, "WUTNTCOA...NGHA2am")

And in the daily twist and turn

We get lost in the maze

Of green and gray and gravel

Listening in our heads

We hear the notes but not their words

Apples in our ears, not where they belong

The way we converse

Lost forever in a sea of nets

Capturing our every last thought

A diamond in a haystack of rough

Shod rocks

The time is now 3/6am

This is actually the updated version. The old version is identical to the above except for the last line, which just adds the "/6" to "3am". This is actually the point where the poem and my understanding of it bypass each other like two strangers, never meeting. I don't get the purpose of the change. It's nebulous, a lot like the images in the poem. Is it 3am or 6am? Is there a difference between the times? 6am is more like the start of a new day than 3am is, so I'm not sure if the How I Met Your Mother rule of "Nothing Good Happens After 2am" still applies. Everyone knows breakfast time is the best time (because theoretically nothing terrible has happened, or been allowed to happen. Doors have not been opened to the outside world and whatnot; at most, you have just showered).

Let's dissect this puppy, little by bit, bit by little.

An apple in the ear will keep the doctor near, I always say. Just kidding. It's a great line. It has a great crunch, and I just love apples. But you can't literally mean apples. The surrounding images don't corroborate any livable reality. Therefore, you need to concretize some images. Relate the crunching sounds to sweetness - it makes sense, I mean, apples being sweet and all up in your ear for some reason. Turn your ear into a mouth and have it chew over something, something it's heard. And let THAT thing be sweet. Ear wax should be saliva and sound a pill for you to metabolize. You need to assault simple phrases and take roads not often traveled; plant land mines in those roads and hope the reader lands on one. Blow their legs off in a beautiful way; "the way [you] converse" should be absolutely grotesque and unexpected.

This is poetry; the reader is given some allowance for his own imagination. That doesn't mean you shouldn't lead them on a bit. Each imagination is subjective and wholly selective, designing different constructs based on the different stimuli strewn about. You and I spy a door. You see a way, I see a window. You and I spy a barn. You see Slaughterhouse-Five, I see the home of Rabo Karabekian's masterpiece.

Feel free to take whatever artistic liberties to make sure we all see ways ins-and-outs and slaughterhouses. Or don't, if it's dynamic poetry you want, where everyone sees something different. But I think then poems become clouds, and my poems definitely aren't clouds. Poetry should be like organ donation; you feel what I felt, you see what I saw, and hopefully it makes you feel better in the immediate.

Anyway, back to J-Ville's poem.

"We get lost in the maze" is followed by some mention of "gray" and then "Listening in our heads" - this makes me think of gray matter and how a brain kind of has physical pathways. There's a maze in all of us.

"Green and grey and gravel" is a good, alliterative line that establishes enough locality while remaining a little anonymous. I can imagine a city almost as easily as I can imagine the country. I'm a city-kid, so there'll be a bias always.

"Apples in our ears, not where they belong" will be my metaphorical plaything for a moment. I've said already what a poem should be (like). And I'll say it again, it should be like a tree. A seed branching out to timber and leaves and roots and nests and habitats, where all manner of life persist. A poem is a lot of things. You just decide which, and that will outline its structure. I would have actually included a tree as an image after this line, just because that's where apples belong.

"WUTNTCOA...NGHA2am" is a poem that jumps from one image to the next without really finishing anyone in particular. There are no concrete segues. The poem follows a comprehensible sentence-form for the first few lines - that is its first structure - until it devolves into abstract statements. Abstract statements, mind you, that don't have a consistent image. You go from mazes to music to seafaring and nets to diamonds in haystacks, and finish with an almost tacked-on line with the singular purpose of making sense of the title, which really doesn't bear any resemblance to the poem. The title is rambling and extended, but the poem isn't. It lacks punctuation, yes, but it's also pointed and somewhat planned. Hardly rambling.

In all, the poem lacks symmetry. Symmetry can be gained with more concrete images, more cohesion between those images with a support structure of words that make some relatable sense with the words before them. Listening in our heads doesn't logically follow "of green and gray and gravel". "The way we converse" is a few heartbeats away from the talk of sound and apples. If you need to separate ideas that are still similar, use stanzas. And don't be obligated to justify your title by tacking on a line. Don't tack on lines, period. Nail them with a fucking hammer, like there is a shelf of ten-pound words sitting above.

That is all.

Poem - Say Hello To The Angel(s)

2010-01-04T14:24:00.004-05:00

The jazz quartet is
four fingers-
whiskey drunk and sucking
on sticks of pleasant death-
stretched across four chords
and drums,
calling to the lulled crowd for
containing their mad reds and mellow
blues where they sit in/at their fashion
- black high-hats and smoking jackets,
puffing hands (and bearded globes)
through cuffs with
wispy organs of touch - and
standing cellos on their
hindquarters and hocks.
Ankles turgid and toothsome,
brown and skeletal but beautiful,
shellacked from ear-to-ear with
sweetness,
like maple maybe, I don't know.
I'm not a musician or Jesus.
But she is august, a deity pushing
us leaves to some sort of swoon.
A pile so rustic we're racist,
if the cello was a breast-having
beast inspiring uncouth clumsily
commanded copulation. Shit, she's
a country.
We are all percussionists
and she is the anthem
(if breasts were notes in a song).

Anyway, they play. The four jazz players.
And we all die silently.

Then we pick up our instruments -
beating hearts and pulsating aortas,
ventricles voluminous and chambers
like cellos in love, the hair of the
angel becomes a harp - and just paint.

------------------------

Title taken from that Interpol song I've grown to like so much. Really little relation otherwise, though. All the same, tell me what you think. All the same, sing please, sing.

Also, I was inspired by a jazz performance I saw with friends. That's where the last line ("and just paint") comes from, when the lead saxophonist said "You come in on the 'da da da' and then we'll just paint" (I was in the front row, closer than anyone except maybe the photographer.). I actually thought the three back-up musicians were better "painters" than the lead saxophonist. He was the storm that fucked the shit up, crashing and jangling with his fat breath against the euphony of the other three. Too bad.

Le Post Long-As-Fuck

2009-12-28T05:17:00.005-05:00

Just kidding. Probably won't be that long. But it's a return to form, I think. I haven't posted in a not-so-short bit. Not at decent length and dissection of myself, anyway. You really should give something of yourself in your posts. I took down a post that I might put back up. We'll see. Time, people, it will tell.

So yes, I'm like two weeks into my job or something now. I love it. Talking to dopey customers is fun. They all think they're so clever. They all say the same shit ("But if you're just gonna throw away the pitcha, why can't I get it fuh free? Where da dumpster?" Up my ass. That's where it is.).

Whatever. It's really great and good, easy money. Caught two shoplifters in two days. That's what's up. Saturday was a rainy day, and because my job is so weather-dependent, I didn't really have much work to do. So to the three or ten souls that flitted around with their skates on, or to the tourists that came in to shield themselves from the proverbial deluge outside, I yelled promotional phrases. I normally yell "Come check/buy your photos right here, at '_____ ______.'" But I was bored and my boss was late, so I got away with yelling the following inanity that proved to sell absolutely nothing. It did entertain my sullen co-workers, though. That was enough. Here's a list:

Buy a photo or/because...

I'll follow you.
Find you in the parking lot.
You'll get stuck in traffic.
Keanu Reeves' career depends on it.
Chris Brown'll beat your ass.
MY CHILD'S AN HONOR STUDENT!!!
You'll lower my self-esteem.
I will empty an aerosol can into the atmosphere.
The terrorists win.
9 out of 10 photographers recommend my photos.
I'll eat you.
I'll beat you.
You'll die alone.
Angelina Jolie will adopt you.
Dr. Phil will psychoanalyze you.
Our photos are minty-fresh.
They prevent halitosis.
It'll snow again.
I'll breathe on you.
I'll videotape you from an uncomfortable distance.
I'll sing you to sleep. I have a very unpleasant voice. CAN YOU HEAR IT?!
Santa will put you on his naughty list.
You'll get a cramp.
Octomom will give birth to you.
I'll friend/poke you on Facebook.
I'll write and perform a satirical song in the vein of Weird Al Yankovic.
I'll leave your band and start my own. I swear.

Then I just started to yell things:
I'M ON A BOAT!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, PHOTO TAKES YOU!
NO, WE DO NOT TAKE FOOD STAMPS!

Overall, very fun day.

----------------------------------------------
I've also written a poem. It's about how much romance is wasted on meaningless shit. I kinda like a lot of that meaningless shit, but whatevs, you don't have to believe it to write it. It's just another view. Here you go.

True Meaning

Listen:
Will you marry me
so we may be married
like vegetables in
vichyssoise, with
a milk of broth
about us like champagne,
a potato a promise ring
for parting only under
the gravest circumstances?

I think it's cute
how we no longer say things
plainly; nay, we are poets.
with gestures like cakes
(with names and faces of sugar
when all we want is the butter
and delight, smack of lips)
and euphemisms,
for vulgarities like love.

I don't mean to mince words
like onion bits
but perhaps taking a knee
like tradition is too bold
a flavor,
like adding cayenne to our
cavorting,
so just drink til you feel
that potato at your lips,
and be happy
I've done this much.

-------------------------------------

On a final note, I'm gonna be doing submissions. If you've written a poem and want my sarcastic wit to dissect it and all its angstyness, send it on to thepaperdrumhead@gmail.com. Just include "Poem Submission" in the Subject line. Send me whatever, actually. Fun links, short stories, links to links and short stories. It's all good. Just no porn. I will find you and fuck you into oblivion if you send me porn. I can get my own.

Le Petite Post

2009-12-19T22:16:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure if that's French for "The Petite Post." (EDIT: It is now. Thanks, Sim.) I kind of just winged that one. Hopefully it is. I'm big on alliteration. The novels/short stories I'm working on have a lot of it, but not in a cheesy way like in the "Darkly Dreaming Dexter" series (the shitty book series which the greatest television show ever is based on, "Dexter").

This is just a quick blog update because I really enjoy blogging and haven't done it in a while. My last blog update was an excuse as to why I'm not blogging despite my liking to blog oh so much. Just like this one is.

I read something recently about short but effective poems.

Here's one I thought up while waiting for the train and seeing a right little birdie pass by.
-----------------------

For a bird,
monotony
is okay.
-----------------------

I was gonna jazz it up with more words or some structure (haiku-ize or something, at least), but I didn't feel like it. Tell me if I should.

I Fucked Up

2009-12-15T02:23:00.001-05:00

I haven't posted anything in days. I'd check the exact dateage on my last post to get an accurate idea of exactly how long it's been, but I'm too lazy. Still wondering why it is I haven't posted anything.

I took down my last post because after re-reading it a few times, I didn't like how personal and rambling it was. So if you read it, kudos.

I've been busy, like a bee in a STAFF jacket. I got a job somewhere. I like my job quite a bit. I take pictures of people and try to sell them back to them. I'm a greedy peeping tom, or an awkward paparazzi. I'm also fairly good at this job and have already taken to bossing people around. I'm Polish Mussolini with a Telephoto lens. I said "smile," dammit.

I also have two finals in less than seven hours and because of the aforementioned job and something called "Modern Warfare 2", haven't really gotten around to studying to full effect. I foresee nothing good.

I'm also struggling to think of a new post. What should I do? Someone's reading this. Fucking comment, putz. Thank you. I had some post ideas at some point, I always do, but I forgot to write them down at a time when I promised myself I wouldn't forget to write them down. So here we are.

Haven't posted. Actually redacted one post and will probably redact another one or two (You know who you are, "Imperialism of Cow" post. I'd hotlink it now on the eve of its redaction, but I'm too lazy.). Got a job that's really cool but is fucking with my me time. Haven't written anything new, even though I have some good poem and short story ideas, and even have helpful writing tips via links from a friend to expedite the writing of such various wonderful happiness-inducing things. Haven't studied for multiple tests. Haven't gotten the haircut I told myself I'd get.

Oh ya. I fucked up.

Hipsters - A Modest Proposal

2009-11-25T00:31:00.003-05:00

Hipsters – A Modest Proposal

For Preventing the Dissemination of Hipster Mores to Landed American Youth and Presently-Less Pretentious Twenty-Somethings, Who Could Possibly Become More Pretentious Upon Contact with Contagious Hipster Personalities, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Naked.

It is with objectionable guilt that I should walk past cold huddles of man in the Winter-time and see them shiver despite their beards and much flowing hair. To see them falling discolored and desiccated as Fall leaves, followed by two, three, four other leaves of cold man behind them, because they have not, in this climate, the money to sustain them. And then I crossover in season to Spring or Summer and find the Hipster in cashmere fetters, chained at the neck twice-round and knotted for unnecessary warmth, a patchwork lattice of plaid and exuberant taste. The Cold Man sees not without prescription at anytime, and is giftless in vision, day or night, likewise-time. But the Hipster dons dimmed glasses of every neon shade everyday for half a fortnight; I'm surprised that area occupied by the outsize goggles is not markedly lighter than the skin encompassing the Hipster-human.

The Cold Man struggles to pay his landlord's duty of rent and electric—gas is not even on; they build primitive fires in the center of a kitchen, in a steel barbecue—while the Hipster remains shiftless and prospers in café lounges, which are heated and self-contained.

The Cold Man has little contact with others; he does not know of leisure and lay and is thus lonely. His time is spent working for the family every night and day. He wears the same boots—with holes like gopher burrows—to the same job—he is a laborer like all the hard-workers—every day. He has no socks and so sleeps in the warm leather "L" shaped tatters glued in sweat to his feet. Each day is a painstaking triathlon of morning evening and midnight, when he has woken from his nighttime nap to defecate solemnly in the cold yellow bathroom—an outhouse brought in, it seems, as the home and its rooms crumble without the support of two parents working deftly—and afterward waits for the morning of the next day, only a few several hundred minutes away.

Meanwhile the Hipster is just another finger—a pinky—on the red hand of his usual group. They are also fingers, also pinkies; not an evolutionary thumb or utilitarian index digit among them. They are inherently identical and woefully posh in their pseudo-magnanimity, generous of themselves: doling out skinny-jean crotches and sleeveless-shirt-and-vest armpits like coins without the coffers to put them.

I have thus spent many months deciding upon a program of effect; attempting to make use of the Hipster while at the same time helping the Cold Man and those even more worse off, who do not have burrowed-boots and barbecues in their kitchens, who are naked and live in boxes made of cardboard paper. I have stumbled upon a solution that will reign in the Hipster inutility.

It has been assured to me, by a very well-to-do Nigerian fur trader on Wall Street, that Hipsters of the twenty-something variety, when plucked off Bedford and the far West of America, and marinated in a surprisingly culinary concoction—a marinade of chamomile tea and extra virgin olive oil—can become themselves very fine clothing. The most American of apparel.

Not unlike skinning a chinchilla, the plan lies in harvesting the hair of hirsute Hipsters. When packed into sheets of cotton and stitched along a seam, pillows of Hipster hair can be made. The hair itself can be stitched into already made clothing to provide extra insulation against the cold that has made Man a seeming coward to living a civilized life of leisure. It can act a fine guise on the heads of the bald Cold Men, as a toupee or wig of silken splendor. It can be glued to a purple leotard and used as a Halloween costume to scare little children! It can be knotted and tied to even Rapunzel’s envy! So strong when knotted, it can anchor a boat to shore or bind fifty Hipsters together at once. Thus one hipster nets many!

To do all this, we must first loosen the skin of the Hipster. Boiling the hipster whole is likely your best bet.

Many hunting enthusiasts will make claim of quartering and other such inhumane vivisection as better practices; I call them gambles. The Hipster is much too covered in hair to make any such doctoral feats possible with a shred of accuracy; we must not cut off the head—and the hair on it—of the Hipster before it has been boiled! The boiling process releases Hipsteroxidants. (The high heat triggers a latent chemical reaction within the hair follicle, which the water then percolates throughout the water, releasing the Hipsteroxidants.) These Hipsteroxidants are to be considered the “ivory tusk” of this lanky elephant. They are the source of the Hipster cancer. In boiling water, they are rendered inert and instead aid in the grease breakdown process.

After loosening the skin, remove the now likely dead Hipster from his boiling-water bath and immediately dunk him into the chamomile tea and basil-infused extra virgin olive oil ice-bath. The speed at which you move the Hipster from boiling to ice-water will determine the suppleness of the hair later on. It is not uncommon for the Hipster’s hair to be found in tangles. Apply and lather a moisturizing hair shampoo to all the affected areas. However, this step must be done by hand, as the use of plastic or polyurethane gloves can damage the delicate hair.

Upon rinsing any excess soap from the Hipster, if it should still be alive, euthanize it by beating it to death with a copy of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The latest edition from any publisher, hardcover, will do nicely. Once dead, it is safe to slowly trim away all the hair desired. For a short period after expiration, the Hipster will continue to grow hair, so do not dispense of the body! Keep it stored at room temperature under a soiled mattress surrounded by old vinyl records for up to a week after death for maximum hair removal.

The Nigerian informs me that it may be possible to farm hair from living Hipsters, and I welcome all opinions for expediency, and I am not so brash or selfishly idle as to ignore alternative methods, but I have calculated in so far my succor and predicted a mighty gain: in a year’s time, with the boiling of one Hipster by every non-Hipster of the New York and California states each day for a year, we will have accumulated enough hair to reforest the Amazon thrice-fold.

So: I profess to you, in the sincerity of my heart, to not have any personal motivations besides the good of the Cold Man and common peoples, who would only benefit from the hair of Hipsters. It is yonder in past when any one person should go body-frigid in any Season, and any single malingerer should be overpopulating by his own kind and not adding to it wholly. To this principle of greater good, I have added my penny’s worth, and dictated a simple plan for the restoration of our social norms, which haven’t been quite the same since the 1970s.

THE END.

Metronome

2009-11-22T22:34:00.001-05:00

I was supposed to do a poem about my recent move, but I haven't finished it yet ('bout 70% done). Then again, I don't believe any poem is really ever finished. But that's another thing.

Here's another poem imagining the heart as a metronome that needs constant fixing by a machinist. It's also not finished (as more can definitely be done with it), but it can be considered as finished because I think it can be considered as finished if my own opinions and contexts are not up for consideration. It's got funny punctuation and spacing that will probably be off-putting and far-reaching images and metaphors that will be a little difficult to see immediately. I thank you if you've gotten this far and are still not turned off. You are a truly loyal reader.
-------------------
Metronome

Imagine:
   A metronome sounds the same
   backwards and forwards
( forwards and frontwards
   backwards and rearway).
So: Socrates would agree -
   The heart is the same
   always (to an ear displaced
   of chest-centered pumps).
Unless sex and death are new
neighbors,
   knocking on the machinist's door.

Well then,
then,
a metronome becomes a gasket
filling the spaces without sound
with mechanical heartbeats.

No Post

2009-11-20T14:04:00.005-05:00

I should have a post for you, loyal reader (Hi, Sim). However, I do not. Rather than dole out excuses, here's a kitty:

Go ahead. Click on him. He wantsits.

I will post something soon. Don't know what, though. Haven't finished any of the poems I've been working on, and I'd like to actually do some research on Kurt Vonnegut before I write up the Overdue Review for his books. In case you've forgotten, this collection of 1s and 0s, of letters and sentences, is intended as a portfolio for my future. A very lacking inventory of things I've written down on post-its and am just getting to. Also, I really like Vonnegut and want to do right by the guy, should his ghost smite me in the ether once I arrive there.

Bear with me, my dearest reader(s).

We're All Bad People.

2009-11-13T00:24:00.010-05:00

Schadenfreude. Heard of it?

It's the reason Saw is so good. It's damning.

It damns a man (and his poor foot), just like Titanic damns Jack and Memento damns Leonard (more so than it does Teddy, who dies) ad infinitum.

We are an evil people, us movie-lovers. But movies are a human construction - a willful decision to destroy a designed person(s) so real they might as well be carbon exasperating - so maybe you, movie-hater, are fucked too.

I don't particularly care for scenes. Y'know, like when that New York cabbie brawled it out with the Pedi-cabbie over an issue of impatience (and right-of-way). Or when someone's a tad too drunk and needs a sit-down (or sleep-down, for the rough nights of egregious miscalculation). Or when mommy and daddy air their grievances to an invisible Judge Judy in the parking lot of a Costco Wholesale Club.

Shit like that just doesn't run kosher by me anymore. I used to like a good fight and tussle or whatnot, and had my fair share of youthful brawls. I never got seriously hurt (though there were several incidents involving cleaning tools, like brooms--two boys roughhousing). The reasoning behind pitting my health against that of another strap was never quite there, either. Usually it boiled down to the id chloroforming my ego from behind and going all Joker, or a girl.

But now I'm older and leave the fighting to the adults, who should fucking know better, the twits. Also, I have braces now and couldn't even begin to afford the costs of my damaging them. I just don't have the bank to be stupid anymore.

That's all beside the point of this article.

As you may or may not have noticed, all my posts tend to "tangentialize" in some way, at least to me, at which point I've lost my focus and can no longer regain it, not as I'd originally wished or intended. Good thing this is a blog and I can do shit like that, though. HEY! I have fine print!

Maybe the above has to do with spectacle. In most of the fights I've been in, there seemed to have been an engaged audience. They egged us on as we punched and kicked each other over something supercilious, hooting and hollering in the playground for apple juice-laced blood, it seemed.

I'm actually not all too sure of the point. We as a society just seem to relish the suffering of people, to a degree, which is a little fucking terrible. And cinema is a vicarious experience; we mouth the words and roll our shoulders and sit forward, because we want it so bad: the gun powder to ignite and propel the bullet down the barrel; the couple to fight wittily (when does that ever happen? Genuine fights among couples are about repetition, repeating the same hurtful message repeatedly so it'll sink in and subsume whoever the intended target is. Fuck charming yet sharp banter in elevated tones.); for the character to wade through the rapidly thinning waters of his own sanity so he may become whole again by the edge of the river bank or waterfall or whathaveyou. We want the ending as much as any part. We want the corpse as much as we want the newborn baby, the sun's explosion as much as the very first bright light.

We want to become martyrs so we may be saints. We want to be damned so we may be redeemed. Well, I haven't seen the clouds open up once yet.

It probably has something to do with our values, but that's a rant for another day.

Money Money Money

2009-11-10T15:25:00.005-05:00

Whoever said it isn't everything is a fucking doofus who either never had any or was so disconnected from social norms of behavior - because of extended poverty and the impolite inability to tip the waiter - that he just said dumb shit like this willy-nilly. (In this way, our beliefs conform to our standard of living; so basically, Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs was a dick because he was a poor shit whose only other option was grand larceny in confederation with a gang of other colorful poor doofus-dicks.)

I used to believe in happiness' dependence upon immaterial conditions, like compassion, empathy, charity, poetry and other people: bullshit.

If anything, only other people and vast sums of money can make us happy. But those other people have to be less or equally as poor as you or I.

(There are exceptions to every rule and this is no different: Your family can be as poor as you, but their ability to make you happy varies person to person; how unhappy they can make you is still pretty fucking astounding, until you realize they're human and what can you do, until you realize all parents have an inherent parental responsibility and some actions are inexcusable, but then you realize, "fuck, you're old enough, right? the parentals don't even factor into my shit", but you just used the non-word "parentals", until your brain becomes as jumbled as this sentence and by the end you're battling with yourself and you can't even see the whites of your own eyes. Maybe life's just a string of "untils", until nothing.)

***

I don't actually believe any of the above. I'm actually pretty content (an arguable position of human state, as it connotes a languor, but I like a little languor in my step), but I occasionally have tragically tyrannical mental spats like the one above that last a few minutes and completely intoxicate me: I believe nothing else of fate and future for those few fractious minutes. These spats or spikes or drops or troughs, whathaveyou, are elicited by my present economic situation, which is generally on the low side but I do a damn good job of drawing a median between that situation and my contentment; I keep the vicissitudes of my life generally isolated from the caprice of the chemicals swishing about the gray matter up-top.

But I have to declare a major soon and while that is unquestionable - English - as I have basically no other marketable skills, it still makes me wonder how the fuck I can expect myself to do anything differently than my poor parents. Their traditional Polish immigrant careers - a cleaning lady and a carpenter - are so far from my prospective own - a writer of some sort, hopefully - and yet I feel like my destiny is unequivocally fucked on the basis of blood and upbringing alone.

I'm nothing like my parents (listing the differences would be indulgent and no one knows the three of us well enough to draw a conclusion for me, so that statement will remain a tad nebulous and perhaps even historically incorrect for everyone including myself, but bear with me) and yet their quicksand looks an awful lot like mine. Not to mention that I'm probably going to get cancer just because that's what happens. And so on.

I dislike the phrase "Only the Good Die Young." It's a little unfair to those people who are on the fence, y'know, the well-meaning assholes who don't particularly enjoy being happy at another person's expense but occasionally say or do uncharacteristically dumb shit that jeopardizes their personality profile's sanctity. I think I'm one of these people simply because I care so little about so much so often that it becomes an unattractive character trait; my allele's couldn't give two shits what you, Mr. or Mrs. Facebook Status Update, had for breakfast. Or what you like, because you appear to like everything indiscriminately.

We after all only have one life, and if a third of it is wasted sleeping already, how dare you consume more of it with your bullshit non-musings?

If we spend a third sleeping, what of the other two-thirds? A third working and a third playing, perhaps? Can't be. No one would get anything done, no one would have any fun, and we'd all be fucking poor.

No Post

2009-11-06T23:29:00.002-05:00

No Post tonight on account of supreme busy-ness. I'm moving from Brooklyn to Queens this week, so expect a poem about that. Wait for it.

Vampires - One Dude's Opinion

2009-10-28T18:15:00.018-04:00

As I'm typing, I'm actually watching the Wendy Williams show (it was not my volition that changed the channel to this talk-show pittance, but my mother's), where Wendy is talking about another new vampire novel series co-written by two fat lesbians or something, I don't really care. (As a host, Wendy Williams is better than most, I'd say, at least better than the miserable Tyra Banks, who is a moron.)

I'm tired of vampires. I've only read the Twilight series, but I think my feelings are an unconscious response to all the bullshit I vaguely recall: countless web links to vampire memorabilia; vampire underpants, with adorably suggestive wooden stakes; the aforementioned flood of mawkishly craptastic vampire literature (which my sister has read and had the time to digest and can only say this about the entire experience: *fart sound*), The Vampire Diaries (which my sister says is terrible), JPEGs of carefully thought-out tables weighing the virtues of one fictional vampire over another (Angel will always be #1, the rest can suck a cross), and easily the classiest offender, a Vampire-teeth Fleshlight.

A Fleshlight is a flashlight-shaped tube with a latex-rubberish front piece that can be swapped out with various shapes, which are so far limited to mouths, vaginas, assholes, and a, what I'd imagine to be wildly erotic, amorphous slit. They've introduced a mold that looks like a vampire's mouth, teeth and all. You stick your cock into this tube.

This all makes sense because us guys like sharp canines so near and dear to probably the only thing we'd risk our lives to protect, next to family and some friends (the order of priority probably varies greatly man-to-man, but the penis is doubtlessly close to the top). Obviously, we've learned nothing from Lorena Bobbitt.

Granted, there is a lot of good vampire-related material out there: True Blood, Angel, Interview with a Vampire (I'm not actually sure about this one, but I've heard more good things than bad and I need something to pad the list), whathaveyou. You, reader and emo-vampire fanatic, probably, know more than I on this. But the basic point is that, at least for the first two examples, it takes good direction and writing to create good, tolerable vampires. I doubt True Blood would be as good without Alan Ball at the helm (though the end of Season 2 did peter a bit, to which I'd recommend Mr. Ball take the Dexter route and just ignore the original literature the series is based on; Mary Ann was my least favorite plot-line and character ever, of any series). Angel and its eponymous vampire with a soul would not have succeeded its parent series, Buffy, in popularity and awesomeness, if not for Joss Whedon.

Which brings us to this article, which seeks to explain the unusual romantic leanings of women towards vampires, as well as delineating the reasons men watch True Blood, which seems to boil down to the chance of seeing some tits and the biological male need to protect his brood. Enter vampire, who only in death can protect his family. Sounds like a snappy life insurance slogan, eh? His arguments make sense, though I hardly think men are disposable. If that were true, what of the plethora of emotionally-displaced sons with daddy issues? If we were so disposable, there would be no such thing as patriarchal abandonment; it would be a non-issue. Sons and daughters need fathers as much as they need mothers, socially and biologically speaking. Maybe I'm just progressive that way, but I believe in equal division of labor.

Personally, I watched True Blood because I thought it was interesting; at no point did I think in the event my family is put in harm's way, that I would superhumanly sprint towards the villain and rip his throat out, or turn into a bull and impale the motherfucker with my horn. Besides, there are only two interesting vampires on that fucking show, Eric and Godric, of which one has already passed on to wherever vampires go when they die again. And my all-time favorite character, Renee, died last season. He was a racist human character who up until that point was a seeming supporter of vampire rights. You know why he's my favorite character? He acted a better "wolf in sheep's clothing" than any vampire could, despite vampires being designed for such same purposes.

As to the point of why panties get wet at the sight of pale skin, I blame the other mythical creatures for their lameness. The competition isn't exactly fierce; just look at the pool of competitors: zombies and mummies. Their not exactly alive with personality; they're very single-minded and monosyllabic. Vampires are the most human-like of the bunch, and they're not exactly dead either. They can evidently become doctors and learn the piano, compose songs, and they travel in packs! Everybody likes a socialite, as opposed to zombies, who are like nonverbal guests at a college-hosted party, where everyone knows the point but no one readily addresses it in any communal form, and mummies, which are complete shit as a scary monster. They're shit-hideous, but that makes them no scarier than most homeless. They can even be sort of handsome, in an Egyptian sort of way, once they've sought you out and consumed your organs, that is.

Most of all, I blame tweens. The teenage girls who buy into this bullshit and, when they see Robert Pattinson in the streets, they yell Edward's name. That, if a different actor were chosen for the role, would swoon like inflated cretins all the same. This is the same type of bitch you'd see on "My Super Sweet 16". I'm not even talking about the over-rich simpleton with unlimited wants, I'm talking about their desperate friends that need to go to the "party of the century." These people cry when they don't get what they want. Why? Because they're shameless children. Sometimes, I wish these fuckers were born like Benjamin Button, time-riddled crones with the time to grow, as opposed to over-indulged teenagers with room to grow.

Baby Einsteins - Not So Much

2009-10-24T14:07:00.003-04:00

Fellow blogger, Simona, recommended to me an interesting article about an old and apparently well-known product - new to me - that is intended to brighten up the dwindling landscape of precocious American youth one baby at a time. You've heard of these things before, surely, the gravid mother holding a pair of Bose headphones to her distended midsection, pumping Ave Maria or the latest luminary's autobiographical audiobook in the hope that their kid won't come out average, like the rest of us. It's not the same scenario - the early-development theory deals with prenatal development while Baby Einstein traffics infantile improvement - but the undergirding cretinism is of the same soul.

I'm not big on this belief. I believe in aliens more than I believe in this hustle-job. I'm sure there's evidence to support it, but that's just McCarthyism. Bollocks to the lot of it.

The Wikipedia article says that "for each hour-per-day spent watching baby DVDs/videos, infants understood on average six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them" (University of Washington), which just seems stupid to me. How do you gauge understanding in infants? It seems a lot like gauging verbal understanding in dogs (which have the equivalent capacity as a two-year-old infant, studies show), who, by all accounts, are limited to the sounds of their names and a handful of other self-serving words (food toy sit stand dead etc.).

Baby Einstein, for babies aged 3months-3years, it seems is more likely to be used to parent and coddle along the development of parental absenteeism than accident prone and absent-minded infants. It's like that scene in Four Rooms when Antonio Banderas' kids are sat in front of the tv while mommy and daddy go to a party, their only supervision being the black&white television, a yet unfound dead hooker in the hotel mattress, and Banderas' stern warning to the children to not "misbehave." It's likely a scene in the lives of many, sans the dead hooker and black&white television (we've grown up since then, color televisions and all that hi-def shiznet).

Anyway, on to the thing that stuck out to me from the article and not the schlock it summarizes:

The videos — simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.

"Not many words"?

Then what, pray tell, is the fucking issue? Why does "49%" of America believe that this idiotic, decade-old product will make their unremarkable child smarter, when the same percentage of people hasn't yet agreed upon a President in my lifetime. How many years did it take Bush to drop to his career-low (around 22%, I believe)? Not fast enough, I'd say.

8 years led by The Decider, a stuttering monkey; maybe he should have watched a Baby Einstein video.

Wanton Tardiness Will NOT Be Tolerated

2009-10-23T23:48:00.017-04:00

It's 11:53 and I feel like I should have posted something by now. I did earlier in the week, but I feel like more is necessary. More is better and less is never enough (but that's just logic). MOAR I SEZ!

I'd write something up now - a intriguing treatment on baby Mozarts and prepubescent pedants and eggheads straight out of the womb, bursting out of damp canals with a predilection for poetry - but I'm lazy and tired and want to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Tomorrow is another day.

Temperature

2009-10-19T15:02:00.004-04:00

Temperature

What is the temperature of

difficult writing? does it pace

like episodic heartbeats

(climbing like mercurial mountain

sherpas, sinking like the shy in

their seats - all of whose hearts

lapse latently, that is with a

vibrato of caution)

or does the first paragraph

climax, and the rest plod

(cold like clods of earth); should the words

flow like blood, or is that septicemia?

Is it difficult for lack of love

of words

or is piecing together ponderings

a feat for the weary?

Overdue Review: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

2009-10-12T12:17:00.010-04:00

Welcome to the first Overdue Review, a segment dedicated to reviewing old stuff that I'm just getting around to, in the hope that you'll take my word for it, whatever it is.

My first victim is American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis. Before I go on, I should let you know that I read it in one go in about six hours. I achieved this feat (the book is 399 pages) by skipping huge portions, or what could be considered a cumulative large portion. I hit on every single page and skimmed it -- because let's face, it's mostly all bullshit. I diligently read through the first 120 pages in about 2 1/2 hours, reading every word (read: prominent clothing label). I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I consider myself a slow reader. Anyway, I could barely stand that serving, so I wasn't going to endure two more helpings. Admittedly, the clothing labels lose ground to manic violence and madness towards the end, but that didn't stop my skimming. I skimmed and waited for the juicy parts. I think I hit every major violent murder and cannibalization in the book (hard to miss), as well as most of the funnier bits, like when Bateman blatantly threatens a person or explicitly announces his horrific hobby, only to find out they didn't hear him for one reason or another.

I don't think I lost anything by this method; I think this is the core of my issue with the book, that I feel like I lost nothing by reading only half of it.

I also don't have anything that I truly love about it. I don't particularly care for Ellis's style--it's indistinct; I don't particularly care for the many, many, MANY descriptions of people's clothes: we get it, everyone looks the same. While this is a effective tool for concretizing a key moment in the novel--when Bateman confesses to his lawyer, only to find out later that the lawyer, along with everyone else, mistakes Bateman for someone else--the reading experience was tantamount to trudging through mud. It would be insufficient for me to suggest that Ellis do less of it, because that would still have been too much and I would harp on about it anyway. I don't care for all the fucking, either. I admire Ellis' respect for detail, but I think the film version did a better job of establishing the personality base for this base character. Sure, I loathed Bateman more while reading the book than I did watching the movie, but that's only because the sum total of gallons of blood spilt seems greater in the book. The inordinate violence and sexual excess are two sides of the same token, so it's understandable that they'd be equal in their descriptiveness, but the experience still left me feeling dirtier than an outsize street rat rummaging through the uterus of a whore.

With all that said, I think people should read this to understand the descriptive power of language, and that it can make modern American rating systems for film, video games, etc. seem irrelevant. The difference between a PG-13 and R rating in this country for films can be a single use of the f-word or no cursing at all but the on-screen presence of a woman's nipple. Yet any kid could pick this book up at a bookstore and mindfuck himself for life after a few pages of the right chapter (any one of the "Girls" chapters). I'm sure there's something in place somewhere in America to prevent minors from accessing crazy shit like this, but I'm just as sure that it's broken.

Australia wraps its crazy literature in cellophane, but that's just silly.

Tempus Fugit (or Carpe Diem)

2009-10-11T01:00:00.003-04:00

For a brief moment, I hate myself when I write a poem that's just words and images. The purpose is, yes, to infect the mind with something beautiful and let it spread to the world through a cough of words from one to another. It's the spread of ideas, metaphorized as germs, see. When you read a poem of mine, it's like I'm open-mouth coughing in your face. Cooties of inspiration. But it feels even better to have been coughed on and let the virus take over, and let the fever of words come as they wish. I say fuck the Tylonel Cold and write.

It's so hard to imbue meaning or a message into a poem and make it seem effortless. I think I succeeded.

Please comment.

Tempus Fugit (or Carpe Diem)

Time has made a flock of my memories,

the hands ticking like feathers floating

slowly and the hours minutes seconds

all bunched up; the day and date is out

in the periphery somewhere between two

& four, I think (time has pecked the numbers -

all that remains are little silver squares

like pixelated stars). Time is three, I think.

***

An uncertain little snipe abides

the pecking order for the bread,

and after the long wait, he goes

jabbing like swift seconds

until the minutes, with hard crusty edges, stop

in the throat with authority,

and for a moment, it's an hour

of scary airlessness, and a next moment's

passing is death.

A coterie of winged idiots waddle

happily puzzled at this godly dowry

of crumbrich goodness, before one's

eye flits to nothing really, just stupid

really, like maybe he remembered

and then forgot everything entirely

like a bird, and is so dumbly

unleavened like matzo in the street

by a Goodyear tire.

One bird, the one that's been wary of bread

(and is grayer, fuzzier, mired for it),

finds again the idea connected at his shoulders

and seeks safety. It nests in the tree like a clock

with browning leaves not caring for

clockwise, its forked feet perched

on a nail in the thin dry wall

(someone forgot to knock knock

and wait for the solid thud before

beating clack clack on the nailhead).

That bird, sand in its hourglass eyes,

leaves and another steals a few moments,

seeing the contentment of the last. But

the branch is ossified and crisp like fresh

baked memories, the kind that have never seen

rain. It snaps as if his feet grasped too

greedily; flap flap away.

Shoveling Sunlight

2009-10-11T00:08:00.003-04:00

A short poem for y'all. Tell me what you think. With comments and criticism, I would like to expand it--there's so much to be done with the image; or perhaps just leave it, in all its ethereality.

Shoveling Sunlight

There is a garden patch

behind the house belonging

to my neighbor, a lady

who fancied burying the whole

of the solar system in the ground

with red dwarf roses and white

lily stars circling sunflowers,

grown from when, supposedly,

she shoveled dirt over the sunlight.

Words are Crazy... "Soul"

2009-10-07T19:01:00.007-04:00

I've always found the fact that there exist words for unfounded abstractions interesting. For one thing, "soul." As in the immortal disembodied spirit of your being. We, as a society, have agreed upon something. An answer to a broad question of human origin and present - what makes you you and me me? We know what a soul is, like we know what a carrot is, despite never having touched or seen one. When kids used to sell their souls, they had to sign a piece of paper, like Peewee Lawyers. I still remember the Simpsons episode where Millhouse eats that very piece of paper, once Bart's. "I hereby bequeath my soul to one yada yada... Enjoy and Good Riddance." The best we can do with a word like "soul" is be romantic, yet it exists.

Taking that, realize that there exist words, in the English language at least, for abstract concepts that... "ensoul" means to endow with a soul. How do you explain that without resorting to religious examples (I'm not the most well-versed atheist, so please fill me in if there are biblical characters that once lacked souls but were then given one) or "Angel", the TV series?

Shit like that amazes me.

Lassie vs. Toto

2009-10-06T21:09:00.016-04:00

Dogs. They're man's best friend. They're cute, cuddly, and once provided medieval kings and queens with warmth on cold winter nights when the castle's central heating was busy not-existing. But there is one trait not commonly associated with the canine: battle-savvy (unless you're a bad sort). From birth, they are showered with milk and love. Sour milk and demeaning, demeaning love. Unfitting of an animal with such beastly potential (You wouldn't mollycoddle Grendel, would you?). Dogs grow like Spartans grow, with coats of fur before hardly a half-year's age, and chains of steel around their necks to keep their maws from devouring a friend (though Spartans used them to keep their awesome capes linked, y'know, like in "300"). And unlike pussy vampires who have to die to earn their "ferocity", a puppy can snap a bone with its teeth before a baby of equivalent age can realize it just made a mistake in its diaper. A dog will make a mistake at your feet and expect that you dutifully palm it and toss it. They're feral, emotionally ambiguous creatures that expect--nay, desire--no less than cautionary behavior from humans, and a treat. This is why I am inherently suspicious of any dog that acts like a new mother, nuzzling next to loved ones and whimpering simply at the joys of life.

This brings us to Lassie and Toto, two pups with perhaps the most suspicious alibis for their inbred complacency of the human race. Lassie, famous for the heroics portrayed in her daily daytime documentaries, was a rough collie, a breed of dog known for its thick suit of hair and love of baby flesh. However, rather than eat the chiclet-sized Timmy Martin (or poor Jeff Miller before that) like her species was born to do, Lassie saved the danger-magnet each and every time he failed to commit suicide by jumping down the local watering hole. I'm still puzzled as to how Timmy's legs weren't jelly after a season of the same shit.

Then there's Toto, the only nonverbal animal in a world where a 6-foot can of WD-40 has an opinion but no physical heart, a hay-filled Halloween ornament belabors a lack of IQ, and a fucking lion hangs out with a small girl and her furry appetizer instead of devouring them and killing the other ludicrous creatures of Oz. (I don't think the flying monkeys talked either, but that may just have been deference to the Wicked Witch. Seriously. They gave J.K. Rowling a hard time about witchcraft in literature, but they blatantly encourage this shit every Thanksgiving. Doesn't anyone else see LSD's hand in its production? No? Okay then.) I feel I may be slighting the poor pooch. He may be the smallest of the herd, but he did survive being flung by a tornado into another dimension, right? FALSE. Oz was a dream sequence. Toto is bullshit. Lassie eats Toto for obvious reasons. End of story.

Shout out to P for the idea.

The Paper Drumhead

2009-10-04T18:14:00.008-04:00

No. 2 hands bang on paper-

topped bongos and produce

thumps like babies crying dryly--

It's raspy when heard through a baby

monitor across the hall (like gossip flowing

between stuck teeth)--

but sometimes the hands hit sharply and

pierce the drumhead.

It's like that game

where you flick the middle of the straw paper

till it can't walk anymore

to find out the first letter of the first name

of your destined lover, except more

musical and climactic.

It's college-ruled, the paper drumhead.

-----

This isn't really my style of poetry, but I felt I needed to do something. Expect a different version in time.

Poet Pending...

2009-10-04T00:20:00.008-04:00

FIRST!

I read somewhere that setting goals for yourself is a good idea. Taking an idea from a friend's blog, I've decided to do Post Phriday, because let's face it (talking to myself here), I will doubtlessly stop posting without a goal or impetus in like a week's time. So by the end of every Friday, Eastern Time, something WILL be posted, or babies be damned.

I like words because you can control them, like dough. You can press them and prod them, like dough. You can knead them into shape, like dough. You can digest them and shit them out somewhere else, like dough. They may not look the same afterward, but the basic ingredients are still there (pizza [+] bagels poetry conversations arguments etc). I want someone to one day pay me for my shit, each and every bowel movement, so let’s get this party started.

Hopefully this thing will net me a job and then, when the back of my ears are dry, a career.

I'm a poet but expect just about any type of writing you can imagine and by all means shout out ideas for future posts. A blog of the people, for the people, by me. No holds barred shit, ya 'eard?