Hitting My Stride

Sonnet #50

I like to beat people up
absence of passion, principles, love. She murmurs
What just popped into my eye was a friend's umbrella
and if you come and pinch me now
as I go out for coffee
...as I was saying winter of 18 lumps
Days produce life locations to banish 7 up
Nomads, my babies, where are you? Life's
My dream which is gunfire in my poem
Orange cavities of dreams stir inside "The Poems"
Whatever is going to happen is already happening
Some people prefer "the interior monologue"
I like to beat people up


-Ted Berrigan

The first one is always the best one.

poem #2, Super Free Shipping

The deal of a century was made
a half an hour ago.
The tables were turned in opposing
directions like a clockwork, a line dance?
I was there to see it all but
lost my lunch to the thief brigade.

How fast was that seagull? Rather, how fast
was the wind it coasted? She once told me
that intro to cell biology
drastically weakens your emotional
fortitude. In practice this, however,
is dramatically true.

Ending on a footnote he stepped
over the door sill into surprising
grass, the softness of which turned
his body into a blossoming ant hill.

some new photos, i.e. be bored killing time

This is a bug I just found haunting the surface of my desk. Curious to find out what type of bug it was, I looked online only to find out that two other people had the same question and asked the website whatsthatbug dot com. Its a Wester conifer seed bug. Very harmless. However I stilled showed it the front door.

Click the picture. It's like snickers for your brain.

the world is shrinking everyone is getting smaller

Is alone-ness a bad thing or has it only been portrayed so by popular culture? I know for myself being alone is a large part of my character. The more I'm around people the harder it becomes for me, so hard in fact that I tend to actively avoid it. And I have many friends who are exactly the opposite, who crave the social atmosphere to the point that this craving is a large part of their personality. Some days though I have visions, maybe more like fantasies, of myself surrounded by other people, and I'm confounded with conversation; everyone is talking very rapidly and I'm right in there with them, mixin it up.

Just saw The Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's new documentary on his activism on global warming. The news is shocking and his presentation has really affected me. A quote from Winston Churchill:

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing, and baffling expedience of delays is coming to a close. In its place, we are coming to a period of consequences." (italics inserted)

scary isn't it...

Poem #1

Red is an obvious accessory to any worthwhile suburban scene. She said once that lawn ornaments are practically equal to works of art. I said my Civic is better than your Corolla, so there. One step down, into the lawn, looking back at bricks as if touching them, the damp of rain that had just fallen. Ideas are invisible like cars in blockbuster movies and fish below the water’s surface. I was invisible for a day in January; they all thought it was neat how I moved her hair back like a brush of wind.

A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple-though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does.

-Lyn Hejinian (From My Life)

Bjork - Pagan Poetry

Picked up a Bonnie 'Prince' Billy album today, called The Letting Go. Just begun to listen to the track and I like "love comes to me" and "cursed sleep". Been fascinated with this guy for a while. When I first hurd him it was through a friend Thom who threw me a mix tape. I then got his album Ease Down the Road nad fell in love with his lyrics instantly. "Rich Wife Full of Happiness" and the title track are some good tunes from the album. This new one so far seems promising. I was a little off-put by his Master and Everyone LP but i rolled with the punches. I suppose this is what every good artist must do, ie change and rearrange. It wasn't a while after I heard Will Oldham from Thom that I realized he was in one of my favorite movies when I was growing up, Matewon, a film directed by John Sayles, which among many things, tackled the ideas of community, family, and race, (all big things for sayles) in the context of labor riot in a West Virginian coal mining town. His role in the movie was that of a young, up-and-coming, preacher who happens to be I think the most radiant character of the movie, save Chris Cooper's union rabble-rouser(sic). Oldham had been in other movies as well, a cameo in Junebug, an endearing movie in itself, as well as his first starring feature, Old Joy, which I have yet to see. He is an intriguing person who is impossible to fully grasp in his lyrics. I keep coming back to his songs because they leave so much open and everything is honest.

stop motion drum and piano

pretty cool i thought

I think Im Smitten

poem i like

Autobiographia Literaria


When I was child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!


-Frank O'Hara

ONLY IN INDIA

this is watsup... the worst traffic you could say... but see how the traffic keeps moving without an accident. Santosh krishna Murthy

News

Whenever I read about political unrest and brawls in Congress I kinda wish our country was like that. Only kinda though.

The more I think about Sasha Baron Cohen's movie Borat the more I become ambivalent about its major themes. It seems kind of crass to create a character who is based on stereotypes of third world countries. I did laugh in the theater like everyone else but later on I've been feeling an inscrutable guilt. These real life people, American citizens, were lampooned at their own expense. It seems that the premise of the movie was too easy, that it was too easy to make fun of these people and to not delve into their more dynamic qualities. Everyone went home after the Southern dinner party scene to live their lives with the same vigor and compulsion that we all do. We laugh at them but we cant laugh at ourselves.

bride of quietness

But must write the words needed
to describe the angles of your face
the curvilinear spaces and to do this
seems so very important and natural.

I tend to misinterpret song lyrics
so bear with me but your face is
so I don't know song-like? like
skein of seagulls? Have you seen

seagulls when the coast on ocean
winds? We've already talked bout
this...It's late and the suns still up.

Praise of Idleness

It looks that the future leaders and thinkers of the world are hard at work.

Been reading My Life, Lyn Hejinian's collection of prose poems, which can be considered autobiographical in nature. The gist of it that I so far have gathered is the work is a fragmentary illustration of herself and her personal history interspliced wtih sudden commentary and tangential trains of thought. The work is experimental and was considered avant-garde in its time. The work is dense and rich and it takes a while to read, even though it is only a hundred or so pages. It is seperated into 39 parts i think, presumably to miiror the age she was when she wrote to poem. I dont understand fully what it is im reading but I love it.

Thats how its been for me for a while. Many poems I read I may read only for the sake of its inexplicableness and puzzling quality. Im drawn to what is immediately weird and off-putting, but this doesnt mean I fully appreciated the work. It seems that when I truly understand a poets design it is at that time the i soon forget his/her poetry and move on to something new.

Ahhhhhhh yes....

"Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned enough coal, oil, and natural gas to produce some two hundred and fifty billion metric tons of carbon. The result, as is well known, has been the transformantion of the Earth's atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today--three hundred parts per million--is higher than it has been in six hundred and fifty thousand years, and probably much longer. At the current rate of emission growth, carbon dioxide concentration will top five hundred parts per million--roughly double pre-industrial levels--by the middle of the century. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual global temperature rise of between three and a half to seven degrees Fahrenheit, and this, in turn, will prompt a sting of disasters, including fiercer hurricanes, more deadly droughts, the disappearence of most remaining glaciers, the melting of the Arctic ice cap, and the inundation of many of the worlds major coastal cities." Elizabeth Kolbert from The New Yorker Nov. 20, 2006

Been thinking about the adaptive unconcious and how it directs our decisions in life without any help from our conscious minds. When you think about it we are, to certain degrees, racist, sexist, ageist what have you, and this is only because sterotypes that riddle our culture have nested in our adaptive unconscious and affected, even spawned, erroneous trains of thought. Still investigating the ins and outs of it but for more info read this, contemplate this and this...

SELF HELP

a bird's attitude about the world
everything asthetically pleasing like coffee cups
kitchen appliances and linoleum flooring.

raking the leaves is a lesson in futility
i wanted to burn them in the backyard
but worried about appeasing the wrong gods.

fuck the leaves i know what i'll do
write boring poems about raking leaves
in hopes that other people can contemplate
my frustration.

It is the idea of this blog to let down consciuos barriers in order not to inhibit the act of creation which has been the bane of my existence since I was 14. I hope that if I type fast enough everything will come gracefully and beautifully but if there are some many beautiful things in this world how can I expect to contrubite anything substantial?

ancient mariners hat-trick