Wednesday, October 31, 2012

muddy shoes


It’s kind of like when, after it rains, you, the very, very bright you, for some reason, decides to take a short cut across a field of grass. You may question whether it’s dry but do it anyway.  This feeling…it’s like that 7th step in that field when you realize that it is indeed still very, very wet.  Your feet sink in and squish. The corners of your pinky toes smoosh against the mud that’s oozing in through the side of your canvas sneakers.

Across the field minutes later, shoes heavy, perhaps even pant legs now dragging behind you and scraping the sidewalk with each sodden stride. Yeah, it’s kind of like that…that sting in your cheeks when you realize, 10 minutes later, that somewhere after that soggy foray into the grass a piece of toilet paper found your sticky sole and has been a quiet hitchhiker below, causing no fuss, only accumulating dirt and tiny pebbles into the clumps of poo-colored dirt already dried like ugly, lumpy doughnuts around the base of your lower half.

So then, really, you’ve got to know that your whole day is fucked. 

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Lassi Lassie


(This is part of a chapter of a short story in the works...still untitled)



The Indian was apparent in Shilo. Her eyes were too mysterious – too pained and possessed- too buried under generations of shape shifting and dilapidated dwellings to not be of Remy’s.

He knew nothing of her birth. What a travesty…to ignite the fire of life but remain ignorant of your match’ s potency.

Penelope and Remy had met at a bar with sodden floorboards, or at a jazz show with a slumping trumpet player, or on a walk around town when the streetlights blurred and melted into the cascading sunset. He was around for one night only, unattached to anybody and anything beside his fraying knapsack. Within moments of their meeting he felt a savage impulse to press himself into the soft folds of Penelope’s ivory flesh.  She was indefinable; a foreign dove to him. He, a harrowing stranger with formidable shoulders and thick, coal black eyebrows. 

He brushed his fingers across her whiteness while she drank his shadows and like the miraculous explosion in space between matter and dark matter, a life sprung from it’s recessed cubby into this realm of the living. 

Monday, October 8, 2012

reflections


Lyn Hejinian writes “But is it, the self, a person?”.

In response, I write:
Is this entity, to which we refer numerous times a day, probably every day of the week, an actual being? Is it more than the abstracted concept that we associate it with?  Considering how much attention the average self-aware individual pays to this self, it should have by now amassed such strength to form a unique, delineated personality and ought to warrant a more befitting description than what is generally ascribed.

Is the self a person?
If so, is it a person beyond our person? 
Is it removed, physically, from this vessel that we name our body? 

“And is art…the work of a self?” Another of Hejinian’s.  
I ask, can the self be so acutely and independently developed that it is capable of creating art?  I wonder what this says for the organism identified as “me”; that which we consider our original…could that self be simultaneously responsible for creating art? 

She states:
“Description…bounds a person’s life”

I question:
Without the boundaries we associate with our original self - i.e. physical bodies, mental capacities, and obedience to natural laws– could we recognize the boundaries of the existential self without full and compete understanding the former's parameters? 
We must know where one ends in order to make out the burgeoning outlines of the other.


epitaph of the elusive

Broke the spell
With the unwrapping of small square
Slippery plastic:
A reminder of freedom

Liberation from the wretched retching
A swift movement towards closed

After which, the only thing oppressive:
The sweat
on the back
of the neck

:

The nearness of a traveled, intimate face

Unraveled the rabble
Of mock-minded messengers
Who had set up their bivouac
in the back
of the neck

Stared dauntless and excited
At the withstanding wisps of loyalty
As they fell in sparkling twists
from the back
of the neck