Morning smells of everything we thought to ask for. We turn over and breathe it each away from the other in the smallest tactful winds. The sun has beaten us up again, but it’s Sunday and we know nothing demands us except the newspaper hefted up to the stoop. I empty what night left me [...]
I write a lot into the Twitter text box. The I edit, select, cut, cut again, print out, cut up, lay about, arrange, rearrange, randomize, assemble, and reassemble the thought shards in to longer pieces, for reading out and collecting into a pocket book I’m working on, tentatively called Notes to Nothing. These are edited [...]
CrossTalk
CLICK HERE FOR AUDIO An abrupt abutment of wide earth and broad air is a line that draws him without end to the boundary of wide earth and broad air. He plows a square on the plain without end to the boundary, the bent hedgepost by the sun. He plows a square on the plain [...]
I question the reach of your eyes in front of the man who shaped no lean sliver of who you are across from me right now looking past me in your wriggled chair and as for an answer you bang your glass hard down at the table almost slam it really splat on the newspaper [...]
Tagged thought shardsSeveral pieces on pith… are published in a book of poems by joesmith. Really. Click the button and buy it if you like. Thank you.
These poems are from Vasko Popa’s “Games” cycle of 13 poems, translated by Charles Simic, published in Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems. If you buy only 1 book of poetry your whole life, you couldn’t choose a better one. Popa is an all-too-little known maestro of the powerful poetic parable and Simic is [...]
There are icons to shatter here. Does anyone remember when meaning was meaningful? People are not stupid. “We no longer have anything to hide in this integral reality that envelops us.” They are oblivious. I am of two or more minds. You can’t feel up unless you get down. Suicide is a state of mind. [...]
There are no camels in this combo crèche, formed in Singapore, assembled in Malaysia. The pieces, each in its place, dominate the living room, diverting our path to where we cleanse and empty and keep my store-bought teeth, neither sneer nor smile in their snap-tight cup. The lone cow’s head is broken, decapitated last season, [...]
THE SIRENS These are the seductive voices of the night: the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to say they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful. – Franz [...]
anyone famous or important enough to land him a job or sufficiently elegant to bequeath him some grace, the names of his favorite quivering trees, the distance from earth to moon or sun to earth, where he last put his keys or where he would go if he could, how many ounces in a pound [...]
The soap opera organ announces what we can hardly bear to hear. A metal-aproned matron summons the skin ribbon she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500, circa 1969. Her tremolo is a casual torture. We mistake her voice for a choir of a thousand muffled mothers and wobble dutifully in to an Easter [...]
“In the Virtual is the ultimate predator & plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent.” -Jean Baudrillard The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images)
“Reality, having lost its natural predators, is growing like a proliferating species.” -Jean Baudrillard The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images)
Tagged Nihil De NadaI save the spaces. No, I’m no bent surveyor with a three-legged stare bent on destiny, unsettled by innominate expanses, undone by an absence of fences, parsing the plenty. We know how that was manifest. I’ve never been enamoured of wrought geometries and plaid is a bad parody of place. I save only the spaces: [...]
Tagged poetryWhen the planets turned ready in slow-time abeyance for a rendition of lives to clash, maybe Cherokee man or colonial long hunter, maybe English renegade, or would-be farmer plunging his hands in black dirt to tease out a weed’s root system, or maybe highland warrior who puts his tired head to his suffering wife’s breast [...]
Tagged Jenny Benjamin-Smith, poetryStrip malls give way to strip clubs One hundred fifty miles grind Alongside mammoth motor homes The land is changing She is more voluptuous Her sins secreted While in dusty towns Proud old resentments Bolted to bricks shout “Get us out of the United Nations!” Greasy truck-stop trading posts Stand between bands of green Separating [...]
Tagged Kathleen Eull, poetryHere in the town of the common and the good, only the flashes reach us. There’s no thunder rumble, no sound to savor, no low music to score the out-of-favor soul. No, first it’s the din, carried air away east, then the bright, the flight of sand as light, breaking in waves on main street [...]
Tagged joesmith, poetryAlert as the light that changes color with the weather atop the building some mistake as electric, we’re mingling our blood and juices without the dolor that ought accompany a great big age of disease. We are lovely here and welcome the change we bring to each brown room. In the phone booth, we tear [...]
Tagged poetry