confession 1

So, like, he was all, like, How can you be like this, and I was like, Bitch, how can you be like this. Soon as I said that, he walks out and shit, right. Sometimes, like, it feels like I’m not at home even when I’m at home, you know?

fable 1

He flicked another glowing cinder onto the kitchen table and palmed his face. He crossed his heavily pensive arms. The negotiations with the Sea-God and the stevedores failed. He put on his coat and stamped out of the room as his wife said grace even though the dinner grew cold.

story 2

The burglar slipped the coat hanger out of the car window and back into his bag. Receipts littered the floor alongside damp photos with silhouettes of figures taller than the solitary woman that remained. She smiled wide from her glowing face and her eyes were always closed. The burglar reconsidered.

dreams 2

Her blood patted the green stonework of the Tower. She dropped like a wounded raven. Her listlessly pale right arm drags on the wearing balustrade. He set her down by the door before he kicked in the darkened carpentry. The statue of Saint Anne attends to the stolid infant Baptist.

dreams 1

She dreamed of the damp, the green blight that snapped as it fell on the grain that, now, would never breathe the fizz of yeast, neither in the loaf nor in the cask, but he dreamed of the patina on the engagement ring that she left on her lover’s dresser.

science fiction 1

Io. The moon reminds everybody of an old origin. Neapolitans recall their hometowns, and so do Sicilians. The colony remains, tumescent, swollen with newcomers. A murderer was lynched today, though he insisted on immolation, as his grandfathers knew. The settlers joke that they’re the only ones who think they’re home.

fable 2

The sun-god arrived in full regalia, which included his gilded chariot, driven by a train of eagles and lions and oaken wings. In arriving at the Sacred Cavern, he descended with the felicitous grace. The trade union grumbled at his presence, desiring adequate compensation for his obliviously short-sighted immigration policies.

fable 1

His head weighed down with sweat. Flattened. Bothersome. He trekked far. Fathoms by now. The forehead shone blue from the dusk of the plains. His requisition forms loosed his grip. Soiled. Thumbprinted. He retrieved them from the trodden turf. His counsel with the Prophetess must wait while the queue lengthens.

allegory 1

The Empress peered over the bridge. She thought upon the distant pricipalities sworn to her empire. She knew the names of two that lay at one another’s anitpodes. One witnessed the day while the other ate at vespers. In winter, as in all empires, both knew the vastness of nightfall.

aphorism ccc

The strongest traditions break other traditions.

Metaphysical 1

Awoke with the sound of His music today,
I knocked on His door and asked Him to turn it down
Although His neighbors seem to like it and His
Ex-girlfriend was telling me, "Whatever."

distich ix

The pilgrims passed a man about his plow and cart,
And rolled their sight away from plowshares twice as smart.

sijo 4

I sought to view my own passions in the foolishness of
Family. I returned from the festival like a migrant
Tern who is refreshed from futile, ordered flight to other climes.

haiku 5

The harvest draws near,
Invited my tired son-in-law.
He is so foolish.

haiku 4

Niece's miscarriage;
Brought her a cracked tea vessel
When she wept remote.

haiku 3

A gilded coin-piece
Chipped off a flaking blister,
Just greened copper.

haiku 2

Clouds convened above,
Glancing the holy summits.
A cloud's mystery?

haiku 1

A bird bit the core
From out a dropping cherry -
Alas, motherhood!

sijo 3

The shoreline where the twilight of July broiled soft listens,
Unquiet from groans of the expanses breaking yet unbroken,
Flaming, while I search for grass growing in her absent footprint.

tractatus 7

The property whereby multipliers augment their multiplicands, which extends to that of denominators, is like to the manifest of the Godhead - our infinitesimal passions reflect the Beloved's gentility only when observed from collation. One must also note, astute reader, that this selfsame property allows the mind to consider the numbers one employs when counting. One recalls that an ended quantity of cubits describes the dimensions of Noah's Ferry - man's first encounter with Arithmetic. How would God have informed the Sailor of his duties to life on Earth, given the Sailor's due unfamiliarity with numbers? I expect God told the Preserver of arithmetic by saying that a man's elbow to his forefinger measures a length, proceeding that this length remains ended, closed. Then, continuing, that a length adjoined to another can be called 'two' lengths, and so on. A summation parted by a unit is the very essence of counting, and thus the Number is revealed to the Sailor by divinity - that is to say, the aforementioned property. I often think to myself, in admittedly wanting for patent substance, that the Hellenes fell to their geometry first in considering the Temple of the Firmament; that the posture of the Great Bear toward the Lodestar developed Euclid's definition of a line.

sijo 2

The bovine scythes mow down the patient grassland in those days
When winds besiege the infirm clouds and my lake-mannered
Stillness stirs like sailor-weakness, though I sit upon the ground.

tractatus 6

Should the mind of man, so far from that of the Godhead, therefore rest upon his own manners and accustomed platitudes that numbers must presuppose mathematics? Nay! With regard to my own method, I assume the personage of the saint who takes Divinity to his actions and passions; therefrom, I have found the fountain of numbers - entities so ugly to Horatius. Numbers rest immutable amidst the rows of seasons and the implacable cycles and epicycles, though our understanding be recombined with new learnings and enterprises. Neither the Greeks, Romans, nor Hebrews - as are available to my esteem - conceived of zero, in spite of its utility to the sciences.

sijo 1

The cleft-footed mule split a persimmon under the step
That fermented for an entire winter long
When my remorse had left me distraught beyond counsel.

Sonnet V

There was a time I flew like rain, through storms,
And winds, and through the black of lightning, hot
As anything that chaos ever forms
Or ever forged in crucibles of naught
Ere known. Who would invent the bursting cloud?
And who would boil the vanished spring on fire
To parch the fasting members of the crowd,
Instilled with morbid armfuls of desire,
Now torn, now moved, as I am, from my love?
O autocrat, whoever you may be,
Take my fire to your citadel above,
Congeal, hasten hither and disquiet me!
I, a box of epitaphs upon a shelf,
Here plead to you to seize me from myself.

aphorism ccii

Writing is like suicide but sicker.

aphorism cci

The examined life isn't so great either.

tractatus 5

The two principles, those of Piety and Virtue, are seen to extend to algebra. Some insist that the primary foundation of algebra is Aristotelian, the identity that N=N. Independent of all other numbers, many take this truth for the beginning of the numerical science. What folly! Such asserts that if an egg have a crack, and if the egg can remain itself without a crack, that the crack can exist without the egg! The two principles I have delineated more satisfactorily resolve the foundation. The four basic relations of algebra comprise addition, multiplication, exponentiation, and logarithms. These relations comprise a minimum of two numbers, as an opened fruit yields at least two pieces, else the fruit is whole. For logarithms, I shall say that they tell the mathematician how long something may mature given a rate of growth. For exponentiation, I shall say that it makes growth observable. For multiplication, I shall say that it distributes itself among its parts. For addition, I shall say it is simplistic.

Fragment XIII

Kings replace friends as skin replaces scabs.

libretto iv

The Emperor:

No! The emperor deigns not
To bow before the crowd.
The works and days make men to sweat,
Men shan't make the day to leak;
The fever and the influences harm not
Nobles, gold-blooded, thoroughbred.
Without the emperor
They all would burn their meats
To cook the kindling.
Madmen, madmen, madmen!
Who will cure them of their curates?
Not I, no longer, no chance.

distich viii

I bought a fruit gone dark with rot and hung with mold,
A beard to rival that of cardinals, I'm told!

Observations on Correspondence (7)

I've held few correspondences in my life, unsurprising, expected, for I've held few households for great lengths of time, such as the summer I spent before moving to Portugal when my enthusiasm exceeded my stomach, by which I mean that I would forego lunch and breakfast, though only twice, in order to save for the long-distance postage, a distance which has since shrunken, or, rather, a price which has since shrunken, not unlike friend in Haiti whose admiration for the world of letters has diminished for reasons I shall not discuss, not here, not now, not me.

From "An Essay on the Ostracist" (2)

Fragments I and IV exhibit a common trope in poetry of any nation. As with much of Horace and with the first book of the Georgics, the Ostracist pays close attention to the time of year in which the given fragment takes place. Basho preferred oblique glances into the spring and more serious, for Basho, looks at the winter. The Ostracist designed to trap the listener, for it was an oral culture, into the situation. As the archaeologists have agreed, tonsure was seasonal, taking place well within the spring. With a touch of wit, the Ostracist wishes to draw parallels between the sanding of the orchards with the tonsure of the beard, for the former is deemed comical and the latter sanctimonious. Of course, this might simply imply tribal rivalry with another region that had no such ceremony.

libretto iii

Proserpina:

When I had left the birds were winging
Sweet airs, sweet airs,
They left me with a dirge
That I carried underneath.

When the primavernal empress
Leaves for cavernous hours,
The river hardens for his grief
That comes from deep within.

When Proserpina leaves the House of Bounty
And the clouds visit the villagers
They all seek out her tracks.

The dowry of Fall is full paid,
The king of Depth now pines in waiting;
The Duchy of Green is come again!

tractatus 4

Fancy lies below Custom. Any given custom may be unjust or impious, but always another custom, a preceding or foreign custom, balances the scale. The corruption of a monarch is resolved in his progeny. The winter of a kingdom gives way to its spring. Fancy belongs to the sordid individual, the corrupt monarch of one's own life, the base and disarrayed mind. The individual, if you will, is the Fancy engine. The lion may be known by its claw, but the individual's station may not be known without the entirety. To this end, the Divinity in Man, which shall be called the Beloved's Providence, governs the individual.

tractatus 3

As birds sing to one another, as insects fiddle to themselves, the forces of nature discourse. When the Beloved and his testimony are wanting, Custom is maintained. Pindarus believed Custom to reign all; though hardly true, the poet knew that Custom ordains all. He mistakes a Custom to its craftsman, as though a boat educated its shipwright.

tractatus 2

With regards to virtue, one must turn from the Beloved to the Theophile. In the absence of the Beloved, one finds mankind to be the Divinity among the beasts. One must serve the Revelation of the Beloved, but, when the Beloved shrouds himself for deception or for roth, those who once sought the Divinity are to turn towards the Testimony. In the absence of the eldest, fatherhood falls to the next; succeeding the bruise of the sunset, one lives by the light of the crescent. Without the Beloved, the race of Man resorts to himself.

theology iii

God's greatest message is unsaid. Laughter begat Struggle, for Isaac begot Jacob. The child sacrifice learned to laugh but from his mother rather than from the great Father. His two ungrateful sons could not understand to see the man who laughs from the great pleasantry.

tractatus 1

The two great forces in the cosmos comprise virtue and piety; for piety guides man in understanding the world whence he originated. Divinity compels man's perception. The Godhead rewards the mortality seeking the Beloved with creed, aspiration, and love-for-all. For surely, though the Beloved has allowed much evil in the world, he has repaid Man thousandfold for all its goodness. The Seirenes flocked to the barks of Ulixes, but the Mariner understood: the beauty of the voice is fair, but the captain alone responds as the oarsmen deny. The limbs of man must raise toward the Beloved, though his mind be distraught.

Fragment XII

...sweet[ness] from the warm[ly] tumid rind!

aphorism lv

The chasm between war and peace is a narrow wire; the difference lies in whether one starves or bleeds, respectively.

aphorism liv

The hunger of bullets exceeds even ours.

distich vii

Saints pen a word of clemency to those who read
The shrift, though geese prefer their coats to mercy's creed.

Sonnet IV

I took a flying song into my heart
That seized me, shaken, primavernal weather
Shall never vie to loose the light-forged art
Afflicting us, unwarned, to lie together.
Last night I took the air from him who dotes
Upon my smile, which he compared to sections
Of quartered limes, revering forms, like notes,
That touch of symmetry. Upon reflection
Entire nights long, that mendacious strain,
So sick with damp, the hungering mouthfuls clutch,
With avaricious groans, the tightening rein.
The trite deception's hardly worst as such.
The string lies stretched across the span and shakes
When struck by wind that desperation wakes.

octave ii

I steal upon the deluge flooding wide,
There are no folds to oblige the promise-rite.
I take the lodestar for my constant bride.
Though every man would look upon her sight,
In me, and only me, will she confide
Her smoldering will, impassioned, charring bright,
That claws the viscera within. The soul -
That killing flight - will nail me to the pole

octave i

Across the earth whose waving peaks delude,
Those climbers striving upward and ahead
Ignored the quakes, the faults misunderstood.
Marines, by navigation underfed,
Forever discontent with longitude,
Starve for the sight of dusk forever red.
Surpass, my son, the blinkers of the day,
And the irons in the night that bade you stay

libretto ii

The Emperor:

Don't they recall... does nothing come to mind?
Do they discern, do they even blink an eye?
Knowledge, enlightenment, and civilization
Had passed them by like birds for the south.
The townsmen and the hill folk
that cry for confederacy
Have chosen for their progeny
The serfdom of the tooth,
And the law of bones,
And the worship of the morass!
Alas, the empire
Is uncrowned
As the sinews lie slack,
Hung as they are like a side of pork,
Or afflicted with the Gnashing of Teeth!
"Life," say I,
"Cry instead for life!
Betroth Reason!
Understanding!"

libretto i

The Navigator:

We stopped over
And I conversed with a colleague of mine
At Tokyo International.
We both deeply admired the design
To which we compared various monuments
Of our many encounters. Then we shared
Snapshot from the old days,
Gyres of the ocean,
The plains of all continents,
The deserts of Peru,
The rouge of West Africa
That chases the sunset.

theology ii

(from On Quaternarianism)
Assuredly, the notion that God is limited to three persons is absurd! Given the popularity of the belief, popularly known to be truth, unpopularly called Trinitarianism, I propose a counterplan. Perhaps God consists of four persons. Daniel's statue takes four parts, as do most of the beasts in the Son of Patmos. Most of the wisdom of Solomon expresses itself in four-parted statements. Another myth of the trinity I have heard comes from the parerga of St. Patrick; he made use of the native clover to explicate the tripartite nature of the LORD. He might have done better to use a four-leafed plant, which itself is considered fortuitously auspicious.

Biography IV

The theologian, known better in our time than in his own, held the Nietzschean opinion that individualism was the invention of the church; that Christian doctrine had shaped and formed the landscape of the individual appealed to the theologian. In his typical irony, he reveled in the notion that the individual as a concept was invented by the turbulent crowd of mystics. What jollity! What oddity! What verity! I believe, and I am not alone in asserting this, that the comedy of the occasion unfettered the theologian from the Scythian rock. Sometimes, I even believe, though unpopularly, that his sense of farce had more to do with his celibacy than his oaths.

distich vi

Such virtue's bollocks! a truly virtuous colleague would
Cohabit, shelter thee when Judgment's come for good!

distich v

Hail rivergod, ris'n past the knee of my dear lady
Whose comely sock bespeaks a flirty damp and shady.

Sonnet III

A gibbous flare stuck in the drop of glass
In frozen constance, static in the soil.
The bead observed the ruddy dawn to pass
And blinked the years of hours and toil.
The nature's flaw ingrained within the form
Where sinuous blows and marks had fast remained,
Then came the wind again in baneful storm
That dared to wash away its visage stained.
What futile, running, cosmic sustenance!
The fatal Bend may try well as it might.
Now Nature yet unvanquished sees that Chance
Twists everything, all seen or far from sight.
No turbulence nor tempest nor deluge alone
Ever unties the palsy from the stone.

theology i

I give little credence to the notion that heaven promises the stalwart soul pleasance of any species. Scripture impresses us with entering "εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ" hereafter (Μάρκος θʹυεʹ). Paul sees a paradisaical heaven as necessarily uncertain, hardly the paradise one would expect (κορίνθιους β ιβ'δ'). Typology compels the many to believe a world such as that of paradise to greet us having forsaken the blood of Eve. A traveler once told me that he had been navigating the undersides of a massive cavern, the dark underworld populated by boneless creatures whose bodies must then melt into the underfoot. He emerged days later, but having emerged he continued to wander, to treat even the benign miasmas outside as those within, speechless, cautious. He had left the cavern to find but his own blindness; he departed the solitary cavern to encounter the solitude of the village. Just as we cannot know whether we shall enter heaven or not, knowing whether or not we are even in heaven is likewise impossible.

distich iv

The sweaty dripper fans him from humidity
Though he'd dry faster flying from cupidity.

distich iii

Our daily bread give us this day, before
The age of staleness take our lunch, or more.

distich ii

The pilgrims flock to bones and wood, but notice them-
They've stuffed their maws with all except the lotus-stem!

distich i

The ship of missionaries departed from the wharf,
Beneath them they beheld a dark enantiomorph.

aphorism cc

Our animals needn't learn from us.

Fragment XI

chopstick split beef on wooden plates

Fragment X

(lifted the footprint from the earth)

Fragment IX

joints... of wood, rinds, sawdust, fibers...

Fragment VIII

...fronds, toadstools..., sweat, lumps of salt...

Fragment VII

So much depends upon our knots

Fragment VI

Methinks my grasp was the hallucination.

Fragment V

All [things] are transient; pain, hate, virtue...

Lexicography 1

echo-system (n) [ek-o-sis-tem, 1987] The infrastructure arising from phenomena and their environment, without availability of symmetric information, whereby one can observe the environment by means of the phenomena, a trope of Insistentialism.
["Within the echo-system, one learns via one's Narcissism..." (Wattman 1987)]

From "An Essay on the Ostracist" (1)

The pottery shards found in an abandoned well were dubbed by the archaeologists and the popular press "the ostraka" after the Greek, or "the fragments" by others. Given the constitution of the shards, their cross-section, the tinge of the shards suggesting the presence of copper, they are believed to come from the heartland of the forgotten tribes of the island. Certain indentations in the clay have lead many to believe that the tribe had access to early-bronze-age implements, absent among the stone-age peoples that succeeded. Burial sites containing atlatls, however, reveal a resistance to bows and arrows, perhaps explaining the extinction of the culture.

Fragment IV

...erasure-blade fell on the flesh.

Fragment III

Wet knives stuck in the wood.

Fragment II

Mistook her hair in(?) wisps of smoky...

Fragment I

...shucked [a] fresh oyster...by myself...

aphorism liii

Loathe all your neighbors as yourself.

Observations on Doubles (6)

Plutarch noted well n the days of the Greeks and Romans that they live by parallel lives, most famously Cicero and Demosthenes, given in plot line and no more, though separated by centuries, the hour of the glories of Apollodorus and Pseudo-Appolodorus, the grammarian and the librarian respectively, who preceded that familiar Renaissance trope of the twins alike in many respects (too many respects) but different in their souls' moments of delight, cleverly cleft at the womb, those happy two of numerous mishaps in which but one is hapless left for the sake of those polyps known as doubles who do the same job just as well and justly, too, just as Marx judged they would, and the one envies the other, the two having made division of labor and themselves.

Observations on Commensuration (5)

The analytic use of standards and measures, first into midnights, onwards to mid-days, later into first-order diminution and then into second degrees of diminution, renders the wide world canonical ("Long live the sound of the cannon!"), whereby the one-by-one world leads the procession, looking like some Jesuit or some odd denomination of anti-nominalists - Benedict's orders come to mind, speechless, speechless, speechless - surely one of them realizes that the angelus belongs to the people, not to the peal of the bell, the reel on the bell, the brazen-sky bell that rings because the plowshares drop and not the other way around.

Biography III

She explained her affinity for exile as that of the separation between the heart and the mind. She claimed to have found the concept in Ovid's "Tristia", but historians, myself included, have yet to find her meaning. When she had been forced out of Portugal, she detoured to Constanta, in modern day Romania, planning to die in the vicinity of Ovid's final resting place. In the well-known story, she planned to enter the bathtub for forty-seven hours, the same length of time her mother had spent in labor. Her note reads: "I shall leave myself as I have entered it: unclean, unknown, and unwanted" (Wattman 178). Luckily for posterity, the Utilities Authority had called a general strike the week before, stripping the town of running water for a pay rise.

Biography II

In her transition from her works such as "As Observacaoes" (The Observations) to her sonnets, the typical criticism to have emerged since Wattman ascribes the shift to her maturity. Of course, she herself would deny this several times in the interviews and manuscripts that arose after the heyday of Wattman's school of Insistentialism had petered out. But even years before that, lines from her verse play "Taxonomies" exhibit her disdain for the very notion of maturity, claiming: "Maturity results from matters-at-hand, bureaucracy, / And all of the prejudice the rear guard maintains" (Taxonomies III, i, 97-8). Her mind, like her poetry but unlike her prose, wrote en plein air, imposing her memory on the nature around her. In fact, all three of her own personal copies of Wordsworth's "Preludes" (one each for 1799, 1805, and 1850) are ferociously annotated. All the references to what she called "infancy, insouciance and incest" are covered in inkblots.

Sonnet II

I've seen men fashioned from wire, snow, or clay,
And even straw cinched tight, or sheets of tin
That would wave some disintegration in
Like heaven condemned and burned by venomous day.
If men were men instead of messengers,
Who would fain carry but themselves and not
The aimless parcels no one ever sought
Who pour canals upon their passengers,
Then we should both become the greatness that
The firmament we bear possesses by the might
Of its forked lightning. Ever since begat,
Along with her lord Chaos, empress Night
Our parents' courses, swollen, flowing fat,
The lies of paths have well remained in sight.

aphorism li

The lessons of maturity foster hypocrisy.

Observations on Character (5)

I visited therapy as someone else.

Biography I

Of course, the Adjutant was hardly known in the party for his oratory. Rather dismissibly, but by no means meagerly, established his renown among the other members of the various Anarchist faction. The press knew him as the man who, “made advances upon [the Infanta] upon her acquittal from [the Filibuster Affair]” (Conard, 1889). The aristocracy lampooned him as, “that lascivious gamin” (Cleant, 1887). Most memorably, though, he boldly, or foolishly, proposed the unimaginable. Even before the Events of 1895, before the Aphoristic Leaflets and the October Bill, he unfathomably suggested that the national anthem be changed to “La Ravachole”!

Sonnet I

As we were gone to bed in heat, and lost
To care in deeply breathing in and on
Each other, as we left for nights that tossed
Our limbs, impassioned, quartered, racked, and drawn
A catastrophic drowse has rent me from
The sight of you, my beloved Heart!
Another stuns my grasp and stills the drum
That leaves me ravished, only with my part.
But would the Dreamer left me with the rite
So that I might beseech him for the time
To share a vision with my Love, delight
In life-long instants of unchained Sublime,
Until red-handed Dawn awakes me fast
From that which Fate dictates can never last.

aphorism xxx (On Acatalepsy)

I'm convinced that nobody's convinced anymore.

Fifth Fair

Taste you. There is such heat in you, hot, harsh, stark, dark as wine. In your hand! Heard you, darkling. Wind from the turret animates your boughs. Bothering your locks. There you are. Galvanize you; fever you. Embraced the shock from your sinews, oaken at a touch, thrush-passionate. Despaired, for the cold of your midnight, wearily and dessicated yearned for your labyrinth; Longed for your fair, pale, willow-pale, tattooed, supply and tenderly shattered pomegranates. Long for you, for your chest, holding firm only in its mutability. A regard! There! You are us.

Observations on Saturday (4)

I guess I could write about something I observed the other day, that unseasonal day, that still day, still as the day is still long, when I heard those two through the window talking about a work of mine, quite honestly too, because I certainly write about fish too often, but I can’t help it, for fish are so very interesting, though not everybody can enjoy them, Plato for instance, since fish have to see everything underwater through the piss and spawn and spit and tears of all the other animals, and I must remind myself to write less honestly.

aphorism x-xii, xx (The "Baroque" Aphorisms)

(Fugue)
Instruments sense purposelessly, interchangeably, and fallibly.
(Toccata)
Organs sense purposefully, uniquely, and infallibly.
[Tast (sic)]
Physical experiments must maximize systemic determination.
(Temptation)
Social experiments must maximize free choice.

Observations on Matthew (3)

As far as I’m concerned, the drive of a religion based on a character with father issues, despite the fact that the same religion won’t recognize it, thanks to that Idealist cadre (thanks to the men who would rather forget their manhood and the women who can’t help but remember their manhood) such a religion treats its prophets as one would treat artistry and dubitable patrimony that condemns its adherents to probity, cudgels them to the point of civilization, strongarms them into a vision of liberty which that same character empties out thereby becoming the past, thereby sowing the future.

aphorism v (Sympathy for Stasis)

Ignorance proves indispensable when indulging indignation.

aphorism xiv (On the Past)

Create a legend, destroy something great.

aphorism iii (Golden Geese)

Don't murder people you can rob.

aphorism ii (Justice's Blindness)

An eye for an eye profits ophthalmologists.

aphorism i (On Programming)

Outlawing mankind takes more than Boole.

aphorism xlii(The Conduct of Properly Objective Observers)

They believe nothing and its opposite.

aphorism cclxii (The Comedian's Paradox)

Learn to be miserable with regularity.

Fourth Fair

We used to be like that. Look at them. She’s blushing or possibly swelling or something. Maybe she’s just choking. That would explain the resuscitation. Were we like that? No, wait, it’s coming back to me… never mind. Too long ago, I suppose. Now we really just have to fend for ourselves. We used to think the world was made for us, and look where that got us! No. We used to do so many things together. Remember that? No, of course not. What was that called – you know, we usually just popped in uninvited. I think it had an “O” in it.

Third Fair

For you, anything. Did you read that poem from this morning? One of her best poems that doesn’t have to do with fish. They serve fish for brunch there, right? Had some kippers for breakfast; still hungry, though; ought to get some flowers. A guy I knew from the realty service runs one. His son’s there too, lost his dentistry license for malpractice on some guy’s bridge. No, you’re fine. Who’ll notice? No, you’re qualified. You’ve filed before, you can type well and you know Excel, I can totally get you a position. Is that a new shirt? You sure?

Second Fair

I reserved a table, it being brunch and all. Hope you can make it. I asked for a seat by the windowsill with the flowers. I should have been more specific – otherwise they’ll leave us just outside. Crap, it might rain, too. I bought that book you suggested… something about dying from epilepsy? No, don’t. No. My makeup will be ruined, and I have an interview. I don’t think I can keep working at that tollbooth. I lied to my roommate again. I don’t like this; lucky she’s a boarder. She’ll move out when the term ends.

Observations on Leonardo (2)

Personally, I find something much more spiritually fulfilling in Leonardo’s androgyny, of lover and beloved, and, incidentally, as in his sketches of the parabolic droop of acorns, inconstant grass, sun-bearing trees, he illustrates the paths of motion that normally disappear and reappear with the dictates of time, or, conversely, its modality, he brings the motion, weight, percussion, and force together into optical mastery with no chance of a rival or precedent to impede his mighty ocular capacities, all while he teaches the eye to see and the pulse to infer, by which virtue he becomes artistry itself articulated with life.

aphorism xv (Burning Bright)

A backwards world is only as bad as its asymmetry.

A Response to the Question "What Do You Seek in a Woman?"

Her wit, fits, slit, and tits.

A Response to the Question "What Do You Seek in a Man?"

His defiance, violence, reliance, and silence.

Anonymous Responses to a Survey

1. A pulse.
2. My blood type.
3. Neurosis.
4. Psychosis.
5. Rachmaninoff or Patti Smith
6. Everything.
7. Everything.
8. Ambivalence.
9. Misanthropy.
10. Martin Luther.
11. Empress Wu.
12. Birds that swim.
13. People flying.

A Survey

1. What do you seek in a spouse?
2. What do you seek in a friend?
3. What features do you find attractive in members of the same sex?
4. What features do you find attractive in members of the opposite sex?
5. Your favorite musician or composer.
6. What do you hate most about spring?
7. What do you like most about spring?
8. What is your favorite anxiety?
9. What is your favorite hatred?
10. What is your least favorite admiration?
11. What is your least favorite obsession?
12. Your vision of freedom.
13. Your vision of horror.

A Taxonomist

I’ve spent my life studying microorganisms, and I can tell you conclusively why viruses are not alive. How would you define life? That’s a possibility, but those attributes extend to corpses. The four criteria I use for discerning living beings from the unloving are that they eat, shit, fuck and die. Viruses consume nothing, they just destroy; they don’t metabolize, so they don’t properly shit; they hijack other beings for reproduction, not reproducing themselves, you see; and they don’t die. I’ll explain. In order to immobilize viral pathogens, you have to completely destroy it, or else it will still reproduce.

The Conspirator's Lament

My evening, my peace, O! Let me write from the well of your eye whose temple posts harsh beacons from far. I weep through you, I tremble you; your autumnal hair breathes on my chest! The hounds of love attend you almost loyally, ever unclean, heavy of heart. I yearn for your corruption. Your veil warms me to the viscera. My birthright, the land of my grandfathers, drags me by the hair to the baseness of virtue, the quotidian probity of the insipid spirit. Desecrate me, Beloved! Guide me, O my vernal lodestar! Would that night could trace the heart!

The Traitor's Lament

Kingdoms strike me as the domains of homebodies. Regard – these allies of mine, these equals of mine, these enemies of my enemies, printing themselves into the ground like the sheaves of grain that thrive upon fuming stubble of the field. Amid the fray, I formerly had thought they bled with molten bronze, and wept lava. This dust is heavy with smoke and thunder, and yet it pierces like the unseen miasma. Immolated Spring is come to us! Men-of-war, come to us from everywhere the sinews hasten, for we serve Enmity! I often consider a world where foes were never born…

The Dew Is Gone

The wind goes on and the dew is gone
While we shield our eyes from day.
Alas, alas, since all things pass
Let’s roll by Stoner’s Way
Let’s roll by Stoner’s Way.

Chorus:
Pass that joint this way
Yeah, yeah, yeah, brilliant!
Don’t be an arsehole
Yeah, yeah, yeah, brilliant!

Feck the cops, pull out the stops
You know the reason why
I lost my job to some limp-dick yob
Potheads need not apply
Potheads need not apply.

You ought to avoid going paranoid
And to keep a steady head
If time allows, you big girl’s blouse,
We’ll all watch “Evil Dead”
We’ll all watch “Evil Dead.”

The wind goes on and the dew is gone
While we shield our eyes from day.
Alas, alas, since all things pass
Let’s roll by Stoner’s Way
Let’s roll by Stoner’s Way.

The Emperor's Lament

I carried continents - even upon my sinews - saved the lives of the many from the tyranny of famished minds, spread so many souls across the vast expanse, and yet they jail their liberator! The loyalty of comrades costs less dear than hope expects, and the jingling handfuls, the clinks and glare, of gold has a strength all its own – but no! The weak harbor a species of lust, a lust for golden mediocrity, and they conspire so, that they may betray themselves and all their lives to couple with glittering clods. Who among them shall reign, I wonder.

It's My Manner of Being Alone

I suppose I get my ideas in three major ways: primarily, I imagine that I am the villain of somebody else’s story, or some character or other apart from the protagonist (like a forgotten girlfriend, or some oblivious perpetrator) and I frame a story around that personage, or, alternatively, I might find the neglected figure in a painting, song, filmstrip, opera, or textbook and justify their insignificance, and if none of those work, then I just imagine the least talented of my colleagues and the biggest failures that I know, and I desecrate their graves with irony and hygiene products.

January

The night just spread some frost onto my window, and, while I wasn’t looking, it clogged a pipe with who-knows-what. I went outside and my hands rushed me back into the house. The cold felt nettling, a rude handshake from an inconsiderate host. June isn’t coming for months. Only a fortnight or two into winter and already I’m sick of it. My neighbor’s dog stays in at night, and I rethink how I thought it was bad before… I got my winter clothing out of the box. It still feels weird to dress up indoors; I really should’ve washed them.

Observations on Leonardo (1)

Luca told me that he prefers the copies of Leonardo to the originals, saying that the wood and the plaster crack through the ingenuity, tarnished for authenticity, like an old mirror held up to creation, and fortunately his apprentice could capture the verdure present in every word that the master wrote in his journals, treatises, fables, and other manuscripts that he inscribed, inverted, facing the left in the root-brown inking, confusing to many, but clear when held up to a mirror, accepting that writing with such a pen leaves the left-handed at a disadvantage, yet not for engravers or printers.

Introducing: The Poteens

Perfect, sing it exactly like that when we perform. But you, don’t make him look bad. We all know you had extra training. Tone it down and don’t belt, please. Oh, before I forget, I just found out that their piano is all beat up, so we’ll need to set your keyboard to the right setting before we pack everything up. You know that one setting. I thought your keyboard had that one setting. We’ll figure out something, somehow; that new accordion guy we found lives near the place, so he’ll meet us there; I just filled the tank… Okay.

July 15, 12:30-6:30

Get your suit out of the closet; we need to get it dry-cleaned before tomorrow afternoon. I’ll tell you why, young man, because I said so. No, we are not going to a wedding, not since last time. Look, grass stains! What is…? You must be the only little boy who could make grass stains look that bad on a black pair of pants, and now everyone will be able to tell. No, your aunt isn’t coming with us. I told you what happened to your aunt already. Yes, we’re going to see her. Didn’t I tell you what happened?

The Horseman's Daughter

Despite my palm’s quiet semblance, I can assure you that my heart is troubled! My chest is ill at ease. No, thank you, sitting down is proving better for it. I daren’t demonstrate my malaise - oh how gauche! Take Father, exemplis gratia. He exchanges handshakes with levity in his regard, but when he’s at home he behaves as though some weighty care rides behind him. Take that back! and, please, refrain from further haste in judgment; as you will recall, a flask need not boil, but if the substance of its content demands, then the glass may yet fume.

Sunday Meal

Over there is that man who lost his contact last week. Today, he came in with this one woman and they didn’t talk at all. A lot of people were talking, but it was obvious that they weren’t talking about anything at all. She tipped well and then he helped her with the chair. Those chairs will never get replaced; even though they’re bad for the floors, nobody’s going to replace them. The floor doesn’t look so bad from over by the door, but everybody notices. Someday, somebody will walk in who’s too impolite to keep from talking about it.

Serv'd Only to Discover

My great-aunt won't talk to me because I was born under those stars who remind her of the time when she was little and had to go with her cousin on the fishing boat, the slimy, splintering, too tall, pungent one that smelled like a spoon I used to suck on, to be honest, and she told me that, on top, the thing would glow all unholy, that a desecrating light was going to blind them and kill them all unless they prayed to that one saint, you know, the one that was never afraid of any lightning under any sky.

Unveiling

Course, plots endure. They’ll outlast you t’ll the last day when them seals crack op’n. Ceilin’s a-gonna crash in like a cliff made o’earth… Ask Ole Johnny & Zeke, Remy too, they’ll tell you what. Last dusk is a-comin’ to that there whorehouse by th’red light, not too soon neithah. Yessir. Now don’t be lookin’ at me like that, uh-uh, not that half-asleep look; you lissen hyah. Who are you anyway? Hell, what ain’t you? Tell you what, you ain’t no busybody - busybody woulda raked them leaves. Maybe yo daddy was some pile o’leaves that didn’t wanna get raked.