Monday, April 6, 2015

Somewhere in the Mess of Graphs and Math and Compass You Tried to Make me Follow Rules





I know, I said I wasn't going to post any more of these Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambiers but some of the photos in this one are gorgeous (plus there is only one KFHHCMWWZG left after this one). Yes, I know you're not going to watch it. Harder driving days - gray, rain, road-spray, fog - make for GREAT! photographing days, or so I'm told. This slideshow would seem to confirm the theory. Expect pieces from these in Earthgirl's big show this September. Expect one mememe in the show - Earthgirl is letting me hang one. HEY! Dave played Dog Faced Hermans last night, in comments for the show he intimates it's for me (though on the fly - I'm sure the band was in his queue before the show started).






  • Wraith.
  • Maggie's weekly links.
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
  • Lyn Hejinian: Turbulent Thinking.
  • In a Hagerstown Sheetz, Triskelion Doritos.
  • digression as reply.
  • On Agota Kristof's Trilogy.
  • I've given reread Coover's Origin of the Brunists last fall in anticipation of reading his new Brunists' Day of Wrath, two hundred pages in, uh-oh, I don't seem able to summon a damn.
  • Science fiction short stories review, for those of you who do.
  • The assumption is that the hyphen between Dog and Faced is present if invisible. The Hermans are dog-faced. It could be a single dog who confronted a contentious bunch of Hermans.








PLUTO SHITS ON THE UNIVERSE

Fatimah Asghar


On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.

Naw.

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.

Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.
Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t
shit but a day to me. I could spend your
whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking
about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy
on up and marry me by now. Your day?

That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day
is barely the start of my sunset.

My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold
you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.
And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass
you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.

It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more
copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.
Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview,
and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids
in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:
wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.
They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other
planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like
a motherfucker.

It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold:
the freedom of possibility.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.



3 comments:

  1. Shoulda' done one of those montage-y things on my road-trip last wknd to Memphis.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So having just now completed Gaithersburg to Urbana to Hancock to Breezewood to Monroeville to Squirrel Hill to Cranberry to Portage to Beachwood (and on to University City tomorrow, then to Portage to Cranberry to Breezewood to Urbana to Gaithersburg thereafter, skipping only Squirrel Hill)....no. I"m not watching it. My patience for either route (via Morgantown or Breezewood, and I just don't have the patience for the up-and-down between Freezyburg and Hillbilly Heaven, hence Breezewood) approaches zero. I can only imagine the horror of the number of times you've done it, though you've certainly done a fine job of turning it into a positive ritual for you and EarthGirl. I'm thinking of 166 miles of the Pa PIke as good karma. Which will no doubt backfire.

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  3. The title of this posting is taken from a supposed proclamation of the formerly "major planet", now "minor planet", pluto:

    "Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass you tried to make me follow rules."

    astronomically speaking, it is interesting that pluto is no longer the 9th most massive body directly orbiting the sun, but the tenth, having been displaced by 'eris' - formerly known as 'xena' - discovered in 2005 - our friends at wikipedia are, as usual, quite informative

    the poem proclaims pluto's rebel nature - but it is, of course, following nature's laws, not defying them, that produces pluto's presence in this amazing universe

    it is not the cosmos-as-is that is defied and excreted upon, but the cosmos-as-imagined-by-the-too-restrictive-human-mind

    fine metaphors abound - for example, in todd rundgren's song flesh

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA4Aeirc8BU

    ReplyDelete