Saturday, August 18, 2018

wake from a dream trying to remember step onto a thumbtack



  • Colin Moulding 63 yesterday. Above from earlier this year.
  • The dance of conquest will have to wait.
  • "The Policeman's Ball."
  • I zoomterviewed a potential student worker Friday who asked if he could do audio only as his wisdom teeth were yanked Wednesday and though he could talk clearly his face was still a rainbow balloon, and of course I accommodated.
  • I only needed one wisdom tooth extracted and that fifteen years ago, it took two needles to the gum and ten seconds of wrenching, reminded by the student I remember it now like it hasn't happened yet.
  • "The Elephant Eye."
  • The disappearance of circadian news cycles fucksfun my infernal clocks, the disappearance of circadian news cycles, second's ago aieee! (reminds
  • me Maine sunrises/sets and my body clocks in Maine awry just last week fifteen years ago).
  • Listening for silence with the headphones off.
  • I remember seeing color TV the first time, I was five or six, it was 1965 or 6, it was certainly The Flintstones, it just happened again, my only valid timestamp kerchunk.
  • I bought Collected Raworth at Bridge Street on Pennsylvania yesterday, I have the receipt 
  • wait 
  • threw it away, I want the book, pretty positive it was yesterday, expect a bunch...
  • Moored, dock-slapping, barnacled - ocene.






GASLIGHT

Tom Raworth

a line of faces borders the strangler’s work
heavy european women
mist blows over dusty tropical plants
lit from beneath the leaves by a spotlight
mist in my mind a riffled deck
     
of cards or eccentrics
was i
a waterton animal my head
is not my own
       
poetry is neither swan nor owl
but worker, miner
digging each generation deeper
through the shit of its eaters
to the root – then up to the giant tomato
                
someone else’s song is always behind us
as we wake from a dream trying to remember
step onto a thumbtack
                
two worlds – we write the skin
the surface tension that holds
                                       you
                                       in
what we write is ever the past
          
curtain pulled back
a portrait behind it
is a room suddenly lit
                
looking out through the eyes
at a t.v. programme
of a monk sealed into a coffin
         
we close their eyes and ours
and still here the tune
     
moves on